Opportunities to improve EA communications

By Good Impressions @ 2024-10-15T20:49 (+108)

Many people wish EA was better at communicating with non-EA audiences and want to help, but aren’t sure how. We offer a few options below. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Good Impressions, our website is here and we’ve also provided some additional information below. 

1. Submit your ideas for EA communications projects

Do you have an idea for an impactful EA communications project? Is there something you wish someone would do to improve EA communications? 

These could be projects that help organizations involved in EA causes, the causes themselves, or EA as a whole. 

Submit your idea and we will consider pursuing it or finding someone else to pursue it. 

2. Submit referrals for experienced marketing or communications professionals 

We are looking for marketing or communications professionals to bring additional types of expertise to our team, either in an advising capacity or through a more formal arrangement. Currently, we support clients with paid ads, website optimization, and web analytics. 

Familiarity with EA is not necessary for these roles (we list separate roles for EA generalists below).

3. Apply to work at Good Impressions

We have several open roles for generalists and experienced communicators alike. 

Roles for EA generalists:

• Project Manager
  • We have more demand for projects than we have capacity to run them and Project Managers are the current bottleneck.
  • No marketing experience is required.
• Podcast Producer (contractor)
  • We’re looking for someone to create one or two podcasts that highlight people doing inspiring work to improve the world. 

Roles for people with professional experience in marketing or communications:

• Various Roles for Experienced Marketers or Communicators
  • We’re looking for marketing or communications professionals to support our clients with specialties beyond our current expertise (which is in paid ads, website optimization, and web analytics).
• Visual Content Designer (contractor)
  • We're looking for professionals who can learn complex content, transform it into simple, clear, and personalized messages, and create platform-specific images or videos that represent those messages in a way that grabs the user's attention.

About Good Impressions

Good Impressions is a digital marketing agency that has helped ~60 effective nonprofits, think tanks, and foundations increase engagement with their content, research, services, courses, contests, programs, fellowships, and events. We are funded by Longview Philanthropy and Open Philanthropy and work primarily with organizations focused on making sure AI is safe, mitigating biosecurity risks, improving the lives of farmed animals, helping people living in extreme poverty, and building the Effective Altruism community.

Expanding our theory of change

Until recently, our theory of change has been limited to “topping up” the impact of effective nonprofits by increasing engagement with projects they’ve already created. Our experience is that the EA community often launches important projects without putting significant energy into making sure the right people engage with those projects and this has led to some significant opportunities for impact, including: 

• Recruiting ~220 participants for BlueDot Impact's courses, including employees from OpenAI, Meta's RLHF team, and the WHO Assistant Director General
• Increasing Epoch AI’s Twitter followers by ~3.4x among users who work at top AI labs, governmental bodies, major media outlets, and think tanks, which Epoch says "could have a significant impact on our ability to achieve our goals as an organization"
• Recruiting 7 whistleblowers for Legal Impact for Chickens at 1% of the cost of running undercover investigations
• Setting up a newsletter program for the Center for AI Safety that is generating ~2,000 new subscriptions per month
• Increasing Asterisk's readership by 80% for their 2nd issue
• Improving the Google search results for "longtermism" by creating content that ranks at the top of the search results page
• Selling ~2,000 copies of The Precipice on Amazon for ~$20 per book
• Setting up the Google Ads Grant for 35 EA orgs, generating ~1 million free clicks per year 

Recently, we have expanded our theory of change to include projects focused on EA as a whole, as opposed to individual nonprofits. We did this because it has become apparent that there is significant interest in communications projects among EA decision-makers (e.g. “Brand” was one of the two themes of this year’s Meta Coordination Forum) and we think we are in a good position to pursue this work. We have begun investigating projects involving podcasts, social media content, and other storytelling mediums and will use the ideas and leads from this post to decide which of those projects to pursue.