This is off the cuff, but I am sort of surprised all of this wasn’t tested against CTAs specific to pledges and/or directly donating. Maybe you’ve done that previously and I’ve not seen that work or you haven’t shared. 8 bucks a pop seems like a lot to me, for a cause promoter to spend, especially an EA cause, with no actual cause promotion. My (informed—I’m cause PR/marketing) guess is that if you associated your recruitment campaign with actual “donate” and “pledge” messaging with urgency around the cause, it would be just as effective as this in capturing emails—plus you get the whole actually being effective thing too. I’d also guess that if someone donates or pledges through your platform(s), they are far more likely to develop an actual relationship with GWWC than if shown a guide.
Was there a CTA (e.g., donate now) follow through with the ads linked to guides?
Last off the cuff: your ‘results’ should always end with a cause related goal for a cause when doing cause related marketing. Email capture is not a cause related goal. A captured email that leads to a pledge or donation—that’s a goal and a result. Maybe you’re tracking and measuring this on the backend. If not, I definitely would. A throw away email at 8 bucks a pop is not only expensive, but wasteful. You should find out if that captured email actually means something if you want to know if your campaign was successful.
PS—if mentioning “off the cuff” twice didn’t communicate it, this is a draft opinion. I only read this post and once through at that. I could very well be missing things. I referenced email capture, but the same could basically be said for clicks as well.
For this years Giving Season campaign we’re planning to test a donate CTA vs a newsletter sub CTA and track which causes more donations, pledges down the line. I agree that a donate CTA may fare better.
Also agree that perhaps a more cause focused campaigns could be effective, but this has to be balanced with the nature of GWWC as an org, our place in the effective giving ecosystem and what our vision is. This is something we are thinking about how best to do for our brand. I also think leaning into the community of GWWC and the vision we have is an interesting angle and am excited to see how this might compare to cause focused messaging.
The results we’ve shared here are just based on the advertising we did, but rest assured we are tracking donations and pledges off the back of this campaign—just not included in these results.
Sure thing—please know its all meant constructively. I’m not issuing a complaint in anyway.
Hope something here was helpful! I’ve read this forum for ages without an account and only recently signed up to submit something and now I fear I am dangerously annoying. Ha! To be fair to me though, its rare that there is a cause comms post here. Good luck with your campaigning.
Thanks. Some solo responses; will give more detail once I touch base with the GWWC team.
I am sort of surprised all of this wasn’t tested against CTAs specific to pledges and/or directly donating
We/they have done that in other contexts, see e.g., here.
But it’s a long funnel from a Facebook ad to a commitment to the very high-value ‘pledge’ outcomes (which are valued at tens of thousands of dollars by GWWC). And I believe that the email signup here is fairly meaningful, not something people will do lightly. It’s certainly more meaningful than simply clicking on a link.
Nonetheless, we are aiming to follow up in terms of understanding the value of these emails (are they ‘throwaways?’, do people stay in the system) and whether they lead to more substantial outcomes.
8 bucks a pop seems like a lot to me, for a cause promoter to spend, especially an EA cause, with no actual cause promotion
Compared to the value the EA community is putting on bringing new people into the fold, this seems like a bargain, but of course, it depends on the follow-through. (Not sure what you mean by ‘no actual cause promotion’ though; the ad, the page, and the giving guide are all promoting key EA-relevant themes.)
> My (informed—I’m cause PR/marketing) guess is that if you associated your recruitment campaign with actual “donate” and “pledge” messaging with urgency around the cause, it would be just as effective as this in capturing emails—plus you get the whole actually being effective thing too. I’d also guess that if someone donates or pledges through your platform(s), they are far more likely to develop an actual relationship with GWWC than if shown a guide. Was there a CTA (e.g., donate now) follow through with the ads linked to guides?
I’m sympathetic to your views, and I usually argue for incorporating costly (donation) outcomes in trials where possible. However believe the thinking was something like ‘bring them into the funnel, don’t put our hand out right away’.
Note that signing up for the giving guide involves going to the GWWC site (which has a range of CTA’s of the sort you are discussing). It also leads to email followups with further CTA’s like this.
And of course, the giving guide itself full of EA cause promotion, impassioned and reasoned arguments, and very impactful CTA’s, with links, e.g., below:
Calls to action in giving guide, including hyperlinks
Last off the cuff: your ‘results’ should always end with a cause related goal for a cause when doing cause related marketing. Email capture is not a cause related goal. A captured email that leads to a pledge or donation—that’s a goal and a result. Maybe you’re tracking and measuring this on the backend. If not, I definitely would.
