Lobbying as in advocacy. Google thought they could get away with no political lobbying, until they learned the hard truth. MIRI is not in the same position as Google of course, but the lessons are the same: if you want to convince people, just doing good and important work is not enough, you also have to do a good job convincing good and important people that you are doing good and important work. MIRI/CFAR are obviously doing some work in this direction, like target recruiting of the bright young mathematicians, but probably not nearly enough. I suspect they never even paid a top-notch marketing professional to prepare an evaluation. I bet they are just winging it, hoping to ride the unexpected success of HPMoR (success in some circles, anyway).