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 considerably 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
hm this is super interesting. I started Giving Green's comms/growth function, and at the time I remember talking to a bunch of EAs in comms and marketing functions for advice (RIP, EA comms slack!) - almost everyone said: digital marketing hasn't worked for us, what's worked is earned media and relationship-building. I don't really know whether that's due to underinvestment in good digital marketing, or the broader nonprofit fundraising environment, or the FTX collapse, or something else. But I think it's worth noting that a lot of us have experimented with digital marketing and not seen ROI. (And at least for Giving Green specifically, we do have people on staff who come from growth-oriented digital roles, myself sort of included, but just haven't really seen return from those channels.) I do think I see EA orgs investing more in digital marketing now and I am excited about the learnings we'll have in the ecosystem in the next few years.
A couple of other theories I have:
I'd be curious if you're seeing digital fundraising success in a space / with asks similar to EA orgs' fields/asks - I don't know if I can think of an example of this, even among our non-EA partners.
Thanks — this helps clarify where I agree vs. where I’m more skeptical.
I agree that digital growth isn’t the right tool for every EA org. There are real cases where the audience is extremely niche, sample sizes are tiny, or the theory of change genuinely depends on a small number of high-touch relationships. In those cases, many standard digital tactics will fail.
Where I’m less convinced is the broader conclusion that “digital marketing doesn’t work here” in general. My view here is informed by a mix of EA-adjacent work and mostly for-profit experience: I’ve worked primarily with for-profit orgs (roughly ~200 clients), and a very common pattern there is that early attempts at digital fail — often multiple times — before a system starts working. Orgs don’t conclude from that that “digital doesn’t work”; they keep iterating because digital acquisition eventually becomes non-optional.
I do think something similar may be happening in EA, but with a different stopping rule. When early digital experiments don’t show ROI, many orgs seem to conclude that the channel itself is misaligned, rather than that execution, resourcing, or the evaluation window were insufficient. Given small budgets and high standards of proof, it’s not surprising those early attempts fail — but that doesn’t tell us much about the counterfactual of sustained investment.
On the niche-audience point: in the for-profit world this is often addressed via account-based marketing (ABM), which combines digital and offline tactics to reach very specific, high-value audiences. Conceptually, that feels closer to what many EA orgs are trying to do than mass-reach advertising, and it still relies heavily on digital infrastructure.
So my current view is that digital growth is genuinely low-ROI for some EA orgs and asks — but we’re also likely underestimating its potential by abandoning it earlier than other sectors would.
I strongly agree, and would add that this is a big concern of mine in direct intervention delivery also. Kaya Guides is fortunate enough to have a team that understands digital marketing, and we decided early on to recruit participants for our intervention using Meta ads. When I joined, I implemented direct conversion tracking from our intervention. Combined, we have reduced recruitment costs to around US$1, which is substantially cheaper than forming partnerships in the early years of an organisation, and is much more flexible.
I have been advocating for it where I can within AIM, for interventions that support it (and sometimes go a step further, and try to advocate for selecting interventions that are well suited for digital delivery).
Let me know if there are ways I can help advocate for better growth marketing within EA interventions, I am very passionate about this!
Thanks for spelling this out, I tend to agree from my gut feeling. Certainly surprising given the general data-driven "obsession" in the community.
Trying to see the glass being half full: if hiring for less quantifiable comms is OK, maybe this can be applied to other "overhead" roles as well. Coming from a project management and tech entrepreneurial background myself, I see the EA space also lagging in other cross-functional ops roles. Given the small size of many orgs, obviously not everything can be done in-house full time, but professional service orgs could provide this on a fractional level.
As for the reasons I can only speculate, maybe young average age of founders and orgs, small org sizes, limited budgets (with thinking investing hours themselves don't have costs), grant makers trying to keep things lean and pure, ... wdyt?
Also the service providers themselves need to rise to this challenge with education, visibility and maybe also less fragmentation, as some scale would help with the aforementioned as well as sustainability and quality of service.
This is why I am helping e.g. Amplify and WorkStreamNonProfit, and happy to connect folks working in these fields with each other and with orgs in need.
(And this is also why my thoughts above might not be completely neutral.)
Making this distinction between comms and growth is really important—thanks for writing it up.
I don’t have a strong view on the rest of the ecosystem, but at Amplify we’ve worked with a number of field-building orgs, and I’ve been genuinely surprised by how little investment— even from very well-funded ones—has gone into growth through digital media.
I’ve had a similar reaction — I’ve also been surprised by how little investment has gone into digital growth, even among well-funded field-building orgs.
And I just want to say I really admire the work Amplify is doing. It feels like one of the few places in the ecosystem that’s actively trying to think seriously about these questions. I hope you’re able to keep pushing in this direction despite funding constraints and the current lack of awareness — it seems genuinely important for the long-term health of the space.
Do you think the EA tendency toward many smaller-to-midsize organizations plays a role in this? I'm not in the industry at all, but the "comms-focused" roles feel more fundamental in a sense than the "digital growth" roles. Stated differently, I can imagine an org having the former but not the latter, but find it hard to envision an org with only the latter. If an org only has a single FTE available for "marketing-related" work, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the job description for that role is often going to lean in the comms-focused direction.
I think this is a very reasonable framing, and I agree that org size and FTE constraints matter a lot here.
I also agree that digital growth isn’t the right fit for every EA org. But for certain types of work — fellowships, training programs, advocacy, recruitment-heavy pipelines — it seems quite plausible that digital channels could deliver more leverage in terms of participant volume, quality, and scalability than comms alone.
One place where I may disagree slightly is on which function is more “fundamental” in very small teams. In practice, digital growth tends to be more nuanced and multi-functional, whereas basic comms work (keeping the website updated, occasional social posts, newsletters, simple messaging) often doesn’t require a full-time role on its own. In many for-profit and nonprofit contexts, a single digital-focused marketer can cover a meaningful amount of baseline comms, but the reverse is less often true.
So if an org truly has only one marketing-related FTE, my intuition is that a generalist with strong digital and analytical skills — who can also handle light comms — may sometimes be a better starting point than a purely comms-focused hire. That won’t be true in all cases, but it seems underexplored given the types of scaling challenges many EA orgs face.