I'm the co-founder of EA Philippines and a community building grantee of the Centre for Effective Altruism. I was formerly a Senior Product Designer at First Circle, a FinTech company in Manila. You can reach out to me at brian@effectivealtruism.ph or add me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianctan/.
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Interesting, so that comes to a cost-effectiveness of $333,333 per highly engaged EA, which doesn't seem that cost-effective to me. $33,333 or $3,333 per person (so $100M or $10M to get 3k more EAs) sound like better numbers to me, and I think those numbers are actually quite doable.
CEA's Community Building Grants seem like they could approach the $33,333 or $3,333 per person number, though it's not that highly scalable.
What would you say is the threshold for cost-effectiveness?
Maybe ALS, as exemplified by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? It is a problem, but probably didn't need an ice bucket challenge to focus on it, vs. a malaria ice bucket challenge for example.
Just linking two relevant resources - I assume you're familiar with the 2nd one:
What are the "PlayPumps" of Climate Change?
Looking for more 'PlayPumps' like examples
The first one might help you generate some ideas on sub-causes of climate change that are too much hype, such as the hype around lessening usage of straws/plastic bags in the West.
I'll give two Philippine examples:
- The EDSA People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986, notable for being nonviolent. From Wikipedia:
It "was a series of popular demonstrations in the Philippines, mostly in Metro Manila, from February 22–25, 1986. There was a sustained campaign of civil resistance against regime violence and electoral fraud. The nonviolent revolution led to the departure of Ferdinand Marcos, the end of his 20-year presidential term and the restoration of democracy in the Philippines."
...The People Power Revolution has inspired a call for a change of government through peaceful protests rather than bloodshed. Many similar revolutions have followed since then, taking the Philippine example of nonviolent regime change, such as that in East Germany and many other former Soviet Bloc countries.[66] It also helped inspire the Arab Spring in 2011.[67]
2. Jose Rizal (the Philippines' national hero) and his books "Noli Me Tangere" and "El Filibusterismo":
After publication, Noli me Tangere was considered to be one of the instruments that initiated Filipino nationalism leading to the 1896 Philippine Revolution. The novel did not only awaken sleeping Filipino awareness, but also established the grounds for aspiring to independence. Noli was originally written in Spanish, so the likelihood that Spanish authorities would read it first was very high; which is what Rizal wanted to happen. Copies of books were redirected to churches, many were destroyed, many anti-Noli writers came into the picture. Catholic leaders in the Philippines at the time regarded the book as heretical, while Spanish colonial authorities declared it as subversive and against the government. Underground copies were distributed, so Rizal decided to increase the price, the demand was so high.
The impact also included the expulsion of Rizal's clan in Calamba, Laguna. Extradition cases were filed against him. This led to his decision to write the sequel of Noli Me Tangere, the El filibusterismo. Unlike El Fili or Fili, as they called it, Noli Me Tangere was more delicate and did not invoke rebellion. as El Fili does. So to ensure revolutionary ideas and patriotic reaction, Rizal redefined his careful concepts in Noli to aggression in El Fili.
I'm not sure if people can attribute the 1896 Philippine Revolution as primarily caused by Rizal, but I think he did play a key role. I'm also unsure if we should label the revolution a success (since the revolution merely transferred rule of the Philippines from the Spanish to Americans, and it's not clear to me if the Philippines played a large role in that happening), but I think these 2 books show the capability of fiction/books to inspire revolutions.
Neither of these examples involve movements on the approximate scale of EA. Both seem quite beneficial though and had some attention to detail (i.e. focused on being nonviolent).
I'm not sure if there are any strong Philippine examples that involve movements on the scale of EA, but maybe the work of various local advocacy groups to have the Philippine Mental Health Act passed in 2018 could be one. Though those groups combined could be smaller than the current scale of EA.
I wrote about it in the forum post I linked:
Our cost per attendee using FB ads was around $1-5 per person, depending on the event. Generally, we liked the type of people who came to our events - they were friendly and open-minded. However, only a few of them would be truly interested in EA and be willing to get more engaged in it. In 2020, we still expect to use FB ads, but we know to expect that only a handful of them will be the ones that will truly be engaged and interested in EA.
What's not in that article is how we used FB ads to recruit fellows for one of our student groups' intro fellowships this year. We got ~6 people to sign up (who otherwise wouldn't have heard of the fellowship) from $20 of FB ads, so that's $3.33 / person, and 5 of them ended up graduating from the fellowship (attending at least 6 out of 10 weeks). So using FB ads to advertise a fellowship seems a lot more cost-effective than just advertising an event.
I didn't know Google/YouTube ads could be that specific. Reaching 1,000 students for $10 seems really cost-effective. Though I think a 6 second video of a student talking about their EA group doesn't seem like the best idea to get people to join the EA group. Maybe a one-minute video (with a good 6-second hook) would be better, in case some people find the ad intriguing enough to watch the whole length.
I think this post will be valuable to some EA orgs, so I strongly upvoted this. I also like the inclusion of various use cases.
I think EA organizations or local groups should also try using Facebook advertising, and RobertHarling talks about this too below, though I don't think there are free advertising credits for this. We in EA Philippines have used Facebook ads to get more people to sign up for our events and intro to EA fellowships very cost-effectively, though our high cost-effectiveness might be because ad prices are generally lower in the Philippines. People can read more about how we used FB advertising here.
Got it, thanks! Yeah 3.5 weeks is fine, and it's cool too that the payout can be expedited if needed.
Cool! Around how long after a grant has been evaluated and approved does it take before the money gets to someone? Maybe this differs depending on which country you're from and whether you're an individual or organization, but I'd be asking for individuals.
It's on my list but I haven't gotten to watch it. I enjoyed Better Than Us a lot though, which has the same actor!