melissasamworth
Bio
Participation1
Hi, I’m the founder of Sacred, a digital design studio specializing in digital product design, website development, and branding for non-profits. I have 9 years of industry experience in design, primarily leading digital product design initiatives for small organizations. I’ve always had a passion for doing good, and particularly resonated with the animal welfare and environmentalism movements. In 2020 I joined Ought, which inspired me to continue on a career path inspired by this passion for altruism. After Ought I led a digital product design initiative for Global Food Partners. I am now engaged in exploring how to maximize global impact for good through design and software.
How others can help me
Send EA organizations my way who may be interested in...
(1) Exploring or executing an idea for a web app, website, or mobile app
(2) Website design and development services
(3) Graphic design, branding, and logo design services
How I can help others
Reach out to me if you have questions about design or building digital products! Of course, reach out to me if you'd like to work together professionally. But equally, I'm always happy to get on a (free, of course) call to give a bit of consulting for fellow altruists 🙂.
Comments8
I agree with previous posters: the primary reason to not have kids is that the resources are better spent elsewhere. I personally think my time is much more effectively spent directly addressing the world's problems than raising kids that, 30 years from now, might make an impact. Because hey, it's likely my kids wouldn't be as brilliant as me, you know? (half kidding)
Also, what about the other many negative impacts of humans besides carbon emissions? E.g. microplastics, destruction of the natural environment for resources, pollution (it might be better than 50 years ago, but it's far from being completely solved, right?)
I'm also agree that marketing should have more preference in the EA community. Thanks for all the numbers, it helps put a generalized sentiment into tangible data. A few thoughts:
(1) Is more value created by better branding for individual organizations vs. the EA movement as a whole? Better branding for individual organizations is definitely more immediate and tangible. However, this the branding of individual organizations (as well as perhaps generalized EA branding), also has long-term effects to increase awareness of the EA movement as a whole. If you think of the competition for the EA movement as a whole, it's the non-EA non-profit movement but also just, anything anyone could spend their money or time on! Obviously there is a huge untapped market here, and I imagine better marketing will help us tap into it more.
(2) I've had the sentiment for some time that we could utilize emotion much, much more to increase awareness of our causes, our organizations, our donations. Think–for instance–website with full bleed imagery of (gosh, at the risk of sounding offensive, sorry) animals on factory farms vs. animals in their natural, happy, free state. What we see more often is just some text with some data. Anyway, thanks for the study reference regarding emotion here.
To sum it up: If many billionaires were exposed to very well designed emotional EA-promoting content, backed by amazing reasoning as well, imagine how much more traction this movement could gain.