Retrospective for Inaugural EA SA Summit 2024: Its Impact and What We Learnt

By Estelle Novenka Florens, Imaan Khadir 🔸, Hayley Martin, Ashura Batungwanayo @ 2025-01-29T21:20 (+38)

The EA South Africa Summit took place on October 5th 2024 at UVU Africa in Cape Town. The event brought together 52 members of the EA community for the first time in South Africa. This retrospective is to give a brief overview of what went well, the impact the summit had and what we intend to improve on in the future.

The summit marks a significant milestone in the growth of EA in South Africa. It began in 2018 with a student society at the University of Cape Town that has since gained substantial traction. The broader EA community expanded since then, including an online community and the establishment of a WhatsApp community of ≈150 people and a mailing list of 850+ people. The community also organised and hosted the EA African Organisers Summit in 2022, gathering community builders around the continent. The community reached another major development in February 2024 when local community builders from the group came together to formally organise EA South Africa, leading to the successful execution of this summit just a few months later.

Objectives

Our goal was to bring together people interested in addressing pressing global challenges through an evidence-based approach. We aimed to provide a space for learning, networking, and exploring collaboration opportunities to advance effective altruism in the region.

We expected over 50 attendees, with emphasis on:

• Individuals from South Africa and neighbouring countries interested in learning more about EA
• Existing EA SA community members or South Africans familiar with effective altruism
• People running or working for EA-aligned projects operating in South Africa or neighbouring countries

To measure our impact, we focused on attendees' perception of the event's value, tracking whether it influenced their career decisions or actions. We also monitored their likelihood to recommend future summits and tracked meaningful connections formed during the event. These metrics helped us evaluate the summit's effectiveness as presented in later sections.

Key Takeaways

• Our inaugural EA South Africa Summit ran successfully on 5 October 2024 and achieved a 9.88/10 average likelihood to recommend score.
• As a result of the summit, we saw several commitments to new projects in EA-aligned causes, career changes towards impact, increased giving, and even the launch of new EA groups.
• We have identified key areas for improvement, including venue management, communication, application processing, and budgeting. We're committed to implementing these learnings for future events.
• We believe running a 2025 summit in South Africa would be valuable, especially since we are planning increased outreach and community-building activities over the next year, including EA fellowships.
• The summit's outcomes validate our belief that South Africa and the region have great potential for EA community growth. We are confident that by growing the EA community in South Africa, we can unlock significant potential for improving the lives of humans and non-human animals in the region.

Outcomes and Survey Feedback

The impact of this event

• Respondents said they were highly likely to recommend the EA SA Summit, with an average likelihood-to-recommend score of 9.88.
• People indicated that they had made, on average, 4.29 new connections.  Of these, they thought there might be 2.86 impactful connections on average.
• The majority, ≈78% of respondents, said that the summit was a much better use of their time (>10x the counterfactual), while ≈22% said that it was a notably better use of their time (3–10x the counterfactual).
• Every respondent indicated an intention to take action as a result of the summit.

Intended Actions of Respondents

These commitments are promising, demonstrating the event's positive impact and strong potential for EA community-building in South Africa.

Some quotations from respondents: 

• “The Give Directly presentation was particularly very interesting for me. Especially from my perspective as an African, this opened my mind further in terms of thinking more carefully on  how to maximise the proportion of resources that actually benefit the intended beneficiaries whenever planning or implementing projects.”
• “The Biosecurity space by Mr. Zacharia from 1 Day Sooner. It opened my eyes on where I was going wrong with a Biosecurity project of my own and showed me where to improve on.”
• “This event has really had an impact as it was very informative and educating. It was very eventful and opportunistic to me, making me aware of the different ways to achieve the impossible.”
• “The summit put me in rooms with some very influential people who were able to hear my current career challenges and advise me. This was such a rare and important opportunity that I don’t take for granted. I was also able to make friends who share my interests, and learn about areas I didn’t know much about, like AI.”
• “The event was well organized! I loved it. Please host more.”
• “Please do more. This was great.”

Cause Areas

Respondents’ Average Rating of Cause Areas by their Importance

Respondents’ current engagement in the field of their most important cause area

Most survey respondents are looking for opportunities in the field of their interest. This suggests a need for more career support and opportunities within these cause areas for the EA community in South Africa.

Content, time and community

In terms of the programme, participants found workshops most valuable, then talks and 1-1s, followed by speed meetings and discussion tables. Respondents also felt very welcome and respected at the event based on their scores. 

Conference content and logistics

For sessions that attendees found particularly good, they mentioned sessions on giving cash directly, biosecurity, AI safety and animal welfare. No respondent mentioned a session they found particularly bad. 

