MJM

Molly Jo Molloy 🔸

Strategy Associate @ Hattaway Communications
28 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)Washington, DC, USA

Bio

Participation
3

I'm a strategic communications professional interested in learning how to communicate complex things to people who aren't by default very interested in learning about them---something I think is relevant to most EA cause areas.
 

I have communications and marketing experience across branding, audience strategy and targeting implementation, issue and audience research, creative campaign development, public relations, impact measurement, and media planning.

How others can help me

Pointing me to people to talk to about narrative cohesion and strategy behind AI safety, state capacity, and animal welfare communications. 

How I can help others

I am a firm believer that talking about the intersection of comms with different goals and topics makes me better at what I do! So I am always more than happy to offer a sounding board on your brand considerations, audience strategy, etc. I have a unique breadth of experience in communications that gives me a good handle on how things can get lost in translation between strategic planning and tactical execution, so I may be able to help avoid important pitfalls.

Comments
2

As a communicator that's been repeatedly frustrated by how EA can inadvertently reinforce negative misperceptions about itself, I'm thrilled about this. It's wonderful to see the way I experience EA more clearly reflected and see people and the impact they make (which is really what this is all about!) centered. I especially love how prominent the section with individual stories of impact is. I'd love to see some more examples of people working together, however. I'd hypothesize that feeling like you won't be alone in taking action is very important to people considering taking EA seriously, so I'd love to see more stories of partners and groups making impact mixed in with the individual stories. I'm curious if the work you did with Rethink Priorities would back that up. 

All in all, this site is much more conducive to how the average person takes in information and feels called to act. I also think it does a really nice job of preemptively defending from some of the criticisms of EA that come from those who haven't taken the time to try and understand it. I think the word choice updates are spot on and think it's so valuable that "helping others" is front and center rather than implied. Much more human. Much more warm and appealing!

  • Some bottlenecks on improving communications:
    • What are we pushing for? E.g. What policies are good to aim for/realistic? What should we push labs to do?
    • What is a general idea we think the public could get behind and which sufficiently tracks AI risk prevention?

 

Big questions! It seems like the first is a question for everyone working on this, not just communications people. I'd be interested to know what comms can offer ahead of these questions being settled. What kind of priming/key understandings are most important to get across to people to make the later convincing easier?

Who is doing this kind of comms work right now and running into these bottlenecks? Through what orgs? Are they the same organizations doing the policy development work?