12x more cost-effective than EAG - how I organised EA North 2025 (and how you could do something similar)

By matthes @ 2025-05-02T00:46 (+131)

I put on a small one-day conference. The cost per attendee was £50 (vs £1.2k for EAGs) and the cost per new connection was £11 (vs £130 for EAGs). 

intro

EA North was a one-day event for the North of England. 35 people showed up on the day. In total, I spent £1765 (≈ $2.4k), including paying myself £20/h for 30h total. This money will be reimbursed by EA UK^[1]. 

The cost per attendee was £50 and the cost per new connection was £11. These numbers are significantly (over 10x) lower than for EAG events, suggesting that we should be putting on more smaller events. 

I am not arguing that EAGs should not exist at all. A local event will likely never let me connect with someone living on another continent in person. 

My main goal with this post is to encourage individuals to put on more events like this (25-75 people from a set of nearby cities). 

I also hope that this post inspires existing organisers to further bring down costs of larger events, including EAG events. 

If you would like to read more about EA North 2025, read this retrospective.

why you can probably do this, too

I am an engineer/researcher with degrees in computer science and physics. I have no training in event management and have never before been paid to organise something. I planned EA North alongside a full-time job and while finishing up my PhD thesis corrections. I worked in little bursts of 1-4h of relatively relaxed work with an average of only 20 minutes per week, once I had the funding. 

In total, I spent only about 30 hours intentionally sitting down and organising things. 

If you live in an area that has been somewhat starved for bigger/regular EA events^[2] but has some EA presence/interest, consider putting on a similar event yourself. Maybe link to this post to support your funding application for it. 

what I spent the money on and a comparison with EAG London 2023

My title is a bit cheeky. An EAG is obviously not just a scaled up version of a local event like EA North. Once international travel is involved, travel stipends become much bigger. Multi-day events increase accommodation costs that might be reimbursed. It seems more difficult to find cheap, large venues. Making an event bigger might mean raising the admissions bar and spending more time on applications. Once a second person joins the organising team, this also creates communication/management overheads. So I was curious about how EA North's budget allocation compared.

budget breakdown

This post has a breakdown of the costs behind EAG London 2023^[3]. The author states that this “tends to vary a fair bit between events”. There is also a note that the figures do not include salaries, office costs, and software, which would increase costs by 25%^[4], so I added a line item. This post states that EAG London 2023 had 1.5k attendees (although I am not sure if that includes no-shows). Putting everything together, we end up with these numbers for absolute costs, relative costs, and costs per attendee (everything in GBP): 

Alongside, I included my numbers for EA North. 

I was planning to talk about each point on this list, but ultimately, I have no experience with larger venues, and cannot judge what a sensible amount for e.g. a production company is. I am still leaving the breakdown comparison in here for others. 

cost per attendee per day

EA North 2025 was 33x cheaper than than EAG London 2023 (£50 vs £1630 per person). We may want to account for the fact that EAG London was a multi-day event. If we (maybe somewhat generously) assume 3 days, the cost per day was still 11x cheaper (£50 vs £550 per person).

cost per connection

New connections are often used as a measure of impact for events like these. 

In 2023, EAG attendees made an average of 9.72 connections. At EA North 2025, attendees reported making an average of 4.56 (+/- 2.29 std) new connections, only half as many^[5]. 

We might expect this to be lower because there were fewer people. But it also makes sense to scale this number by the length of the event as we did before (because a longer event means more time to talk to people). Then, the average number of connections per attendee and per day is 3.24 for an EAG in 2023. In this sense, EA North 2025 provided 40% more connections per person per day. 

We can also divide the cost per attendee by the average number of connections to get a cost-effectiveness estimate. Since we are using an average EAG in 2023 for the connection estimate, I am using the average EAG cost per attendee in 2023 ($2032 ≈ £1530 by today's exchange rate). I also added the same numbers for EAGs in 2024 (which were cheaper). I rounded to the nearest GBP.

In terms of connections, EA North 2025 was 14x more cost effective than the average EAG in 2023, and 12x more cost effective than the average EAG in 2024. 

what I spent my time on 

Here is a breakdown of what I spent my time on when preparing the event (once I had the funding promised):

On the day of EA North, I gave the introduction and closing words, facilitated the meet-ups for animal welfare and community building, gave the career workshop, and facilitated the group discussion on building community in the North. See my retrospective post for the schedule.

