TLDR.: I spent ~1260 USD on social media ads (Facebook/Instagram) over ~1,5 years. 
We got an additional 53-57 applicants this way, resulting in a cost-effectiveness of 22,1-23,8 USD per applicant.

Disclaimer: I wanted to capture 80% of the value of what I have to say without putting a lot of time into writing. This means that the post is somewhat rough around the edges, but hopefully, it will be still useful.

I have been very excited about experimenting with paid ads to reach out to people who would otherwise not hear about our Into to EA and AGISF programs. This post is a summary of how I spent ~1260 USD on paid ads for social media, and a botec of what it bought us. Please take all results with a grain of salt, as the data is limited and one thing that works for us might not apply in other contexts. That being said, I’m quite confident that groups that want to increase the number of talented and diverse applicants to their programs should at least experiment with using paid ads.

Cost-effectiveness

I overall spent ~1260 USD, which resulted in 53 additional applicants to our fellowships over 1,5 years (23,8 USD per applicant). At least 4 of these 53 applicants also invited a friend along with them to our program, and if we count them as well, we got overall 57 additional applicants, which slightly improves the cost-effectiveness to 22,1 USD per applicant.

You can take a look at the raw-ish data here as well as see the breakdown by campaign and course type (EA vs. AIS).

Impact

I think most of the expected impact of this will come from the ~30% of the overall applicants who engaged with the courses very seriously and took a lot of value from them. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t do an amazing job keeping track of what % of the original 53-57 applicants never started the course. I would estimate this to be around 20-35%. Given that many people never start the course, I think it’s really valuable to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter^[1] as part of the application process - or if they have a good application, reach out to them in the next round. 

As for the rest of the applications, I think it’s pretty similar to the usual fellowship experience, some people drop out after a couple of sessions, some finish it but end up disappearing after the course, etc.

It goes without saying, but of course, this is not a judgment on people’s intrinsic value!

Additional points and caveats:

• Note that the courses I was advertising were 4 sessions only, and sometimes it was an intensive 1-week course - which I think partly improved the cost-effectiveness but can have other drawbacks, see the discussion here and here. 
• With paid ads, we got to reach out to many talented international students from 3rd world countries, which is awesome - and otherwise, we would have likely not reached them.^[2]
• If you have data on the cost-effectiveness of your social media ads (or want to start gathering such data) make sure to reach out!

Conclusion

Based on this, I will increase our marketing budget, as well as probably expand it to cities where we don’t have an EA presence yet in the country. I think it’s possible that once I have more data, these ads won’t seem as good as now, but even if I’m currently overestimating the cost-effectiveness by 10x - they would still look pretty good.

If you would like to use social media ads for your national/city/university group, feel free to shoot us an email at info[at]eahungary.com

1. ^{^}

   see here or here if you don't have one but want to use ours as a template

2. ^{^}

   In Hungary, there are a lot of international students from 3rd world countries who are here on a scholarship. This means that they have already had to go through a filter, and they are more ambitious than the average student. Given that they are in a new country, they are looking for opportunities to take and communities to join. They also already have more of a “big picture - global mindset”, which is needed for effective altruism. Unfortunately, there is no real “social infrastructure” provided by the universities to welcome these students into Hungary, so many of them can feel isolated, and understandably so. For a lot of them, our EA and AIS community was able to provide this community, which I’m very happy about. Given this isolation issue, at the moment we have also no other good means of outreach to them, although going to English-speaking university classes and pitching our programs is something I want to do more of. We also found that national students who found us through paid ads are also great, and are at least as motivated (if not more) than hungarians finding out about us through other forms of outreach.