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 ;)