TL;DR
Across EA job boards and Forum postings, 70–90% of "marketing-related" roles are comms-focused, while only ~10–20% relate to digital acquisition, funnels, growth, or retention. Several marketers in EA report that our ecosystem is 4–5 years behind standard digital marketing practices—particularly in experimentation, targeting, lifecycle marketing, and channel attribution.
This imbalance has real opportunity costs: many high-leverage programs (training, fellowships, campaigns, fundraising, recruitment) rely on steady inflow and activation of the right participants—yet the systems that reliably deliver this are rarely built.
Comms ≠ growth. EA orgs may be investing heavily in "talking about what we do," but less in "filling and scaling what we do." Given EA's culture of measurement, the lack of measurement-driven marketing is especially surprising.
Context: who's writing this
I'm a digital marketer with 7+ years of experience. I've reached late-stage interviews for several growth-adjacent roles in EA orgs over the past year, and I've spoken with multiple EA marketers about this pattern. I'm likely biased given my background, so I'm genuinely open to being wrong about this—but the pattern feels worth discussing.
*Note: I used some LLMs for copyediting.
1. A pattern I keep noticing in EA job postings
Over the past year, I've been tracking EA job openings that fall under marketing, outreach, communications. This is my rough estimate, not a rigorous analysis, but a consistent pattern emerges:
About 8 out of 10 roles are comms-focused (writing, media, storytelling, brand, newsletters, PR, community updates), while only 1–2 out of 10 are digital growth roles (acquisition, funnel optimization, paid channels, A/B testing, lifecycle/CRM, analytics, digital fundraising, performance).
This isn't just my impression. After speaking with several marketers in the EA ecosystem, the consensus seems to be that EA is 4–5 years behind in digital marketing infrastructure, and importantly, that most orgs don't know how to evaluate or even imagine a performance-oriented marketing function, so they default to comms roles.
2. Why this split matters: comms ≠ growth
Many EA orgs understandably believe that communications is marketing. But in most industries, these are two different functions.
Comms tells the story, manages reputation, produces content, talks to existing audiences, and focuses on narrative and clarity.
Growth and digital marketing attracts new participants through measurable channels, improves conversion rates throughout the funnel, experiments with messaging and targeting, builds repeatable systems for acquisition and retention, and works with numbers rather than impressions.
A healthy organization needs both. EA orgs seem to hire a lot of the first category, and very little of the second.
3. Why are EA orgs defaulting to comms roles?
A few hypotheses that came up repeatedly in conversations:
A. Post-FTX + reputational risk → "Narrative control mode"
Many orgs shifted resources toward media, brand perception, and internal/external comms. This is understandable, but it may have crowded out growth roles.
B. People in EA came up through writing, research, and community-building
So their default model of "outreach" is: writing more posts, publishing more essays, doing more talks, and improving messaging.
This is comms-oriented by nature.
C. Lack of internal advocates for digital systems—and lack of frameworks to evaluate them
Most orgs simply don't have anyone inside saying "we need a lifecycle funnel" or "we need attribution" or "we need experiments every week."
But it's not just that they don't see the value—they also don't know how to evaluate candidates for these roles, what these people would actually do day-to-day, or how to measure success.
In general, it seems like EA orgs intellectually understand that digital growth exists as a discipline, but they struggle to connect it to their specific work. They can't quite see how paid acquisition or funnel optimization or lifecycle marketing would translate into impact for their programs.
So they hire what they do understand: someone who can write well and manage messaging.
4. Why this is surprising for a movement obsessed with measurement
EA is built on cost-effectiveness analyses, impact evaluation, RCTs, marginal value comparisons, and counterfactual reasoning.
Yet when it comes to outreach and fundraising, a large fraction of the work is happening in non-measurable channels: earned media, newsletters, longform content, events, and non-targeted comms.
Meanwhile, in the nonprofit world at large:
- Meta fundraising tools alone have driven billions in donations
- Digital acquisition funnels massively outperform organic outreach
- Systematic A/B testing often doubles or triples conversion rates
- Segmentation and retargeting reduce wasted effort dramatically
These methods are not exotic—they are standard.
