I think this post will be valuable to some EA orgs, so I strongly upvoted this. I also like the inclusion of various use cases.
I think EA organizations or local groups should also try using Facebook advertising, and RobertHarling talks about this too below, though I don’t think there are free advertising credits for this. We in EA Philippines have used Facebook ads to get more people to sign up for our events and intro to EA fellowships very cost-effectively, though our high cost-effectiveness might be because ad prices are generally lower in the Philippines. People can read more about how we used FB advertising here.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t had any success with Instagram promotions for EA at Georgia Tech. I tried promotions for two posts announcing upcoming events, targeting young adults in Georgia interested in Georgia Tech. (It seems that Instagram doesn’t allow you to match for people interested in x AND y, only x OR y, so we can’t narrow the audience to a certain subset of Instagram users at Georgia Tech.) Though we reached over 1,000 people, we’ve gotten zero engagement in terms of likes, follows, or promotion taps. For reference, here are the two posts that we’ve tried promoting: example 1, example 2
In the future, we might try Facebook ads. But it seems that with Instagram ads, a university group like us would have to be much more thoughtful about social media advertising to have a successful advertising campaign. So far, regular (free) publicity to Georgia Tech mailing lists and Reddit have been much more successful than Instagram promotions.
Our cost per attendee using FB ads was around $1-5 per person, depending on the event. Generally, we liked the type of people who came to our events—they were friendly and open-minded. However, only a few of them would be truly interested in EA and be willing to get more engaged in it. In 2020, we still expect to use FB ads, but we know to expect that only a handful of them will be the ones that will truly be engaged and interested in EA.
What’s not in that article is how we used FB ads to recruit fellows for one of our student groups’ intro fellowships this year. We got ~6 people to sign up (who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of the fellowship) from $20 of FB ads, so that’s $3.33 / person, and 5 of them ended up graduating from the fellowship (attending at least 6 out of 10 weeks). So using FB ads to advertise a fellowship seems a lot more cost-effective than just advertising an event.
Nice! That seems like great value for money. As per the comment above, I think that FB/google advertising should be standard practice for EA movement building groups. It also seems like something that we have a centralised support for (e.g., CEA can do it for you or guide you through the process), rather than something that movement builders need to learn themselves.
Yeah. I think a lot of EA fellowships though are facilitator-constrained, not participant-constrained. Possibly ads could still be used to increase the quality of the participant pool, but the value of that is less clear.
I know people at CEA, and 2 of our student groups will write a fellowship retrospective soon. We’ll include this bit formally there, and I can link that to CEA or publicize that to other community builders. This is so that groups that are participant-constrained can use ads more.
But yeah as a broader point, ads could be used to market events or the group itself. Given the amount of karma of this post, I’m pretty sure CEA has already seen it, I just don’t know what their thoughts about it are. But I expect they’re already quite interested in the value of using paid ads. I remembered now that I wrote a part in EA Hub’s resources for group organizers on advertising events before about the potential value of using paid ads. Maybe this post should be linked into that guide. I’ll message Catherine Low from CEA if she would like to include it, or reference it in the July Groups newsletter.
I’ll just add a data point and mention that I also used Facebook marketing when for building an EA uni group. I didn’t track the ROI (or recall it now if I did) but I thought it was effective enough to do a few times and recommend to my successors.
I think this post will be valuable to some EA orgs, so I strongly upvoted this. I also like the inclusion of various use cases.
I think EA organizations or local groups should also try using Facebook advertising, and RobertHarling talks about this too below, though I don’t think there are free advertising credits for this. We in EA Philippines have used Facebook ads to get more people to sign up for our events and intro to EA fellowships very cost-effectively, though our high cost-effectiveness might be because ad prices are generally lower in the Philippines. People can read more about how we used FB advertising here.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t had any success with Instagram promotions for EA at Georgia Tech. I tried promotions for two posts announcing upcoming events, targeting young adults in Georgia interested in Georgia Tech. (It seems that Instagram doesn’t allow you to match for people interested in x AND y, only x OR y, so we can’t narrow the audience to a certain subset of Instagram users at Georgia Tech.) Though we reached over 1,000 people, we’ve gotten zero engagement in terms of likes, follows, or promotion taps. For reference, here are the two posts that we’ve tried promoting: example 1, example 2
In the future, we might try Facebook ads. But it seems that with Instagram ads, a university group like us would have to be much more thoughtful about social media advertising to have a successful advertising campaign. So far, regular (free) publicity to Georgia Tech mailing lists and Reddit have been much more successful than Instagram promotions.
Thanks for sharing your experience! We haven’t tried Instagram ads. Would like to hear if Facebook ads ends up working for you!
Thanks Brian! I’d love to hear what your cost per signup was, feel free to send me a direct message if you prefer :)
I wrote about it in the forum post I linked:
What’s not in that article is how we used FB ads to recruit fellows for one of our student groups’ intro fellowships this year. We got ~6 people to sign up (who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of the fellowship) from $20 of FB ads, so that’s $3.33 / person, and 5 of them ended up graduating from the fellowship (attending at least 6 out of 10 weeks). So using FB ads to advertise a fellowship seems a lot more cost-effective than just advertising an event.
Nice! That seems like great value for money. As per the comment above, I think that FB/google advertising should be standard practice for EA movement building groups. It also seems like something that we have a centralised support for (e.g., CEA can do it for you or guide you through the process), rather than something that movement builders need to learn themselves.
$4 per graduated EA fellow is absolutely incredible!
If anyone knows someone at CEA who would be interested in hearing about this please reach out.
Yeah. I think a lot of EA fellowships though are facilitator-constrained, not participant-constrained. Possibly ads could still be used to increase the quality of the participant pool, but the value of that is less clear.
I know people at CEA, and 2 of our student groups will write a fellowship retrospective soon. We’ll include this bit formally there, and I can link that to CEA or publicize that to other community builders. This is so that groups that are participant-constrained can use ads more.
But yeah as a broader point, ads could be used to market events or the group itself. Given the amount of karma of this post, I’m pretty sure CEA has already seen it, I just don’t know what their thoughts about it are. But I expect they’re already quite interested in the value of using paid ads. I remembered now that I wrote a part in EA Hub’s resources for group organizers on advertising events before about the potential value of using paid ads. Maybe this post should be linked into that guide. I’ll message Catherine Low from CEA if she would like to include it, or reference it in the July Groups newsletter.
I’ll just add a data point and mention that I also used Facebook marketing when for building an EA uni group. I didn’t track the ROI (or recall it now if I did) but I thought it was effective enough to do a few times and recommend to my successors.