Of those who answered the additional questions: 

• 100% were very satisfied with the application and registration process, Swapcard, the overall conference logistics, the venue and catering. Catering also received a unanimous score of 10 out of 10.
• 77% were very satisfied and 33% were satisfied with the pre-conference communication, support with travel and accommodation, and security.
• 33% were very satisfied with the ticket price, including subsidised and free tickets, with 77% ticking “N/A”.

Additional Information

For more than half of the attendees, this was their first in-person event, including EAG and EAGx events. Respondents expressed gratitude and enthusiasm for us hosting more of these events. 

Program

We delivered an event program featuring talks, office hours, and meetups across three main spaces. Organisations in attendance include the Centre for Effective Altruism, GiveDirectly, the Against Malaria Foundation, Animal Advocacy Africa, Newform Foods, 1Day Sooner, and Effective Altruism South Africa. 

• We had 9 talks in the main session, spanning cause areas, including AI safety, animal welfare, poverty alleviation, and global health and development:

• There were office hours sessions:

• We had several meetups: 

• Finally, we had two lab tours of Newform Foods, which does alternative protein R&D in Cape Town.

We plan to finalise the program earlier in future, as we finalised it too close to the event because of our limited capacity and the unexpected venue change. This significantly affected the number of people who could speak, with many citing availability as an issue.

Applications and Attendance

We engaged a total of 427 people for the summit, with:

• 286 expressions of interest from social media ads
• 154 applications
• 72 registrations
• 52 attendees
• 13 volunteers

Attendees’ Level of Engagement with EA

Application Outcomes

• There were 14 people accepted with travel support, of which 11 attended. This is a 21% dropoff rate. We have high confidence that this is largely due to acceptances being sent out too close to the event date, and acceptance emails going to spam, delaying our communications.
• There were 103 accepted without travel support:
  • 23 attended (22%).
  • 80 did not attend (78%), of which, 61 requested travel support (87.5%). We have high confidence that travel costs were the most significant barrier to their attendance. 

There are several things we can do better:

• We opened and closed applications too late. We will consider closing applications around 2  weeks before the event.
• We took too long to review applications, meaning some approved applicants could no longer attend. This was due to our limited team capacity and underestimating the review time.
• Emails we sent to applicants went to spam. Going forward, we hope to mitigate this by using an email marketing platform like MailChimp.
• Many people who registered did not attend, so we think it would be valuable to allow Swapcard access for accepted applicants who are unable to attend.

We noticed we had many high-quality international applicants. In particular, there was great interest from applicants from Kenya. We believe Kenya could benefit from running a summit in 2025. 

Attendees’ Country of Residence

Costs

Organising the event cost ≈$2,150.00, excluding travel support and organiser remuneration. With the spend on travel support of $4,652.85, this brings the total to ≈$6802.85, with a cost per person of ≈130.82. 

To keep overall costs low, we did research and enquiries and reallocated from low to high-priority items when needed. However, we underestimated costs, especially for the venue and catering. We will use quotations and final spending from this summit to inform the budgets for future events. 

Breakdown of Costs (Excluding Travel Support and Remuneration)

Venue

We selected UVU Africa, through the introduction of one of our advisors. Our experience with UVU Africa was extremely positive and we would be happy to work with them again. We also made mistakes: 

• Initially, we relied too heavily on a verbal agreement with our initial venue, Bertha House, which fell through. This significantly affected the event, delaying other event plans and communications. For future events, we will secure written venue agreements earlier in the planning process.
• We set an unrealistic venue budget, which limited our options. In the end, while we got a reduced rate compared to similar venues, our venue exceeded our initial budget. We will adjust the venue budget based on the quotations we received for this event.
• Additionally, we misjudged seating arrangements and set up more chairs than necessary in the main room. In future, we will not set out extra chairs but will add them if needed.

Catering

We quickly adapted to a venue change and selected Lunchworks as a reliable, affordable caterer. We were happy with their service. Unfortunately, we exceeded the catering budget due to accommodating multiple dietary requirements (vegan, halal, and allergy-specific), unplanned costs and expensive vegan and gluten-free snack options. We also over-ordered due to uncertainty because of our late registration timeline and 20% dropoff rate after registration. In future, we plan to close registrations firmly before catering numbers are required and account for a 35-40% no-show rate to avoid over-ordering.

