What happens when an EA org actually invests in marketing? A case study.

By Nick M Brown @ 2026-03-18T21:32 (+72)

This post reflects one campaign run in close collaboration between a digital marketing agency and an EA-adjacent org. Results exceeded expectations, but may not generalize. We aim to share lessons, not promote a particular approach or provider.

Epistemic status: Practitioner sharing one campaign’s results. Reasonably confident in the numbers; less certain about generalizability to other orgs or cause areas. I run the agency that ran this campaign, so take the framing with appropriate skepticism.

What We Did and What Happened

In late 2024, Consultants for Impact, an EA-adjacent org that helps management consultants transition into high-impact careers, partnered with our agency, Effct.org, to run a digital marketing campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The goal was straightforward: reach working consultants who might want to do more good with their careers, but don't know where to start.

Our goals were initially reach more consultants, build their newsletter, and see if paid media could move the needle for the org. What we got was much more than we planned for.

By the end of 2025 we had generated:

• 11,000+ newsletter subscribers (a 5,500% year-over-year increase)
• 44 million impressions across platforms (13x CFI’s initial goal)
• 5,200+ LinkedIn followers (220% YoY growth)
• Reached an estimated 10–15,000 consultants based on conservative estimates. Listed reach on the platforms was in the millions.
• 212+ career advising applications directly from social media, up from just 18 the year before

That last number surprised us as much as anyone. We built a funnel aimed at the top, and people kept walking all the way through it.

This post shares what we learned, for EA-aligned orgs thinking about whether marketing is worth trying.

How We Did It

1. Set clear goals

CFI’s team (Sarah, Emily, and Cindy) didn’t say “let’s raise awareness.” Together, we set roughly five SMART goals and tracked them throughout the campaign. Because the target was specific, everything else snapped into focus: the audience, the channels, the content, the metrics. Vague goals produce vague campaigns. A clear north star made the work simpler. We guided them on what numbers felt realistic. I tended towards conservatism with the estimates. In the end we ended up crushing the goals by about 900%. 

Midstream goal changes are one of the fastest ways to sink a campaign. Once you commit to a direction, protect it. Revisit it at a planned checkpoint (at least a couple of months away), not at week three.

2. Meet your audience where they are

Consultants are busy. They scroll LinkedIn between meetings and Instagram during commutes. They don’t want whitepapers in their feed; they want something worth a second of their attention. So we went to them. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn: wherever working consultants already spent time.

Match your content and platform to your audience. And regardless you are going to need a way to hook and entice your audience into whatever you are doing. For example, a one-sentence summary of a white paper sent to LLM researchers around the country via e-mail with a call-to-action to receive the entire document may be an ideal path for your organization. Or maybe it's a graphic of that paper's key finding posted to LinkedIn, and amplified with targeted ads at people that work at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies.

3. Find a content model that works, then use it

CFI had a strong brand but needed to grab attention. Sarah and Emily pointed us to the @consultinghumor Instagram account, a page with a massive following built entirely on relatable consulting memes. We knew immediately we had a model. But we tweaked it to fit CFI's brand, and also effectively tell the organization's story and impact. Our content mixed three things:

1. Memes that made consultants laugh and share
2. Valuable resources like CFI’s free Giving Guide
3. Real stories of consultants who’d already made the jump to high-impact work. 

The memes were entry points. The resources built trust. The stories made it clear how the organization could help consultants transition into higher impact careers.

4. Treat it like a test

We started with a three-month window. A few ads and posts we were confident in underperformed. We adapted. That mindset of test, learn, repeat is as native to good marketing as it is to EA. You don’t need to commit to a year upfront. Try one channel. Try a few thousand dollars. See what you learn. Once you find what works, do more of it. We ended up working together for over a year.

One caveat: a three-month window is a minimum, not a maximum. I would recommend six month time intervals if you're working with an agency. Give yourself (and your partner agency if you have one) enough time to build, execute, measure and iterate. Ending a campaign before you have enough data doesn’t tell you the experiment failed. It tells you nothing at all. 

5. Work with a partner who gets your mission

Consultants for Impact's team trusted our expertise and stayed closely involved. That combination of trust and engagement made the work both better and faster. If you go the agency route, find someone who understands your norms. EA-adjacent orgs have a specific tone: epistemic humility, transparency, no hype. Get aligned on that upfront, keep communication open, and then let your partner do what they’re good at. A good agency will also work with you to develop a scope of work to achieve the goals. Sticking to that scope is critical. The cleaner the brief, the better the results.

When This Might (and Might Not) Generalize

CFI had a few things working in its favor: a clearly defined target audience (management consultants), a great website, strong programming to point people toward, and a team willing to collaborate closely. Those conditions made the campaign easier to run and the results easier to achieve.

Orgs without a defined audience, or without downstream offerings to convert interest into action, will likely see weaker results. Marketing amplifies what’s already there; it doesn’t create mission or credibility from scratch.

That said: if you have a specific population you’re trying to reach, a clear message, and something real to offer them, paid social is more accessible than most EA orgs assume. 
 

A Personal Note: How I Got into EA and Marketing

In 2016, I was between careers when I came across a Facebook ad from 80,000 Hours. I took their quiz. It pointed me toward entrepreneurship, impact, and marketing. What struck me about 80,000 Hours wasn’t just the content. It was how rare that ad was. EA had strong ideas and almost no megaphone.

So in 2017 I started Effct.org, a digital marketing agency, with the hope of eventually helping EA orgs get their message out. The appetite wasn’t there yet, so we spent years working with governments, nonprofits, political campaigns and private companies. In 2024, I went back to EA Global Boston and met Sarah Pomeranz. This campaign is what happened next.

Why This Matters

For some EA-adjacent orgs, reaching more people isn't a nice-to-have. It's the bottleneck. The programs exist. The mission is clear. The only thing missing is an audience. If that describes your org, marketing isn't a peripheral experiment; it's core to your theory of change. The cost of a test is marginal. The opportunity cost of never finding out is massive.

For CFI, the conversation started with a funny meme about being a consultant. From there, some very real things happened: tens of thousands of people signed up to learn about impactful careers, 212+ applied for 1:1 advising, and some have now changed their careers entirely to work at impactful organizations.

That’s impact. And it started with a meme.

If you’re thinking about trying something like this, happy to chat or answer questions in the comments. And if you’re skeptical, that’s fair. I’d just encourage you to test your skepticism.

Thanks to Sarah Pomeranz, Emily Dardaman, Cindy Lin, and the entire Consultants for Impact team. Thank you, Emily, for helping with this post. This campaign was successful because of the hard work and leadership of Ashtyn Austin at Effct.org. Thanks to the donors who funded this impactful experiment. And thanks to the EA Community for being open to big ideas even if at first glance they look like memes.