I don’t have an answer for you, but I hope and expect the EA Market Testing Team will come up with some good suggestions!
However—my intuition is there isn’t one “best” elevator pitch because the persuasiveness will depend on the context and the person giving and receiving the pitch. So the value of a generic elevator pitch might be less than you think.
For instance, if EA coms up naturally in the context of charitable donations, I often talk about how excited I was when I learned about GiveWell, and how their research made me confident that there were charities out there reliably and transparently saving children’s lives and helping those in extreme poverty. Through that starting point mention the two main parts of EA, (1) the project of of doing research and finding evidence about how to best help others (2) a community of people committed to acting on that evidence to help others as much as possible with our given resources. In contrast, if EA comes up in the context of animal welfare issues I sometimes talk about the Good Food Institute and how excited I am for the prospect of plant or cell based meat as a way to help animals in a more sustainable way than convincing the world to eat less animal products.
To generalize from those examples, and to echo the advice from Giving What We Can’s excellent guide to talking about EA, I think generally we can have success introducing EA by talking about things that personally excite you about it and providing concrete examples.
Piggybacking off this: UChicago EA recently started a meta-EA comms group & are meeting with the Market Testing Team to figure out how we can collaborate re: message testing frames for uni students!
Narrower than this question & I don’t have an answer (yet!) but just wanted to say that someone is working on a part of this question. We’re going to actively look for collaborators as soon as we have a shareable draft proposal. : )
I don’t have an answer for you, but I hope and expect the EA Market Testing Team will come up with some good suggestions!
However—my intuition is there isn’t one “best” elevator pitch because the persuasiveness will depend on the context and the person giving and receiving the pitch. So the value of a generic elevator pitch might be less than you think.
For instance, if EA coms up naturally in the context of charitable donations, I often talk about how excited I was when I learned about GiveWell, and how their research made me confident that there were charities out there reliably and transparently saving children’s lives and helping those in extreme poverty. Through that starting point mention the two main parts of EA, (1) the project of of doing research and finding evidence about how to best help others (2) a community of people committed to acting on that evidence to help others as much as possible with our given resources. In contrast, if EA comes up in the context of animal welfare issues I sometimes talk about the Good Food Institute and how excited I am for the prospect of plant or cell based meat as a way to help animals in a more sustainable way than convincing the world to eat less animal products.
To generalize from those examples, and to echo the advice from Giving What We Can’s excellent guide to talking about EA, I think generally we can have success introducing EA by talking about things that personally excite you about it and providing concrete examples.
Piggybacking off this: UChicago EA recently started a meta-EA comms group & are meeting with the Market Testing Team to figure out how we can collaborate re: message testing frames for uni students!
Narrower than this question & I don’t have an answer (yet!) but just wanted to say that someone is working on a part of this question. We’re going to actively look for collaborators as soon as we have a shareable draft proposal. : )