hm this is super interesting. I started Giving Green’s comms/growth function, and at the time I remember talking to a bunch of EAs in comms and marketing functions for advice (RIP, EA comms slack!) - almost everyone said: digital marketing hasn’t worked for us, what’s worked is earned media and relationship-building. I don’t really know whether that’s due to underinvestment in good digital marketing, or the broader nonprofit fundraising environment, or the FTX collapse, or something else. But I think it’s worth noting that a lot of us have experimented with digital marketing and not seen ROI. (And at least for Giving Green specifically, we do have people on staff who come from growth-oriented digital roles, myself sort of included, but just haven’t really seen return from those channels.) I do think I see EA orgs investing more in digital marketing now and I am excited about the learnings we’ll have in the ecosystem in the next few years.
A couple of other theories I have:
EA funders don’t like to fund digital marketing (possibly downstream of your theories)
Lots of EA orgs’ theories of change are more focused on finding a few special individuals (large donors, highly skilled people for career programs, etc), not mass reach to large audiences. In my first year I A/B tested our email donation asks but we simply didn’t have the sample size and conversion rate to learn anything meaningful.
EAs care a lot about communicating with rigor and nuance, which is hard to do in bite-sized digital formats
Good digital marketing requires a lot of upfront investment in time/money/technical skill, which is hard to justify without seeing ROI on smaller experiments
I’d be curious if you’re seeing digital fundraising success in a space / with asks similar to EA orgs’ fields/asks—I don’t know if I can think of an example of this, even among our non-EA partners.
Thanks — this helps clarify where I agree vs. where I’m more skeptical.
I agree that digital growth isn’t the right tool for every EA org. There are real cases where the audience is extremely niche, sample sizes are tiny, or the theory of change genuinely depends on a small number of high-touch relationships. In those cases, many standard digital tactics will fail.
Where I’m less convinced is the broader conclusion that “digital marketing doesn’t work here” in general. My view here is informed by a mix of EA-adjacent work and mostly for-profit experience: I’ve worked primarily with for-profit orgs (roughly ~200 clients), and a very common pattern there is that early attempts at digital fail — often multiple times — before a system starts working. Orgs don’t conclude from that that “digital doesn’t work”; they keep iterating because digital acquisition eventually becomes non-optional.
I do think something similar may be happening in EA, but with a different stopping rule. When early digital experiments don’t show ROI, many orgs seem to conclude that the channel itself is misaligned, rather than that execution, resourcing, or the evaluation window were insufficient. Given small budgets and high standards of proof, it’s not surprising those early attempts fail — but that doesn’t tell us much about the counterfactual of sustained investment.
On the niche-audience point: in the for-profit world this is often addressed via account-based marketing (ABM), which combines digital and offline tactics to reach very specific, high-value audiences. Conceptually, that feels closer to what many EA orgs are trying to do than mass-reach advertising, and it still relies heavily on digital infrastructure.
So my current view is that digital growth is genuinely low-ROI for some EA orgs and asks — but we’re also likely underestimating its potential by abandoning it earlier than other sectors would.
When early digital experiments don’t show ROI, many orgs seem to conclude that the channel itself is misaligned, rather than that execution, resourcing, or the evaluation window were insufficient. Given small budgets and high standards of proof, it’s not surprising those early attempts fail — but that doesn’t tell us much about the counterfactual of sustained investment.
yeah I basically think this is the problem, and agree that some level of investment would yield a return, but small orgs can’t just keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at some undetermined threshold! we’re not for-profits that can take out loans or get VC money to sink into big upfront acquisition costs :’)
again, if any funders are interested in funding EA digital marketing experiments for audience growth, I’m all ears… I’d like to see a case study of what level of investment is needed for smallish orgs to see a return, especially for fundraising asks.