If EA cares about efficiency per dollar and per staff hour, it seems counterintuitive that digital growth is often underdeveloped.
5. The opportunity cost
Almost every EA program—fellowships, courses, talent pipelines, advocacy campaigns, fundraising, research recruitment—depends on getting the right people in, getting them to take the right next step, making the journey predictable, reducing leakage, increasing retention, and scaling what works.
These are core growth problems.
If an org invests in three comms hires but zero growth hires...
- Programs run fewer cohorts than capacity allows (one per year instead of three)
- Participant quality is volatile
- Research or policy papers get published but reach fewer readers than they could
- Messaging is opinion-based instead of data-based
- High-potential people slip through the cracks
- Digital fundraising opportunities go unmaximized or don't happen at all
In an EA framing, this reduces impact, not just efficiency.
If digital growth functions remain underdeveloped, EA orgs may achieve far less impact than they potentially could, not because of ideas, but because of systems.
I'd love to hear your thoughts!
PS- If you're interested in learning more about marketing in the EA context, I write about this in my newsletter.
Hey! This post feels very relevant for me (I'm Director of Growth at 80k, and manage a digital marketing team, haha!). We've spent $mns and years of staff time on growth + digital :)
Three major reasons we don't invest more:
1. Low capacity to plan + execute campaigns (I failed to hire despite hundreds of hrs of effort in 2024);
2. Slow feedback loops on end-of-funnel outcomes we care most about (people changing their careers can take years)
3. Evidence suggesting that digital marketing is perhaps less likely than other growth channels to find the folks who are most likely to really love our advice (i.e., in for-profit terms, lower CLTV)
Anyway, it seems possible we should connect / chat more about this at some point! :D
Honestly, I think 80,000 Hours is one of the EA orgs that’s actually doing this relatively well. A lot of people’s first exposure to EA ideas seems to come through your content and digital channels, which already suggests meaningful impact.
My intuition is that at some point there are diminishing marginal returns on performance-style digital growth. In for-profit contexts, when budgets get large enough, it often becomes rational to shift away from strictly measurable performance marketing toward less directly attributable channels, because those end up strengthening performance indirectly rather than replacing it. I wonder if something like that is happening here as well.
I was also curious about your point on hiring capacity — do you think the difficulty was mainly a lack of candidates with the right skill set, misalignment with the role’s constraints, or something else? That part feels like an important bottleneck in its own right.
And yes, I’d definitely be happy to stay in touch. If you ever find yourselves looking for extra help or outside perspective on this in the future, I’d be very interested to chat ;)
hm this is super interesting. I started Giving Green's comms/growth function, and at the time I remember talking to a bunch of EAs in comms and marketing functions for advice (RIP, EA comms slack!) - almost everyone said: digital marketing hasn't worked for us, what's worked is earned media and relationship-building. I don't really know whether that's due to underinvestment in good digital marketing, or the broader nonprofit fundraising environment, or the FTX collapse, or something else. But I think it's worth noting that a lot of us have experimented with digital marketing and not seen ROI. (And at least for Giving Green specifically, we do have people on staff who come from growth-oriented digital roles, myself sort of included, but just haven't really seen return from those channels.) I do think I see EA orgs investing more in digital marketing now and I am excited about the learnings we'll have in the ecosystem in the next few years.
A couple of other theories I have:
I'd be curious if you're seeing digital fundraising success in a space / with asks similar to EA orgs' fields/asks - I don't know if I can think of an example of this, even among our non-EA partners.
Thanks — this helps clarify where I agree vs. where I’m more skeptical.
I agree that digital growth isn’t the right tool for every EA org. There are real cases where the audience is extremely niche, sample sizes are tiny, or the theory of change genuinely depends on a small number of high-touch relationships. In those cases, many standard digital tactics will fail.
Where I’m less convinced is the broader conclusion that “digital marketing doesn’t work here” in general. My view here is informed by a mix of EA-adjacent work and mostly for-profit experience: I’ve worked primarily with for-profit orgs (roughly ~200 clients), and a very common pattern there is that early attempts at digital fail — often multiple times — before a system starts working. Orgs don’t conclude from that that “digital doesn’t work”; they keep iterating because digital acquisition eventually becomes non-optional.
