EA North 2025 retrospective

By matthes @ 2025-05-02T00:26 (+88)

intro

EA North was a one-day conference in Sheffield (UK) aimed at people in the North of England (Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, etc.). The event had 35 attendees on the day.^[1] The cost per attendee was £50 and the cost per new connection was £11. The total cost was £1765. By this metric, EA North is significantly more cost-effective than EAGs.

The attendee feedback was quite positive (see below). I am happy with how it all turned out and think it was a very worthwhile use of my time.

Thank you for everyone who attended! Special thanks to the speakers and meet-up facilitators.

venue

Our venue was The Showroom in Sheffield. I booked two rooms. The main room had a projector and was used for the talks. The second room was laid out like a cafe/bar.  This was to allow space for 1-1s to happen at any point during the day. 

agenda

Here is the schedule for the day:

The meet-ups were a mix of speedy 1-1s, self-directed discussions, and semi-guided group discussions. This was dependent on the facilitator and the number of people who showed up.

I gave the career workshop to an audience of five people. Three of them highlighted it on the anonymous feedback form as one of the most useful parts of the day. Feel free to steal my slides.

Just before wrapping up, I led a group discussion on next steps for building the EA community in the North. We discussed what types of things we would like to see in the short and long term (retreats, co-working spaces, events, culture related things, etc.). A few people expressed interest in actively working towards this. 

feedback from attendees

18 attendees provided feedback (51%). 

big ones

When asked “Overall, how likely are you to recommend a similar event to someone with similar interests?”, attendees rated it 8.8 (+/- 0.9) out of 10

As usual, I also asked about connections^[2]. The average number of connections per attendee was 4.56 (+/- 2.29). This means that the cost per connection was only £11.

other things people care about with events

Here are some plots with other feedback results:

Attendees generally found the event valuable. They enjoyed the content, made useful connections, and most became more motivated. Many even indicated that they were inspired to take some action. People felt welcome and included and just overall had an enjoyable day. Almost all would like to come to a similar event in the future. 

what people found the most useful

In the survey, I asked people “What parts of the event did you find most useful?”. Here are things that were mentioned more than once: 

what people liked the least

I also asked about what people liked least. This was mostly spread out quite a bit and everyone mentioned something else (or nothing). Two people mentioned the food, though. 

applicants and attendees

I let people apply until the day of the event. I used the numbers at the application deadline to organise food. In this case the cancellations and late applications roughly cancelled out, so I did not have any issues with that. 

numbers

• 47 applications
• 45 invitations
• 35 confirmed accepts a week or so before the event
• 35 showed up on the day (some cancelled/did not show, others showed up without confirming) 

who applied?

• employment/student status
  • 70% employed
  • 16% students
  • 14% unemployed
• location
  • 22% Manchester
  • 20% Sheffield
  • 7% Liverpool
  • 7% Leeds
  • + York, Blackpool, and lots of other cities in the North, and some from the South
• here is what cause areas people were interested in:

what I would do differently next time

Overall, I am quite happy with how it went and would feel good about just doing the same thing again in a year or two. It would probably be even faster as I could recycle things like the website, forms, emails, and the rough schedule. 

Things I might try if I feel like I have capacity:

• trying to push harder for uncoupling the venue from the food, but that might just not be possible
• being a little bit harsher about application deadlines
• sharing the event a bit more (I personally hate seeing the same event advertised all over my Slack workspaces, WhatsApp groups, etc. multiple times before the deadline - it feels very spammy. I tried to avoid this and generally only posted once everywhere. I might have gone too far here and missed out on applicants.)

resources for you to steal

I strongly recommend that more people consider organising something similar if they live in an area that has some EA presence, but is not one of the big EA hotspots. 

Save yourself some time and consider copying some of these resources from me:

• website
• application form
• feedback form
• career workshop slides

1. ^{^}

   A lot of people had to run off to catch their train just before the closing session, so they are sadly not in the photo.

2. ^{^}

   "How many new connections did you make today? In this context, a new connection is a person you would feel comfortable emailing a question/asking some favour. This could be someone you met at the event for the first time or someone you have known for a while but did not feel comfortable reaching out to until now."