TL;DR

Across EA job boards and Forum postings, 70–90% of "marketing-related" roles are comms-focused, while only ~10–20% relate to digital acquisition, funnels, growth, or retention. Several marketers in EA report that our ecosystem is 4–5 years behind standard digital marketing practices—particularly in experimentation, targeting, lifecycle marketing, and channel attribution.

This imbalance has real opportunity costs: many high-leverage programs (training, fellowships, campaigns, fundraising, recruitment) rely on steady inflow and activation of the right participants—yet the systems that reliably deliver this are rarely built.

Comms ≠ growth. EA orgs may be investing heavily in "talking about what we do," but less in "filling and scaling what we do." Given EA's culture of measurement, the lack of measurement-driven marketing is especially surprising.

Context: who's writing this

I'm a digital marketer with 7+ years of experience. I've reached late-stage interviews for several growth-adjacent roles in EA orgs over the past year, and I've spoken with multiple EA marketers about this pattern. I'm likely biased given my background, so I'm genuinely open to being wrong about this—but the pattern feels worth discussing.

*Note: I used some LLMs for copyediting.

1. A pattern I keep noticing in EA job postings

Over the past year, I've [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) TL;DR

(01:12) Context: whos writing this

(01:43) 1. A pattern I keep noticing in EA job postings

(02:45) 2. Why this split matters: comms ≠ growth

(03:32) 3. Why are EA orgs defaulting to comms roles?

(03:42) A. Post-FTX + reputational risk → Narrative control mode

(04:01) B. People in EA came up through writing, research, and community-building

(04:19) C. Lack of internal advocates for digital systems--and lack of frameworks to evaluate them

(05:08) 4. Why this is surprising for a movement obsessed with measurement

(06:09) 5. The opportunity cost

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.