Marisa is extremely talented, connected, and knowledgable. She helped Legal Impact for Chickens majorly step up our social media game by connecting us with mission-aligned influencers. Marisa helped us get their attention by creating a beautiful, thorough influencer packet just for us, which laid out everything someone would need to promote our nonprofit, from example posts, to imagery, to why our work is important in bettering the world. We are so lucky that Marisa found us and volunteered her services for free--she deserves to be paid well for her exceptional work, which will make all of our jobs easier and our impact greater. Thank you, Marisa!
11
Social Media Strategy for EA Orgs
Project summary
I am a professional influencer and content creator (IG: @marisa.vogiatzi), providing social media advice and strategies, creating media kits, influencer outreach plans, and content for companies. Recently, I have been offering my services for free to highly effective organizations within the Effective Altruism community. However, demand from EA orgs has outpaced the supply of hours I can offer completely free, so I am looking into grant options to dedicate more hours to providing EA orgs with professional social media and marketing services.
Supporting my work is better than asking EA orgs to individually find private social media services on the private market because:
Social media knowledge is highly neglected in EA, including how to even navigate finding a social media consultant-- so most EA orgs just don’t try.
The $/hour market price of high-quality social media consulting is much higher than my $ donated/pro-bono hour ratio, so funding my spending more hours is a great deal for EA orgs.
As my experience working with EA organizations grows, so does the EA-specific value I can provide. Every organization has a niche, and coming in with “industry knowledge” of the EA/high-impact altruism landscape is efficient and risk-reducing.
I help smaller EA orgs that don’t have a marketing budget, but have demonstrated a strong capacity to generate impact. These orgs frequently tell me that if I had not helped them, they simply wouldn’t have made any progress on this front.
The EA orgs I have helped have been very happy with my services, claim it has generated much value, and they have recommended other orgs request my services-- hence my inability to keep up with demand without funding, since I will have to start dipping into my private consulting time budget to help more orgs.
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
Social media is highly neglected in EA. EA orgs tend to perform weakly on social media metrics, which leaves a lot of outreach, fundraising, awareness, and recruitment opportunities on the table. This project aims to bridge this critical expertise gap in the EA community by providing my expert social media consulting services where they are most impactful. I offer the same professional services that I offer as a private social media consultant, but for free, and tailored to the needs of each high-impact EA organization I work with.
How will this funding be used?
Word seems to travel fast among EA orgs, and the number of requests I have received for social media and marketing consulting has outpaced my ability to keep up. This is because I can only offer so many free hours before I have to start turning down paid/private-market collaborations to take on more free EA consulting projects.
This funding will allow me to offer more hours to EA orgs who have requested my services, by partially offsetting the income I would have made from the private service-hours I am replacing.
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
It’s just me, a professional social media consultant and content creator, offering my services pro-bono.
My track record includes designing media kits and influencer outreach plans for multiple EA meta-orgs and ACE-recommended charities, as well as recently beginning content creation for EA orgs and collaborations on my own social media brand as an influencer. I also have years of experience working on marketing campaigns with private sector clients, including private companies and European governments.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
This question is not very applicable to the nature of this project, since I already have a backlog of EA orgs requesting my services, and receiving funding will simply allow me to get to more orgs faster (by contributing more hours to this work).
What other funding are you or your project getting?
This is the first funding application I have applied to.
donated $10
Alene Georgia Anello
about 2 months ago
Thank you so much to Marisa! She designed a social media packet for LIC to share with influencers to get the word out, and she compiled a list of influencers for us to use! She is awesome.
🍊
Vishakha Agrawal
2 months ago
I had an advising call with Marisa a few days ago as I am starting to work on influencer outreach for an AI safety org that I work for. She has so much knowledge about social media esp. instagram and is so eager to learn about AI x-safety so that she can help AI safety orgs even more. I would love to see her get funded.
