I personally feel the website is more engaging, but unexpectedly, I also feel my own conception of EA is more accurately represented !
I'd be excited to experiment with some of these insights, and these methods in general, for other community building practices.
As a communicator that's been repeatedly frustrated by how EA can inadvertently reinforce negative misperceptions about itself, I'm thrilled about this. It's wonderful to see the way I experience EA more clearly reflected and see people and the impact they make (which is really what this is all about!) centered. I especially love how prominent the section with individual stories of impact is. I'd love to see some more examples of people working together, however. I'd hypothesize that feeling like you won't be alone in taking action is very important to people considering taking EA seriously, so I'd love to see more stories of partners and groups making impact mixed in with the individual stories. I'm curious if the work you did with Rethink Priorities would back that up.
All in all, this site is much more conducive to how the average person takes in information and feels called to act. I also think it does a really nice job of preemptively defending from some of the criticisms of EA that come from those who haven't taken the time to try and understand it. I think the word choice updates are spot on and think it's so valuable that "helping others" is front and center rather than implied. Much more human. Much more warm and appealing!
Amazing work! Thanks so much to you and your team for all the effort that went into the redesign, it’s clear a lot of thought and care went into it!
I was wondering something: is there are any plans to publish the research on the EA brand and public perception? I think it could offer really valuable insights for community builders.
Maybe you've already seen this Tom but, if not, the Rethink Priorities team published some findings from testing different framings of EA and longtermism here. The 2024 pulse also has a few interesting reports that may be useful. But I agree, if there's more research it'd be super useful to see it.
Thanks James, I hadn’t seen the Rethink Priorities report, interesting stuff!
One thing that stood out to me in this post was “Doing Good Better” performing the worst in user testing. That’s actually the tagline we’ve been using on the EA Belgium website, so I’d be curious if there were other interesting research findings like this one.
I was only peripherally involved with this revamp, but I want to say that I'm so impressed by Agnes's leadership here! I'm not sure how common it is for a single designer to spearhead a complete website redesign, but to me that sounds bonkers, and Agnes has done it with such grace, care, and attention. I'm really excited to have a beautiful website to share. Thank you for your work, Agnes!
Great work!
Have you considered translating it in other major languages, especially those with large existing EA communities like German, French or Spanish, or EA potential?
A draft translation could be made with AI, and then EA communicators with high context (such as the EA Germany / EA Spain & LatAm organizers) could give feedback and adapt it to culture-specific norms. Once everyone is happy, small flag icons could link to the translation.
Advantages:
- The non-English EA content & communities would be a lot more accessible, and we might counterfactually reach more non-English speakers (e.g. older people who could be donors, senior policy-makers, ...)
- Non-English versions would be better. Even orgs like EA Germany who seem to have spent significant time updating their website don't have the capacity to build someone as professional as CEA does (for comparison, here's the German website: https://effektiveraltruismus.de/)
- Generally, more connections between the English & non-English versions, so everyone can find what they're looking for easily. Currently, effectivealtruism.org does not seem to the German version at all, and on the German website (effektiveraltruismus.de), the English flag icon at the top right does not link effectivealtruism.org either.
Costs:
- Mainly time costs by EA communicators (CEA, EA Germany, ...). Any other costs I missed?
Note that I'm not saying that the EA Germany website is a duplicate, it's not, just the "intro to EA" part could maybe be better connected.
Have you considered translating it in other major languages, especially those with large existing EA communities like German, French or Spanish, or EA potential?
As it happens, we contacted CEA a few days ago and offered to translate the website into various languages. Some of this material is already translated, but it would be great to have the entire website, with its appealing design, available on dedicated domains for all the main language communities.
This is relatively minor, but it would it be possible not to show a cookie notice to people loading the site from countries such as the US where these notices are not required?
Or better yet, just give up on cookies altogether and don’t serve a notice to anyone. Like Wikipedia.
@Jeff Kaufman 🔸 it would be possible, we're currently using a library that claims to use heuristics based on the user's timezone and locale, but this doesn't seem to work very well. For the forum we use IP geolocation which is more reliable, so we can switch to that.
@Ian Turner unfortunately we do get some value out of non-GDPR-compatible analytics, and we want to try and optimise the site as a top-of-funnel intro to EA over time, so we think the banner is worth it for now.
