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CEA is growing again: 25% more people engaged with our programs in 2025
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Angelina Li·Jessica McCurdy🔸·Alex Dial·Joris 🔸
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
This is an organizational update from CEA, relevant for tracking EA community growth trends and institutional health, but has limited direct relevance to core AI safety technical research.
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Building effective altruismAnnouncements and updatesCentre for Effective AltruismData on the EA communityEffective Altruism GlobalEffective altruism groupsOrganization updatesValue of movement growth
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Importance: 28/100blog postnews
Summary
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) reports 20-25% year-over-year growth in engagement across all program tiers in 2025, reversing two years of declining engagement and significantly exceeding its 7.5-10% growth targets. This was achieved through expanding existing programs, launching new initiatives like a career bootcamp and virtual outreach events, while keeping spending increases minimal at 0.4%. CEA plans to accelerate growth further in 2026 through strategic hiring.
Key Points
- •CEA achieved 20-25% YoY growth in engagement across all program tiers in 2025, far exceeding the 7.5-10% growth targets set.
- •Growth reversed two consecutive years of declining engagement in EA community programs.
- •New initiatives included a career bootcamp and virtual outreach events, expanding reach without major cost increases.
- •Overall spending increased by only 0.4%, demonstrating high cost-efficiency in scaling community engagement.
- •CEA plans to accelerate growth in 2026 through strategic hiring to support expanded programming.
Cited by 1 page
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| EA and Longtermist Wins and Losses | -- | 53.0 |
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# CEA is growing again: 25% more people engaged with our programs in 2025
By Angelina Li, Jessica McCurdy🔸, Alex Dial, Joris 🔸
Published: 2026-02-11
**TLDR:** In 2025, we grew engagement with CEA’s programs by 20–25% across every tier of engagement, reversing two years of moderate declines in engagement. We did so without disproportionately increasing costs or lowering the quality or bar for our programs.
This post reviews CEA’s work on growing the EA community, which is only one of our strategic goals. See more on our other strategic goals [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Dy4iGHbAkKAQ4t2Dw/building-sustainable-momentum-progress-report-on-cea-s-2025). We plan to accelerate our growth even further, and we're hiring across multiple teams to make that happen. [Join us](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers)!
**Summary**
===========
* The Centre for Effective Altruism’s [**2025 and 2026 strategy**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QkE35oTsasMn37o7R/stewardship-cea-s-2025-26-strategy-to-reach-and-raise-ea-s-1) **is focused on building sustainable momentum for EA**, and growing the EA community is the cornerstone of building that momentum.
* **In our first year of executing this strategy, we grew by 20–25% year-over-year across each tier of our engagement funnel,** beating our targets of **7.5–10%** year-on-year growth, and reversing the moderate decreases in engagement with our programs throughout 2023-2024. Our results include:
* Hosting the [biggest EA Global ever](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6ytWGP2MBoym6qs6S/a-reflection-on-ea-global-london-2025) without lowering the admissions bar (with the highest satisfaction score and lowest cost-per-attendee in the last 4 years)
* Launching a new [4-day online bootcamp](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/courses/bootcamp) to help participants make a high-impact career pivot
* Reviving several groups at [pilot universities](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xcn5RzaJS5FosabZp/updates-on-cea-s-pilot-university-program) (including Stanford EA)
* Increasing the conversion rate from [EffectiveAltruism.org](http://effectivealtruism.org) to the [EA Newsletter](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-newsletter-archives) by 3.3x (0.6% → 2.6%), and
* Hosting a new virtual outreach event ([EA Connect](https://eaconnect.effectivealtruism.org/)) which was the largest event we’ve ever run.
* **Our growth strategy has centered around building sustainable momentum in EA growth**, while not leaving behind our focus on cost-effectiveness or program quality.
* **We achieved our growth without disproportionately increasing costs. **Overall CEA spending increased by 0.4% on a like-for-like basis in 2025[^o6cerukts4], whereas our tiers have grown 20–25%. When we looked at cost growth for each of the tiers, we broadly found that we did not disproportionately increase our spending.
* **Our growth came from many sources**, for
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