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I plan to write about my experience with buying social media ads in more detail, but I thought I would share some quick thoughts beforehand:
Addressing the elephant in the room
I want to address the general scepticism I sometimes encountered (and used to have) about using paid ads for outreach. I think we have some vague intuition that says, "the type of people who click on ads are not smart or cool”. I want to say that this has not been our experience. A lot of people who joined our programs this way are very talented, motivated and open-minded.
A preliminary look at cost-effectiveness:
-I looked at 5 of our social media campaigns promoting our EA/AIS programs, with an overall spending of 1019 USD.
- -These campaigns got us 34 program applicants (~30 USD per applicant).
- By applicant here I mean people who sign up for the course, but don’t necessarily start it (eg. show up to the first session)
- Roughly speaking, our experience has been that some of the people don’t start the program (and we might never hear from them)
- But those who do are quite motivated, and talented and are more likely to become engaged with our community than people we get from other sources
- ~15 applicants we got through paid ads became engaged with the group and I find them quite promising (~68 USD per applicant)
- Of course, it is hard to tell whether someone is going to engage with us long-term, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that all of our applicants will definitely end up pursuing a high-impact career (Not to mention all the biases in assessing who we think are promising)
- By promising I mean something like “new memebers I’m really excited to have in our group and very happy to support their exploration of EA and AIS”
- Even if only 5% of these people would in fact end up in a high-impact role, I still think paid ads would be worth it
Some caveats
- There were big differences in the campaign’s cost-effectiveness in attracting highly motivated participants
- The cost-effectiveness of general applications was between 12-47 USD
- The cost-effectiveness of highly motivated applications was between 20-142 US
Next steps
- I still need to figure out the reasons behind the big difference in cost-effectiveness and overall take a better look at all our data
- I will eventually make a longer writeup, with guides on how to make social media ads (assuming I will still think it is worth doing)
If you have data or anecdotes to share about your own experience of using ads or want to give feedback please feel free to comment or shoot me an email at gergo@eahungary.com
Bravo for writing this stuff up, glad to see that.
I actually didn't realise that this elephant was an elephant? Indeed, I had the impression that paid ads had been used already by other EA orgs (if memory serves correctly, by EAG, 80k, and SoGive) so I thought they were considered to have legitimacy, as far as I was aware.
You might be right! My impression was based on talking to a handful of people within community building, about fellowship programs specifically - that might be what explains our different impressions (although I'm sure there are plenty of people who are excited about paid ads within this niche too!)
Curated and popular this week
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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I wanted to share a small but important challenge I've encountered as a student engaging with Effective Altruism from a lower-income country (Nigeria), and invite thoughts or suggestions from the community.
Recently, I tried to make a one-time donation to one of the EA-aligned charities listed on the Giving What We Can platform. However, I discovered that I could not donate an amount less than $5.
While this might seem like a minor limit for many, for someone like me — a student without a steady income or job, $5 is a significant amount.
To provide some context:
According to Numbeo, the average monthly income of a Nigerian worker is around $130–$150, and students often rely on even less — sometimes just $20–$50 per month for all expenses. For many students here, having $5 "lying around" isn't common at all; it could represent a week's worth of meals or transportation.
I personally want to make small, one-time donations whenever I can, rather than commit to a recurring pledge like the 10% Giving What We Can pledge, which isn't feasible for me right now. I also want to encourage members of my local EA group, who are in similar financial situations, to practice giving through small but meaningful donations.
In light of this, I would like to:
* Recommend that Giving What We Can (and similar platforms) consider allowing smaller minimum donation amounts to make giving more accessible to students and people in lower-income countries.
* Suggest that more organizations be added to the platform, to give donors a wider range of causes they can support with their small contributions.
Uncertainties:
* Are there alternative platforms or methods that allow very small one-time donations to EA-aligned charities?
* Is there a reason behind the $5 minimum that I'm unaware of, and could it be adjusted to be more inclusive?
I strongly believe that cultivating a habit of giving, even with small amounts, helps build a long-term culture of altruism — and it would
You might be right! My impression was based on talking to a handful of people within community building, about fellowship programs specifically - that might be what explains our different impressions (although I'm sure there are plenty of people who are excited about paid ads within this niche too!)