Hello, my name's Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as a marketer. I'm interested in animal advocacy, moral circle expansion, and normative ethics. Previously, I worked in community building with the Global Challenges Project and EA Oxford, and have interned at Charity Entrepreneurship. Please feel free to email me to connect at bellaforristal@gmail.com :)
Hey Yonatan —I think the more relevant part of my post is the following, which hopefully answers your question? Let me know if it doesn't.
There are some details I can't give because (as I said in the post) I don't have permission from the relevant people to talk about it publicly.
We can’t be sure how many additional people will change to a high-impact career as a result, in large part because we have found that “career plan changes” of this kind take, on average, about 2 years from first hearing about 80k.
Still, our current best guess is that these efforts will have been pretty effective at helping people switch careers to more impactful areas.
Partly this guess is based on the growth in new audience members that we’ve seen (plus 80k’s solid track record of getting new people to eventually switch to more impactful careers), and partly it’s based on a few “proof of concept” switches we’ve seen already.
For example, some small-scale social media ads which 80k ran in 2017 as an experiment led to at least one person switching to a career we’re especially excited about (and 70 people who reported changing their career plans due to 80k).[3] We’ve also already encountered[4] several people who found us via our marketing who seem likely to switch to a more impactful career.[5]
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'using this as a baseline to compare other EA outreach efforts'? Is there some specific outcome metric you'd want to use as a baseline?
In general, I think what works best in outreach can be pretty context-specific, and I wouldn't recommend everything I've done to people with different goals & constraints.
Being more reluctant to do your own outreach after learning about this makes sense if you think there’s some optimal growth rate in EA which we are at or nearly at. If you learn that I’m doing lots of outreach, then it decreases the value of additional outreach (unless we are not yet at or near the optimal rate of growth).
Hey Cillian — thanks so much for a really thoughtful/detailed question!
I'll take this one since I was the only staff member on marketing last year :)
The short answer is:
The long answer...
But our marketing budget still rose by a lot more than 50% — so what's going on there?
I'll start out with the reasons you gave then add my own:
- Maybe the price of acquiring new users / engagement hours increases geometrically or something
Yeah I don't exactly know how the price of finding new users increases, but we should probably expect some diminishing returns from increased investment.
- It looks like marketing drove a large increase in newsletter subs. Maybe they're engaging with the content directly in their inbox instead?
I think this might be a smallish part of it — I've noticed an effect where if the email we send on the newsletter is itself full of content, people click through to the website less than if the newsletter doesn’t itself provide much value.
I don't think this can account for tons of what we're seeing, though, just cos I don't think the emails work as a 1:1 replacement for 80k's site (I can't really imagine there being much of a 'substitution effect' here).
- Maybe you expect a lag in time between initial reach & time spent on the 80k website for some reason (e.g. because people become more receptive to the ideas on 80k's website over time, especially if they're receiving regular emails with some info about it)
I think this might be a pretty big part of what's going on.
There does seem to be a significant 'lag time' from people first hearing about us and people making an important change to their careers (about 2 years on average) and I think there's often a lag before people get really engaged with site content, too.
Also, bear in mind that because of what I said about the 'unevenness' of growth from marketing, people who found out about us this year are mostly still really new.
- Maybe marketing mainly promoted podcast / 1-1 service / job board (or people reached by marketing efforts mainly converted to users of these services)
Yep, I did put some resources directly towards promoting the podcast, and a much smaller amount of resources towards directly promoting 1-1 (about 7% of the budget as a whole, and probably more like 10% of my time). So this could be (a small) part of what's going on.
There are five other main things I think explain this effect:
Okay I hope that gives you an insight into what I think is going on here! Sorry for length :)
Slaughter, probably.
(plus: no access to the outdoors; much larger-than-optimal social groups; separation from young/inability to raise young; handling & transportation to slaughter; problems arising from selective breeding for weight gain e.g. perpetual hunger, higher incidence of injuries like breast bone fractures)
Are we worried beak trimming ban is net neg? Because of increased pecking/deaths from cannibalism & infected wounds.