EA Summit: Santiago 2025 – Retrospective

By Kiran Sargent 🔹 @ 2025-08-15T13:51 (+30)

About the Event

EA Summit: Santiago 2025 took place on July 19 at the Prince of Wales Country Club in Santiago, Chile. It was a one-day event focused on:

• Providing an accessible and low cost entry point to effective altruism for newcomers
• Fostering connections between local professionals. EA community and students
• Showcasing high-impact cause areas: AI safety, global health & development, animal welfare, social entrepreneurship, effective giving and biotechnology. 

AFTERMOVIE: EA SUMMIT: SANTIAGO 2025

Key Stats

• Registered attendees: 133
• Attendees present: 87 (~66%)
• Volunteers: 15
• Speakers: 10
• Net budget: $17,000 USD
• Cost per attendee: $195 USD
• Likelihood to Recommend (LTR): 9.27 / 10
• Avg. new connections per attendee: 4.7
• Avg. meaningful connections per attendee: 2.4
• Attendees likely to apply for a short-term opportunity (<1 yr): 67%
• Rated event >3–10x better than counterfactual: 91%
• Felt welcomed: 4.95/5
• Respect score (others - women & gender minorities): 9.91-10/10

Our Aims

We intentionally aimed for a participant mix to maximize value provided to attendees:

• ~40% newcomers to EA
• ~40% experienced EAs / professionals working in EA causes)
• ~20% mixed backgrounds 

We also wanted to:

• Provide relevant and rigorous content across core cause areas
• Facilitate guided and spontaneous connections through mentoring
• Create value for both newcomers and experienced EAs, while reflecting the inclusive and collaborative spirit of the global EA community

What Went Well

✅ High-quality content & speaker lineup

The summit featured talks on AI safety, global health & development, animal welfare, social entrepreneurship, effective giving and biotechnology, which were consistently described as “very valuable”, by both newcomers and experienced EAs. Agenda included:

Talks: Given the one-day format, we aimed to provide first an overview of core EA cause areas for those new to the community, followed by deeper dives to offer meaningful insights for more experienced attendees. This dual approach was frequently highlighted in the survey responses as a key source of value.

Mentorship Session: We assigned cause area signs to mentors and gathered everyone in the main auditorium. Attendees could self-select which cause area they were most interested in, then join mentors for discussions, Q&A, and experience-sharing. This facilitated connections, sparked opportunities, and helped newcomers understand potential paths. We maintained a ratio of 1 mentor for every ~8 participants.

Speed Friending: This activity encouraged cross-disciplinary connections, ensuring most attendees got to know at least 5 new people.

Cause Area Meetups: These allowed people working or interested in the same domains to connect, brainstorm local impact strategies, and even begin sketching action plans for ongoing collaboration.

Online Speakers: Incorporating remote speakers allowed us to feature global experts, who were highlighted positively in the feedback survey, even if they couldn’t attend in person due to our remote location. While technical challenges must be considered, this format worked well overall. It reinforced one of EA’s core strengths: a willingness from even the busiest, most experienced community members to support local groups and engage with newcomers. It also demonstrated the global nature and accessibility of the EA network, helping new attendees feel welcomed and empowered to reach out. 

✅ Great energy, great people

Participants brought a spirit of enthusiasm, curiosity, and openness, making strong use of social spaces like the terrace, lunch areas, speed-friending sessions, and mentoring to connect meaningfully. Several spontaneous mentoring moments also emerged throughout the day.

Participant Mix: We were intentional about curating a participant mix that would maximize value. For example, 1:1s between two newcomers often yield limited benefit, so we aimed to connect newcomers with more experienced EAs. This allowed newcomers to gain insight into cause areas, build valuable connections, and see impactful careers as both inspiring and attainable. Meanwhile, experienced attendees were able to meet peers in their field, collaborate on future projects, and help strengthen the EA Chile community.

Outreach: Due to venue capacity limits and our choice to offer free, open registration (via Airtable, with no application), we focused our outreach on attracting attendees we viewed as the most likely to be influenced by the event to go on and have a large, positive impact. Rather than using broad channels like Instagram or LinkedIn ads, we prioritized targeted outreach, including WhatsApp messages to relevant groups, direct invitations to recommended individuals, emails using the Uni Group CRM from past events, and partnerships with aligned organizations who helped share the event with their networks.

✅ Professional feel, low cost, low time demand for organizers

We used Swapcard to manage the agenda and showcase speakers, which gave the event a professional feel, standing out from traditional local conferences. This approach contributed significantly to the positive participant experience.

