Interesting question. I think in outreach we have some big advantages over the Victorian era. A modern day Dorothea would be able to google her questions! I think having a welcoming accessible site and community are a good first step, but maybe we also need to work harder at capturing people’s imaginations.
A modern day Dorothea would be able to google her questions!
Good point. I wonder if any of the major EA outreach orgs are doing SEO (essentially finding common search queries that indicate someone is looking for what you have, then generating content for your site so Google will likely present it in response to their searches. For example, right now when I google for “how to save lives most efficiently”, I don’t see any results that seem good. Creating a web page with “how to save lives most efficiently” as the title might be able to change that.)
We’re doing that for career related questions at least, and ‘what are the biggest problems in the world’. There’s still a lot more work to be done. We’ve focused on those with the most traffic first, rather than stuff like ‘how to save lives most efficiently’, though you might get some interesting people in those even if there’s only like 5 per month!
Interesting question. I think in outreach we have some big advantages over the Victorian era. A modern day Dorothea would be able to google her questions! I think having a welcoming accessible site and community are a good first step, but maybe we also need to work harder at capturing people’s imaginations.
Good point. I wonder if any of the major EA outreach orgs are doing SEO (essentially finding common search queries that indicate someone is looking for what you have, then generating content for your site so Google will likely present it in response to their searches. For example, right now when I google for “how to save lives most efficiently”, I don’t see any results that seem good. Creating a web page with “how to save lives most efficiently” as the title might be able to change that.)
We’re doing that for career related questions at least, and ‘what are the biggest problems in the world’. There’s still a lot more work to be done. We’ve focused on those with the most traffic first, rather than stuff like ‘how to save lives most efficiently’, though you might get some interesting people in those even if there’s only like 5 per month!