CEA is growing again: 25% more people engaged with our programs in 2025

By Angelina Li, Jessica McCurdy🔸, Alex Dial, Joris 🔸 @ 2026-02-11T23:02 (+104)

TLDR: In 2025, we grew engagement with CEA’s programs by 20–25% across every tier of engagement, reversing two years of moderate declines in engagement. We did so without disproportionately increasing costs or lowering the quality or bar for our programs.

This post reviews CEA’s work on growing the EA community, which is only one of our strategic goals. See more on our other strategic goals here. We plan to accelerate our growth even further, and we're hiring across multiple teams to make that happen. Join us!

Summary

After one year of executing on our sustainable momentum strategy, we have exceeded our own growth targets by a significant margin, and now have much more confidence that growing the EA community is tractable. There are real challenges that remain: our modelling has gaps, growth carries risks, some of our products need significantly stronger foundations before scaling, and we can’t do this work alone. We are excited to tackle these challenges and see sustainable momentum as an important goal worth pursuing.

In 2026, we will (1) set the foundations to deliver an ambitious step-change in EA’s growth trajectory in 2027+ and (2) continue delivering year-on-year growth for CEA programs.

We believe the world’s most pressing problems need more talented people aimed at solving them. We are motivated to grow EA, and to do it right.

Attendees at EA Global London 2025, the largest in-person event we’ve ever held (so far!)

Why grow?

CEA’s 2025 and 2026 strategy is focused on building sustainable momentum for EA, and growing the EA community is a key aspect of achieving that momentum.

There are several reasons why we are prioritizing growth: Most directly, there’s the impact people have through their careers or donations when they put EA principles into practice. Indirectly, achieving this type of growth is a clear signal to the world that EA is worth taking seriously and applying to big life choices.

Our goal is to build and sustain momentum, not to boom and bust. Some other things this growth strategy is not:

Peter Singer’s fireside chat with Zach Robinson (our CEO) was one of the most popular sessions at EA Connect 2025, a new virtual conference we organized last year

2025 review

Our focus in 2025 was on measuring and growing engagement with CEA programs. While our ultimate goal remains focused on growing the EA community as a whole, we wanted to start with where we have the most influence.

At the start of the year, we built a model to measure the growth in the number of people who engage with CEA programs at different tiers of engagement (from “Exploring EA” to “Actualizing Impact”). Using this model, we set targets of 7.5–10% growth across all tiers in 2025.

We are glad to say that we ended up growing by 20-25% across our tiers. We exceeded all our growth targets by a large margin and hit the majority of our stretch goals, reversing our previous two-year trajectory of moderate decreases in engagement with most of our programs.

Our growth model and 2025 targets

To measure and set goals for EA growth, we built a model that tracks the number of people who have engaged with CEA programming at different tiers of engagement.

At the start of the year, we set the following goals for 2025:

We go into more detail on how we built this model and set our 2025 goals in the appendix, and describe each tier more in the next section.

Our results

In 2025, we grew by 20-25% year-over-year across each tier of our engagement funnel[2], beating our 7.5-10% growth target and reversing the moderate declines in our programs’ growth throughout 2023-2024.

Tier 2: Exploring EA

🔎 Persona: This person is curious about EA and takes an active, possibly one-off action to learn more or “try it out”.

Summary: Grew from 47K people in 2024 to 58K in 2025 (25% growth)[3]

We have invested in improving the quality and reach of introductory programming this year. Some of our work here has included:

Metric (all unique counts)[4]20242025Growth
EffectiveAltruism.org visitors who view 3+ pages31,00040,208+30%
EA Newsletter subscribers who click on at least one link this year12,35414,535+18%
EA Forum users who log in11,31811,419+1%
Attendees at virtual events1,2302,630+114%
Attendees at EA Summit events4091,095+168%
Attendees to introductory events at groups in our scalable support program~1,000~1,500+50%
Attendees to introductory events at groups in our pilot university program205638+211%
We piloted a campaign to tell the human stories behind effective altruism, featuring leaders and community members like Lewis Bollard.

Tier 3: Actively Involved with EA

📚 Persona: This person is actively engaged with EA in more than a one-off way. They are leveraging some mechanism for repeated interactions, and are starting to think about how EA could affect their life.

