1. Start a Project Incubator

Some pretty good advice I've heard is 'do things that your most engaged members will find valuable'. The easiest way to do that is to get them to do it for you!

Project Incubator plan is to incentivise people to setup their own groups on EA-relevant stuff. Examples might be a Forecasting group, joint upskilling on AI, Cause Prio investigations group. You give them the brief, incentivise them ("we will buy you a pizza each week for 5 weeks of this group running"), and voila - groups!

This also seems good for identifying potential future organisers, since the type of people who can gather their mates and organise a group probably have decent social and logistical skills. This might also be good for engaging people who wouldn't normally do EA stuff (ie. people who think Forecasting is cool but wouldn't come to EA events), although this is less clear and the bar for approval would probably be higher.

Status: Tried this this year. Nobody applied so we can't really judge the expected value. Initial 'costs' for setup were low (like 1-2 hrs planning and making application form).

2. Conference + Accommodation = Retreat ?

Retreats are generally considered to be pretty good value (ie. CEA gives funding for them), but also a high cost (time and effort). Roughly, there are two parts to Retreat organisation - Logistics and Content.

Going to an EA Conference as a group, and booking shared accommodation the night before/after, basically gives you all/most of the content 'for free', so that you only really need to do the logistics part. This is lower organising cost, less likely to go wrong, and gives you 'retreat vibes' and the cool 'late night life changing conversation' opportunities which seem partly indicative of the value.

Downsides are this is expensive (although you can reasonably ask members to pay for part/all of the stay costs). Additionally, if people are doing most things at the Conference solo, then getting back quite late and just sleeping, you probably don't get any value from being in the same house overnight. It would require some evening activities to be organised, and for people to buy into doing them, in order to be valuable.

Status: Have been to a conference where the group booked shared accommodation. It was good vibes. Didn't do any formal 'evening activities' of the Retreat sort though, so hard to judge if it was worthwhile.

3. Don't Stop Over Summer!

The standard pattern seems to be that uni groups do activities and events throughout the term, then go completely silent over holidays and summer breaks. This is completely understandable - it's hard to do things and people need a break!

However, it's probably easy and low-cost to do some things over the holiday. Specifically: Get a (free) Discord channel setup. Organise 1-2 'virtual game nights' on there. Discord has free multiplayer games. You  can do lightning talks / presentation night (either serious or silly).

If you do this right, it should basically just be a bunch of friends hanging out, so no expected 'effort costs' or similar!

Status: Not tried this but will be doing it over the upcoming breaks!