There also were a few awesome volunteers to facilitate other meet-ups and a speed-friending session. These were events that they wanted to attend anyway and so it shouldn’t have negatively affected their own experience of the event much. The talks were also given by volunteers.  

After the event I spent 30-45min doing the reimbursement and writing a follow-up email to attendees. (Writing this post and the retrospective took much longer.)

ideas for being even more cost-effective

Here are some ideas for making a similar event even cheaper (without significantly affecting how much people are able to network or have a good time):

• consider more unconventional venues (will also significantly affect food costs)
  • pubs with function rooms (30-50 people), cheap and sometimes free in this part of the world
  • people’s houses (20-40 people)
• don’t provide food (if the venue allows for it)
  • people would have had to buy/bring/make food for that day anyway
• spend even less time on organising
  • write scripts to automate some of the work involved in keeping track of applications, confirmed and unconfirmed attendees, and any reminders associated with that - not sure what EAG teams do here
  • spend less time thinking about individual applications - I usually did not change my mind after 5min of looking up the person and reading their application 

recommendations to funders

I personally found that getting the funding was the most annoying bit of putting on EA North^[7]. Some of this was just caused by personal task preference, but I see potential for improving the process for both funders and grantees. I have two main pieces of advice to funders based on my personal experience. 

reconsider how many resources you spend on small applications

After sharing my initial budget/event proposal with EA UK, I received lots of input on my suggested goals, budget, and schedule. Some of this was useful, but it generally did not change the event much. It did however create additional labour and delays, not just for me, but also for at least five people who commented on the document (+others whose comments were forwarded to me in other ways). All of whom presumably otherwise try to have impact with their time. Each of these people would have had to stop their main work, read the document, come up with comments, and presumably come up with a recommendation. Overall, I think that too much time and effort was probably spent on this funding decision, and too many people were involved. 

Maybe consider setting a hard limit for time/people allocated to a budget proposal based on its size. Consider lowering the limit. 

consider providing funding upfront

I do not know how common this is, but I personally have found that any kind of financial support that I have ever received (putting on this conference, fee and travel reimbursements for other events, purchasing equipment etc.) was always based on reimbursements. 

Paying for everything myself was just about possible for me, but this would likely be a barrier for many others. Where possible, providing funding upfront (and asking for any leftover money to be returned) would make this funding much more accessible. 

thermal printers are cool and cheap

The week of the conference I happened to find out that I can use my £30 thermal printer to print on "holographic" paper. I got 500 labels for £8 and printed a few stickers while watching a movie. A few people at the event found them fun. I would recommend trying this out if you want to make some merch and a t-shirt seems like too much. Just make sure your printer has a full charge to get a nice crisp black.

conclusion

Consider putting on an event like this, even if you have no experience. Check out my retrospective for resources to steal.

If you are someone who puts on events, consider if you can be more frugal with time and resources.

If you are someone who funds events, also consider if you can be more frugal with time and resources when evaluating funding applications.

1. ^{^}

   EA UK originally approved a budget up to £4.3k.

2. ^{^}

   Sheffield is just a 2h train ride away from London, yet most people I talk to here and in nearby cities (including me) do not feel like they're part of the Oxbridge/London hotspots. The bar for "starved for events" might be lower than you think. 

3. ^{^}

   EAG costs came down in 2024 ($2032 to $1558 per person on average) but this is the event I had a breakdown for. 

4. ^{^}

   This should really be included from the start and I would love to see a full breakdown. Perhaps it could be calculated by dividing the total costs per year by the number of events, scaled to the size of the event.

5. ^{^}

   I adapted the prompt I have seen other feedback forms use for this: 

   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.

6. ^{^}

   I used Padlet for attendees to create attendee profiles and seek out people to talk to ahead of time. 

7. ^{^}

   Ultimately, none of this affected my ability to put on the event. I am grateful that I received this funding and paying for it myself would have been quite painful for me. Thank you to EA UK for supporting EA North!