It has been three years since I leaped from the “corporate world” to effective altruism. To celebrate that transition (and hopefully help anyone looking for ways to grow their impact), I’ve compiled some marketing lessons I’ve learned from working full-time as a marketer for ClearerThinking.org, and occasionally giving advice to other organizations.
The lessons I’ll share are very specific to the EA community. I’m not listing lessons that would also be applicable to the “conventional/corporate world” because they may sound too repetitive and obvious to most marketers. However, if you need more general marketing advice, I invite you to explore this introductory post (or even send me a message on LinkedIn so we can chat!).
Disclaimer: This post is both a reflection on marketing lessons I’ve learned and, at the very end of the article, an offering for a service we've been providing through ClearerThinking.org, based on these lessons that we believe would be valuable for EA organizations investing in growth. I hope this transparency helps set the right expectation as you read on.
Lesson #1 - Niche audiences demand niche creatives
The first lesson is that, when it comes to reaching niche audiences through ads, it’s essential to have a creative that is not only appealing and eye-catching, but that also filters out people you don’t want to reach.
In the perfect world, you’d log in to the ad platform, set up a few demographics and interests that you believe match the audience you want to reach, and the algorithm would take care of delivering your ads exclusively to those people.
It doesn’t take much experience managing ads to figure out that is definitely not what happens.
Targeting on most platforms (yes, including EA-favorite LinkedIn!) have significantly diminished in effectiveness in the past few years, and if you want to reach a very niche audience (i.e., highly educated, vegan, Python programmers living in high GDP countries), you must use your creative assets as a targeting mechanism - I like to call it “filtering through the creative”.
Essentially, the approach is to limit your targeting settings only to what is absolutely non-negotiable (i.g, if you can just offer career advising for english speakers, it’s reasonable to target only english speakers), but then let the creative do the heavy-lifting by inherently "filtering in" your ideal audience.
For instance, imagine you work for an organization whose mission is to reduce animal suffering. You want to create a campaign that generates email subscribers for your newsletter, with the potential to convert them into future donors.
Instead of trying to set up an audience of “animal lovers” or something similar, you go super broad in the targeting settings while using a creative that appeals only to individuals with genuine donor potential.
Check out the two examples of very similar creatives promoting the same message. The only difference is that version A is broader, and might be appealing to everyone sympathetic to the cause (including people who are less likely to donate), and version B is more niche, and since it mentions donations, will probably not be appealing to people with zero chance of donating.
Version A - Broad
Version B - Niche
#2 Targeting effective altruists is probably a waste of time and money
Still on the subject of Ads, the second lesson is that trying to target EAs through ads is (probably) a waste of time and money.
I haven’t found a way to target effective altruists through advertising. I’ve tried creating “filtering creatives”, highly refined lookalike audiences, creating audiences based on websites they access, and even running ads to people who recently searched for “effective altruism”, “ea forum”, and terms like that on Google, but I couldn’t make it work.
Of course, it's possible that some very clever strategy could work, or that a world expert could figure out some way to make it work, but having tried this a few times throughout the past three years, I see no way to make it succeed.
In my experiments, I either get zero conversions or a few conversions from confused users who I have no idea how they stumbled across my campaigns. It’s hard to say why, but I suspect it has something to do with the relatively low number of effective altruists out there, as well as the fact that those people are generally wary and averse to ads (and may even be running ad blockers). Given that many within the EA community are hesitant to run ads for their own organizations, it isn’t surprising that their propensity to click on ads is likely even lower!
(By the way, if you had success targeting effective altruists through Ads - and you were able to confirm they actually are EAs - I’d truly love to know how you did!)
#3 Don’t let the high engagement of your early audience sabotage your marketing strategy
Another lesson: don’t get too attached to your few super-engaged audience you’ve built early on.
If you run marketing for an EA organization and already have a small audience, chances are it was acquired through either networking, word of mouth, or very specific campaigns (mostly organic in all likelihood) that circulated within the community.
Your open and click rates likely look awesome, but let’s face it: you cannot scale your reach by expecting the same level of engagement from broader, less-intentional audiences.
It’s totally natural to see your metrics drop once you start exploring more channels, and objectively speaking, it’s better to have a totally acceptable 25% open rate for 100,000 users than a 50% open rate for 10,000 subscribers.
#4 Long-term goals should also be measurable
Talking about metrics and expectations… Long-term goals shouldn’t justify a lack of results.
I’ve seen organizations doing the same thing for years and justifying the lack of results by claiming it's a long-term strategy.
