EA - Community Building from scratch: The first year of EA Hungary by gergogaspar

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Community Building from scratch: The first year of EA Hungary, published by gergogaspar on January 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TLDR/summary:I (Gergő) started EA Hungary as a paid organizer in mid-September 2021. In one year, we’ve had 100+ intro fellowship applicants, 88 of whom completed it successfully. We have run other fellowships, from whom around 20 people have benefited. I have had about 110 calls, most of which were oriented on career support for the new members. EA Hungary brought counterfactually ~35 people to EAGx conferences and organized a retreat for 20 students. EA Hungary hired the second employee (Dia) in July, doing ~0.5 FTE.The aim of this post is to share the progress of EA Hungary in its first year (2021 Oct to 2022 Sept) I wrote this up with the intent of helping those who are starting a new group (hence the chronological order). If you are only interested in the main outcomes, read the tables. I hope this will be useful.Background and how I got fundingI learned about EA sometime in 2020 and while attending the EAGxVirtual (13 – 14 June 2020), I met a few other people based in Hungary. We had the first in-person meetup in August 2020, with 6 people. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, so we carried on with online meetups about once per month. We ran the intro fellowship for existing members (7 people), followed by the in-depth fellowship (4 people).During this time (and afterwards) I was supported by Catherine Low from CEA, from whom I learned a lot (∼1 call every 1,5 months).In the meantime, I was also volunteering for SoGive as a charity analyst and then as an analysis coordinator (teaching people basic charity analysis + operations work). I learned a lot from this and I think it really sped up my involvement within EA. My experience with SoGive also helped me start and run EA Hungary more effectively, as I have already gained some operations and mentoring experience.In the fall of 2021, I started a second Master’s in Philosophy at ELTE - (Eötvös Loránd University).Thanks to these activities mentioned above, I had a strong enough track record to apply for funding from EAIF to do 0.5 FTE, (although this upscaled to full-time pretty quickly).(I also have this story presented in memes, don’t ask why.)2021 Fall semester (from 2021 Mid-Sept to 2022 January)Main outcomes:(Where you see gaps it means that I didn’t record the exact numbers/data)8-week intro Fellowship: Number of applicants:DataNumber of people successfully completing the fellowship Number of people who filled out the completion survey:Data1-1 Mentoring calls262222∼20Other outcomes:Online social around week 4, which was attended by around 6 people- End-of-fellowship meal which was attended by 14 people.General info about the 2021 Fall period:Marketing and advertisement of the fellowship was almost completely done on Facebook groups of various university programs of ELTE university. (Facebook is still the most widely used social media in Hungary, although it is slowly losing popularity)Lots of start-up time costs, as I was still figuring things out.If you would like to save time on operations, I recommend using some draft emails/forms from the EA Hungary care package as well as these amazing resources: EA Student Groups Handbook, EA Groups Resource Centre and this folder.2022 Spring Semester (2022 February-May)Main outcomes:8-week intro Fellowship: Number of people successfully completing the fellowshipDataNumber of people who filled out the completion survey:DataIn-depth fellowship Number of people successfully completing the fellowship 1-1 Mentoring calls (unfortunately I didn’t keep an exact account, so this is a rough estimate) EAGxOxford attendees EAGxPrague attendees (the two numbers mean all attendees - counterfactual attendees (ie. people who wo...