I’m currently a co-director at EA Netherlands (with Marieke de Visscher). We’re working to build and strengthen the EA community here.
Before this, I worked as a consultant on urban socioeconomic development projects and programmes funded by the EU. Before that, I studied liberal arts (in the UK) and then philosophy (in the Netherlands).
Hit me up if you wanna find out about the Dutch EA community! :)
Good points! I’ve found the book ‘Change: how to make big things happen’ useful in my work at EA Netherlands. I wrote up a few takeaways in a comment here.
Yup, that’s a risk! I think you can mitigate it by learning how to do marketing well, but that’s easier said than done!
Thanks Vasco!
I think it isn’t used much by EA event organisers because it probably doesn’t really measure precisely what it claims to measure. However, I do think it’s nonetheless a reasonable measure of overall quality, and because it’s widely used outside the EA bubble, you can more easily use it to benchmark (compared to likelihood to recommend scores).
Oh, this is perfect timing. I had just ordered The Goal in an effort to get better at this sort of thing. Great to see how it helped someone like yourself—a decent signal that it’s a useful book to read.
Good to know! If it doesn’t get included in the EA Survey, we might consider doing it ourselves at the national level (M&E budget allowing...).
But obviously, international data that would allow us to compare across regions would be more useful.
I think the magnitude × direction framing is really useful, and I agree the risk is real.
At EA Netherlands, I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of Ben Todd’s notion of “community capital” — roughly, the stock of shared values, trust, human capital, coordination capacity, norm-following, and reputation that a community accumulates over time. The worry you’re describing is essentially that outreach erodes community capital. And it can — if you do it carelessly.
But my ambition is to try to monitor this over time. If we surveyed relevant aspects of the community periodically — tracking its values, the degree to which people are following community norms, the actions people are taking, the degree of interconnectedness between members, and the quality of human capital coming in — we might be able to detect whether outreach efforts are degrading the direction term, and course-correct if they are.[1]
If that’s feasible, it turns a binary question (“should we grow or not?”) into an empirical one (“is this particular form of growth maintaining alignment?”). Some forms of outreach might pass the test, and others might not. But you’d want to check rather than assume.
I think the implicit model in your comment is one where we have to choose — stay small and aligned, or grow and dilute. But perhaps there’s a third option: invest seriously in both outreach and monitoring community capital, and course-correct over time.
Out of interest, has this been considered, @David_Moss?
Thanks Joris, and an excellent question. The honest answer is that I can’t cleanly attribute the application increase to marketing. If I had to put a number on it, I’d estimate marketing contributed roughly 30–35% of the application increase — but this is genuinely uncertain, and I’d put the range at somewhere between 20% and 50%. Here’s the reasoning and the data behind that.
What we did differently this year
The standard promotional activities — Forum posts, reaching out to group organisers across the region and asking them to share the event — were roughly the same as previous years. We also ran paid ads in both years, but the 2025 campaign was substantially different in quality and targeting.
In 2024, the ad campaign was set up by a very capable student who threw herself into it but had no prior experience with paid advertising. She ran campaigns on both LinkedIn and Meta. In 2025, we hired a professional agencies to run the Meta campaign on Instagram and support us with organic content on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Here’s how the paid campaigns compare. In 2024, we spent ~€2,640 and generated 454,904 impressions and 4,162 clicks (CPM of €5.80, CPC of €0.63). In 2025, we spent ~€3,200 and generated 257,698 impressions and 6,442 clicks (CPM of €12.41, CPC of €0.50). CPM is cost per 1,000 impressions; CPC is cost per click.
So the 2025 campaign was more expensive per impression but cheaper per click — it reached fewer people but got more of them to engage. And the critical difference was what happened after the click: in 2024, there was no lead capture mechanism, just link clicks. In 2025, 709 leads were captured via instant forms and entered an automated email follow-up sequence.
I asked Claude to compare the 2025 campaign stats against industry benchmarks, and the results suggest the agency did a good job. Our CPC of €0.50 is well below typical Instagram rates (industry averages run $1.83–$3.35). Our CTR of 2.62% is roughly 3–10x the Instagram norm of 0.22–0.88%. And our CPL of €4.07 is a fraction of the average Facebook lead campaign CPL of ~$28. The one caveat is that instant forms with pre-filled data make conversion very easy, which flatters these numbers — the real question is always what those leads are worth further down the funnel.
