Comms & Marketing for Effective Altruism

Using Communication & Marketing to Grow Effective Altruism Organizations

TL/DR: To use marketing & comms to maximize your impact & achieve your goals, pull together this 4-part strategy:

1. Research & Audience Deep Dive
2. Analysis & Health Check
3. Strategy & Tactics
4. Measure & Experiment

Communication and marketing for effective altruism represents a huge opportunity – one that can create massive growth, awareness, and impact in the world. But that said, Comms & Marketing for EA is unique.

But that said, marketing for EA is unique. Organizations trying to do good in the world have what feels like a million things on their plate, and marketing can often fall down the list. You also want to be extra sure of any investment you make.

Simply put, this represents a huge potential opportunity for EA organizations if executed well. Think of the core focus areas of many EA orgs and how marketing & communication might help:

• Growing awareness of your cause area
• Building a community
• Trying to enact change, whether in policy or in public perception
• Inspiring people to take action
• Fundraising in order to do more good in the world
• Launching new projects, courses, campaigns, or goals

Think of it – the power to change people’s opinions and actions in the world. The right marketing strategy can do that.

So, how do we do it?

After working in marketing & comms for 20 years, I wanted to share with you the communication & marketing strategy for EA template we use with organizations around the world.

1. Research – First, you’ll want to make sure you’ve pinpointed your target audience. Understand exactly who they are, how they find you, and the steps they take before they’re ready to take action.  You’ll want to know:

• Demographics: What’s their age, location, education, career experience, net worth, etc.?
• Psychographics: What content they consume, social channels, spending habits, biggest goals, biggest challenges, what keeps them up at 3am?

From here, you can create an Ideal User Persona (IUP), a one-page snapshot of who you want to engage with. Diving deeper, you can create a user journey map, essentially plotting out the steps they take from being completely unaware of your organization to being a power user and advocate for you. Finally, check your brand identity is complete and consistent across all platforms.

2. Analyze – Second, do a health check. What activities have you been doing, how well have they performed, and what gaps exist? Compare them against standard paid benchmarks like these, conversion benchmarks like these, and email benchmarks like these.  Are there activities across Paid-Earned-Shared-Owned (P-E-S-O) channels that you’re missing?  Think about the funnel from someone being completely unaware you exist, to becoming an advocate for you. Where is the biggest drop-off? If your organization is pretty new, you can also do a competitive scan. What activities are similar organizations doing, and how are they looking?

3. Strategize – Marketing without measurement doesn’t really count for much in today’s landscape! Especially in EA organizations, you need to be able to prove the impact of your efforts. Look at your Google Analytics regularly.  Search out both a) the successful things to double down on and b) the less successful pieces to stop investing in. You can even create an experimentation calendar with ideas of things to try.

After you have your overall strategy, next up is the tactics that can get you there. Many organizations will throw out tactics (newsletter, LinkedIn, blog) without tying it back to their overall goals.  We have a list of about 60 tactics, across Paid – Earned – Shared – Owned (PESO) channels. The mix is going to be different for everyone based on what your goals are.

4. Measure – Marketing without measurement doesn’t really count for much in today’s landscape! Especially in EA organizations, you need to be able to prove the impact of your efforts. We have analytics experts who can dive into return on investment and top measures of success. From there, we implement a suggested experimentation calendar, to ensure results are consistently on the rise.

Don’t Take Our Word for It…

Curious How to Put an EA Marketing & Comms Strategy to Work?

Because we believe in the power of effective altruism and how powerful marketing can be to helping EA organizations achieve their goals, we’re offering free one hour communication & marketing strategy sessions for EA organizations.

Interested? Simply fill out the form below, send us an email to [email protected], or book via our Calendly link.

Let’s grow our impact, fellow EAers.