Introduction & explanation

Late-2024 update: This project is on hiatus/moved

Note from David Reinstein: The EA Market Testing team has not been active since about August 2023. Some aspects of this project have been subsumed by Giving What We Can and their Effective Giving Global Coordination and Incubation (lead: Lucas Moore).

Nonetheless, you may find the resources and findings here useful. I'm happy to answer questions about this work.

I am now mainly focused on making The Unjournal a success. I hope to return to some aspects of the EAMT and effective giving research projects in the future. If you are interested in engaging with this, helping pursue the research and impact, or funding this agenda, please contact me at [e-mail].

See also

• Our public reports of trials and analysis in the web-book here

• The Barriers to Effective Giving living web book

• Our regularly updated 'data analysis report' on all the trials and evidence, which you can download HERE as a protected zip file (need to request password, permission granted with consent of participating organizations)

• EAMT Goals, FAQ; EAMT Progress and results

What is the "EA Market Testing Team"?

We are a small group of researchers and practitioners. This project is organized by David Reinstein , who maintains this wiki/Gitbook and other resources.

We aim to promote awareness and understanding of the (EA), and "to make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm." We consider marketing campaigns, charitable appeals, events, and public communication, working both with our partner organizations and in independent surveys and trials. We want to improve the design and messaging of organizations like Giving What We Can and 80000 Hours to improve their outreach methods and maximize their impact. Measuring and testing 'what works and when': While we are also testing and analyzing this rigorously. We help run and track careful data collection and rigorous controlled trials, as well as helping to organize the reporting of less rigorous trials. We robustly analyze the results to better understand which approaches tend to have a more positive impact. Communication: We track, organize, and share what we have learned with the EA community, building and organizing resources and a knowledge base. This will address questions such as:

• How to implement and test marketing campaigns?

• What has worked to promote EA?

• What motivates/blocks effective giving?

• What profiles of people are most likely to be interested in effective altruism?

We strive to be transparent. We want to report and share our data, procedures, code, and evidence without overselling the results.

We believe this is the first organized collaboration of its kind. We aim to...

• Coalesce our understanding and evidence on barriers and facilitators of effective altruism, effective giving, and effective action

• Run a broad set of high-powered trials (large samples, high-stake real-world contexts, substantial differences between conditions)

  • ... to gather evidence on what works best to promote meaningful actions in specific cases,

  • ... while aiming at

• Do profiling, survey, and segmentation activities and trials, building evidence on 'which types of people' are most responsive to effective giving messages and appeals

• Share our results, data, and tools, with the relevant EA and research-interested communities. This will enable more and better outreach, promotion, testing, and insight.

What is our mission? ...

As EAMT has progressed, we have encouraged others to do work and pursue initiatives in the 'space' of studying EA messaging, and marketing EA and effective giving. We hope that the resources we have provided, and the connections we have made have contributed to this. As the space changes, the EAMT mission, scope, and activities are adjusting as well.

We are moving towards a heightened focus on

1. Advising, proposing, and helping to design and coordinate experiments, trials, and initiatives.

2. Transparent presentation of the results, rigorous statistical analysis

3. Synthesizing, sharing, and communicating this knowledge and skills base

This work provides substantial public goods, whose benefit is shared among the partner organizations and the EA community.

Other relevant/new organizations and initiatives

• Other marketing/implementation resources (including User Friendly, Good Impressions, and Altruistic Agency)
• Rhetorical.org

• Giving What We Can 'Bequests' (a project we have encouraged and advised)

• Effective Altruism Psychology Lab (NYU)

• Effective Giving Collaboration and Summit

We believe the EA Market Testing Team is the first organized collaboration of its kind.

Goals and FAQ

Goals/FAQ link (below in detail, scroll outside margin to skip past it)

What have we accomplished?

For an overview of our progress and ongoing work, see the 'progress and results' document we are building. (Below in detail, scroll outside margin to skip past it)

Note that we cannot publicly share details of ongoing and upcoming trials. We aim to share the results when it is possible. We aim to integrate shareable aspects of this private doc.

For a data-driven dynamic document covering (some of) our trials and evidence see HERE.

"Testimonials"

---

Luke Freeman, Executive Director of Giving What We Can

"The EA Market Testing team has been very helpful in helping us to pursue our mission of creating a world where giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. They have helped us at each stage along the process of ideation through to analysis so that we can base our outreach activities on sound theory and strong evidence. This is at a particularly important time as we have been scaling up our marketing activities to reach and engage new audiences with effective giving and the ideas of effective altruism more broadly. We look forward to an ongoing collaboration with EAMT so that we can continue to iterate and increase our impact.”

Grace Adams, Head of Marketing, Giving What We Can:

It’s been extremely useful to hear what others in EA, individuals and orgs are doing and sharing learnings between us. I hope that we can develop a set of tactics that we know successfully convert people and get them more involved in EA. A reliable set of best practices for marketing EA would be a great outcome.

Greg Gianoupolis, Charity Elections

"As a quick testimonial relevant to this stage of the process, David [Reinstein]'s support has been critical to the Charity Elections team's development of plans for marketing and program evaluation. Our first ad campaign was particularly impactful, generating one click to the Charity Elections page on the Giving What We Can website per $0.01 spent on the campaign. We will continue to incorporate his advice into our advertising to spread awareness of the Charity Elections program among high school students and teachers."

How to get involved?

If you are interested in getting involved with our project or have feedback for us, contact David Reinstein at daaronr AT gmail.com.

Next, check out the Gitbook content overview.

(For an explanation of this Gitbook's structure, content, and aims.

1. This quote comes from the 2022 Giving What We Can strategy document.

2. However, we are also careful to be efficient, recognizing the tradeoffs between rigorous experimental design and practical marketing.

3. Including testing templates, guides and implementation tips