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It was used in the Felicifia community, although it wasn't used as definitively as it is now. Although 'strategic altruism' was more common although that wasn't as catchy. It was also just used in casual conversation.
I could be wrong though.
This 'official' account gives the impression that no term had much common currency, apart from the jokey 'super-hardcore do-gooder' before the end of 2011. I can't comment about whether other branches of the community used terms in a similar way- I've never heard of felicifia. http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism/
In response to
Negative and Positive Selection
One of the most important social structures of modern society is the corporation - a framework for large groups of people to band together and get absolutely huge projects done. In this framework, the structure itself is more important than individual excellence at most levels. To a lesser extent, the same applies to academia and even "society as a whole".
In that context, I think preferring negative selection to positive makes sense: a genius data-entry clerk is less helpful than an insubordinate data-entry clerk is disruptive.
And remember that we have side routes so real geniuses (of some kinds) can still make it: set up their own company, start their own political party, start publishing their work online, design games in their basement, and so on.
I'm not sure that it's the corporate structure that makes negative selection more useful in the data entry case. It's not the fact that the data-entry clerk is part of a large organisation that means that a slightly incompetent data-entry clerk is more disruptive than a genius-level one is helpful. Rather it's the fact that data-entry is a relatively low skill job and with relatively little room for excelling above mere competence. Leaving the corporation wholly out of it, and imagining a person doing data entry in complete isolation, the most helpful data-entry clerk would still be selected by making sure they weren't terrible, but weren't necessarily brilliant, at typing and remaining attentive etc. I think this idea is supported by the fact that for higher level/skill positions, one probably would want to employ more positive selection.
If your point was specifically that insubordination (and not just slight incompetence in general) is more harmful than genius-level work is helpful, then I guess that, in an obvious sense, the harm of insubordination is due to the corporate nature of work (since you can't be insubordinate outside of a group hierarchy). But then I'm not sure that insubordination-worries requires negative selection, or at least not a wide range of negative selection tests. Sure, you might want to include a negative selection test along the lines of 'are they likely to do the opposite of what they're told on a whim occasionally?', but it's an open question whether the rest of your criteria would be negative or positive.
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lukeprog (Luke Muehlhauser) objects to CEA's claim that EA grew primarily out of Giving What We Can at http://www.effectivealtruism.org/#comments :
I certainly agree that effective altruism existed long before GWWC.
The discussion I'm addressing though is about the origin of the term "effective altruist."