Summary: Grew from 8K people in 2024 to 10K in 2025 (25% growth)[3]

We have been continuing to build on the work we do to support people in deepening their engagement with EA after they have first encountered these ideas. Some of our work here has included:

Metric (all unique counts)20242025Growth
Attendees at EAGx (or EAGx-like) events[5]2,8663,238+20%
EA Forum users who read 20+ posts and make a post/comment1,809 1,798+0%
EA Opportunities Board visitors who click on 3+ opportunities5041,273+153%
Graduates from online Courses561 769+37%
Graduates of introductory fellowships at groups in our scalable support program~650~700+9%
Graduates of introductory fellowships at groups in our pilot university program113235+209%
Participants during the first pilot of “Make your high-impact career pivot”, a free 4-day online bootcamp we launched last year.

Tier 4: Committing to Impact

🎯Persona: This person is starting to pursue substantial actions on the basis of EA principles, although they may not yet have made a significant impactful contribution.

Summary: Grew from 3.9K people in 2024 to 4.9K in 2025 (+25% YoY growth)[3]

The main program we track in this tier is EA Global, which is one of the most established resources we have to offer people who are starting to pursue substantial actions on the basis of EA principles. Our work here has included:

Metric (all unique counts)20242025Growth
Attendees at EA Global events2,2942,943+28%
Highly engaged EA members at groups in our scalable support program~200 ~275+135%
Highly engaged EA members at groups in our pilot university program3684+233%
Our Bay Area EA Global event grew by 18% in 2025. We hope to see you at EA Global San Francisco 2026 soon!

Tier 5: Actualizing Impact

💼 Persona: This person is making significant impactful contributions based on EA principles.

Summary: Grew from ~2,250 users in 2024 to ~2,700 in 2025 (20% YoY growth)[2]

Alongside the three above tiers which track engagement with CEA programs, we also monitor a laggier indicator to track how many recent alumni of CEA programs go on to take significant impactful actions.

How we measure this tier: We classify someone as “Tier 5” if they meet both these criteria:

How to interpret growth in this tier:

This tier is still in development. It captures one major way people make significant contributions based on EA principles (legibly high-impact roles), but misses out on others (e.g. donations, or roles that are less legibly high-impact). We are working to develop a fuller picture over time.

Changes in our spending

One question readers may have is: how has the corresponding spending on CEA programs has changed over time? We conducted a rough-and-ready analysis to evaluate the question: “Have we achieved our growth results by disproportionately increasing our spending?”

The following graph summarizes how the costs of our growth generating projects have changed over time, as compared to our growth results:

Some interpretation notes:

While there is some ambiguity with regards to how to classify our marketing and communication costs, our overall takeaway is: No, we don't think CEA achieved our growth results by disproportionately increasing our spending. We think our results came primarily from greater strategic focus and the growth generating tactics we used.

We discuss why we think this (and give more context on our Tier 2 work) in the appendix.

Maintaining the quality of our programs while we scale

While our numeric modelling and growth targets are useful tools to keep us accountable for our goals, we don’t just steer blindly via numbers. Internally, we introduced G.R.O.W. principles to keep us oriented towards impact as our north-star:

Here are some other ways we think about maintaining the quality of our programs:

We describe our G.R.O.W. principles in more depth in the appendix.

Stanford EA organisers (supported by our pilot university program) tabling at their club fair.

2026 plans

In 2026, we have two main growth-related objectives:

  1. Set the foundations for a trajectory change in our ambition
    • We plan to set more ambitious growth goals for 2027 and onwards. Within our Growth strategic pillar, our primary focus will be on growing the number of people making significant impactful contributions (e.g. on the level of a career change), as that best reflects realized impact (as opposed to growth earlier in the funnel, which represents potential impact).
    • In 2026, our primary focus will be on getting ready to deliver on that increase in our ambition. We will focus on substantially improving the foundations of our programming, both to improve the scale-readiness of our existing programs, and to launch new scalable programs.
  2. Continue to sustain EA’s momentum by delivering year on year growth via CEA’s programs
    • While our primary focus will be on building foundations with urgency, we still want to maintain a steady pace of sustainable growth across CEA programs.
    • In 2026, our goal is to grow by 10–15% across our tiers.[9] This is purposefully lower than the growth rates we achieved in 2025 as we want to reemphasize the need to build foundations for accelerated future growth.

What does this all mean?

After one year of executing on our growth strategy, we exceeded our own targets by a significant margin. This result was not a foregone conclusion—we set goals we thought were achievable but ambitious, and we beat them across every tier. We have much more confidence now that growing the EA community is tractable.

That said, we hold these results with appropriate humility:

Ultimately, we invest in building the EA community because we think that the world’s most pressing problems need more resources directed at them. More talented people in high-impact careers, more donations, more people thinking carefully about these values and how to help.