On top of the paid campaign, we invested significantly more time in organic LinkedIn content with support from the agency. My personal profile generated 103k impressions over the campaign period (March–December), reaching 25,129 unique members, up 814% on the prior period. The EAN company page added another 26k impressions, with a clear ramp from ~500/month early on to 7,100 in November, dropping back to ~700/month after the event. We also distributed posters across university campuses in the Netherlands.
A caveat on the LinkedIn figures: the organic content also included campaigns for our intro course (which saw a 140% increase in completions YoY), so those numbers overstate the EAGx-specific reach. I can’t easily disaggregate the two.
The mechanics of the Meta campaign
We ran Instagram ads using Meta’s instant form format. Someone scrolling their feed sees an ad, taps it, and a form pops up within the app pre-filled with their name and email — they can submit with essentially one tap. Those emails then synced to a Mailchimp automation that sent two follow-up emails linking to the application page.
The funnel looked like this: ~50,000 people reached → 6,000 clicks → 709 instant form leads → 612 entered the email automation → ~30–40 click-throughs to the application page. We generated those 709 leads at €4.07 each.
We originally wanted to run a website conversion campaign, which would have let us track the full journey from ad to application. The EA Global website (where applications happen) doesn’t support a tracking pixel, so we built our own landing page — but then we messed up the pixel there as well. So we fell back to the instant forms, which gave us reliable lead data but broke the chain between ad exposure and actual applications.
What the feedback survey says
The post-event survey asked attendees how they heard about EAGxAmsterdam. Only ~2% of respondents credited Instagram ads and ~3% credited LinkedIn. On the surface, this looks like marketing had no effect.
But I’d be cautious about taking that at face value. Only 98 out of 159 respondents answered the channel question. It’s plausible that attendees who came via ads — likely newer to EA and less engaged — were less likely to fill in a post-event survey, meaning they’d be systematically underrepresented.
There’s also a basic attribution problem. Someone sees an Instagram ad, doesn’t click, then hears about the event from a friend a week later and applies. They’d truthfully answer “through a friend” on the survey, even though the ad planted the seed. Self-reported attribution tends to undercredit awareness channels and overcredit the last touchpoint.
How I get to the estimate
Taking all of the above together: we received 906 applications in 2025 versus 570 in 2024, an increase of 336 (59%). Attendance grew from 381 to 517 (36%).
One way to get at the question is to compare against the broader trend. CEA’s recent post reports that overall EAGx attendance grew 20% in 2025 (2,866 → 3,238). Amsterdam’s 36% attendance growth significantly outperformed this. And there are reasons to think the baseline is even lower than 20%: that figure partly reflects expanding from fewer to 10 events globally (including new ones in Nigeria and São Paulo), so the per-event growth rate may be close to flat. There were also factors working against us: EAGxBerlin was close to us on the calendar (competing for the same regional audience), and EA Connect — CEA’s largest ever virtual event — ran around the same time, potentially satisfying people’s appetite for EA events without needing to apply to an in-person conference. In 2024, EAGxUtrecht was in the summer, further from other events.
So Amsterdam significantly outperformed a baseline that was probably close to flat, despite calendar headwinds. The main local factors that could explain the outperformance are: Amsterdam being more well-known than Utrecht, and our marketing investment.
Of those 336 additional applications, how many did marketing drive? 709 people submitted an instant form after seeing an ad. But the gap between tapping a pre-filled form on Instagram and actually paying ~€120 and filling out a substantive application is wide. For a paid event with a non-trivial application process, a lead-to-application conversion rate of 5–15% seems realistic — that gives roughly 35–105 applications from Meta ads. LinkedIn and the poster campaign are harder to quantify: LinkedIn works as an awareness channel that primes people to respond when they encounter the event elsewhere, and posters are essentially untrackable. Together they probably contributed a few dozen applications at most that would show up in the data as “EA Global website” or “through a friend.”