I do think something similar may be happening in EA, but with a different stopping rule. When early digital experiments don’t show ROI, many orgs seem to conclude that the channel itself is misaligned, rather than that execution, resourcing, or the evaluation window were insufficient. Given small budgets and high standards of proof, it’s not surprising those early attempts fail — but that doesn’t tell us much about the counterfactual of sustained investment.
On the niche-audience point: in the for-profit world this is often addressed via account-based marketing (ABM), which combines digital and offline tactics to reach very specific, high-value audiences. Conceptually, that feels closer to what many EA orgs are trying to do than mass-reach advertising, and it still relies heavily on digital infrastructure.
So my current view is that digital growth is genuinely low-ROI for some EA orgs and asks — but we’re also likely underestimating its potential by abandoning it earlier than other sectors would.
yeah I basically think this is the problem, and agree that some level of investment would yield a return, but small orgs can't just keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at some undetermined threshold! we're not for-profits that can take out loans or get VC money to sink into big upfront acquisition costs :')
again, if any funders are interested in funding EA digital marketing experiments for audience growth, I'm all ears... I'd like to see a case study of what level of investment is needed for smallish orgs to see a return, especially for fundraising asks.
Small for-profit companies also can't just "keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at some undetermined threshold, or take out loans or get VC money to sink into big upfront acquisition costs", so I don't think it's a fair argument (in fact, it might be case that it's easier for a small EA org to get funded than it is to the vast majority of for-profit businesses out there).
This is a good take. 80k are good at it, bluedot too, and GWWC have started doing good things as well.
I think national orgs like EA Netherlands are well-positioned to do more, but we're only just waking up to this and are learning how best to allocate a portion of the EUR 30-40k in unrestricted funding we get from CEA. At EAN we've started working with Amplify and a marketing agency and have had great results (3x'd our intro programme completions and increased our EAGx attendance by 35%). Would like to do more of this in the future if we can find the money/re-allocate more of our funds.
This is really nice to hear, honestly. Those results sound genuinely meaningful, especially at that scale.
Would love to stay in touch and compare notes as you figure out how to do more of this 🙌
Strong agree from FarmKind’s perspective. An equal bugbear for me is that to the extent EA orgs focus on comms, they’re insufficiently focused on how to communicate to non-EAs. There seems to be a resistance to confront the fact that to grow we need to appeal to normal people and that means speaking to them the way that works for them, rather than what would work for us
Strong agree. I think some of that resistance comes from past comms “dramas” — for example around earning to give. It was pushed quite hard at one point, and that ended up shaping the public perception as if that’s the EA message, which understandably made people more cautious afterward.
At the same time, I find it interesting that initiatives like School for Moral Ambition are now communicating very similar underlying ideas, but in a way that feels much more accessible to “normal” people — and they haven’t faced anything like the same backlash.
To me that suggests it’s not that these ideas can’t be communicated broadly, but that how we frame and translate them really matters.
In case helpful, the EA Market Testing team (not active since August 2023) was trying to push some work in htis direction, as well as collaboration and knowledge-sharing between organizations.
See our knowledge base (gitbook) and data analysis. (Caveat: it is not all SOTA in a marketing sense, and sometimes leaned a bit towards the academic/scientific approach to this).
Happy to chat more if you're interested.
This is really helpful! thank you for sharing. I wasn’t familiar with this work before, and it looks genuinely very interesting. I’ve bookmarked the knowledge base and will likely come back to it as I continue thinking and writing about marketing in the EA ecosystem.
I’d also be very happy to chat and learn more about what the team tried, what seemed promising, and where things got stuck.
Anna, thanks for shedding light on this. I've been through my own journey of whether and how to phase shift my career as a Growth Marketing leader into something that can move the needle in the EA community. One of my more skeptical reflections from a few years ago:
I want to believe EA can do more. I’ve read, I’ve watched, I’ve argued with colleagues. The achievable question in my mind is, “How can EA influence a mainstream audience to amplify the impact of its [EA's] own research and recommendations 1,000x?” I.e., How do we apply EA to EA? And does the movement have the DNA to diversify and scale its giving base?
