EA - Marketing Messages Trial for GWWC Giving Guide Campaign by Erin Morrissey

Link to original articleWelcome 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 Messages Trial for GWWC Giving Guide Campaign, published by Erin Morrissey on September 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The trial was run in conjunction with Josh Lewis (NYU). Thanks to David Moss and others for feedback on this post, and to Jamie Elsey for support with the Bayesian analysis. TL;DR Giving What We Can together with the EA Market Testing Team (EAMT) tested marketing and messaging themes on Facebook in their Effective Giving Guide Facebook Lead campaigns which ran from late November 2021 - January 2022. GWWC's Giving Guide answers key questions about effective giving and includes the latest effective giving recommendations to teach donors how to do the most good with their donations. These were exploratory trials to identify promising strategies to recruit people for GWWC and engage people with EA more broadly. We report the most interesting patterns from these trials to provide insight into which hypotheses might be worth exploring more rigorously in future (‘confirmatory analysis’) work. Across four trials we compared the effectiveness of different types of (1) messages, (2) videos, and (3) targeted audiences. The key outcomes were (i) email addresses per dollar (when a Facebook user provides an email lead) and (ii) link clicks per dollar. Based on our analysis of 682,577 unique Facebook ‘impressions’, we found: The cost of an email address was as low as $8.00 across campaigns, but it seemed to vary substantially across audiences, videos, and messages. The message "Only 3% of donors give based on charity effectiveness, yet the best charities can be 100x more impactful" generated more link clicks and email addresses per dollar than other messages. In contrast, the message "Giving What We Can has helped 6,000+ people make a bigger impact on the causes they care about most" was less cost-effective than the other messages. A ‘short video with facts about effective giving’ generated more email addresses per dollar than either (1) a long video with facts about effective giving or (2) a long video that explained how GWWC can help maximize charitable impact, the GWWC 'brand video.' On a per-dollar basis ‘Animal’ audiences that were given animal-related cause videos performed among the best, both overall and in the most comparable trials. ‘Lookalike’ audiences (those with a similar profile as current people engaging with GWWC) performed best overall, for both cause and non-cause videos. However, ‘Climate’ and ‘Global Poverty’ audiences basically underperformed the ‘Philanthropy’ audience when presented videos ‘for their own causes.’ The Animal-related cause video performed particularly poorly on the ‘Philanthropy’ audience. Demographics were mostly not predictive of email addresses per dollar nor link clicks per dollar See our Quarto dynamic document linked here for more details, and ongoing analyses. Purpose and Interpretation of this Report One of the primary goals of the EAMT is to identify the most effective, scalable strategies for marketing EA. Our main approach is to test marketing and messaging themes in naturally-occurring settings (such as advertising campaigns on Facebook, YouTube, etc.), targeting large audiences, to determine which specific strategies work best in the most relevant contexts. In this report, we share key patterns and insights about the effectiveness of different marketing and messaging approaches used in GWWC's Effective Giving Guide Facebook Lead campaigns. The patterns we share here serve as a starting point to consider themes and hypotheses to test more rigorously in our ongoing research project. We are hoping for feedback and suggestions from the EA community on these trials and their implementation and analysis. We continue to conduct detailed analyses of this data. We'd like to get ideas from the community ...