That’s a good point. We are tracking the ‘backend’ as noted above. We also hope to do more work in estimating and modeling the links between top and bottom funnel outcomes. This is something I’m very interested in (and pursuing related quantitative work involving value-of-information).
Thanks for your interest . And, as noted, i hope for more followup when the antipode wakes up.
Sure. Just a couple quick thoughts and clarification:
We/they have done that in other contexts, see e.g., here.
But it’s a long funnel from a Facebook ad to a commitment to the very high-value ‘pledge’ outcomes...
That is a long funnel—its an even longer funnel from those pledge landing pages to the actual effective causes. I think what I mean is to directly pitch the actual causes GWWC lists as effective (e.g., AMF). Like a FB video about Malaria that links directly to tailored AMF pledge landing page all about how this AMF pledge is super effective. Something like that. People donate from SM and search ads all of the time. And its probably also a lot easier to target specific causes through Meta’s ad platforms than it is trying to profile people who might be down with preference sacrificing, no? Anyway, I don’t think I was clear. I meant testing EA causes specifically and then growing that relationship from there. I think it would be an interesting outcome comparison to what you’ve just now reported on testing.
Compared to the value the EA community is putting on bringing new people into the fold, this seems like a bargain, but of course, it depends on the follow-through.
I am not sure its necessarily a valid cost effective measure to compare what you are doing to other EA org’s audience acquisition costs. The United Way, which is much more analogous to GWWC, would probably be a better comparison. I highly doubt they have an 8 dollar email capture cost or clickthrough cost. New member cost, sure and then some, but that goes back to our now agreed to point, I think, about what ‘results’ actually are.
Not sure what you mean by ‘no actual cause promotion’ though; the ad, the page, and the giving guide are all promoting key EA-relevant themes.
I mean the actual EA causes like AMF. GWWC is not a cause, neither is its pledge mechanism for that matter, really. Its a means to an ends for altruists. This and the dollar commitments to member acquisition EA groups commit to are probably a larger critique I should’ve written instead of my theoretical one that was likely straight up ignored (ha!) , but I think EA orgs could take a page from cause-related marketing history. For example, AMEX, when they paid to restore the statue of liberty in the 1980s, didn’t actually do a ton of talking about AMEX. They cobranded the cause campaign, for sure, but it was all about the statue of liberty. And now everyone associates AMEX and the statue of liberty and not in a negative way and probably subconsciously for a lot of folks. And their numbers went boom during the campaign. The short point: the cause always comes first is the first rule of cause marketing. Altruists in particular would benefit from always putting the actual causes first, rather than the altruists club. If an altruist is doing too much talking about themselves (including their reasons and methods), people might start to doubt the whole altruist thing. Again, probably more meta than this very practical marketing campaign study, but I think its a pretty important perspective.
People donate from SM and search ads all of the time. And its probably also a lot easier to target specific causes through Meta’s ad platforms than it is trying to profile people who might be down with preference sacrificing, no?
Possibly. Not sure ‘preference sacrificing’ is the right term though. Also, there is a big push within EA to bring people into the movement in conscious involved ways and not “just donate”. GWWC is also trying to bring people in to consider direct work and other involvement.
I meant testing EA causes specifically and then growing that relationship from there. I think it would be an interesting outcome comparison to what you’ve just now reported on testing.
This would indeed be an interesting comparison and possibly worth trying. But I’ll wait to hear what/if the GWWC partners think about this. (Note that I am personally working on some trials involving things related to this, but not through GWWC.)
I am not sure its necessarily a valid cost effective measure to compare what you are doing to other EA org’s audience acquisition costs. The United Way, which much more analogous to GWWC, would probably be a better comparison. I highly doubt they have an 8 dollar email capture cost or clickthrough cost. Maybe a new member cost, but that goes back to our now agreed to point, I think, about what ‘results’ actually are.
I don’t see United Way as comparable to GWWC. Much less niche, much lower impact, substantially less of a commitment. But I don’t know what their email capture cost is, and obviously not all email captures are alike. But do you have data on the United Way email or new member acquisition cost? This would be useful to have as a benchmark.
I mean the actual EA causes like AMF. GWWC is not a cause, neither is its pledge mechanism for that matter, really. …
… you will see a lot of powerful material about the actual causes.