Setting those against the 336 additional applications, and accounting for the confounders above, I’d estimate marketing explains somewhere in the range of 20–50% of the growth, with 30–35% as my central estimate. The range is wide mostly because the lead-to-application conversion rate is doing all the heavy lifting and I have no data to pin it down. I hold this loosely.
What would actually help us figure this out
The biggest gap is that we can’t connect our leads to actual applications. Fixing the tracking pixel or matching our 709 lead emails against the applicant list would give us a hard floor on ad-driven applications. It’d be great if the EA Global team could find a solution for this.
The other thing that would help is knowing whether Amsterdam outperformed or tracked with the broader trend. @Arthur Malone🔸 / @Kiryl Shantyka / @Niki Kesseler — would you be able to share application trends across EAGx conferences over the past couple of years? The overall EAGx attendance figure includes new events, so a per-event comparison would give a cleaner baseline. If Amsterdam’s growth was in line with returning events, that points to ecosystem-level factors. If it significantly outperformed, that helps isolate the local effect.
Nice post and beaut new website!
Thank you, Nick! Means a lot to get a forum compliment from a power user like yourself :)
Thanks for everything Naomi!
So true! It’s also just very nice to receive these messages
Definitely worth a shot! Make sure you apply to CEA’s organiser support programme (if you haven’t already) when applications next open. Until then, maybe reach out to @gergo, Director of EA UK? He might have some tips to help you get going.
Thanks! And were your goals mostly about getting sign ups to the advising service? Or getting newsletter subscribers? Or raising brand awareness? Or a mixture of these things?
Last year we ran performance ads for our intro course and EAGxAmsterdam, and then did a bunch of brand awareness content production on LinkedIn.
Great post, thanks for sharing! We’ve also had promising results when we’ve invested in marketing. Could you say approximately how much was spent? Or Sarah, if you’re reading this and you’d rather chat privately about spending, could you ping me an email?
Thanks Marijn!!
Centola’s book ‘Change: how to make big things happen’ is really good.
He has six key tips:
Don’t rely on contagiousness. Social change does not always spread like a virus. A viral advertising campaign doesn’t enable new ideas to take hold. Simply attracting eyeballs will not suffice. Not only that, it can backfire when people hear about a change but notice adoption isn’t happening.
Protect the innovators. Non-adopters are often a countervailing influence. Innovations that face entrenched opposition from established norms can spread more effectively when early adopters have less exposure to the entire network.
Use the network periphery. Highly connected influencers can be a roadblock for social change. The key to initiating social change is to target the periphery. Stop looking for special people and instead look for special places.
Establish wide bridges. A narrow bridge typically consists of a single weak tie between groups. Narrow bridges have reach but lack redundancy, which is necessary to spread complex contagions.
Create relevance. When behaviour change requires social proof that a change will be helpful for a potential adopter, or if it requires emotional excitement or loyalty/solidarity, similarity among the sources of reinforcement will help. However, when change is based on legitimacy, i.e., believing that the behaviour is widely adopted, then the opposite is true: diversity among reinforcing sources of adoption is needed.
Use the snowball strategy. Clustering is key to triggering tipping points. Again, focus on special places, not special people. Incubator neighbourhoods allow a new behaviour to compete against an established norm.
Quick tip: just run your draft through Claude and ask it to either give feedback in the style of an EA Forum user or, if you’re short on time, ask it to rewrite it in the style that EA Forum readers prefer (and make sure you have plenty of reasoning transparency).
From what I understand, Forum usage declined for a couple of years and has now stabilised.
My guess is that, since the Forum is mostly used by fairly engaged EAs, the post-FTX slowdown in top-of-funnel growth is showing up here on a lag. People don’t usually arrive on the Forum cold; my impression is there’s typically a runway of a year or two between first contact with EA and posting or commenting in earnest. So a recruitment hole in 2023–24 produces a Forum hole now, even if intake has since recovered.
If that’s roughly right, two things should follow: the share of activity from accounts under ~12 months old will have dropped more than overall activity has, and Forum recovery will lag whatever recovery CEA is seeing at the top of the funnel by another year or two.
And then it’s probably compounded by dispersion — as you point out, a lot of the conversation that would once have happened here has migrated to LW, X, or Substack.