I never made a post about this, but I shared examples with our colleagues in the space. It's been interesting to go back to some old notes right now. Here's one of these examples apropos of the 'giving base' point above and forgive me to the extent it's dated:
...there are a relatively high number of EA giving/funding organizations (i.e. in small EU countries) and relatively low number of EAs working on how to unlock high-impact funding at large international donor organizations (think UNICEF or Red Cross). Given our relative weakness in marketing, customer journey, etc. (relatively little mainstream distribution capability compared to for-profit tech world), you would expect even a 1% chance of unlocking major funding through a large donor org would be worth the effort of shifting resources. Yet this seldom occurs. Some factors affecting why I think we don't lean into this include (a) skills mismatches, (b) concerns of 'moral compromise' and (c) to a lesser extent, cultural distance.
After workshops and EAGs and 80k and HIP (which I highly recommend) and even some consulting for Good Impressions and many, many conversations, I made the choice to continue working in business and earning to give. However, I'm still heavily networked in the community and happy to connect, make intros, compare notes, etc. Thanks and best of luck!
Thanks for sharing this. it honestly makes me a bit sad to read, but in a thoughtful way. I still want to hope there is room to influence this over time, even if it’s slow and uneven.
I really appreciate that you found a way to keep having impact “through the side door,” and to stay engaged with the community rather than fully disengaging. That feels important.
I’d genuinely love to connect, compare notes, and trade ideas or intros 🙏
Do you think the EA tendency toward many smaller-to-midsize organizations plays a role in this? I'm not in the industry at all, but the "comms-focused" roles feel more fundamental in a sense than the "digital growth" roles. Stated differently, I can imagine an org having the former but not the latter, but find it hard to envision an org with only the latter. If an org only has a single FTE available for "marketing-related" work, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the job description for that role is often going to lean in the comms-focused direction.
I think it's also more fundamental in the sense a number of EA orgs are inherently "comms-focused" because they're lobbying for some sort of cause to some sort of decision maker (convince politicians to endorse challenge trials or ban datacentres and lead paint,, or maybe persuade fish farmers or maternal care workers in LEDCs to adopt a different approach). Or if they're not directly lobbying they might be trying to communicate research to a relatively small group of people like computer scientists or people who want to do inter-species utility loss comparisons.
Also, with some notable exceptions I think a lot of EA is quite insular: orgs want to convey that they're doing important work to OpenPhil funders, a pipeline of talent coming from EA groups, "aligned" organizations to collaborate with or the sort of small donor that's already thinking about long shot solutions to x-risks or making donations to improve the welfare of unfashionable creatures. That's a short list to a/b test, a hard group to target with paid media, and also an audience which has exacting expectations about how things are communicated, so the digital marketing to wider audience approach may not work so well. The down side is that competing for the same attention is going to usually be net less impactful than finding interest from the wider public...
I think this is a very reasonable framing, and I agree that org size and FTE constraints matter a lot here.
I also agree that digital growth isn’t the right fit for every EA org. But for certain types of work — fellowships, training programs, advocacy, recruitment-heavy pipelines — it seems quite plausible that digital channels could deliver more leverage in terms of participant volume, quality, and scalability than comms alone.
One place where I may disagree slightly is on which function is more “fundamental” in very small teams. In practice, digital growth tends to be more nuanced and multi-functional, whereas basic comms work (keeping the website updated, occasional social posts, newsletters, simple messaging) often doesn’t require a full-time role on its own. In many for-profit and nonprofit contexts, a single digital-focused marketer can cover a meaningful amount of baseline comms, but the reverse is less often true.
So if an org truly has only one marketing-related FTE, my intuition is that a generalist with strong digital and analytical skills — who can also handle light comms — may sometimes be a better starting point than a purely comms-focused hire. That won’t be true in all cases, but it seems underexplored given the types of scaling challenges many EA orgs face.
I would imagine you can count on 2 hands the number of EA orgs that even have 1 full time marketing role. Maybe I'm wrong though and its more like 4-5 hands :D.
Making this distinction between comms and growth is really important—thanks for writing it up.
I don’t have a strong view on the rest of the ecosystem, but at Amplify we’ve worked with a number of field-building orgs, and I’ve been genuinely surprised by how little investment— even from very well-funded ones—has gone into growth through digital media.