Marine Lercier
3 months ago
Your work seems extremely beneficial! Would you consider helping new charities develop their social media presence/strategy? That would be very helpful for a new NGO like mine.
donated $50
Neel Nanda
3 months ago
This seems like a great service to provide! And I'd expect that someone interested in EA is better placed to provide useful work for an EA org's needs than a generic professional. It's hard to judge how good you are here, but having too much demand seems like a strong positive signal, and totally worth funding.
Marisa Vogiatzi
3 months ago
Given the interest shown, I have increased my donation cap to 6k for 6 months in case donors want to add more than my initial 1.5 month part time goal-- this will simply translate into more hours and more orgs helped, at the same ratio whether 1k or 6k raised. I don’t actually have a minimum or maximum here; I can basically scale my hours infinitely, since I’ll just turn down more private-sector work as more donations replace more of my income/survival needs.
If you are a donor interested in funding a large amount of time for me to do this work, and you want more info than I’ve been able to share here (e.g. showing internal work I’ve done for orgs), I’m happy to have a 1-on-1 call; I would need to get the client’s permission to share some info/work, but perhaps they would be happy to share this with you if you’re interested in substantially funding my work.
Austin Chen
3 months ago
@marisavogiatzi Thanks, appreciate the updates!
Since demand for your work seems to be high (a great problem to have and it speaks well of your work!), I'd encourage you to consider charging EA orgs some portion of your market rate. Basically, use a (discounted) price to help you & EA clients decide how worthwhile working together will be. E.g. you might charge a well-funded EA org like GWWC 60% of your standard private market rate, or a new upcoming one like LIC 30%, making up the rest from funds from donors like here.
I've seen some other folks around EA start doing this -- for example, Lighthaven is happy to offer their campus https://www.lighthaven.space/ at a discount for work they believe is valuable (such as the very first Manifest - thanks!), but still charge some amount to offset their costs and make sure that the event they're hosting is producing value.
donated $50
Neel Nanda
3 months ago
@marisavogiatzi I'd encourage you to increase the max funding significantly higher if you would spend more hours on EA stuff given more money! It's max funding, after all. I also second Austin's suggestion of charging people some money for it (specialised to what the org can reasonably afford), this is a good way to ensure you're actually providing value.
wasabipesto
3 months ago
This seems like an extremely beneficial service that is sorely needed by the community!
Could you provide an example of content you have produced for an EA org in the past?
Approximately how many additional projects would you be able to take on if this proposal is completely funded?
Austin Chen
3 months ago
@wasabipesto Seconded -- this application is pretty interesting; I'd really love to see some names of EA orgs who have used your advice (or are on your backlog), and ideally links to some of that work!
🥦
Dusan D Nesic
3 months ago
@Austin thirded -- posting here to get notified when you reply @marisavogiatzi
Rowan Clements
3 months ago
Also keen to hear more! This seems like the kind of service EA NZ could really benefit from.
Marisa Vogiatzi
3 months ago
Thanks for the questions!
I am currently working on collaborations with Giving What We Can and Legal Impact for Chickens (an ACE-recommended charity), and l am leading EAGxBerlin’s media volunteer team. I am talking with a smaller AI Safety org next week to assess their needs. I recently had to decline assisting the Aquatic Life Institute with their social media as I was currently assisting these other orgs, and can only divert so many hours from my private sector consulting without funding.
Some of these projects include an influencer brief/media kit (for the org to send to influencers, outlining key campaign details, goals, messaging guidelines and templates), finding and creating a list of influencers for potential collaborations with their contact details and brand niche, giving feedback and tips on social media strategies. In September, I will be at EAGxBerlin for in person content creation for next year’s social media marketing of the conference.
As I have mostly been working on their internal media strategy, I cannot share the work I’ve done with these orgs.
Every $1000 donated will translate to ~1 month of part time work I can do for orgs, which tends to be ~ 1-2 EA orgs helped, varying on the scope of their needs.