EA - 80,000 Hours has been putting much more resources into growing our audience by Bella

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 80,000 Hours has been putting much more resources into growing our audience, published by Bella on February 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Since the start of 2022, 80,000 Hours has been putting a lot more effort and money into getting more people to hear of us and engage with our advice.This post aims to give some insight into what we’ve been up to and why.Why invest more in outreach?80,000 Hours has, we think, been historically cost-effective at causing more people to aim their careers at tackling pressing world problems. We've built a system of resources (website, podcast, job board, advising) that many people have found helpful for this end — and so we want more people to find them.Also, 80,000 Hours has historically been the biggest single source of people learning about the EA community. If we want to grow the community, increasing the number of people reached by 80k seems like one of the best available tools for doing that.Thirdly, outreach at the “top of the funnel” (i.e. getting people to subscribe after they hear about 80k’s ideas for the very first time) has unusually good feedback mechanisms & is particularly easy to measure. For the most part, we can tell if what we’re doing isn’t working, and change tack pretty quickly.Another reason is that a lot of these activities take relatively little staff time, but can scale quite efficiently with more money.Finally, based on our internal calculations, our outreach seems likely to be cost-effective as a means of getting more people into the kinds of careers we’re really excited about.What did we do to invest more in outreach?In 2020, 80k decided to invest more in outreach by moving one of their staff into a position focused on outreach, but it ended up not working out & that person left their role.Then in mid-2021, 80k decided to hire someone new to work on outreach full-time. They hired 1 staff member (me!), and I started in mid-January 2022.In mid-2022, we found that our initial pilots in this area looked pretty promising — by May we were on track to 4x our yearly rate of subscriber growth — and we decided to scale up the team and the resource investment. I ran a hiring round and made two hires, who started at the end of Nov 2022 and in Feb 2023; I now act as head of marketing.We also decided to formalise a “marketing programme” for 80k, which is housed within the website team. Since this project spends money so differently from the rest of 80k, and in 2022 was a large proportion of our overall spending, last year we decided to approach funders specifically to support our marketing spend (rather than draw from our general funds). The marketing programme has a separate fundraising cycle and decisions are made on it somewhat independently from the rest of 80k.In 2022, the marketing programme spent $2.65m (compared to ~$120k spent on marketing in 2021). The bulk of this spending was on sponsored placements with selected content creators ($910k), giving away free books to people who signed up to our newsletter ($1.04m), and digital ads ($338k). We expect to spend more in 2023, and are in conversation with funders about this.As a result of our efforts, more than 5x as many people subscribed to our newsletter in 2022 (167k) than 2021 (30k), and we had more website visitors in Q4 2022 than any previous quarter (1.98m).We can’t be sure how many additional people will change to a high-impact career as a result, in large part because we have found that “career plan changes” of this kind take, on average, about 2 years from first hearing about 80k.Still, our current best guess is that these efforts will have been pretty effective at helping people switch careers to more impactful areas.Partly this guess is based on the growth in new audience members that we’ve seen (plus 80k’s solid track record...