This is really nice to hear, honestly. Those results sound genuinely meaningful, especially at that scale.

Would love to stay in touch and compare notes as you figure out how to do more of this 🙌

Thanks for sharing this. it honestly makes me a bit sad to read, but in a thoughtful way. I still want to hope there is room to influence this over time, even if it’s slow and uneven.

I really appreciate that you found a way to keep having impact “through the side door,” and to stay engaged with the community rather than fully disengaging. That feels important.

I’d genuinely love to connect, compare notes, and trade ideas or intros 🙏

Strong agree. I think some of that resistance comes from past comms “dramas” — for example around earning to give. It was pushed quite hard at one point, and that ended up shaping the public perception as if that’s the EA message, which understandably made people more cautious afterward.

At the same time, I find it interesting that initiatives like School for Moral Ambition are now communicating very similar underlying ideas, but in a way that feels much more accessible to “normal” people — and they haven’t faced anything like the same backlash.

To me that suggests it’s not that these ideas can’t be communicated broadly, but that how we frame and translate them really matters.

Thanks for putting this so beautifully together.

I remember the first time I was at a retreat with a lot of activists, and i had the same realization, they were all just regular people...

I think this is a really good extension of the argument, and it matches my intuition too.

My sense is that what’s happening with growth is part of a broader pattern where EA orgs tend to underinvest in cross functional or ops type roles, especially when teams are small and budgets are tight. The points you raise about org size, founder experience, and constraints all feel very plausible, and I agree that fractional or shared service models could make a lot of sense here.

Thanks for being transparent about your involvement. I’d be very happy to connect and continue the conversation.

This is really impressive. Those results are genuinely striking, and this feels like exactly the kind of example that deserves more visibility in the ecosystem.

I think it would be incredibly valuable to turn this into a concrete case study outlining what you tried, what worked, what didn’t, and where the limits were. Examples like this seem much more informative than abstract debates about whether growth works in EA contexts.

More broadly, I’m very interested in helping surface and write up these kinds of cases for the Forum over time, to give other orgs concrete reference points and inspiration. If you would be open to sharing more detail, I would be very happy to write this up or co write it in a way that is useful for others. Feel free to DM me if that sounds interesting.

I agree. Many EA norms that are great for reasoning, caution and overthinking before acting, work against growth, which learns through fast, imperfect experiments.

So “we tried growth and it didn’t work” often reflects a very slow learning rate, not strong evidence that the channel itself is low-ROI.

This is really helpful! thank you for sharing. I wasn’t familiar with this work before, and it looks genuinely very interesting. I’ve bookmarked the knowledge base and will likely come back to it as I continue thinking and writing about marketing in the EA ecosystem.

I’d also be very happy to chat and learn more about what the team tried, what seemed promising, and where things got stuck. 

Honestly, I think 80,000 Hours is one of the EA orgs that’s actually doing this relatively well. A lot of people’s first exposure to EA ideas seems to come through your content and digital channels, which already suggests meaningful impact.

My intuition is that at some point there are diminishing marginal returns on performance-style digital growth. In for-profit contexts, when budgets get large enough, it often becomes rational to shift away from strictly measurable performance marketing toward less directly attributable channels, because those end up strengthening performance indirectly rather than replacing it. I wonder if something like that is happening here as well.

I was also curious about your point on hiring capacity — do you think the difficulty was mainly a lack of candidates with the right skill set, misalignment with the role’s constraints, or something else? That part feels like an important bottleneck in its own right.

And yes, I’d definitely be happy to stay in touch. If you ever find yourselves looking for extra help or outside perspective on this in the future, I’d be very interested to chat ;)

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.