Previous to my 15+ years as an international educator presenting chiefly English Language and Literature in Germany and Wales, I held a range of roles in editing, writing and project management, mostly in line with education and some in the philanthropic realm, in Chicago, Seattle and NYC. Highlights from that period include serving as editor-in-chief and volunteer coordinator for an annual magazine for Earth Day Chicago, editing technical articles for Microsoft, and producing (product managing) award-winning children’s educational software for Edmark.
I also worked as a copywriter at a German high-tech industrial ad agency for some time.
I left teaching in 2021 to commence a career shift into an impact role in comms and development. Since 2022, I’ve been communications and outreach lead (PT) for the Charity Elections program, a project “incubated” by Giving What We Can, as of summer 2024 I am also Donor Relations Coordinator (PT) at ALLFED, responsible for stewardship, fundraising systems, and more.
I am interested in exploring ways to apply my strengths in relationship development, communication and writing, editing, storytelling, planning, creative problem-solving, project coordination, and other areas, in a role collaborating with others to explain, explore and inspire solutions to today’s social and environmental problems. The most on-target opportunities seem to be centered in outreach, fundraising and stewardship/donor care, PR, “content,” or marketing (and I have not ruled out education/training and curriculum development).
Current personal interests related to EA include deepening my understanding of various areas of EA including longtermism and cause prioritization, exploring and developing the stories we use to bring EA to a wider audience, and looking at current thinking around the application of EA approaches and ideas in educational contexts and the working world.
I’m also a sometime volunteer editor for various EA organizations and Kiva.org, served on the Comms Team for High Impact Professionals, have been occasional copyeditor for The Unjournal, and founded and advised several student green clubs. Outside all this, I’m an amateur songwriter (www.lyricist.net) with musical theatre cred in the form of a Tisch MFA and various readings in Chicago and NYC. highlight: An original poem of mine was read on NPR by the poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine. I’ve got one especially nice blog entry up for Giving What We Can. Meanwhile, writing and editing stuff can be glimpsed at www.adamedit.com. My family is returning to the EU in 2025.
Thanks for reading!
TARGETED INTRODUCTIONS TO EA FOR SPECIFIC AUDIENCES
ADDENDUM: The above post about “Targeted Introductions” has been moved to get its own feedback, to this location: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nJP2iLJZxjF8z8frw/a-case-for-targeted-introductions-to-effective-giving-for
I would suggest that if this of interest to you, you link to and read that updated version.
TL;DR—Slightly verbose :-) rationale for conducting a defined outreach effort, comprised of a series of articles targeted to and tailored for very specific audiences outside EA to orient them to effective giving.
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Here’s a concept relevant to this post as it offers one possible direction for EA writing.
It is not unlikely something like this is already in the works somewhere in EA that I don’t know about, and if so, I am sure the community will not let me remain uninformed.
(I was recommended to make this a full-on post rather than a reply, but I’d like to see what sort of feedback it gets here first.)
As marketers know, a specific target audience is easier to reach than a very broad one. You can choose a channel that already targets that audience with a message tailored to reader and context (e.g., a magazine about knitting reaches knitters particularly and quite efficiently). Plus, you might benefit from the medium itself if its ideas are trusted by and shared widely between people in that target population.
Meanwhile, there is much discussion, as EA increasingly meets the world, about how to disseminate information about the movement clearly, delicately—after all, you are asking people to examine their values—and in manageable doses. First impressions are oh-so important. You can see discussions about this around the forums. Examples include this Forum post, this podcast on this set of guidelines, portions of this Forum post—e.g., about the dangers of a “low-fidelity [first] exposure” with EA—and this video providing a teacher’s views on risks and solutions around external movement building.
So alongside any efforts to write content for a broad distribution, one might visualize a specific project to turn out a series of highly focused introductions to EA targeted towards specific audiences outside EA, written by or at least in the voice of an “insider,” and pitched to relevant publications.
The example that sparked this idea was an intro to EA written specifically for product managers by Clement Kao, speaking the language of its audience, making connections between their approaches and EA’s that would, one hopes, make Kao’s fellow product managers feel 1) well understood and 2) positively inclined towards EA.
This targeted outreach could be addressed to any community: Unitarian Universalists; sci-fi fans; AARP members, eSport gamers; you name it. But certainly EA has been looking to establish more momentum in reaching people in the workplace, and there are widely distributed publications within just about any professional community. As an example, consider how many developers’ eyeballs meet mass-distribution magazines like CODE or .NET.
Such a project could start by targeting the broadest and potentially most EA-aligned audiences—for our Market Testing team to identify, of course—and aim to be published in top specialized media for those groups. While containing a central common set of well crafted ideas and terminology, articles would differ in addressing the particular concerns of people in that target group, highlighting ways EA fits their world view and how its tenets can help them improve their work or their lives.
For authentic insider voices, we might do well to mine the multitalented ranks of EA for writers to author articles on areas in which they have experience.
Can anyone see a downside risk here? I haven’t so far, and it seems to me that, with careful attention to leading readers to further engagement with EA, such an effort might also cultivate a growing crop of EA groups in the workplace (or among any targeted groups).
A broader question is whether EA outreach would benefit from a far-reaching, coordinated program (perhaps with some elements like the above) to ensure a consistent, vetted message using consistent EA language—or continue to be accomplished as it is now, not badly, but ad hoc by various organizations within the community. Also, whether one particular organization, such as GWWC, would be the logical hub for such an undertaking.
(Thanks: David Reinstein for feedback on my early draft and Sunnie Huang for extra encouragement.)