To give more clarity on what I mean by imagining larger spends—it seems to me like many of these efforts are sales-heavy, instead of being marketing-heavy.
I can understand that it would take a while to scale up sales. But scaling up marketing seems much better understood. Large companies routinely spend billions per year on marketing.
Here are some figures a quick Claude search gave for car marketing spending, for instance. I think this might be an interesting comparison because cars, like charitable donations, are large expenses that might take time for people to consider.
(I do realize that the economics might be pretty different around charity, so of course I’d recommend being very clever and thoughtful before scaling up quite to this level)
I asked ChatGPT about the average marketing spend of auto manufacturers was (it said 7-8%) and the average fundraising spend of the largest US charities (it said ~10%, which is consistent with my intuition). While I’m not endorsing these percentages as optimal for auto manufacturers or non-EA charities—much less advocating that they should be applied to EA charities—they could provide some sort of ballpark starting point.
Automotive marketing, as I understand it, is considerably about creating vague positive brand associations that will pay off when the consumer is ready to make a purchase decision. That’s a viable strategy in part because there aren’t too many differences between (e.g.) a Ford and a GM truck. It’s not obvious to me that would-be EA donors would respond well to that kind of campaign, and this may limit the extent to which their marketing budgets and strategies serve as a useful guide here.
Frustratingly, the links that Claude found for these went to Statista, which is mostly paywalled, but the public bits mostly seem to verify these rough numbers.
To give more clarity on what I mean by imagining larger spends—it seems to me like many of these efforts are sales-heavy, instead of being marketing-heavy.
I can understand that it would take a while to scale up sales. But scaling up marketing seems much better understood. Large companies routinely spend billions per year on marketing.
Here are some figures a quick Claude search gave for car marketing spending, for instance. I think this might be an interesting comparison because cars, like charitable donations, are large expenses that might take time for people to consider.
(I do realize that the economics might be pretty different around charity, so of course I’d recommend being very clever and thoughtful before scaling up quite to this level)
I asked ChatGPT about the average marketing spend of auto manufacturers was (it said 7-8%) and the average fundraising spend of the largest US charities (it said ~10%, which is consistent with my intuition). While I’m not endorsing these percentages as optimal for auto manufacturers or non-EA charities—much less advocating that they should be applied to EA charities—they could provide some sort of ballpark starting point.
Automotive marketing, as I understand it, is considerably about creating vague positive brand associations that will pay off when the consumer is ready to make a purchase decision. That’s a viable strategy in part because there aren’t too many differences between (e.g.) a Ford and a GM truck. It’s not obvious to me that would-be EA donors would respond well to that kind of campaign, and this may limit the extent to which their marketing budgets and strategies serve as a useful guide here.
Frustratingly, the links that Claude found for these went to Statista, which is mostly paywalled, but the public bits mostly seem to verify these rough numbers.
https://claude.ai/share/941fbda6-2dc5-4d15-bb31-99fcfc4d0a8b