I have recently just cold-added about 10% of my FB friends who I thought might be interested in EA to the EA facebook group. Probably added about 40 people in one go. What do people think of this outreach strategy? I think it’s a pretty unintrusive soft sell that doesn’t take a lot of time and could be a good foot in the door technique.
As another data point, I’d be at most slightly annoyed, and just leave the group. So the benefit might be worth the slight annoyance and social cost, in a similar way to that I discussed in Spreading EA messages to friends—including giving the hard sell.
It might be a bit jarring for people to be thrown into a group without knowing much about what it is or why. Maybe if you also coupled it with a PM to them explaining it?
You can also ‘invite’ people to join the group rather than add them straight to it—perhaps a bit less jarring this way, especially with a bit of PM explanation
I think it would be a very good thing to encourage other EAs to do at least a smaller version of this. After reading your comment, I realised that ~3% of my FB friends were particularly receptive to EA ideas, but hadn’t even been invited to the group yet. I invited them immediately.
I tend to agree with Peter that coupling it with something else, like a FB message (or maybe something more personal), would be good for anyone outside that first couple of percent.
I have recently just cold-added about 10% of my FB friends who I thought might be interested in EA to the EA facebook group. Probably added about 40 people in one go. What do people think of this outreach strategy? I think it’s a pretty unintrusive soft sell that doesn’t take a lot of time and could be a good foot in the door technique.
If someone did this to me for a group like EA that I wasn’t into I would be pretty annoyed.
Though I would mostly be annoyed at FB for letting people add you to groups.
As another data point, I’d be at most slightly annoyed, and just leave the group. So the benefit might be worth the slight annoyance and social cost, in a similar way to that I discussed in Spreading EA messages to friends—including giving the hard sell.
It might be a bit jarring for people to be thrown into a group without knowing much about what it is or why. Maybe if you also coupled it with a PM to them explaining it?
I think that’s the beauty of it :)
but yes maybe one could follow up after a while with a PM.
You can also ‘invite’ people to join the group rather than add them straight to it—perhaps a bit less jarring this way, especially with a bit of PM explanation
Plain friend request is more fun than friend-request-accompanied-by-sales-pitch!
I think it would be a very good thing to encourage other EAs to do at least a smaller version of this. After reading your comment, I realised that ~3% of my FB friends were particularly receptive to EA ideas, but hadn’t even been invited to the group yet. I invited them immediately.
I tend to agree with Peter that coupling it with something else, like a FB message (or maybe something more personal), would be good for anyone outside that first couple of percent.
Sounds helpful to me.