<aside> 📌 TL;DR: AI safety groups should carefully consider their branding strategy to attract target audiences and avoid silently losing talented individuals by giving the wrong impressions. Key things to do are identifying audience profiles, tailoring the value proposition and differentiating your group from others. Common branding strategies (technical, institutional, impact, or broad appeal) each have tradeoffs to weigh based on your goals and your context. Regularly seek feedback to refine branding rather than relying solely on intuition.

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Table of contents

Why branding matters

First impressions matter. It’s easy for organizers to underestimate how many talented people they lose to self-exclusion. The “vibes” you project can be a dealbreaker for many people, and these are often silent failures: it’s difficult to realize this is happening unless you make an explicit effort to find out about it.

Many group organizers have seen steep and surprising benefits after branding changes[1], and based on my interaction with many organizers, I suspect many groups’ early struggles with outreach stem from the problems I describe below. Branding is not a silver bullet, but it certainly helps.

But before we jump in, a brief disclaimer: branding is not about being strategically dishonest or hiding your intentions from others, it’s about communicating clearly and making a compelling case for why others should care about your group. It’s an exercise in communicating clearly, not in deception, and it’s important to distinguish between these two things.

What failure looks like

To illustrate my point, here are some examples of failures that can occur from using the wrong branding strategy for a particular audience. All of these are loosely inspired by actual experiences from groups:

• A law student is looking for extracurriculars for the semester and finds about a student group advertising an AI policy fellowship. She looks into it, but by their website, the group looks like your typical random CS student club, and apparently they run this “fellowship” over Discord. She quickly rules it out.
• A CS PhD student is dissatisfied with the research being done in his lab and wants to do something more meaningful. He’s read some convincing papers on AI Safety, but it’s not like there’s anyone interested in this kind of research on campus (or funding for it). There’s an AI Safety group on campus, but they are just a bunch of undergrads and don’t seem to be doing any research.
• A recent policy graduate is looking for opportunities to break into tech policy. After some searching, they find that a group in their city offers an AI policy fellowship. The fellowship's contents look interesting, but the group seems unprofessional, and not like the kind of thing you would proudly put in your CV. She looks into other options.
• A big EA city group decides to start an AI Safety subgroup and starts doing outreach outside the group to find people interested in their technical fellowship. They later discover that only a few people applied for the fellowship, all of whom are part of the EA group.[2]
• An ML professor is curious about the possibility of doing AI Safety research. He recently heard that some students on campus started an AIS club, so he looked them up. He immediately gets the vibe that it’s an advocacy group, which he finds off-putting. As a result, they refrain from reaching out to the group.

You get the gist: it’s important to consider how you’re perceived by others. Particularly those in your target audiences, but occasionally those outside of it.

Edit: Note that these can also be successes, depending on your target audiences. Signaling clearly who you're not looking for is also valuable, as it avoids bad experiences from misaligned expectations about your group.[3]

Defining your strategy

These are some things to consider when rolling out your own branding strategy. Even when a group is following or copying an existing strategy (as the ones below), I think organizers would benefit from taking some time to think through these considerations anyway:

• Target audiences
  • Think through who your audiences are, and write down their profiles.
  • Consider not only their demographics (“3rd year CS student”) but also their interests (“wants to perform research that feels valuable”) and how they might find out about your group (“regularly checks the faculty mailing list for TA opportunities”).
  • These aren’t necessarily just your audience of potential members. They could also include other important stakeholders (for example, professors or decision-makers).
• Value proposition
  • Think about each of your audience profiles and what’s your value proposition to them.
  • Do they want to join your fellowship because they are looking for their first research opportunity? Because they like having intellectual conversations? Because they like hanging out with people who care deeply about things?