Hi James, I’ve been working on the EA brand at CEA, and appreciate you raising this! I’ll be at EAG London and would be happy to talk more, if you’re attending and want to book a 1:1 with me then, or we could schedule a call for afterward. It sounds like there’s some cool work being done at EA Netherlands that I’d love to hear more about!
To give some relevant context, until recently (March of this year), I was the only full-time employee working on communications at CEA—which was dramatically insufficient for the work to be done! As Zach mentioned in his Forum post on CEA strategy, we revamped our hiring process and have been working on building out the team. The exciting news is that we’ve made great progress and now have a Communications team of four full-time employees (FTEs)! This also means that we’re still in an early scaling phase, as people onboard to their roles. I share that context to clarify that the lack of more coordinated or in-depth engagement with different stakeholders was an unfortunate side effect of limited capacity and the need to triage my work heavily. We’re still figuring out how to best use our new and growing capacity, but we’re excited about broader community engagement as one of those areas.
A few points of clarification: community builders were surveyed as part of the brand association work that Agnes cites here. I know Agnes conducted lots of user interviews across the community and with people less familiar with EA to inform her work as well. In my role at CEA, I regularly keep in touch with community builders at various levels (city, national, university) and advise people in the EA community on comms strategy and media-related questions. I recognize this engagement can feel spotty in places, and not everyone has visibility into it. I definitely think the Comms team has room for improvement in communicating about our work, and I also want to be clear that we care about and track the perspectives of community builders and others in the community.
Thanks for this, James! No worries at all about tone—I completely understand how those kinds of days go.
I really appreciate you sharing more context about where you’re coming from. It sounds like there may have been some communication gaps or crossed wires here—I know I’ve talked to your co-director Marieke about comms more than once (most recently in February at EAG), and Britney from our team left some comments on one of your comms strategy docs recently that the Groups team flagged to us. But it sounds like there may be a disconnect between those conversations and what you were looking for, or maybe the information didn’t flow in the most helpful ways for your planning, which is great to know.
You also raise a really good point about proactive communication. As I said, we’re definitely still figuring out the best ways to keep stakeholders informed as we scale up our capacity and work, and this is helpful feedback in that.
Looking forward to chatting directly soon!