My education background is in Philosophy and Computer Science. I work for a small software company in the Bay Area. I am thinking about ways to grow impact-oriented thinking at large scales.
deniz
Karma: 16
Thank you very much for the welcome and for your thoughts!
That is a good point regarding the growth potential of the community itself, and certainly the quality of any growth would need to be a primary consideration.
My only counter-consideration to your point is that the bar to overcome is lower when convincing someone to adopt some aspect of EA-style methodology when compared to becoming a full EA community member. That being said, it certainly seems more concrete and easier to fathom how to grow the community, and less so for how to “spread EA style thinking”.
I think of GiveWell and 80,000 Hours as good examples of organizations that in their own way promote EA principles. Providing resources and tools for consumers seems to me a good way to increase reach, and perhaps there are areas that have not already been covered by existing EA-adjacent organizations.
deniz’s Quick takes
Hi All! I have been following the community from a distance for a while, but I am slowly getting more acquainted. Looking forward to going through the Motivation Series and learning more about ongoing discussions in the community.
At the moment, I am especially interested in the problem of growing impact-oriented thinking as a whole, especially ways that could possibly reach outside of the existing EA community. I am excited about a future where the kinds of discussions that are occurring here are being had in more contexts and are an integral part of our communal thinking. Please reach out to me if there are any efforts in that space or if you share my interest!
I am relatively new to the community and am still getting acquainted with the shared knowledge and resources.
I have been wondering what the prevailing thoughts are regarding growing the EA community or growing the use of EA style thought frameworks. The latter is a bit imprecise, but, at a glance, it appears to me that having more organizations and media outlets communicate in a more impact-aware way may have a very high expected value.
What are people’s thoughts on this problem? It likely fits into a meta-category of EA work, but lately I have been feeling that EA messaging and spread is an underserved area for improvement. It’s possible I’m simply unaware of some difficulties or existing related efforts.
I would suggest treating the page like a funnel to convert Facebook followers to engaged email subscribers first, then think more about where to direct that engagement after.
General steps I would follow:
1. Ramp activity back up and determine a growth strategy. Try to understand the existing audience engagement and the baseline growth rate over a month or so of consistent activity (how many people actually see the posts, how does engagement differ by type of content, do the followers care more about humor or EA, does cross-posting to Instagram get any traction, etc).
2. Create a funnel to convert followers to email subscribers. With no financial investment, this means incorporating email sign ups into the normal posts somehow (maybe every post has a link to sign up, or maybe 1 in 4 posts is solely for promoting the email sign up). If there is capacity for even a little financial investment, it will be possible to target the highly engaged followers with more precision using Facebook ads.
3. Create email campaigns to direct attention to worthwhile areas. What these “worthwhile areas” should be is what you’re actually asking about in the post. This could be a variety of things, maybe a longer term goal, or rotate through different short term campaigns. But for now, I think it will be more useful to confront this problem if the first two steps are proven solvable first, especially since details here will depend on how the email audience shapes up (age range, interest areas, etc).
Generally, I think pushing specific conversion goals directly from the Facebook page will be a difficult endeavor, like you’ve seen with the attempts you mentioned. The email funnel will be more productive if even a small percent of followers eventually become subscribers, and that will allow the Facebook page to be more focused on growth and reach (something it has already succeeded at).
Doing this well would require a serious time commitment. It really depends on how the first couple months of testing go, but I suspect there is significant upside. If interested, I’m happy to discuss more and see if there’s any way I can help!