Program managers & marketing leads — what have you learned about filling cohorts effectively?

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing number of fellowships, accelerators, bootcamps, and training programs across the EA and EA-adjacent ecosystem (AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, global health & development, climate, and more).

One recurring challenge is:
👉 How do programs consistently recruit the right participants and fill cohorts effectively?

I’m especially interested in hearing from:

• Program organizers or managers who have run these types of initiatives.
• People working on marketing, communications, or outreach for fellowships/accelerators.

If that’s you, I’d love to learn from your experience.

Here are some guiding questions (please feel free to answer whichever are relevant):

1. Biggest challenges – What has been hardest about recruiting the right participants for your program?
2. Approaches tried – Which outreach or marketing strategies have you used? What worked best, and what didn’t?
3. Resources – Did you rely on in-house capacity, or did you also use external agencies/consultants/freelancers?
4. Future needs – If you could improve one thing about your recruitment pipeline, what would it be?
5. Scaling – What do you see as the main barriers to scaling recruitment effectively across EA-aligned programs?

Next steps:
I plan to synthesize responses into a short write-up so we can all learn from each other’s experience.

Thanks so much to anyone willing to share insights — this will be helpful not just for me, but for many others building and scaling programs in the community!