Improving the Effectiveness of Effective Altruism Outreach
Disclaimer: This post is mainly relevant to those who are interested in Effective Altruism
Introduction
As a Less Wronger and Effective Altruist who is skilled at marketing, education, and outreach, I think we can do a lot of good if we improve the effectiveness of Effective Altruism outreach. I am not talking about EA pitches in particular, although these are of course valuable in the right time and place, but more broadly issues of strategy. I am talking about making Effective Altruism outreach effective through relying on research-based strategies of effective outreach.
To be clear, I should say that I have been putting my money/efforts where my mouth is, and devoting a lot of my time and energy to a project, Intentional Insights, of spreading rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, as I think I can do the most good through convincing others to do the most good, through their giving and through rational thinking. Over the last year, I devoted approximately 2400 hours and $33000 to this project. Here’s what I found helpful in my own outreach efforts to non-EAs, and lots of these ideas also apply to my outreach regarding rationality more broadly.
Telling Stories
I found it quite helpful to focus much more on speaking to people’s emotions rather than their cognition. Now, this was not intuitive to me. I’m much more motivated by data than the typical person, and I bet you are too. But I think we need to remember that we suffer from a typical mind fallacy, in that most EAs are much more data-driven than the typical person. Moreover, after we got into the EA movement, we forget how weird it looks from the outside—we suffer from the curse of knowledge.
Non-EAs usually give because of the pull of their heartstrings, not because of raw data on QALYs. Telling people emotional stories is a research-based strategy to pull at heartstrings. So I practice doing so, about the children saved from malaria, of the benefits people gained from GiveDirectly, and other benefits. Then, the non-analytically inclined people become open to the numbers and metrics. However, the story is what opens people up to the numbers and metrics. This story helps address the drowning child problem and similar challenges.
However, this is not sufficient if we want to get people into EA. Once they are open to the numbers and metrics through the story about a concrete and emotional example, it’s very important to tell the story of Effective Altruism, to get people to engage with the movement. After leading with a story about children saved or something like that, I talk about how great it would be to save the most children most effectively. I paint a verbal and emotion-laden picture of how regrettable it is that the nonprofits that are best able to tell stories get the most money, not the nonprofits that are most effective. I talk about how people tend to give to nonprofits with the best marketing, not the ones that get the work done. This is meant to appeal to arouse negative emotions in people and put them before the essence of the problem that EA is trying to solve.
Once they are in a state of negative emotional arousal about other charities, this is the best time to sell them on EA, I find. I talk to them about how EA offers a solution to their problem. It offers a way to evaluate charities based on their outcome, not on their marketing. They can trust EA sources as rigorous and data-driven. They can be confident in their decision-making based on GiveWell and other EA-vetted sources. Even if they don’t understand the data-based analytical methodology, an issue I address below, they should still trust the outcomes. I’m currently drafting an article for a broad media forum, such as Huffington Post or something like that, which uses some of these strategies, and would be glad for feedback: link here.
Presenting Data
A big issue that many non-EAs have when presented with Effective Altruism is the barrier to entry to understanding data. For example, let’s go to back to the example of saving children through malaria nets that I used earlier. What happens when I direct people to the major EA evaluation of Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell’s write-up on it? They get hit with a research paper, essentially. So many people who I directed there just get overwhelmed, as they do not have the skills to process it.
I’d suggest developing more user-friendly ways of presenting data. We know that our minds process visual information much quicker and more effectively than text. So what about having infographics, charts, and other visual methods of presenting EA analyses? These can accompany the complex research-based analyses and give their results in an easy-to-digest visual format.
Social Affiliation
Research shows that people desire social affiliation with people they like. This is part of the reason why as part of Intentional Insights, we are focusing on secular people as our first target audience.
First, the vast majority of EAs are secular. This fact creates positive social signaling to secular people who are not currently EAs. Moreover, it is clear evidence that Effective Altruism appeals to them most. Second, network effects cause it to be more likely for people who already became Effective Altruists to cause others in their contact networks to become EAs. Therefore, it pays well and is highly effective in terms of resource investment to focus on secular people, as they can get others in their social circles to become EAs. Third, the presence of prominent notables who are EAs allows good promotion through a desire to be socially affiliated with prominent secular notables. Here’s an example of how I did it in a blog post for Intentional Insights.
There are so many secular people and if we can get more of them into the EA movement, it would be great! To be clear, this is not an argument against reaching out to religious EAs, which is a worthwhile project in and of itself. This is just a point about effectiveness and where to spend resources for outreach.
Meta-Comments About Outreach
To do so, I think we need to focus much more efforts—time and money—on developing Effective Altruist outreach and communication. This is why I am trying to fill the gap here with my own project. We haven’t done nearly enough research or experimentation on how to grow the movement most effectively through communicating effectively to outsiders. Investing resources in this area would be a very low-hanging fruit with very high returns, I think. If anyone is interested in learning more about my experience here, or wants to talk about collaborating, or just has some thoughts to share better suited for one-on-one than for discussion comments, my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org and Skype is gleb.tsipursky
In conclusion, I strongly believe we can do much better at our outreach if we apply research-based strategies of effective outreach. I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.
