Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself: At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy — and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasn’t clearly communicated.
On communication: We did try to be explicit about this strategy — it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didn’t consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive — just something that didn’t land as clearly as we hoped.
Where we’re at now: We’ve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core — which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.
In retrospect, I wish we’d communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isn’t enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off — I really appreciate you surfacing it.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself:
At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy — and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasn’t clearly communicated.
On communication:
We did try to be explicit about this strategy — it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didn’t consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive — just something that didn’t land as clearly as we hoped.
Where we’re at now:
We’ve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core — which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.
In retrospect, I wish we’d communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isn’t enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off — I really appreciate you surfacing it.