This is also something we tested somewhat. We compared cause-themed videos to videos more generally discussing giving effectiveness. See here for some of the results across the most comparable trials. Of course, as you note, we are only reporting on a proximate metric—people providing their emails/downloading guides. But at least for this outcome, the cause-specific videos did not consistently outperform the ‘facts about giving’ ones. (Although they did outperform these for some audiences, particularly animal-related videos for animal-interested audiences. On the other hand the animal videos performed particularly badly on the ‘philanthropy-interested’ audience.)
re: United Way—yes, it is a horribly ineffective organization compared to EA charities, certainly, but I was actually referencing their model—they are an intermediary between their selected causes and individual donors, like GWWC, they have a tailored list of causes to pledge to, like GWWC, and a giant part of their model is time period pledging, like GWWC. I just think their similarities would be a more apt comparison for cost effectiveness on email acquisition (or better, member/pledge acquisition).
I don’t have their numbers, but its a pretty scrutinized organization and I think the comparison, frankly, is also campaign opportunity for an org like GWWC that is actually doing it better… maybe worth a poke around.
This is off the cuff, but I am sort of surprised all of this wasn’t tested against CTAs specific to pledges and/or directly donating. Maybe you’ve done that previously and I’ve not seen that work or you haven’t shared. 8 bucks a pop seems like a lot to me, for a cause promoter to spend, especially an EA cause, with no actual cause promotion. My (informed—I’m cause PR/marketing) guess is that if you associated your recruitment campaign with actual “donate” and “pledge” messaging with urgency around the cause, it would be just as effective as this in capturing emails—plus you get the whole actually being effective thing too. I’d also guess that if someone donates or pledges through your platform(s), they are far more likely to develop an actual relationship with GWWC than if shown a guide.
Was there a CTA (e.g., donate now) follow through with the ads linked to guides?
Last off the cuff: your ‘results’ should always end with a cause related goal for a cause when doing cause related marketing. Email capture is not a cause related goal. A captured email that leads to a pledge or donation—that’s a goal and a result. Maybe you’re tracking and measuring this on the backend. If not, I definitely would. A throw away email at 8 bucks a pop is not only expensive, but wasteful. You should find out if that captured email actually means something if you want to know if your campaign was successful.
PS—if mentioning “off the cuff” twice didn’t communicate it, this is a draft opinion. I only read this post and once through at that. I could very well be missing things. I referenced email capture, but the same could basically be said for clicks as well.
Hi LB,
Appreciate your time in giving us some feedback!
For this years Giving Season campaign we’re planning to test a donate CTA vs a newsletter sub CTA and track which causes more donations, pledges down the line. I agree that a donate CTA may fare better.
Also agree that perhaps a more cause focused campaigns could be effective, but this has to be balanced with the nature of GWWC as an org, our place in the effective giving ecosystem and what our vision is. This is something we are thinking about how best to do for our brand. I also think leaning into the community of GWWC and the vision we have is an interesting angle and am excited to see how this might compare to cause focused messaging.
The results we’ve shared here are just based on the advertising we did, but rest assured we are tracking donations and pledges off the back of this campaign—just not included in these results.
Hi GraceAdams,
Sure thing—please know its all meant constructively. I’m not issuing a complaint in anyway.
Hope something here was helpful! I’ve read this forum for ages without an account and only recently signed up to submit something and now I fear I am dangerously annoying. Ha! To be fair to me though, its rare that there is a cause comms post here. Good luck with your campaigning.
Thanks. Some solo responses; will give more detail once I touch base with the GWWC team.
We/they have done that in other contexts, see e.g., here.
But it’s a long funnel from a Facebook ad to a commitment to the very high-value ‘pledge’ outcomes (which are valued at tens of thousands of dollars by GWWC). And I believe that the email signup here is fairly meaningful, not something people will do lightly. It’s certainly more meaningful than simply clicking on a link.
Nonetheless, we are aiming to follow up in terms of understanding the value of these emails (are they ‘throwaways?’, do people stay in the system) and whether they lead to more substantial outcomes.
Compared to the value the EA community is putting on bringing new people into the fold, this seems like a bargain, but of course, it depends on the follow-through. (Not sure what you mean by ‘no actual cause promotion’ though; the ad, the page, and the giving guide are all promoting key EA-relevant themes.)
I’m sympathetic to your views, and I usually argue for incorporating costly (donation) outcomes in trials where possible. However believe the thinking was something like ‘bring them into the funnel, don’t put our hand out right away’.
Note that signing up for the giving guide involves going to the GWWC site (which has a range of CTA’s of the sort you are discussing). It also leads to email followups with further CTA’s like this.
