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.

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.

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.

Thanks for doing this AMA, Joey! I’m curious about Ambitious Impact’s experience with outreach and participant recruitment for your accelerator.
– What have been the biggest challenges in finding and engaging the right applicants?
– Which approaches or channels have you tried so far, and what’s worked best (or least well)?
– Looking ahead, how do you see participant recruitment and scaling evolving — what do you expect to double down on in the future?
– More broadly, what do you think are the common challenges accelerators or fellowship programs face when it comes to effective participant recruitment?