I broadly agree with your thesis and would love to see more university groups prioritize the types of activities you mention. I think EA university community building needs to hear this critique right now.

But I'm worried people could over-update on this, so I want to introduce three caveats:

1. You need a core group: Placing more emphasis on collectively skilling one another up only seems possible for groups that already have 3+ people seriously committed to doing the most good, which can't be said for many new EA groups. New groups might benefit from overmarketing to build up a core group.

2. You need to maintain some mass outreach component: Ideally, every student at your uni knows that an EA group exists and roughly what it does. I think there are low-cost ways to do this, like mass email and dept. emails with mail-o-meter that funnel towards an intro event or fellowship (or fellowship alternative). Nevertheless, I'd be worried that a group that focuses too much on self-skill will miss finding many of the "instant EAs" that could be a great fit for the group. 

3. It's hard to onboard new members into a group that's skilling up: Imagine your friend tells you about this cool new student group that's all about impact. You're super excited – you've been looking for something like this – and then you attend a co-working session on FTX megaproject sketching. Or a reading group on a GPI report. You would have zero context and I wouldn't blame you if you walked away unsure what the group does and didn't come back. If you invite lots of people who are missing context to your event, you also risk seriously degrading the quality of your event. If you don't have events for them, you're potentially missing out on a lot of talent and introducing exclusivity concerns.  I want organizers to think more about these competing concerns. The easiest potential solution I see to the lack of onboarding is lots of 1-on-1 conversations with people who show interest (which I think every organizer should hear a few more times anyways). 

I'm also still genuinely uncertain that the multiplier effect isn't just that good. I lead a student group, and I've people who I think will do cool work have told me they wouldn't have gotten into EA if it weren't for me. I'm not sure if skilling up multiplies my impact in the same way. However, the post effectiveness is a conjunction of multipliers makes me think that it can be easy to underestimate the importance of improving your judgment and working on the right problems (and sub-problems) – which you do by skilling up,  building models, and good faith debates with friends. Not marketing. 

I agree it's these things are worth worrying about, though I think I don't totally agree with the bottom line "organizers should spend less than half of their EA time marketing."

My thinking is that EA student group outreach is an amazing opportunity. I think people doing it well while students often end up having more impact through it than they do in their later jobs.

In addition, someone working 15h per week on it is probably going to achieve more than 3x as much as someone working 5h per week. I also think someone being intentional about outreach can often achieve a lot more than someone who just does an object-level EA thing.

So, the model I would propose is that each uni group choose 2-3 people who make EA outreach their main focus (or whatever is needed to take the low hanging fruit; and maybe this should be a full-time recent grad), and then everyone else focus their EA time on something else (e.g. preparing for a career on an object-level issue).

I think there's then a somewhat separate and important discussion about how best to do EA outreach on campus (e.g. mass vs. high fidelity). My take is that there's a lot of value to be had from mass outreach (e.g. most students still haven't even heard of EA or 80k), but it's also easy to mess it up, and is important to combine with some more high-fidelity channels.

(Minor, but I  get the impression think the career capital you get from EA student group organising is better than you do e.g. I think learning to talk to people about EA on a small scale is really useful to doing later high-scale marketing; and running a student group of volunteers teaches you a bunch about management in general.)

If you're ever running an event that you are not excited to be part of, something has gone wrong

This seems way too strong to me. Eg, reasonable and effective intro talks feel like they wouldn't be much fun for me to do, yet seem likely high value

(Weakly held personal opinion) I would go further and say that you attract people like you.^[1]If what you or your core group is signalling most to outsiders are your community building (or marketing) qualities, you're likely to attract folks who are also keen on community building (and put off folks who are likely keen on the object level work you're recruiting for). 

Here's an intuition pump I have. Imagine two EA uni group websites that are exactly the same except for one difference in their profile page:

• Website A showcases students who have internships in orgs solving x-risk issues, has co-published a paper on cost-effective poverty interventions, wrote a series of blog posts on effective animal advocacy, etc.
• Website B showcases students who have basically none of the above

I feel pretty confident that A will attract the right kinds of people into EA.  

I also feel somewhat confident that B will be a net negative. I could imagine that each cohort of students coming into B  gets worse in quality each year, until it becomes "ponzi scheme'ish" entity. 

1. ^{^}

   https://medium.com/@michelbachmann/start-with-who-15b8857ed718

I was surprised to see that the word "class" appears nowhere in this post.

Once you've paid your tuition, college classes are free. And they teach a lot of useful skills if you pick the right ones. It's great to read articles and work on small projects and find other extracurricular ways to skill up. But I'd hope that anyone organizing an EA group is also choosing good classes to take.

Examples of classes I took in college that felt like "skilling up" (which, collectively, took much more time than founding Yale EA, even on a per-semester basis):

• Several writing classes
• A negotiation class
• An entrepreneurship class focused on building and scoping a specific business idea
• A class where I learned the R programming language
• A class on marketing via behavioral economics

I also did a ton of extracurricular campus journalism, which has been exceedingly useful in my career despite being quite disconnected from EA-focused upskilling.

