EA - Marketing 101 for EA Organizations by Igor Scaldini

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Marketing 101 for EA Organizations, published by Igor Scaldini on August 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.As a newcomer to the EA community, I'm surprised by how rarely EAs talk about marketing and organizational growth. As a marketer myself, maybe it's just a matter of me over-expecting people to give more importance to the matter, but even so, I'm confident that there are good reasons to talk more about it.First, according to this survey run by User-Friendly in February 2022, 72% of EA organization leaders said that effective marketing significantly helped their organization to achieve its objectives. I haven't conducted a survey myself, but the dozens of conversations I've had with professionals and founders in the EA movement support this statement.Another good reason is that EA organizations need a minimum degree of awareness to raise funds to achieve their goals. Of course, networking is important, but how scalable is it? Since creating awareness is one of the main marketing premises, EA organizations should consider using it more effectively.So the question I've been wondering is: why?Why don't people in the EA community talk that much about growth loops, retention, and marketing in general? Talking to colleagues in the community, I'm able to see a pattern in the main reasons that EAs are resistant to marketing.So my objective with this article is not only to explain what marketing is and provide a roadmap with practical tips that make sense for EA organizations but also to address some of these objections. Hopefully, this will at least get you thinking a bit about the value marketing could bring to your organization.Please feel free to share your thoughts and criticisms in the comments section, as I'd like to hear them so that I can improve this post to make it more useful.If you are convinced of the importance of marketing and are just looking for a roadmap, I recommend jumping straight to the section "A useful marketing framework for EA organizations."You may also be in a situation in which you have been running marketing campaigns for a while but facing some operations issues (misalignment of strategies, missing deadlines, idleness, etc.). In this case, the section "How to be prepared for operational success" may be particularly useful for you.Lastly, it's important to note that I will focus on marketing for EA organizations, not the marketing of the effective altruism movement itself. If you're interested in the latter, I recommend this post on making effective altruism enormous, this one on keeping EA welcoming, and this one on movement course corrections.Addressing some marketing misconceptions I've seen among EAsMisconception #1: Marketing is all about persuasion.Some EAs are suspicious of marketing because they think that it's all about persuading people to agree with you, rather than impartially seeking the truth. If used ethically, persuasion can indeed be a vital tool for marketing. However, an effective marketing strategy goes way beyond persuasion - channel optimizations, user journey, targeting, and many other things we do in marketing are important for growth but don't involve persuasion at all.Misconception #2: Logical arguments are enough to attract people.Some EAs think that there's no need to market EA organizations because the right people will be attracted by logical arguments alone. I deeply wish this were the case, but unfortunately, it's not. There is plenty of research showing that emotions play a huge role in our daily decisions. In my experience, telling a compelling story is one of the greatest and most time-tested ways to encourage people to act - even if those people are part of an audience that highly values logic.Misconception #3: Marketing destroys the organization's reputation among EAs.If done wrong, ...