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by gergo
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AI safetyBuilding effective altruismMarketingBuilding the field of AI safetyField-building
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TLDR:

Most EA and AI Safety groups don’t do enough marketing, so we would like to change that. See our new website to apply for help (it's free!). 
We are also hiring. (Update: now closed)

Why:

Several people have pointed out in the past on the forum that marketing is underutilized in the EA and AI Safety ecosystem.[1] Since then, two great initiatives sprung up to address this gap. These are User Friendly and Good Impressions. I think they are great, but currently supporting local groups is outside of their scope.[2]

At the beginning of every semester, university groups are hustling to get applicants to their courses, and many city groups as there is a lack of new members joining. For this reason, we think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that we could pick up by (1) making organisers aware that they can request support for marketing courses and other programs (2) and then setting up paid social media ads for their platforms.

Background of this project

Over the past ~2 years, we had a lot of success for our national group (EA Hungary) with using paid social media ads to attract diverse and talented participants to our courses, at quite a low cost. Since this initial cost-effectiveness analysis, we have been slowly increasing the budget of our campaigns and experimenting with different approaches. In the past months, we have started expanding our scope and supported a few other groups as well, to see how much these results transfer to other countries. Although our data analysis is still in process, the results seem promising so far which is why we are excited to scale the program further and spin out a new organisation focusing on this area.

Apply for support

You can apply for support here (it’s free), and read more about the project on our notion page (which is just an MVP for now).

Working with us just involves 4 easy steps, to minimize the amount of time that is needed on your end.

  1. You share your initial plans in this form (~5 mins).
  2. We will give you some feedback and suggestions via email, and send you a second form to confirm your ads. (~15 minutes).
  3. We will set up the ads for you, and invite you for a ~20-30 min call well we walk you through how the marketing campaign will look like, to finalize everything and make sure you are satisfied with our plans. At the end of the call, we launch the campaign together.
  4. After your program ends, we will follow up with you to get feedback and assess the success of the campaign.

Our team

Gergő Gáspár is co-director for the European Network for AI Safety (ENAIS) and founded EA & AIS Hungary. His background is in psychology and he has 4+ years of experience in community building.

Milán Alexy is the Director for EA Hungary and Head of Operations of AI Safety Hungary. His background is in economics and behavioural science.

The advisor of this project is Marta Krzeminska, a seasoned marketing professional who was previously Head of Marketing for Mindease. 

Merell Lystra is our social media assistant and has been doing the lion’s share of work during the summer. However she is starting a new university program in September, so her involvement will decrease with the project in the coming months.

Conclusion

We are very excited about this project and think that marketing can be a key driver for growing our communities. Consider working with us if you are interested in contributing to this vision!

  1. ^

    Opinion: Digital marketing is under-utilized in EA
    Marketing 101 for EA Organizations
    The cost of (not) taking marketing seriously
    Concerns Regarding EA Marketing

  2. ^

    There were some adjacent projects though, e.g. Good Impressions has done some marketing for Bluedot in the past, and User-friendly helped GWWC with advertising and web traffic. My understanding though is that they are not actively seeking out to support local groups. Good Impression has told us that they would be open to supporting an organisation focusing on this (which is great news for us!).

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