And of course, the giving guide itself full of EA cause promotion, impassioned and reasoned arguments, and very impactful CTA’s, with links, e.g., below:
That’s a good point. We are tracking the ‘backend’ as noted above. We also hope to do more work in estimating and modeling the links between top and bottom funnel outcomes. This is something I’m very interested in (and pursuing related quantitative work involving value-of-information).
Thanks for your interest . And, as noted, i hope for more followup when the antipode wakes up.
Sure. Just a couple quick thoughts and clarification:
That is a long funnel—its an even longer funnel from those pledge landing pages to the actual effective causes. I think what I mean is to directly pitch the actual causes GWWC lists as effective (e.g., AMF). Like a FB video about Malaria that links directly to tailored AMF pledge landing page all about how this AMF pledge is super effective. Something like that. People donate from SM and search ads all of the time. And its probably also a lot easier to target specific causes through Meta’s ad platforms than it is trying to profile people who might be down with preference sacrificing, no? Anyway, I don’t think I was clear. I meant testing EA causes specifically and then growing that relationship from there. I think it would be an interesting outcome comparison to what you’ve just now reported on testing.
I am not sure its necessarily a valid cost effective measure to compare what you are doing to other EA org’s audience acquisition costs. The United Way, which is much more analogous to GWWC, would probably be a better comparison. I highly doubt they have an 8 dollar email capture cost or clickthrough cost. New member cost, sure and then some, but that goes back to our now agreed to point, I think, about what ‘results’ actually are.
I mean the actual EA causes like AMF. GWWC is not a cause, neither is its pledge mechanism for that matter, really. Its a means to an ends for altruists. This and the dollar commitments to member acquisition EA groups commit to are probably a larger critique I should’ve written instead of my theoretical one that was likely straight up ignored (ha!) , but I think EA orgs could take a page from cause-related marketing history. For example, AMEX, when they paid to restore the statue of liberty in the 1980s, didn’t actually do a ton of talking about AMEX. They cobranded the cause campaign, for sure, but it was all about the statue of liberty. And now everyone associates AMEX and the statue of liberty and not in a negative way and probably subconsciously for a lot of folks. And their numbers went boom during the campaign. The short point: the cause always comes first is the first rule of cause marketing. Altruists in particular would benefit from always putting the actual causes first, rather than the altruists club. If an altruist is doing too much talking about themselves (including their reasons and methods), people might start to doubt the whole altruist thing. Again, probably more meta than this very practical marketing campaign study, but I think its a pretty important perspective.
Possibly. Not sure ‘preference sacrificing’ is the right term though. Also, there is a big push within EA to bring people into the movement in conscious involved ways and not “just donate”. GWWC is also trying to bring people in to consider direct work and other involvement.
This would indeed be an interesting comparison and possibly worth trying. But I’ll wait to hear what/if the GWWC partners think about this. (Note that I am personally working on some trials involving things related to this, but not through GWWC.)
I don’t see United Way as comparable to GWWC. Much less niche, much lower impact, substantially less of a commitment. But I don’t know what their email capture cost is, and obviously not all email captures are alike. But do you have data on the United Way email or new member acquisition cost? This would be useful to have as a benchmark.
I think if you look at the content of
the video ads open the boxes and click the ’Video ads theme and content links here
or GWWC’s home page and giving guide …
… you will see a lot of powerful material about the actual causes.
This is also something we tested somewhat. We compared cause-themed videos to videos more generally discussing giving effectiveness. See here for some of the results across the most comparable trials. Of course, as you note, we are only reporting on a proximate metric—people providing their emails/downloading guides. But at least for this outcome, the cause-specific videos did not consistently outperform the ‘facts about giving’ ones. (Although they did outperform these for some audiences, particularly animal-related videos for animal-interested audiences. On the other hand the animal videos performed particularly badly on the ‘philanthropy-interested’ audience.)
re: United Way—yes, it is a horribly ineffective organization compared to EA charities, certainly, but I was actually referencing their model—they are an intermediary between their selected causes and individual donors, like GWWC, they have a tailored list of causes to pledge to, like GWWC, and a giant part of their model is time period pledging, like GWWC. I just think their similarities would be a more apt comparison for cost effectiveness on email acquisition (or better, member/pledge acquisition).
I don’t have their numbers, but its a pretty scrutinized organization and I think the comparison, frankly, is also campaign opportunity for an org like GWWC that is actually doing it better… maybe worth a poke around.