I think this post touches on some really important topics, so thanks a lot for writing it! To push back on some things:
Would you say the same applies to newer university groups? It seems likely to me that following through on the advice of this post would limit the amount of people that hear about EA at your university. If you don’t already have a mature university group, a lack of growth means it may never become one, which would be a very steep opportunity cost.
Phrased differently, this post appears to come from the perspective of a mature groups where the impact bottleneck is the organizers and active members setting themselves up for impactful work and projects, as opposed to a less mature groups where the impact bottleneck is finding and reaching out to people that would be interested in EA. If you limit intro talks, fellowships and 1:1s, how much value can you really provide for people that aren’t already EAs?
Although the advice in this post could be very beneficial for groups in the second stage, it could possibly be harmful for the multitude of groups in the first stage.
Claim 1: Having the most promising people market EA is inefficient.
For newer groups, if the most engaged and promising people don’t market EA, it is likely no one will. To change that, you need to build up a group and find various organizers, which requires growth, which can be hard to achieve without marketing.
Claim 2: Too much marketing causes bad epistemics in the group.
Can’t say I’ve noticed this much, personally. From speaker events to fellowships and book clubs, marketing will generally point an event or program where exploring ideas and skilling up are central (though admittedly not necessarily for the organizers).
Especially if the organizers doing the outreach don’t have a good understanding of problems themselves, they might be perceived as unconvincing by the epistemically-rigorous people they want to attract.
Doesn’t this also function as an argument for why the marketing should be done by the most engaged and promising people?
Claim 4: Leaders marketing EA too much causes bad perceptions of EA around campus.
I agree that the difficulty of accurately conveying what EA is and does through the brief moments of first impressions definitely poses a risk for reputation around campus. However, I feel this could also be used as an argument for spending more rather than less time thinking through how you signal and market EA.
Perhaps a good takeaway from all this is that marketing for university groups should ultimately be self-defeating, rather than self-reinforcing. To use marketing as a means of creating a solid core group of people interested in EA, after which it can take a backseat in the list of priorities and skilling up this core group becomes the focus.
Finally, I feel like a lot of this could be avoided by creating standardized pipelines for marketing EA and setting up the digital infrastructure (think of website, linkedin, instagram, facebook, slack, discord, circle, mailing list, announcement chat, calendar for events, calendly for 1:1s, sharable QR code to a linktree, and perhaps most importantly, which ones of these you even need in the first place). This would both free up a lot of time for organizers, as well as allow for fine tuning the messaging to the extent that this is possible. Luckily it appears this is being worked on.
I think this post touches on some really important topics, so thanks a lot for writing it! To push back on some things:
Would you say the same applies to newer university groups? It seems likely to me that following through on the advice of this post would limit the amount of people that hear about EA at your university. If you don’t already have a mature university group, a lack of growth means it may never become one, which would be a very steep opportunity cost.
Phrased differently, this post appears to come from the perspective of a mature groups where the impact bottleneck is the organizers and active members setting themselves up for impactful work and projects, as opposed to a less mature groups where the impact bottleneck is finding and reaching out to people that would be interested in EA. If you limit intro talks, fellowships and 1:1s, how much value can you really provide for people that aren’t already EAs?
Although the advice in this post could be very beneficial for groups in the second stage, it could possibly be harmful for the multitude of groups in the first stage.
For newer groups, if the most engaged and promising people don’t market EA, it is likely no one will. To change that, you need to build up a group and find various organizers, which requires growth, which can be hard to achieve without marketing.
Can’t say I’ve noticed this much, personally. From speaker events to fellowships and book clubs, marketing will generally point an event or program where exploring ideas and skilling up are central (though admittedly not necessarily for the organizers).
Doesn’t this also function as an argument for why the marketing should be done by the most engaged and promising people?
I agree that the difficulty of accurately conveying what EA is and does through the brief moments of first impressions definitely poses a risk for reputation around campus. However, I feel this could also be used as an argument for spending more rather than less time thinking through how you signal and market EA.
Perhaps a good takeaway from all this is that marketing for university groups should ultimately be self-defeating, rather than self-reinforcing. To use marketing as a means of creating a solid core group of people interested in EA, after which it can take a backseat in the list of priorities and skilling up this core group becomes the focus.
Finally, I feel like a lot of this could be avoided by creating standardized pipelines for marketing EA and setting up the digital infrastructure (think of website, linkedin, instagram, facebook, slack, discord, circle, mailing list, announcement chat, calendar for events, calendly for 1:1s, sharable QR code to a linktree, and perhaps most importantly, which ones of these you even need in the first place). This would both free up a lot of time for organizers, as well as allow for fine tuning the messaging to the extent that this is possible. Luckily it appears this is being worked on.