EA Finland Annual Report 2024 (+spring 2025 updates)

By Karla Still 🔸 @ 2025-05-29T05:30 (+11)

EA Finland's annual report 2024 offers a rather comprehensive overview of our activities and impact. This post highlights parts of the report that I believe are most interesting for other community builders. 

This post has 3 sections:

  1. Reflection (copy-pasted from the end of the report)
  2. Picks from the report (additional facts that help build an understanding of our community)
  3. Briefly about 2025 (a bonus section on how 2025 has been going for EA Finland until May)

Context for the reflection below: EA Finland had 2.4 full-time employees (FTEs) until mid-February 2024. Due to funding cuts, we reduced to 0.6 FTE. Therefore, our overall objective in 2024 was to maintain the level of impact we had in 2023.

1. Reflection

Challenges with resource allocation

Shortfalls

Wins

While it is hard to determine the correlation between funding EA Finland and outcomes such as a member landing a high-impact job, the interviews suggest that EA Finland’s activities have made a difference, and I’m confident that the quality and quantity of our activities would be lower without any employees.

2. Picks from the report

Local groups

Map of local groups in Finland and their respective activity

If interested in a particular group or what the university and local groups do in Finland in general, you can find sections for each group in the report. 

Community survey results

The purposes of the survey were to (1) get direct feedback from members, (2) measure the impact of EA Finland and the local groups, and (3) get a temperature check on the community's wellbeing. 

(n=41)

Positives that recurred in multiple free-form responses:

Wishes and improvement suggestions:

Demographic data was similar to the previous year:

Career advising

The total number of career advising sessions by EA Finland was lower in 2024 compared to previous years. The career advising was the first point of contact with EA for 60% of our 33 advisees.

Intro programs

Between 2021 and 2024, 204 people have completed Finnish EA intro programs. Yay! The intro program (aka fellowships) is a 4 to 8-week-long reading group with content similar to the EA Handbook. Out of 33 accepted participants, 27 finished the 5-week course we organised in the fall. 

Communications

We published more blog posts on our website altruismi.fi, many in Finnish. That might have been a driver for the increased visits compared to 2023. (+61% unique visitors. Total 10,400. But the vast majority exit our website after visiting just one page, so that could be worked on.)

Generally, we didn't make any major changes in our communications, but continued with occasional social media posts, monthly newsletters and maintaining Telegram chats. (We have 389 members in the main chat.)

Finances

You can find an overview of funding received and expenses per category at the end of the report. 

To the annual report

3. Briefly about 2025

As I'm writing this, we're already 40% through 2025, so I thought it would make sense to share something about how the ongoing year is going.

EA Finland received continued general funding for February-August from the EA infrastructure fund.

It first seemed like the career advising project in late 2024 paid off, as we had 13 career advising calls in February alone, but in the past months, it has levelled off, and we are now on the same trajectory as in 2024 for the total number of calls. 

We tried weekend-long crash courses in the spring instead of the multi-week intro program, primarily to see if it's more scalable. (Forum post to be published.)

Small local groups have gotten a new push, which is a joy to see. I'm curious to see how that plays out. 

We'll start a project improving the marketing and outreach of EA Finland, and contract a local marketing agency to work with us on that. As it's in its very beginning, I don't have much to say yet about it. 

We are organising our annual retreat again in August, hoping to once again get a new record in participants and create a high-impact event for our members.

I'm stepping down from leading EA Finland in August, and I'm excited to share that @Xylix Pelttari will take over as the next executive director.


Karla Still 🔸 @ 2025-05-29T05:32 (+5)

PS. Here's a list of past Forum posts related to EA Finland in chronological-ish order.