(Cross-posted on the Effective Altruism Forum)
I think the broader issue here is that the exact type of outreach that appeals to the masses will repel people who are early adopters of EA. One mental model I use in marketing is that just as people who are driven by emotional appeals seem to have an intense aesthetic aversion to data based arguments, those who are driven by logic seem to have an intense aesthetic aversion to emotional appeals.
There seems to be ways to signal around this (NPR has mostly emotional appeals, but it seems to appeal to people who like data as well), but it’s by no means an easy problem. It’s a hard tradeoff between attracting the smaller amount of people who seem to be natural fits for the movement, vs. attracting the masses but risking turning off that smaller group of data driven people.
This is definitely a valid point, and that’s why I’m encouraging the data-driven people to be oriented toward their goals. Are they in the movement for the purist appeal of the data, or are they there to do the most good? If they are there to do the most good, then logically they must want other people to donate their money to the most effective charities. If they want other people, who are more emotionally driven, to donate their money to the most effective charities, then they need to support efforts that are not appealing to them and not fail at other minds. We still need to have all the data there, of course, but we just optimize the way we present it to make it effective for moving the emotionally oriented people.
The real tradeoff comes with people who aren’t in the movement yet, but would be turned off by this.
People within the movement are already bought in to the idea—but would they have still bought in if they got an immediate sense of “this movement is being unethical and trying to appeal to my emotions”—if the answer is no, it’s likely that the movement would lose out on others with the same mindset.
My sense is that those types of people who aren’t in the movement would not be the readers of the kind of venue where such things are published—i.e. Huffington Post, etc. Besides, I would question whether appealing to emotions is unethical—that’s a much longer discussion and I don’t want to have it here, just want to say it’s much more complicated than “appealing to emotions = unethical”
I’ve rallied against the “emotions are unethical” thing elsewhere on lesswrong—like you I have experience in marketing, and I don’t see it as evil.
But—I think I’m in the minority on LW, and I suspect on that issue LW is representative of the EA early adopter crowd.
In terms of your other point about different advertising mediums, I’m not really sure… it seems like it would be relatively easy to test.
Without using words like “unethical” or “evil”, let me point out that deliberate emotional manipulation of your target is a risky move and can backfire. For a certain type of people (well represented on LW, I think), trying to emotionally manipulate them for marketing purposes is unproductive because if they detect it, they will kick you out and never invite you back in (and you’ll suffer a severe reputation hit in the process, too).
The emphasis here should be on “deliberate”. You’ll always be having some emotional effect on your “target”, whether you want it or not. But there’s nothing ethically wrong with ensuring that this emotional stance is sufficiently aligned with both your express message and your target’s broader goals.
Yes, which is why I talk not about effect but about manipulation.
I also agree that this is a spectrum at one end of which is an innocent desire to be nice to a potential customer and make the interaction a pleasant experience.
Manipulation is a loaded word. Instead, we can use the word “marketing”—we know that it works, because we have data from thousands of companies and non-profits, who have tracked the effect that marketing has on their brand. Marketing with an emotional message is almost always more effective than marketing without.
The problem here is with aesthetic preference. What you instinctively label the negatively connoted “manipulation”, another demographic labels ‘a good message″ or ‘human’. What you may label ‘evidence based’ may be seen as “ignoring the human element’ or ‘boring’.
I really do think it’s an aesthetic preference thing. So basically, I agree with your conclusions—the problem is, how do you deal with it?
I don’t think my problems are aesthetic in nature. I think they have to do with my autonomy preferences. I don’t like to be manipulated in general, not only by advertising.
How do I deal with it? I arrange things so that I see little advertising and what I see is mostly static and silent images (e.g. on billboards), as well as things like product placement in movies. On the web I… deploy technical countermeasures :-)
How would a marketer deal with it? In the usual way—by tailoring the message to the intended audience.
Do you mind if I taboo “manipulated”? I’m having trouble modeling what you feel as anything other than an aesthetic preference. Do you mind if someone gives you data that supports their argument?
The problem as a marketer of EA, is that you have two intended audiences with clashing preferences. Essentially, you’re trying to convey two diametrically opposed brands. You can tailor the message to the medium that you’re advertising in, but then you have the problem that your overall brand is still muddled.
“Aesthetic”, outside of high art, generally means the position on the ugly—beautiful axis. Do you mean that some people object to e.g. photos of starving African children because they are “ugly”, that is, upset the people’s contentment, confer agita, and harsh their mellow? That doesn’t apply to me.
As to modeling what I said, let’s try another… image :-) There is a quote which made its way around LW: “You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘a most judicious choice, sire’” Let’s run with it.
So, my conscious mind is just a toadie standing next to the actual decision-maker. Fine. Does the toadie have any power? Sure. He is the gatekeeper, controlling access to the king, in particular, the information flow that reaches the king. You can do a lot with that :-)
Now, if I’m the gatekeeper, what does the marketer do? He tries to go around me and directly influence the king. Do I like it? No, I do not like it at all.
It’s a very common problem, I think. So you segment as much as you can—marketing loves segmenting, anyway :-)
Good point EA early adopter crowd, will have to think about that.
Yup, will experiment with different mediums and see.