We’ve seen EA be a powerful lever for saving lives, reducing suffering, and safeguarding the future. We want to see it work at a much larger scale.

The Giving What We Can pledge signup booth at EAGxBerlin, our largest EAGx event in 2025

Acknowledgements

This post was authored by Angelina Li. Jessica McCurdy leads CEA’s Growth work, and is supported by Alex Dial, Joris Pijpers, Angelina, and others. Many colleagues at CEA reviewed this post, and many more contributed to this work.

Finally, all of this work is aimed at better supporting people who engage with our programs, including all of the readers of this post, and especially the ones who made it all the way to the end. Thank you for showing up, and for all of the impactful work you do!

Join us

If you're excited about growing the EA community, consider joining us! We're hiring across many teams this year—you can find our open roles at centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers.


Appendices

Our model and targets

Building the model

To measure and set goals for EA growth, we built a model that tracks the number of people who have engaged with CEA programming at different tiers of engagement.

Here is an idealised description of what our current approach is trying to capture:

We’d like to measure and set targets for growth in the number of people who have engaged with a CEA program at each tier of the funnel.

We took four steps to measure this growth:

  1. Defining tiers: We defined “EA engagement tiers” and identified qualifying engagement criteria corresponding to each tier.
    1. As a proxy for engagement, we categorized specific actions within CEA programs by where they typically meet people in their EA journey. For instance, we categorize clicking on a link in the EA Newsletter as early exploration (Tier 2), and attending an in-person EAGx event as more active involvement (Tier 3).
  2. Bucketing users: We used the tiers from step 1 to categorize users for each year based on their observed engagement data. In general:
    1. If you qualify for a later tier one year, we automatically count you as being in all earlier tiers for that year (e.g. qualifying for ‘Committed to Impact’ means you also qualify for the first two tiers).
    2. We only use engagement data from a particular year when categorizing users, so if someone was in the “Committed to Impact” tier last year, but based on this year’s engagement, they only qualify for the “Exploring EA” tier, they only get counted in the “Exploring EA” tier this year.
  3. Add uncaptured users: We added in our estimates for the number of additional unique people in each tier contributed by program metrics that weren’t captured by our CEA-wide CRM.
    1. For instance, we don’t systematically capture personally identifying data (e.g. names and emails) for visitors to the EffectiveAltruism.org website, or attendees at introductory events hosted by groups we support. We have some educated guesses for the duplication rates here that we apply. 

Setting the goals

Using the above model, we then took the following steps to set growth targets for 2025:

  1. Forecast program-level growth: We worked with program leads at CEA to forecast 2026 growth for each of our growth metrics, in two different worlds: (1) Must-Hit growth (what we’d aim to achieve in an ambitious but readily tractable world), and (2) Stretch growth (what an outstanding year of growth would look like).
  2. Populate tier-level targets: We then used the program-level forecasts to generate tier-level forecasts for each growth scenario.
  3. Round targets: We then rounded the overall growth rate of each tier to the nearest 2.5%, to avoid false precision.

Some interpretation notes:

Changes in our spending

We conducted a rough-and-ready analysis to evaluate the question: “Have we achieved our growth results by disproportionately increasing our spending?”

The following graph summarizes how the costs of our growth generating projects have changed over time, as compared to our growth results:[10]

Here’s a brief description of how we generated the above results:

High level takeaways:

Bottom line: We don't think CEA achieved our growth results by disproportionately increasing our spending. We think our results came primarily from greater strategic focus and the tactics described in the main post.

G.R.O.W. principles

To keep impact at the forefront, we introduced four G.R.O.W. principles internally to govern our prioritisation. While these were originally written for internal publication, we are sharing them to add more color on how we think about growth:

Principle #1: Greater than Numbers

Our metrics can’t capture all impact. We prioritize cost-effective real-world impact over hitting numerical targets – especially when the two are in tension. Our focus remains on the ultimate beneficiaries of our work: not just those who engage with our programs, but the lives they go on to help.

Being Greater than Numbers means focusing on increasing our actual impact, not just what’s easiest to measure.

In action: We deliberately hold back on scaling programs we judge as unready, even if this would help us hit our growth targets. For instance, we deprioritized marketing the EA Opportunities Board last year because we weren’t confident in the program’s scale-readiness. We are now actively working on improving this service. If you’ve benefitted from the Opportunity Board, we’d love to talk to you!