Great stuff! And thanks for taking the time to share what you’ve done.
Do you know if the team working on the EA brand project would be up for talking with professional community builders? At EA Netherlands we’re working on our brand quite a bit at the moment, and I think a few other national organisations are too. Since national orgs are often the main entry point for EA in their region, I think this should probably be done in coordination with CEA to make sure we’re all aligned.
To speak frankly, I’m a little surprised professional community builders haven’t been involved in brand work so far. (This comment isn’t addressed to you Agnes, from what I understand it’s not your responsibility to keep brand stakeholders in the loop! Writing it here in case a relevant person reads it).
Again, thanks for this work, it looks great!
Hi James, I've been working on the EA brand at CEA, and appreciate you raising this! I’ll be at EAG London and would be happy to talk more, if you’re attending and want to book a 1:1 with me then, or we could schedule a call for afterward. It sounds like there’s some cool work being done at EA Netherlands that I’d love to hear more about!
To give some relevant context, until recently (March of this year), I was the only full-time employee working on communications at CEA—which was dramatically insufficient for the work to be done! As Zach mentioned in his Forum post on CEA strategy, we revamped our hiring process and have been working on building out the team. The exciting news is that we’ve made great progress and now have a Communications team of four full-time employees (FTEs)! This also means that we’re still in an early scaling phase, as people onboard to their roles. I share that context to clarify that the lack of more coordinated or in-depth engagement with different stakeholders was an unfortunate side effect of limited capacity and the need to triage my work heavily. We’re still figuring out how to best use our new and growing capacity, but we’re excited about broader community engagement as one of those areas.
A few points of clarification: community builders were surveyed as part of the brand association work that Agnes cites here. I know Agnes conducted lots of user interviews across the community and with people less familiar with EA to inform her work as well. In my role at CEA, I regularly keep in touch with community builders at various levels (city, national, university) and advise people in the EA community on comms strategy and media-related questions. I recognize this engagement can feel spotty in places, and not everyone has visibility into it. I definitely think the Comms team has room for improvement in communicating about our work, and I also want to be clear that we care about and track the perspectives of community builders and others in the community.
Thanks, Emma! And sorry for the rather curt comment. I typed it out while my phone was dying and I was on the move after a rough start to the day. In hindsight, it came across more strongly than I intended.
I really appreciate the context you shared. To give a bit of background from my side: it’s felt like things are moving quite quickly on CEA’s end with branding and related work (which is exciting!), but from where I sit, it’s sometimes felt like orgs like ours are struggling to keep up. I can’t speak for all community builders, but I usually try to follow CEA’s lead to keep things coherent across the ecosystem — so the lack of engagement has at times felt a little disorienting, and honestly, a bit disempowering.
For example, we’ve recently been putting quite a bit of time and money into revamping our website and visual identity. If we’d known more about what was happening at CEA, it could have helped shape our direction. A short note to CEA's groups team, which could have been forwarded on, would have gone a long way — something like: “Hey, we’re working on EA brand stuff at the moment. It’s being informed by such-and-such findings. Here’s our rough timeline and broad direction. More soon”.
What’s made that feeling a bit more acute is that I’d actually tried to reach out a couple of times to find someone at CEA to talk with about this, but didn’t get a response. I almost certainly didn’t go about it the right way (in hindsight, I probably should’ve just emailed you directly), but that lack of feedback added to the sense of being out of the loop.
That said, I’m really glad to hear about the progress and new capacity on your team, and I’d love to stay in sync however we can. And sorry once again for the abrasive tone of my comment!
Thanks for this, James! No worries at all about tone—I completely understand how those kinds of days go.
I really appreciate you sharing more context about where you’re coming from. It sounds like there may have been some communication gaps or crossed wires here—I know I’ve talked to your co-director Marieke about comms more than once (most recently in February at EAG), and Britney from our team left some comments on one of your comms strategy docs recently that the Groups team flagged to us. But it sounds like there may be a disconnect between those conversations and what you were looking for, or maybe the information didn’t flow in the most helpful ways for your planning, which is great to know.
You also raise a really good point about proactive communication. As I said, we’re definitely still figuring out the best ways to keep stakeholders informed as we scale up our capacity and work, and this is helpful feedback in that.
Looking forward to chatting directly soon!
