I think there might be two things here:
Customisation is hard and (groups think it is) necessary: Groups want something weird or custom about their courses (their own facilitators for just their group, in-person groups, different readings, translated content etc.). This is always true, because if they were okay with something standard their members could just take our standard courses.
(FWIW I think most customisations that groups want are probably not necessary, but people behave like they are critical blockers. Most group leaders should probably think more carefully about the time trade-offs of getting more things 80% right rather than few things 99% right. Quality is not the goal. I don’t think this philosophy works everywhere, but for (especially informal) group organization where stuff is bound to get dropped anyway it seems fair to accept.)
This customisation usually meant having to communicate and manage this. And there would be ongoing coordination overhead—inevitably a facilitator gets ill occasionally, or a room isn’t available, or people haven’t done the readings and want to reschedule. And then for each of these events there’s some extra coordination layer added for the group. We automated more of this over time, but it’s still always clunky if say a facilitator is ill at short notice and we need to find a substitute.
Integrated automated systems not set up for customisation: This was exacerbated because our systems are primarily designed for us to run our courses, rather than other people. They were fairly tightly coupled, meaning it was hard to just take one piece (we’ve improved this now, although it isn’t perfect). This meant we had to do a lot of hand holding to explain how they worked, fix things when people used them in ways we didn’t, etc. If we had built it more like a self-serve SaaS product this would have reduced our support burden / the amount of back-and-forth, but this is very hard to do with such a small team.
I’m not quite sure what the lessons are here. I think if I was to try to support as many groups with ops support now I might try (moderate confidence, please don’t take this as perfectly accurate—I also suspect speaking to many diverse group leads would lead to better insights here):
Build technical tools (e.g. for scheduling, admissions, hosting readings) that:
can be used entirely self-service by group leads
are modular so people can put together their own custom course from building blocks, but with an obvious default that plays well together
are very easy to get started with (e.g. free hosted versions, intuitive interface/video tutorials)
Build resources such as:
curricula and session document templates, with instructions on how to use them inline
marketing templates
template Airtable bases / Google Sheets for common course functions
evaluation rubrics, to check courses are going well / what responsibilities of course leads should be (but not actually tell them what to do, just what to achieve)
AVOID trying to write a ‘guide’ to running a course. Despite how useful these could be, people usually don’t read them. They also are a pain to maintain as other things evolve.
AVOID trying to outsource more ‘human’ operations
AVOID catering for all custom set-ups—draw a boundary at what is delivering the most value for groups
I worked with Gergo while I was at BlueDot Impact and he was at AI Safety Hungary. He is hard-working, has good insights about this space and clearly very value aligned (all of which is corroboated by the success of things like AI Safety Hungary and the insights posted on his Field Building Blog).
I’d recommend Amplify as a valuable initiative in this space, especially when compared to other similar work.
Thoughts on FAQ 3 (“Why not hire a regular marketing agency?”)
I would strongly +1 the points already in the FAQ about value alignment, and having insight into the EA/AIS space.
At BlueDot we worked with many external agencies, and burned a lot of time and energy trying to explain things, or going back and forth on things not being quite right. When we worked with people who ‘got’ AIS stuff, things moved much faster (e.g. with Good Impressions—although my understanding is that they are capacity constrained and have a different expertise set than Amplify, hence why I think Amplify would be a good addition).
This is perhaps in contrast to the EAIF evaluation of “It wasn’t obvious to us that different organisations working with Amplify would be more valuable than them working with for-profit digital marketing agencies.”
As a separate point, I would also note that the quality of agencies varies dramatically, and it’s very hard to evaluate whether an agency is actually any good. I have much more confidence in Amplify, and I expect Gergo’s track record + general transparency will help us continue to track this much better than general external agencies.
(Although on a side note a list of agencies that are known good (ideally with evidence) + understand our space and needs would be a valuable resource too. Although even if we had this I think it would still be worse than having Amplify funded.)