Principle #2: Reach and Progress

We grow the EA community by reaching new people who haven’t yet encountered these ideas and helping those who are interested to progress in their engagement. Instead of chasing short-term or one-off growth spikes, we bring talented people in through sustained outreach and guide them to impactful opportunities.

Reach and Progress means expanding to new audiences and feeling responsible for both conversions into and out of our programs.

In action: We encourage groups we mentor to send committed group members to EA Global and EAGx events: for instance, via hosting events for group members to apply to conferences together, and having mentors emphasize this as a valuable next step.

Principle #3: Out-of-the-Box Thinking

We push boundaries and explore creative solutions, seeing “EA or CEA has never done this before” as a reason to try, not to hesitate. Achieving ambitious goals requires taking calibrated risks, testing new ideas, and learning from failures.

Out-of-the-Box Thinking means embracing innovation and continuously finding better ways to make an impact, while remaining principled and responsible with our ambition.

In action: In building on our Courses program, we considered building on top of our typical 8-week fellowship format. However, after conducting a product discovery process, we landed on a 4 day intensive bootcamp which has been showing signs of promise.

Principle #4: Work Across (C)EA

We win and lose as a team — to be effective stewards for EA’s trajectory, we’ll need to make sure that programs across CEA and EA have what they need to succeed.

Work Across (C)EA means achieving more together than we ever could alone.

In action: We have started coordinating with other community building organisations to help advance our collective growth goals, and aim to build on this partnerships work in the future.

  1. ^

    Our spending on CEA-wide operational costs in 2025 was $21.8M, a 7% increase compared to 2024.

    Our 2025 operational costs include the costs of operating Trajan House and EA Funds (and exclude EA Funds grantmaking), which were not part of CEA previously. Excluding Trajan and EA Funds, we spent $20.5M, a like-for-like increase of 0.4%.

  2. ^

    Disclaimer: We stopped being able to gather the data we needed to calculate Tier 5 in November 2025, due to an issue affecting our data vendor. If we had been able to collect a whole year’s worth of data, our best guess is we would have ended the year at around ~20% growth based on extrapolating the trend from previous months (this tier was growing by a very steady percentage throughout the year). We report both figures for transparency’s sake.

  3. ^

    We count someone as part of a tier if they take any actions in that tier, or qualify for a higher tier. As such, the sum of metrics in the above chart will not equal the total number of people in this tier (e.g. because some people take multiple actions).

  4. ^

    For instance, if someone attended multiple EA Summit events in 2025, we still count them as “1 attendee” under the EA Summit row.

  5. ^

    For modelling purposes, we considered the London EA Student Summit an “EAGx-like” event.

  6. ^

    A note on methodology: attending EA Global doesn't constitute “committing to impact” by itself. We include it in this tier because the admissions bar for EA Global is similar to how we think of users in this tier. As a general note, this model is designed to give us useful trend lines for how different audience segments within CEA are growing, but it will be wrong at the individual level in many cases—some of our users might be deeply committed to impact without attending EAG, or might skip a year and still be highly engaged.

  7. ^

    Note that while we did increase our Marketing and Communications costs significantly from a low starting point (and so they account for a substantial portion of our cost increase), they still account for only 4% of our overall spending.

  8. ^

    Although we may update programs for unrelated reasons, such as to serve more users or improve our product-market-fit.

  9. ^

    Specifically, we set the following growth goals:

    • Tiers 2 (Exploring EA) through 5 (Actualizing Impact) by 10%
    • Tier 1 (Hearing of EA), a new tier we are adding, by 15%
    • Tier 6 (Leading within EA) at the lower of: 10% or our measured 2025 growth rate.
      • As we’re still designing our Tier 6 definition and methodology, we don’t yet have a measured growth rate for 2025 (though we expect it to be similar to, and correlate with, our Tier 5 metric). Accounting for this uncertainty, our goal for 2026 is to grow at the lower of a) a 10% growth rate and b) 2025’s measured growth rate.
  10. ^

    Note that we don’t include Tier 5 in our analysis: we did not dedicate resources to directly increasing this tier in 2025, and we measure Tier 5 differently from our other engagement tiers.


John Salter @ 2026-02-12T11:00 (+11)

What a turnaround. Well done!!!

James Herbert @ 2026-02-12T11:42 (+5)

Great work and great post! Thanks for sharing. 

