First, I wanted to thank all of the Effective Altruism Global organizers and participants. I found it to be very valuable and overall well put together. There was obviously a ton of work put into it, most by conference organizers who I don't believe will get that much credit for it, and I very much commend their work.
That said, there's always a lot of room for new ideas, and I find I often get a bunch of ideas at and after these conferences. Because of the EAGx events, ideas described now may be able to be put into action somewhat soon and experimented with.
As may be expected, I recommend that people make all of their ideas be independent comments, then upvote the ideas that they think would be the most useful.
edit: I accidentally retracted this without meaning to. The comment has been reposted below.
Hey Kit. I was in charge of marketing for EAG this year so I can explain what we did and why. I'm very sorry you felt like we were being deceptive. On my end, there's a difficult line to walk between using the copy that best accomplishes our goals and using copy that is maximally clear. Feedback on whether we've made the right calls will be helpful for better calibration in the future.
For some context here, when a person is nominated we put them into an automated Mailchimp flow. If the person applied or clicked a link in an email they were removed from the automation. If they did neither of these we sent them 3 emails asking them to apply. The email you're referring to was the last of three emails.
Julia and I actually thought quite a bit about the message and concluded that it wasn't deceptive for a few reasons: 1) The from line included "via EAG" 2) the email address the message came from was "hello@eaglobal.org." 3) The email itself seems to be clearly from us and not the nominator. For example, the first paragraph is "If you want to use the nomination [fname] [lname] gave you for Effective altruism Global 2016 you need to do it by the end of today." 4) The email copy contains an unsubscribe link. 5) The email copy contains CEA's name and address.
I'm interested in whether you think it's deceptive given this information.
Over the course of marketing EAG we found that deadlines were effective in getting people to apply for EA Global. Yet, it's also very important for us that a large percentage of people apply before we have to do things like order shirts, send the headcount to the caterer, etc.
To try to get some of the power of deadlines without encouraging a ton of last-minute applications, we set rolling application review deadlines. For most applications, we promised a two-week turnaround to hear back. The rolling application deadlines were dates where we promised a faster turnaround time if you applied by a particular date.
After reviewing our copy I think we were insufficiently clear about this in some of our emails. I'll try to be more vigilant in the future. However, I think plan itself is not deceptive if properly communicated. Interested in what people think.
Unless you're referring to something different than I think you are, this was true. I went through our attendee database and found everyone that hadn't yet claimed a ticket. I then put these folks into some email automation for follow-up on whether they planned to claim their ticket.
I agree. These emails were a mistake. They were written by an intern and didn't go through the proper review channels before sending them out. We instituted some policies after this happened to make the review process more clear, but don't have enough data to know if that will solve the problem. It's something we'll be working to address in the future.
Hey HowieL and Kit,
I find it difficult to think about this issue in a principled way. Not using standard marketing tactics is not costless. We used the language we used because it was the most effective. Using different language would have caused a decrease in EAG attendees and a decrease in the total value of the conference.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that some kinds of off-putting language are more effective at getting people to attend. How would you model the tradeoff between generating extra value at EA Global on the one hand and the harm of... (read more)