I’ve had a similar reaction — I’ve also been surprised by how little investment has gone into digital growth, even among well-funded field-building orgs.
And I just want to say I really admire the work Amplify is doing. It feels like one of the few places in the ecosystem that’s actively trying to think seriously about these questions. I hope you’re able to keep pushing in this direction despite funding constraints and the current lack of awareness — it seems genuinely important for the long-term health of the space.
Thanks for the kind words!
I strongly agree, and would add that this is a big concern of mine in direct intervention delivery also. Kaya Guides is fortunate enough to have a team that understands digital marketing, and we decided early on to recruit participants for our intervention using Meta ads. When I joined, I implemented direct conversion tracking from our intervention. Combined, we have reduced recruitment costs to around US$1, which is substantially cheaper than forming partnerships in the early years of an organisation, and is much more flexible.
I have been advocating for it where I can within AIM, for interventions that support it (and sometimes go a step further, and try to advocate for selecting interventions that are well suited for digital delivery).
Let me know if there are ways I can help advocate for better growth marketing within EA interventions, I am very passionate about this!
This is really impressive. Those results are genuinely striking, and this feels like exactly the kind of example that deserves more visibility in the ecosystem.
I think it would be incredibly valuable to turn this into a concrete case study outlining what you tried, what worked, what didn’t, and where the limits were. Examples like this seem much more informative than abstract debates about whether growth works in EA contexts.
More broadly, I’m very interested in helping surface and write up these kinds of cases for the Forum over time, to give other orgs concrete reference points and inspiration. If you would be open to sharing more detail, I would be very happy to write this up or co write it in a way that is useful for others. Feel free to DM me if that sounds interesting.
I will take a note—we are trying to do more comms in 2026 and this could be a great thing to post about. If we do, I’ll reach out :)
Thanks for spelling this out, I tend to agree from my gut feeling. Certainly surprising given the general data-driven "obsession" in the community.
Trying to see the glass being half full: if hiring for less quantifiable comms is OK, maybe this can be applied to other "overhead" roles as well. Coming from a project management and tech entrepreneurial background myself, I see the EA space also lagging in other cross-functional ops roles. Given the small size of many orgs, obviously not everything can be done in-house full time, but professional service orgs could provide this on a fractional level.
As for the reasons I can only speculate, maybe young average age of founders and orgs, small org sizes, limited budgets (with thinking investing hours themselves don't have costs), grant makers trying to keep things lean and pure, ... wdyt?
Also the service providers themselves need to rise to this challenge with education, visibility and maybe also less fragmentation, as some scale would help with the aforementioned as well as sustainability and quality of service.
This is why I am helping e.g. Amplify and WorkStreamNonProfit, and happy to connect folks working in these fields with each other and with orgs in need.
(And this is also why my thoughts above might not be completely neutral.)
I think this is a really good extension of the argument, and it matches my intuition too.
My sense is that what’s happening with growth is part of a broader pattern where EA orgs tend to underinvest in cross functional or ops type roles, especially when teams are small and budgets are tight. The points you raise about org size, founder experience, and constraints all feel very plausible, and I agree that fractional or shared service models could make a lot of sense here.
Thanks for being transparent about your involvement. I’d be very happy to connect and continue the conversation.
Building on the strong points you and others raised (especially ethai), I think one factor working against data-driven marketing in EA orgs is how cautious EAs tend to be when deciding what to do. There’s often a lot of overthinking and a desire to fully resolve details before launching anything.
This trait is very valuable in many contexts, but it can work against growth, where success depends on fast learning and experimentation.
Saying “we tried growth for a year and it didn’t work” doesn’t mean much if “trying growth” mostly meant spending three months debating Facebook ad copy, running a campaign for a few weeks, and then spending another three months overthinking the results rather than rapidly testing more variations (I’m using ads just as a simple example, but ofc growth marketing goes way beyond testing Ads).
I agree. Many EA norms that are great for reasoning, caution and overthinking before acting, work against growth, which learns through fast, imperfect experiments.
So “we tried growth and it didn’t work” often reflects a very slow learning rate, not strong evidence that the channel itself is low-ROI.