The Intervention
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The Intervention
Understanding the characteristics and behavior of TLYCS’s potential donors, preliminary assessments of the behavioral bottlenecks they encounter, and the literature review, this section proposes several interventions. These interventions rely upon The Life You Can Save’s main touchpoints with the community: social media, their website, and the newsletter. Together, these interventions represent our suggestions for the most promising tests to start a long-term learning agenda. Our team sought to test the proposed interventions by measuring the performance of a specific series of posts on TLYCS’s major social media platforms. This testing structure was designed within strict time constraints, which proved incompatible with conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or A/B testing over a longer period of time . Therefore, our team developed a testing strategy over social media, which could provide nearterm, useful data on which to base more robust future social media RCTs or A/B testing, while operating within the confines of our compressed time window. We also propose several interventions using the website and newsletter. A donation quiz will simplify the difficult choice for potential donors among the curated effective charities. Current newsletter subscribers can be leveraged to build The Life You Can Save’s community by inviting them to share the book. And focusing content at the top of
the homepage on specific impacts will promote website engagement, especially among new users.
Social Media Testing Structure Our testing structure was composed of a series of test posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, posted from November 16 to 30, 2020. These test posts consisted of posts with a broad charity framing, with specific cause framing, donor testimonials, and a post centered around Peter Singer’s TED Talk on effective altruism. To remain consistent, the posts were all uploaded to the social media platforms around 12pm ET each day. The test posts were randomly rotated between the various components, and interspersed with a few exogenous control posts that TLYCS conducted as normal, for example a November 24 post for a virtual live crowdfunding event to be held December 7, a post about gratitude on November 25 (Thanksgiving) and a November 28 post about how to download Singer’s book. Strategy Given tight timelines, our team had to manage competing demands for broader insights on different types of framings and content, while attempting to maintain a degree of statistical power. Traditional RCT or A/B testing proved challenging over social media, and would probably best be conducted through social media advertising, to allow for small, specific tweaks that could be tested among
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