Re the 'Changes in our spending' appendix and the challenge of separating 'performance' marketing from 'awareness' or 'brand' marketing, we've also been thinking about this at EA Netherlands. My tentative solution is to split CAC into an ‘activation CAC’ (only direct conversion costs) and a ‘blended CAC’ (total spend including brand/awareness). Apparently this is quite standard in the commercial world. 

If blended CAC holds steady or falls even as we scale up awareness activities, that’s evidence the broader work is expanding the top of the funnel and making our conversion efforts more efficient downstream. If blended CAC rises while activation CAC stays flat, it could be an early signal that our awareness spending is not translating into engagement.

So for EA Netherlands, using intro programme completions (87) as the denominator:

For context, Claude tells me the average B2B SaaS blended CAC is ~€500

Angelina Li @ 2026-02-12T18:38 (+2)

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing! I'll pass it on :)

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-02-12T11:47 (+4)

Thanks for the update.

Have you considered assessing your impact in terms of changing careers and increasing funding?

How did the number of subscribers of the EA newsletter change over 2025? CEA's dashboard only shows data up to February 2025.

Rory Fenton @ 2026-02-12T14:38 (+11)

Hey Vasco, I just joined CEA last month to start building out an internal monitoring and evaluation function. Getting into our impact in terms of things like career changes + donations is a top priority. For now, I'm still in learning mode, but I hope to have some defensible ideas on this soon!

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-02-12T16:21 (+3)

Hi Rory. That is great to know. I am looking forward to what you come up with.

Angelina Li @ 2026-02-12T18:16 (+8)

Thanks Vasco! Here’s the graph of EA Newsletter subscribers over time. We’re about to hit 64K subscribers :)

(Edit: replaced the tooltip to show our end-of-January totals, the last full month of data we have)

As a side note, the reason why we track actively engaged subscribers as our central growth metric is because many people who are subscribed never open the newsletter, and therefore we don’t think they get value from it. In general, we think “flow” metrics (like active engagement, attendance in a given year) are a better proxy for our present-day impact than “stock” metrics (like the number of people who have ever come to an EAG).

I’m glad the dashboard has been useful for you! Hearing about user demand is definitely valuable data for us. Unfortunately we’ve had to deprioritize maintenance on this for a while, due to higher priority M&E and engineering projects taking precedence over the last few quarters.

Relatedly, we will soon be hiring for a software engineer to join the Online Team and work on engineering projects across CEA. I’m really excited that we are building out our technical and analytical capacity (hi @Rory Fenton!). If any software engineers reading want CEA to have more capacity to execute on projects like this, I encourage you to apply!

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-02-12T18:35 (+4)

Thanks for sharing, Angelina.

It is nice to see significant growth of the number of subscribers over 2025, especially considering the downwards trend over 2023 and 2024.

I agree "flow" metrics are a better proxy for current impact, and that the number of actively engaged subscribers is a better metric than the number of subscribers.

MHR🔸 @ 2026-02-12T12:51 (+5)

I second Vasco's desire for the dashboard to be maintained again!

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-02-12T13:15 (+2)

I like the dashboard because it is a way of quickly getting a rough sense of the impact of CEA's programs. The number of people engaging in each tier may well track progress better, but they cannot be so easily interpreted as concrete metrics like the number of subscribers of the EA newsletter.

I think it would also be helpful to see the number of people engaging in each tier across time. There are numbers in the post for 2024 and 2025, and the numbers for 2025 were better than for 2023 ("reversing the moderate decreases in engagement with our programs throughout 2023-2024"). However, the meaning of this depends on the stability of past trends. Many past annual changes in engagement up or down of 10 % to 20 % would make a 25 % increase from 2024 to 2025 less impressive relative to a past downwards trend of a few years.

Angelina Li @ 2026-02-12T18:29 (+4)

Responded on the dashboard above, but wanted to quickly say thanks @MHR🔸 and @Vasco Grilo🔸 for letting us know you are invested in this project, that kind of feedback is useful for us.

I think it would also be helpful to see the number of people engaging in each tier across time. [...] Many past annual changes in engagement up or down of 10 % to 20 % would make a 25 % increase from 2024 to 2025 less impressive relative to a past downwards trend of a few years.

Thank you for the feedback, Vasco. As you have noted, we have some older data on growth trends (although not cost trends) in the dashboard. This is of course not formatted the same way, and plus how we think about growth (i.e. our funnel approach) has changed over time.

The team is presently busy preparing with EAG SF, but I'll make a note of your feedback so we don't lose it.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2026-02-12T18:37 (+2)

Thanks, Angelina. Happy preparation of EAG SF.