For practical reasons, I think it’s essential to establish a time range that makes sense for your specific goals and audience. Convincing people to donate to reduce insect suffering will likely take longer than convincing them to donate a few dollars towards global health projects, so it’s essential to set realistic expectations about that.
You probably won’t know the exact answer, but having a reasonable estimate is definitely better than having no deadlines at all to assess your strategy's effectiveness, and it’s virtually the only way (I can think of) of creating a positive loop in which you learn and optimize your efforts.
#4 Outbound is a thing
I’m not sure why, but I haven’t seen any EA organizations experimenting with outbound marketing. By outbound, I mean structured outreach campaigns (usually via email, phone, or SMS) targeted at people who’ve never interacted with your organization.
Some might call this “cold mailing,” but I dislike that term because it implies blasting random inboxes at scale without any privacy or ethical considerations, which is far from what effective outbound looks like today, or the kind of outbound strategy I personally support.
The modern approach is deliberate: define your ideal client profile (ICP), identify and source relevant contacts (through public sources), respectfully reach out with relevant, personalized messages, test what works, and iterate.
#5 Interactive web tools tend to convert better than landing pages
In the past three years, I’ve had the opportunity to use a bunch of different methods to acquire users. The most common ones being:
- Native Forms: These are ads that, once clicked on, display a native form so people can enter their info. Since it’s very low-friction, the conversion rate is usually good. However, the engagement from these users tends to be low.
- Landing Pages: Instead of a native form, users are directed to a landing page where they can convert via a form. This approach falls somewhere in the middle in terms of engagement and conversion.
- Interactive tools: Instead of a native form or a landing page, people go to an interactive tool, in which they can add their email address – for instance, in all Clearer Thinking tools, we give users the option to enter their email (which will also get them an email copy of their report, but they can still get their report on the web without doing so).
Of these strategies, the one that I’ve seen work best – both in terms of cost-per-acquisition and engagement – is interactive tools. Native forms convert well, but users obtained through them usually have low engagement (likely due to the low friction, implying less genuine initial interest), and landing pages fall somewhere in between.
Another advantage of interactive tools is that you can request an email address only at the end, so only those who have genuinely engaged with your tool will provide their email. In our experience, users who invest 20-30 minutes engaging with a tool are far more likely to engage with future communications.
For the past months, we’ve been running a project via ClearerThinking.org in which we brand one of our tools (one with a high conversion rate, and also makes sense to the partner’s audience) and run ads to generate subscribers for the partner. We've already been applying this approach with a variety of organizations, and the results are really promising.
Since we have more than 80 interactive tools and have a great deal of experience creating and adapting these tools, it gives us a lot of flexibility to find the right fit for a given partner.
I’m happy to chat and help you evaluate whether it's a good fit for your organization! Reach out to [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn.
I’d also be curious to know if you have any other marketing lessons/insights to share, so we can learn from each other and keep this (rare but often valuable) marketing conversation going in the EA community.
Very interesting and timely post for me as I have been exploring the idea of hiring a fractional CMO for my EA-adjacent org to address these very concepts.
You talk about conversions and growing a marketing list, but I find it difficult to define a framework for applying standard conversion metrics to what ultimately amounts to impact. For example, I run a coaching program that helps people align their financial plans with their giving goals. My aim isn’t to coach as many people as possible, but rather to coach the most impactful people. E.g. those who will donate regularly or make career changes that lead to greater impact.
It’s challenging to design a marketing strategy that optimizes for that kind of outcome, since traditional metrics like leads, clicks, or sign-ups don’t necessarily reflect meaningful impact. I’d be curious if you (or others here) have thoughts on adapting marketing frameworks to measure or predict impact-oriented conversions rather than purely volume-based ones?
P.S. I also made a huge attempt to run ads and found it to be a total failure for same reasons you listed above.
In that case, the best approach is to build a lead scoring system that assigns a value to each trait/behavior you believe translates into the impact you want to drive - of course, it will never be a perfect translation, but that's okay as long as it makes sense. Then, with a good CRM, you can assign each lead a score (originated from your lead scoring logic) and plug this info into your analytics, so it becomes part of your reports, conversion tracking, etc. This is pretty much what businesses that optimize for lifetime value (instead of immediate ROI), like investment banks and subscription-based services, do nowadays.
Of course, all of this requires a good amount of work and investment in a good CRM and Analytics. If you can't afford this sort of complexity/cost for now, I'd simply recommend picking a conversion which is as close as possible to the impact you want to create, and be at peace with the fact that this is better than doing nothing. :)