Thanks! And were your goals mostly about getting sign ups to the advising service? Or getting newsletter subscribers? Or raising brand awareness? Or a mixture of these things? 

Last year we ran performance ads for our intro course and EAGxAmsterdam, and then did a bunch of brand awareness content production on LinkedIn.  

Great post, thanks for sharing! We’ve also had promising results when we’ve invested in marketing. Could you say approximately how much was spent? Or Sarah, if you’re reading this and you’d rather chat privately about spending, could you ping me an email? 

Thanks Marijn!! 

Centola's book 'Change: how to make big things happen' is really good.

He has six key tips:

1. Don't rely on contagiousness. Social change does not always spread like a virus. A viral advertising campaign doesn't enable new ideas to take hold. Simply attracting eyeballs will not suffice. Not only that, it can backfire when people hear about a change but notice adoption isn't happening.
2. Protect the innovators. Non-adopters are often a countervailing influence. Innovations that face entrenched opposition from established norms can spread more effectively when early adopters have less exposure to the entire network.
3. Use the network periphery. Highly connected influencers can be a roadblock for social change. The key to initiating social change is to target the periphery. Stop looking for special people and instead look for special places.
4. Establish wide bridges. A narrow bridge typically consists of a single weak tie between groups. Narrow bridges have reach but lack redundancy, which is necessary to spread complex contagions.
5. Create relevance. When behaviour change requires social proof that a change will be helpful for a potential adopter, or if it requires emotional excitement or loyalty/solidarity, similarity among the sources of reinforcement will help. However, when change is based on legitimacy, i.e., believing that the behaviour is widely adopted, then the opposite is true: diversity among reinforcing sources of adoption is needed.
6. Use the snowball strategy. Clustering is key to triggering tipping points. Again, focus on special places, not special people. Incubator neighbourhoods allow a new behaviour to compete against an established norm. 

Quick tip: just run your draft through Claude and ask it to either give feedback in the style of an EA Forum user or, if you're short on time, ask it to rewrite it in the style that EA Forum readers prefer (and make sure you have plenty of reasoning transparency).

Nice post, and I'm happy you're posting on the forum again! 

As others have pointed out, Power for Democracies is an org with roots in the EA community that is working on this. Also, I would argue that 80k's current second top issue, extreme power concentration, has a lot of overlap with what you're talking about here. Furthermore, much of the longtermist inspired work that focuses not just on surviving but flourishing addresses this issue, but mostly in a very theoretical sense.  

But to answer your question directly, and putting to one side CEA's concerns about 501c3 stuff, I think it's not currently more of a concern because 1) maybe it's not the most neglected thing 2) maybe it doesn't feel very tractable and 3) perhaps most importantly, EA isn't doing much cause prioritisation work these days. 

However, I would note that it feels like there's a bit of a vibe shift on this issue, and more and more EAs are prioritising work in this area. 

Edit: I've got more time, so I want to add more detail.

On Power for Democracies

Power for Democracies identifies giving opportunities to support democracy. Co-founded by a senior advisor at Effektiv Spenden, it's basically trying to be the GiveWell or GivingGreen of democracy. 

Their recently concluded first project, Effectively Countering Authoritarian Playbooks, ran two parallel workstreams: prioritising countries and prioritising tactics.

For country selection, they built a framework around four dimensions — Importance, Threat, Tractability, and Opportunity — combining quantitative data from sources like V-Dem and Civicus with qualitative country profiles and expert consensus processes. 

They were looking for places where democracy is genuinely under pressure but where civil society intervention is still tractable. 

From a global pool, they selected seven priority countries: Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Indonesia, Poland, Argentina, and the US.

On the tactics side, they scanned roughly 35 common civil society approaches — strategic litigation, voter mobilisation, investigative journalism, anti-corruption lobbying, and so on — scoring each for quality of evidence and theoretical grounding. 

They then matched threats to tactics for each country, wrote deep-dive reports informed by expert interviews, and evaluated specific organisations using structured rubrics, independent researcher scoring, and funder reference checks.

They have three initial recommendations:

• Freedom2Vote — voter mobilisation targeting underrepresented voters in the US
• Media and Law Studies Association — legal defence for journalists facing prosecution in Turkey (~150 cases/year)
• CELS — human rights and democracy advocacy through legal action in Argentina, operating since 1979

You can read an in-depth write-up of their research process here. You can donate to their recommended orgs here.

On the antifa movement more generally

If you want to know more about antifa, I recommend this lecture given by the author of the recent book 'Antifa: Portrait einer linksradikalen Bewegung' (unfortunately, it hasn't been translated). It's apparently one of the more rigorous academic histories of the movement. 

At 1:14:22 I asked him about the effectiveness of the movement and its different tactics, and the evidence for claims of effectiveness. 

His answer had two components. First, his general thesis on the effectiveness of the movement is that, through its actions, it has sensitised German society and the German state to the growing fascist movement. Second, he highlighted the success of recent efforts within the German antifa movement to gather intel and build archives concerning fascist individuals and groups. This has been used to prevent right-wing attacks or to very rapidly inform the authorities when apparent 'lone wolf' attackers have actually had fascist backgrounds. Apparently, they often do a better job of this than the German security services, and now receive funding from the Berlin city government. If you're an EA and are looking to do something about fascism beyond what Power for Democracies recommends, this feels like a good fit! 

Unfortunately, he didn't provide much detail on the evidence for the claims of effectiveness.

Great work! I've been eagerly anticipating your recommendations for some time

Thanks for collating and sharing! 

If you haven't already seen it, you might find the post 'Doing Prioritisation Better' an interesting read

Hey! I'm a co-director at EA Netherlands. According to various indicators, we're the fourth largest national EA community in the world, we target mid-career professionals, and I think what you're proposing is very interesting! But I'm not sure I understand - why build a new tool? Why not just build in some EA thinking into your existing service? Similar to what Charity Navigator has done. 

Have you already spoken with Nina at HIP? Maybe check out the School for Moral Ambition as well.