Marketing

We ran social media ads on Meta and LinkedIn before the event. $100.80 worth of ads resulted in 286 expressions of interest, 29 applications and 4 attendances. Some volunteers who learnt about the event via the ads referred others - at least 3 we know of, who also attended and volunteered. This means a total of 7 people attended the summit directly or indirectly as a result of the ads. 

Social Media Ad Results by Platform

Of the 29 applicants, 16 were accepted without funding, 2 applied after the cutoff for assessing applications, and 11 were rejected. 

We set up the ads with dynamic creative with the support of Amplify Reasoning, and had a small ad budget of $110.80, with $60 for Meta and $50.80 for LinkedIn. 

EA SA Summit Social Media Ad Costs (in USD)

Although most social media ad respondents were not already engaged with EA, the ads effectively gauged interest in EA in South Africa and raised awareness of our group. Many respondents were well-suited for introductory EA materials like fellowships, with several following our page and two expressing fellowship interest, demonstrating high potential EA interest in South Africa.

The summit ads resulted in 11 applications for our January 2025 Fellowship, one of which was indirect, i.e. they were referred by an ad respondent. Of these, 10 were accepted. 

Photography and Videography

We deprioritised recording and photography when we had the venue and catering costs exceed their initial budgets so that we could keep costs down. Our venue provided us with videography and we got volunteers to take photos.  However, only single-angle videography was available and we did not have high-quality photos of each session. Next time, we will likely hire a second videographer for multi-angle footage and recruit a professional photographer or engage more volunteers.

Merchandise 

After considering alternatives, we chose Thunder Marketing, which offered reasonable pricing and good-quality 100% cotton shirts, which were both cost-effective and environmentally friendly. The shirts looked great and were well-received. However, ordering was finalised just two weeks before the summit, creating unnecessary stress for the team and supplier. We will place merchandise orders at least one month before events to ensure smoother operations.

Accommodation and Travel

We used a reimbursement system for travel and accommodation, but this proved challenging for attendees who required upfront payment. We hope to offer upfront payments in future and will improve the attendee handbook with accommodation suggestions, an accommodation coordination sheet, and information about navigating Cape Town.

Swapcard

We set up Swapcard, kept it up-to-date during the event and used it to send communications before and after the event. However, we added attendees to Swapcard too late. This meant they did not have time to familiarise themselves with the platform, view the program, and set 1-1s with other attendees. Next time, we will include instructions on how to use Swapcard in pre-summit materials. We would also like to livestream sessions on Swapcard.

Team Composition and Collaboration

Organising Team

Team members generally had delineated roles, but stepped in to help each other when needed. We used Notion for team coordination, which largely worked well. Planning from the proposal to wrap-up took ≈700 hours across the team of four: 

• Hayley Martin Co-Team Lead
• Ashura Batungwanayo, Co-Team Lead
• Imaan Khadir, Communications Lead
• Estelle Florens, Logistics Lead

The team’s prior engagement with EA and event production includes: 

• All are co-organisers for Effective Altruism South Africa
• Two were part of EA UCT’s Executive Committee
• Three attended EAGs or EAGxs, with some volunteering.
• Three attended the Africa Organisers Summit 2022.
• All facilitated EA fellowships.
• Some had prior event production experience, including large in-person events. 

There are a few things we could have done better:

• We were time-constrained due to work and studies. We underestimated the time required to plan the summit and had several inefficiencies that increased the time required.
• Our processes were not streamlined and we did not automate enough, which lead to wasted time. We have gained a lot of learning value and will use this summit to benchmark the planning time required for our events to ensure the team has more than enough time. 

Volunteers

We had 13 volunteers. Those who were newer to EA became more engaged. Two applied to the Condor Camp South Africa, an AI Safety camp. We have realised the importance of engaging volunteers and team leads earlier, and will do so next time.

Closing Thoughts

The EA SA Summit signifies a lot for EA in South Africa and the continent more broadly. We managed to get significant traction in a short amount of time. This suggests enormous potential for growth as we plan for more exciting activities this year.

We've learned a tremendous amount through organising this summit, from venue management to application processing. Looking at our application data, particularly the strong interest from Kenya, we see great potential for EA summits across Africa. We're excited to support other EA groups hoping to run similar events, sharing what we've learned to help build thriving EA communities across the continent.

Despite being a relatively small event, the summit had a clear impact - from the solid recommendation score to the concrete commitments made by attendees which validates our belief in South Africa's potential for EA community growth. We're confident that by continuing to grow the EA community here, we can unlock significant opportunities for impact and leverage the many talented individuals based in the region who wish to have a community of like-minded people.

Moving towards 2025, EA South Africa has exciting plans to keep the momentum going, including several introductory fellowships, socials, and more.