None of this was as time-efficient as targeted reading on EA topics would have been. But targeted reading doesn't come with certain benefits that classes offer (external project deadlines, free project review from experts, office hours with said experts). And because you have to take classes at college anyway, getting at least some value from them is a huge counterfactual win.

*****

It actually seems okay to me if most of organizers' "EA time" is spent on marketing-like activities, as long as they are learning and practicing useful skills in their classes and non-EA activities (and as long as group members can tell that their organizers have cool stuff going on outside of EA marketing).

Great post, Emma, with valuable insights. I'd just add one point regarding university courses and the role of EA-aligned faculty.

As a psych professor,  I've taught a course on 'The psychology of Effective Altruism' three times for 20-25 upper-level undergrads at a large state university. My university doesn't have an EA student group, but there are other EA-adjacent groups, e.g. for veganism and AI research.  

I've noticed that there's often a social/intellectual firewall between student groups and formal courses, such that the student groups don't realize how easy it might be to recruit a professor to teach a course on EA, rationality, or specific EA topics -- or for student group members to give guest presentations about EA in an existing course (such as ones on AI, judgment & decision-making, microeconomics, or moral philosophy.)

One  efficient way to promote the skill-building  mission of student EA groups would be for student organizers to be less bashful about approaching faculty like me about doing more formal teaching, conference organizing, colloquium inviting, and other 'service work' in support of EA. Our promotions, tenure, and raises depend in part on doing this kind of service work, and most faculty I know who are open to EA would rather do EA-related service than other kinds of service we could be doing (e.g. serving in a Faculty Senate, an IRB committee, or  department website committee.) 

So, student groups might even find that they can offload some of the community-building and skill-building to faculty mentors and allies -- especially since we're already paid and encouraged to do this kind of service.

I would reframe this as 'community builders don't spend enough time on other EA things' rather than 'community builders spend too much time community building'. I know the thought is that less time marketing -> more time on other stuff, but I think it's worth setting a different tone. I worry there's too much of a meme going round like 'community building is not that good a thing to do', where it should be 'we are finding ways community building could be done better - exciting!'

To me, this is a great post for suggesting how community building could be done better through more direct experience - exciting!

Strongly upvoted. 

In my view, part of the problem are feedback loops in the broader EA scene, where focus on "marketing" was broadly rewarded and copied. (Your uni group grew so large so fast! How we can learn what you did and emulate it?) . 

Also - I'm not sure what metrics are now evaluated by central orgs when people ask for grants or grant renewals, but I suspect something like "number of highly engaged EAs produced" is/was prominent, and an optimizer focusing on this metric will tend to converge on marketing, and will try to bring in more (highly engaged) marketers. 

Thanks for writing this post!

I do think there are some cases where there isn't a clear line between what you call "marketing" and "skilling up."

If I do the "menial operations work" of figuring out how to easily get people to go to an EA conference, is that "marketing" or "skilling up"? It depends; if my goal is to do technical research only, then it probably isn't a useful skill, but operations is a very useful skill that you can build while doing EA community building.

If I know a group organizer has done the gruntwork of operations, I know that they can handle work that may not be that intellectually stimulating (regardless of the kind of work). I know that they are highly conscientious and able to not let tasks slip through the cracks. These are extremely useful traits in anyone. Of course, group organizing isn't the only way you can get these skills, but it's a pretty good one.

Great post! I especially like your ten bullet point suggestions for what community builders can be doing to skill up.

An inconsistency I noticed is that early on you write:

I claim that the vast majority of university group organizers should spend less than half of their EA time marketing. The rest of their EA time should be dedicated to skilling up.  

And you argue for this position throughout. But then in your penultimate paragraph you say:

I may also be wrong that organizers should spend less than half of their EA time skilling up.

I think this must be a typo, and that it should read "organizers should spend less than half of their EA time marketing" or, equivalently, "organizers should spend more than half of their EA time skilling up"?

Thought-provoking post, thanks a lot for writing it! 

I broadly agree that it’s good for community builders to spend significant time on learning/direct work, especially if their long-term plan is not to do community building, but I think I disagree with some of your specific reasons.

I think the post sometimes conflates two senses of marketing. One is “pure” marketing, the other is marketing as you define it (i.e., marketing and ops), which includes things like organising content-heavy events and programs like fellowships. My instinct is that:

A. Most of the negative effects of “too much marketing” that you identify are negative effects of “pure” marketing, rather than marketing-and-operations. I think this is especially true of claim 2 and 4: It doesn’t seem to me like organising a talk or fellowship creates bad epistemics or makes EA comes across as pushy or single-minded. It’s maybe not always the best thing organisers could be doing (e.g., because of claim 1 and 3), but doesn’t seem harmful otherwise. 

B. It’s not true that 60% of community builders spend 70-80% of their time on “pure” marketing.

I’m curious if you disagree with either of these claims. (But even if not, I think the central argument could still be true, though for slightly different reasons, e.g., that organisers spend too much time on “pure” marketing, or that spending significant time on learning/direct work makes you a better community builder.)

