I have some data that may be relevant to folks with interest in this topic*: I work for CEA, and this quarter I did a small brand test with Rethink’s help. We asked a sample of US college students if they had heard of “effective altruism.” Some respondents were also asked to give a brief definition of EA and a Likert scale rating of how negative/positive their first impression was of “effective altruism.”
Students who had never heard of “effective altruism” before the survey still had positive associations with it. Comments suggested that they thought it sounded good - effectiveness means doing things well; altruism means kindness and helping people. (IIRC, the average Likert scale score was 4+ out of 5). There were a small number of critiques too, but fewer than we expected. (Sorry that this is just a high-level summary—we don’t have a full writeup ready yet.)
Caveats: We didn’t test the name “effective altruism” against other possible names. Impressions will probably vary by audience. It could still be the case that “EA” puts off a sub-set of the audience we really want to reach. (E.g. if we found that highly critical/truth-seeking people in certain fields were often turned away by “EA,” I’d consider that a concern. We don’t have that data).
I do think this is encouraging, but doesn’t settle the question. Testing other brands and sub-brands may still be a good idea. Testing brands within very specific sub-audiences is also harder to do. CEA is currently considering trying to hire someone to test and develop the EA brand, and help field media inquiries.
*I think this post may have been written after I gave Max the info that he posted on my behalf here so I’m cross-posting.
I have some data that may be relevant to folks with interest in this topic*:
I work for CEA, and this quarter I did a small brand test with Rethink’s help. We asked a sample of US college students if they had heard of “effective altruism.” Some respondents were also asked to give a brief definition of EA and a Likert scale rating of how negative/positive their first impression was of “effective altruism.”
Students who had never heard of “effective altruism” before the survey still had positive associations with it. Comments suggested that they thought it sounded good - effectiveness means doing things well; altruism means kindness and helping people. (IIRC, the average Likert scale score was 4+ out of 5). There were a small number of critiques too, but fewer than we expected. (Sorry that this is just a high-level summary—we don’t have a full writeup ready yet.)
Caveats: We didn’t test the name “effective altruism” against other possible names. Impressions will probably vary by audience. It could still be the case that “EA” puts off a sub-set of the audience we really want to reach. (E.g. if we found that highly critical/truth-seeking people in certain fields were often turned away by “EA,” I’d consider that a concern. We don’t have that data).
I do think this is encouraging, but doesn’t settle the question. Testing other brands and sub-brands may still be a good idea. Testing brands within very specific sub-audiences is also harder to do. CEA is currently considering trying to hire someone to test and develop the EA brand, and help field media inquiries.
*I think this post may have been written after I gave Max the info that he posted on my behalf here so I’m cross-posting.
This is great, I’ll put a note in the main post highlighting this when I get home.