Team Structure: To streamline planning, we divided responsibilities across five core areas: content, communications, outreach, logistics, and volunteers. Each area was led by a trusted volunteer with previous organizing experience (mostly from the EA university group), who helped out with the respective task if his time demand permitted it, which allowed me to focus on delegation, feedback, and stepping in when needed. This approach made the event feasible in under three months of planning and gave volunteers valuable career capital and experience organizing large events, potentially preparing them for running future EA Summits or EAGx events.

Call to Action: We ended the event by presenting opportunities for involvement across different cause areas and experience levels, and gave attendees time to develop personal action plans to translate the day’s inspiration into concrete next steps. This was one of the most appreciated aspects of the day, according to post-event survey feedback.

Summit Format: Despite the absence of travel support, the event achieved a high standard of quality at significantly lower cost than a typical EAGx. The quality of attendees and content, combined with inferior budget requirements, suggests that Summits may be a highly cost-effective way to connect and grow EA communities.

What Could Have Gone Better

🔸 No-show rate (~34%)

Only 87 out of 133 confirmed attendees showed up. The venue had a capacity of 110 attendees, and we expected a no-show rate of 15%, so we slightly overbooked, but it still wasn’t enough. We had sent repeated emails asking attendees to cancel their registration via a one-click button if they weren’t planning to come, to help us better estimate catering needs. This higher-than-expected no-show rate may have been due to the free registration, limited commitment mechanisms, or cultural factors. For future events, we plan to:

• Use double confirmation via WhatsApp
• Overbook more aggressively
• Consider symbolic deposits to increase commitment

The unexpectedly high no-show rate significantly increased our cost per attendee from $153.70 to $194.33. Had we known this beforehand, we likely would have reduced spending on furniture, swag (pens and agendas), and catering (which included lunch, two snack services, and a permanent drink station), to make the event more cost-effective.

🔸 Catering confusion (vegan vs vegetarian)

Despite reading about this issue in EAGxLatam retrospective, spending more than ⅓ of our budget on this item and repeated conversations with the chef, he misunderstood key concepts between vegetarian and vegan and included non-vegan ingredients in the menu. We had to delay lunch and move the schedule around and manage to fix it, but it made some vegan attendees understandably disappointed, as the event was advertised as fully vegan. In the future, we’ll:

• Get menus ingredients approved in writing
• Have a person in charge of going through everything that is being served

🔸 Few 1-on-1s through the app

While Swapcard was helpful for navigating the agenda and browsing attendee profiles, it was underused for booking 1-on-1 meetings, despite us sharing a guide, explaining its value in the opening session, and showing attendees how to book. In practice, most meaningful connections occurred informally or during structured mentoring sessions. For future events, we recommend:

• Building in unstructured “connection time”
• Encouraging self-scheduled meetings in person

That said, outcomes were still positive as attendees made in one day an average of 4.7 new connections, with 2.4 described as meaningful, and 94% of attendees reported that their 1-on-1s were valuable or extremely valuable

🔸 Timing mismatch with local norms

The event officially started at 9:00 a.m., but most people arrived around 10:30. This is not unusual for Chile. For future versions I recommend considering local norms (e.g. longer soft-start windows, later content kickoff).

Budget Snapshot

Looking Ahead

We hope this summit serves as a proof of concept, showing that EA Chile community is ready for more and that Summits can be a cost-effective way to grow and energize the EA community in new regions.

Here are some resources and personal recommendations for future Summit organizers worldwide:

• 📁 [Resource Folder]: Includes mailing & outreach templates, signage and printing files, speaker slides, the attendee guide, and more.
• 🌍 Remote location? Consider online speakers to broaden your speaker pool at low cost. (Just be sure to test for technical reliability.)
• 🥗 Double-check all menu ingredients, especially for non-vegan or allergy-sensitive. Get written confirmation from the caterer.
• 🧾 If you're using direct registration (not applications), use outreach channels to attract your aimed audience and build in confirmation steps.
• 📱 Swapcard was useful for agenda visibility and creating a professional feel, but for actual 1:1 connections, structured mentoring sessions worked better.
• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Delegate tasks. Giving volunteers ownership over specific tasks (content, comms, outreach, etc.) saved time, helped volunteers build career capital, and tested personal fit for future events. (University EA groups are a great support base!)
• 💼 Want to test your personal fit for ops or project management? Organizing a Summit is a great way to explore whether you enjoy and excel at events, operations, and execution-heavy roles. You can apply here.
• ✨ End with action: We shared concrete opportunities (segmented by level of experience and cause area) and gave attendees time to write personal next steps

We’re deeply grateful to Arthur for his guidance and to the Centre for Effective Altruism for their support and trust.

And I’m especially proud of the incredible volunteer team who made this possible: Tomás, Alberto, Benjamín, Roberto, Valentina, Giancarlo, and all our amazing volunteers.

Most of all, we're inspired by the energy, warmth, and talent of the EA community in Chile.

Let’s make this the first of many 🇨🇱