Yes, setting up a meeting (or several) to ensure that the majority of community builders are aligned on the new branding strategy would be a smart move, I think. Thanks for suggesting this, James, and great work overall on the new website, Agnes!
Good work, exciting to see!
Very nice work, I'm excited about this new communications effort! (Minor point: Isn't there an important book missing under resources?)
This is sooo good, nice work!
We’ve redesigned effectivealtruism.org to improve understanding and perception of effective altruism, and make it easier to take action.
View the new site →I led the redesign and will be writing in the first person here, but many others contributed research, feedback, writing, editing, and development. I’d love to hear what you think, here is a feedback form.
This redesign is part of CEA’s broader efforts to improve how effective altruism is understood and perceived. I focused on goals aligned with CEA’s branding and growth strategy:
We focused especially on three key audiences:
The changes across the site are aimed at making it clearer, more skimmable, and easier to navigate. Here are some side-by-side comparisons:
Some of the changes:
…and lots of smaller improvements throughout.
The old navigation came up frequently in user testing. People kept clicking around without finding what they were looking for, and few people ended up interacting with the links in the dropdown. I've significantly simplified it and moved away from using abstract words like "About" and "Connect" to instead naming concrete things like conferences, courses, and FAQs.
Previously, users were sent to this page on the Forum. Now common next steps are in one place, and the page is already seeing a lot of interaction.
To evaluate the redesign I ran surveys and user interviews on the old site, and am now running the same tests on the new site. We'll also run a few different A/B tests in the next couple of months.
It’s still early, but some promising signs so far:
I’m planning to write a follow-up when we have more data.
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the feedback form or as a comment on this post. I'm out of office for the next couple of weeks so may not be able to respond personally, but I'll read every comment!
The process for identifying the brand associations started with compiling input from a few sources, including external research, a stakeholder survey that received 28 responses and a survey by the communications firm And-Now in 2023 with 689 respondents from EA newsletter subscribers, 26 respondents from CEA staff, and 16 respondents from key external stakeholders. The group working on the EA brand identified the top associations across our target audiences and iterated on the desired associations individually and through group discussion.
Thanks for your work on this!
I think I mildly prefer the older landing page (sorry!).
The newer one feels more shiny, in a way that appeals to me a bit less. Trying to spell this out a bit more/ what it is that appeals to me less:
- In terms of the vibe it feels more professionalismy, status signallingy, corporate, respectable or something. (I don't think it's entirely fair to describe the new website as these things, but it does at least feel like the new website is more in this direction relative to the old).
- I'm remembering Sarah Constantin's article on Ra as I write this, which I think gestures towards what I like less.
- I feel a bit of an ick of the 'featured in' section (which has logos of eg. the BBC, NYT etc.). I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because it feels like there's a subtle implication of 'if you respect these institutions/ brands, then you'll like this effective altruism thing'. And I'm like 'huh, I'm not sure how much I do respect these institutions/ brands'... idk. (also, featured in feels like a bit of an odd way to put it, as a bunch of these places have written things very unchartiable about EA).
- From the new website, I get a bit more of a sense that someone is trying to sell something to me somehow. Like, it seems like the kind of website that I expect to see from a corporation that wants me to buy their product, and less like the kind of website that I expect to see from something that wants to provide me information or something.
- It may just be that I am into boring websites. For example, my idea of a good time/ a good website is eg. Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Astral Codex Ten. I guess I'm just really into large walls of text. But doubling down on this, I think there is something good about the statement that large walls of text makes. It's like 'hey, what we're about is like thinking carefully and passionately impassionate reasoning, and so we're going to communicate with you via lots of words and explicit arguments and claims, and not with shiny images and vague associations with established institutions, because we think that in an ideal world people should be persuaded to get involved with a community/ philosophy on the basis of explicit arguments and claims, and not on the basis of shiny images etc.'
- I think the above comments might make it seem like I'm more anti the new website than I actually am. I think it's like if there was a content-to-shiny scale for websites, with Wikipedia at 1 and idk the Adidas website at 10, then I'd put the new website at like a 5.5, and ideally I'd want it to be a 3.5. Maybe even a 3. But also if I were king then I'd want all websites to move a couple of points down on this scale.
- I like the tagline change and other word changes! I also like that an essay to what EA is is linked early on and also highlighting actions that people have taken.
(Very much agree with the "Featured in" point!)