Small for-profit companies also can’t just “keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at some undetermined threshold, or take out loans or get VC money to sink into big upfront acquisition costs”, so I don’t think it’s a fair argument (in fact, it might be case that it’s easier for a small EA org to get funded than it is to the vast majority of for-profit businesses out there).
hm this is super interesting. I started Giving Green’s comms/growth function, and at the time I remember talking to a bunch of EAs in comms and marketing functions for advice (RIP, EA comms slack!) - almost everyone said: digital marketing hasn’t worked for us, what’s worked is earned media and relationship-building. I don’t really know whether that’s due to underinvestment in good digital marketing, or the broader nonprofit fundraising environment, or the FTX collapse, or something else. But I think it’s worth noting that a lot of us have experimented with digital marketing and not seen ROI. (And at least for Giving Green specifically, we do have people on staff who come from growth-oriented digital roles, myself sort of included, but just haven’t really seen return from those channels.) I do think I see EA orgs investing more in digital marketing now and I am excited about the learnings we’ll have in the ecosystem in the next few years.
A couple of other theories I have:
EA funders don’t like to fund digital marketing (possibly downstream of your theories)
Lots of EA orgs’ theories of change are more focused on finding a few special individuals (large donors, highly skilled people for career programs, etc), not mass reach to large audiences. In my first year I A/B tested our email donation asks but we simply didn’t have the sample size and conversion rate to learn anything meaningful.
EAs care a lot about communicating with rigor and nuance, which is hard to do in bite-sized digital formats
Good digital marketing requires a lot of upfront investment in time/money/technical skill, which is hard to justify without seeing ROI on smaller experiments
I’d be curious if you’re seeing digital fundraising success in a space / with asks similar to EA orgs’ fields/asks—I don’t know if I can think of an example of this, even among our non-EA partners.
Thanks — this helps clarify where I agree vs. where I’m more skeptical.
I agree that digital growth isn’t the right tool for every EA org. There are real cases where the audience is extremely niche, sample sizes are tiny, or the theory of change genuinely depends on a small number of high-touch relationships. In those cases, many standard digital tactics will fail.
Where I’m less convinced is the broader conclusion that “digital marketing doesn’t work here” in general. My view here is informed by a mix of EA-adjacent work and mostly for-profit experience: I’ve worked primarily with for-profit orgs (roughly ~200 clients), and a very common pattern there is that early attempts at digital fail — often multiple times — before a system starts working. Orgs don’t conclude from that that “digital doesn’t work”; they keep iterating because digital acquisition eventually becomes non-optional.
I do think something similar may be happening in EA, but with a different stopping rule. When early digital experiments don’t show ROI, many orgs seem to conclude that the channel itself is misaligned, rather than that execution, resourcing, or the evaluation window were insufficient. Given small budgets and high standards of proof, it’s not surprising those early attempts fail — but that doesn’t tell us much about the counterfactual of sustained investment.
On the niche-audience point: in the for-profit world this is often addressed via account-based marketing (ABM), which combines digital and offline tactics to reach very specific, high-value audiences. Conceptually, that feels closer to what many EA orgs are trying to do than mass-reach advertising, and it still relies heavily on digital infrastructure.
So my current view is that digital growth is genuinely low-ROI for some EA orgs and asks — but we’re also likely underestimating its potential by abandoning it earlier than other sectors would.
yeah I basically think this is the problem, and agree that some level of investment would yield a return, but small orgs can’t just keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at some undetermined threshold! we’re not for-profits that can take out loans or get VC money to sink into big upfront acquisition costs :’)
again, if any funders are interested in funding EA digital marketing experiments for audience growth, I’m all ears… I’d like to see a case study of what level of investment is needed for smallish orgs to see a return, especially for fundraising asks.
Small for-profit companies also can’t just “keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at some undetermined threshold, or take out loans or get VC money to sink into big upfront acquisition costs”, so I don’t think it’s a fair argument (in fact, it might be case that it’s easier for a small EA org to get funded than it is to the vast majority of for-profit businesses out there).
There is a whatsapp group now!
omg I have already left my EA comms job but I would be down to hang out and yap in there if that’s welcome!!!
if you DM me your whatsapp number I can add you :)
I’m interested in joining too!