Hey! Firstly—massive kudos for this post and your marketing efforts. That’s a LOT of work done in total. A couple of thoughts:
Do you know what the breakdown of attendees by outreach method was? The amount of stuff done might make this an unusually useful sample of what works.
Your in-lecture pitches might actually have decreased the number of attendees to a first meeting (in a good way)!
I can imagine last year, several people came to the first meeting thinking “EA sounds potentially interesting, but I don’t have enough info to know if I’ll like it. Let me go to their first meet and find out.”
I can imagine this year, several people heard the pitch, and made the judgement that EA wasn’t for them, so they didn’t turn up to the first meeting.
I think the number attendees at the first meeting is largely unimportant/Goodharting compared to the number of attendees at the (say) fifth meeting.
EA is quite high-commitment as societies go (“Hey, you should come and change your whole life plan to help others”). Heavy-tailed impact and such.
I think the more interesting question is whether increased marketing resulted in a higher quality/fit (ie. likely to stay around and take points really seriously) of attendee, than pure number. The fifth meeting attendance might be a partial datapoint for this.
Below is the breakdown of who filled out our application in the callout for both years. This would notably be the sample of the most interested members. Small sample size and hard to draw conclusions here.
2. Very interesting idea here! Thanks for bringing it up. The only thing is, about 2,000 people heard the pitch, maybe 1,000 of which were freshmen. This means we reached about 10% of the freshman population. I would expect the affect you described to happen, just not sure if it would be of a very high magnitude at all.
3. I agree with this. However, it would be very hard for me to believe that our outreach strongly filtered for interest levels this year, even though it wasn’t substantially different in style than in the past.
Hey! Firstly—massive kudos for this post and your marketing efforts. That’s a LOT of work done in total. A couple of thoughts:
Do you know what the breakdown of attendees by outreach method was? The amount of stuff done might make this an unusually useful sample of what works.
Your in-lecture pitches might actually have decreased the number of attendees to a first meeting (in a good way)!
I can imagine last year, several people came to the first meeting thinking “EA sounds potentially interesting, but I don’t have enough info to know if I’ll like it. Let me go to their first meet and find out.”
I can imagine this year, several people heard the pitch, and made the judgement that EA wasn’t for them, so they didn’t turn up to the first meeting.
I think the number attendees at the first meeting is largely unimportant/Goodharting compared to the number of attendees at the (say) fifth meeting.
EA is quite high-commitment as societies go (“Hey, you should come and change your whole life plan to help others”). Heavy-tailed impact and such.
I think the more interesting question is whether increased marketing resulted in a higher quality/fit (ie. likely to stay around and take points really seriously) of attendee, than pure number. The fifth meeting attendance might be a partial datapoint for this.
JLDC,
Thank you for your insightful comment.
Below is the breakdown of who filled out our application in the callout for both years. This would notably be the sample of the most interested members. Small sample size and hard to draw conclusions here.
2. Very interesting idea here! Thanks for bringing it up. The only thing is, about 2,000 people heard the pitch, maybe 1,000 of which were freshmen. This means we reached about 10% of the freshman population. I would expect the affect you described to happen, just not sure if it would be of a very high magnitude at all.
3. I agree with this. However, it would be very hard for me to believe that our outreach strongly filtered for interest levels this year, even though it wasn’t substantially different in style than in the past.