Thanks, Akash! I haven't thought a lot about how this might apply to larger-scale events like retreats, but this makes a lot of sense to me. Somewhat unrelatedly, I think it'd be nice to have a catalog / google doc of workshops that are all about skill-building (or "learning together or working on interesting unsolved problems together." as you put it).  I felt like the Bright Futures Retreat had a lot of good examples of this. University group organizers then have a good reference of what types of events are useful, and they can either 1) use the catalog as inspiration for spin-off workshops 2) host workshops from the catalog as one-off events during term, or 3) compile their favorites for a retreat. This would likely save them a lot of time and diminish the amount of ops-related work they do.  

Completely agree, and I'll second the impression that EA marketers primarily activate and recruit other EA marketers. 

Another way to frame this dynamic - 

If someone is making the claim to you that these problems are the overwhelmingly most important things to do with your life, then why aren't they working on them? In a way it almost feels self-defeating. The people who best activated and motivated me to work directly on hard problems were people who themselves were working on them.

This is all anecdotal, of course, but I do think we need an epistemically healthier model of community building, for these and other reasons.

Thanks for creating this! I thought it was really useful and easy to read.

Minor point here, but I think phrases like "soldier mindset" and "high-fidelity" could have been hyperlinked to relevant definitions or articles for clarity.

Strong upvote. 

To me, this seems more relevant for more established groups. Perhaps thinking about operational tasks vs skilling up shouldn't be thought of in terms of percentages, but in terms of necessary vs supplemental tasks. I would imagine things like sending emails, doing 1:1s, buying food for events, etc. are necessary for any group to stay alive.  So if you are the only HEA for your uni group, you might have to spend 90% of your time doing these (and tbh I think this would be the right call). But when it comes to things like doing an egregious amount of marketing or anything else that doesn't seem necessary, perhaps skilling up should be prioritized. 
Also, I didn't see the multiplier effect come up anywhere, and I'm interested to hear how heavily you weight it. 

Hi Emma! Just read your post. We are looking to start our own Uni group, we'll consider the points you make regarding community building in our own journey :)

As I scroll through the existing comments I can’t help but think it sure would be nice if there were a way to have a more-structured media for discussion/debate on these claims (and people’s responses, recursively).

Minor note: "distill" and "redteam" link to the same article. 

I think this post touches on some really important topics, so thanks a lot for writing it! To push back on some things:

Would you say the same applies to newer university groups? It seems likely to me that following through on the advice of this post would limit the amount of people that hear about EA at your university. If you don't already have a mature university group, a lack of growth means it may never become one, which would be a very steep opportunity cost.

Phrased differently, this post appears to come from the perspective of a mature groups where the impact bottleneck is the organizers and active members setting themselves up for impactful work and projects, as opposed to a less mature groups where the impact bottleneck is finding and reaching out to people that would be interested in EA. If you limit  intro talks, fellowships and 1:1s, how much value can you really provide for people that aren't already EAs? 

Although the advice in this post could be very beneficial for groups in the second stage, it could possibly be harmful for the multitude of groups in the first stage.

Claim 1: Having the most promising people market EA is inefficient.

For newer groups, if the most engaged and promising people don't market EA, it is likely no one will. To change that, you need to build up a group and find various organizers, which requires growth, which can be hard to achieve without marketing.

Claim 2: Too much marketing causes bad epistemics in the group.

Can't say I've noticed this much, personally. From speaker events to fellowships and book clubs, marketing will generally point an event or program where exploring ideas and skilling up are central (though admittedly not necessarily for the organizers).

Especially if the organizers doing the outreach don’t have a good understanding of problems themselves, they might be perceived as unconvincing by the epistemically-rigorous people they want to attract.

Doesn't this also function as an argument for why the marketing should be done by the most engaged and promising people?

Claim 4: Leaders marketing EA too much causes bad perceptions of EA around campus.

I agree that the difficulty of accurately conveying what EA is and does through the brief moments of first impressions definitely poses a risk for reputation around campus. However, I feel this could also be used as an argument for spending more rather than less time thinking through how you signal and market EA.

Perhaps a good takeaway from all this is that marketing for university groups should ultimately be self-defeating, rather than self-reinforcing. To use marketing as a means of creating a solid core group of people interested in EA, after which it can take a backseat in the list of priorities and skilling up this core group becomes the focus.

Finally, I feel like a lot of this could be avoided by creating standardized pipelines for marketing EA and setting up the digital infrastructure (think of website, linkedin, instagram, facebook, slack, discord, circle, mailing list, announcement chat, calendar for events, calendly for 1:1s,  sharable QR code to a linktree, and perhaps most importantly, which ones of these you even need in the first place). This would both free up a lot of time for organizers, as well as allow for fine tuning the messaging to the extent that this is possible. Luckily it appears this is being worked on.

It seems like a poor division of labor to have the president doing so much of the outreach. Have you considered having a dedicated outreach coordinator? This would be a job good for a communications-focused member to have. Unlike a president, who as you said is likely wasting some opportunity to skill up, this role would be useful for the communications-focused person later in life as well.

Relatedly to time, I wish we knew more about how much money is spent on community building. It might be very surprising! (hint hint)