Very grateful for the kind words, Elizabeth! Manifund is facing a funding shortfall at the moment, and will be looking for donors soon (once we get the ACX Grants Impact Market out the door), so I really appreciate the endorsement here.
(Fun fact: Manifund has never actually raised donations for our own core operations/salary; we’ve been paid ~$75k in commission to run the regrantor program, and otherwise have been just moving money on behalf of others.)
i’ve been working at manifund for the last couple months, figured i’d respond where austin hasn’t (yet)
here’s a grant application for the meta charity funders circle that we submitted a few weeks ago, which i think is broadly representative of who we are & what we’re raising for.
tldr of that application:
core ops
staff salaries
misc things (software, etc)
programs like regranting, impact certificates, etc, for us to run how we think is best[1]
additionally, if a funder was particularly interested in a specific funding program, we’re also happy to provide them with infrastructure. e.g. we’re currently facilitating the ACX grants, we’re probably (70%) going to run a prize round for dwarkesh patel, and we’d be excited about building/hosting the infrastructure for similar funding/prize/impact cert/etc programs. this wouldn’t really look like [funding manifund core ops, where the money goes to manifund], but rather [running a funding round on manifund, where the funding mostly[2] goes to object-level projects that aren’t manifund].
i’ll also add that we’re a less funding-crunched than when austin first commented; we’ll be running another regranting round, for which we’ll be paid another $75k in commission. this was new info between his comment and this comment. (details of this are very rough/subject to change/not firm.)
i’m keeping this section intentionally vague. what we want is [sufficient funding to be able to run the programs we think are best, iterate & adjust quickly, etc] not [this specific particular program in this specific particular way that we’re tying ourselves down to]. we have experimentation built into our bones, and having strings attached breaks our ability to experiment fast.
Very grateful for the kind words, Elizabeth! Manifund is facing a funding shortfall at the moment, and will be looking for donors soon (once we get the ACX Grants Impact Market out the door), so I really appreciate the endorsement here.
(Fun fact: Manifund has never actually raised donations for our own core operations/salary; we’ve been paid ~$75k in commission to run the regrantor program, and otherwise have been just moving money on behalf of others.)
what would fundraising mean here? is it for staffing, or donations to programs, or to your grantmakers to distribute as they seem fit?
i’ve been working at manifund for the last couple months, figured i’d respond where austin hasn’t (yet)
here’s a grant application for the meta charity funders circle that we submitted a few weeks ago, which i think is broadly representative of who we are & what we’re raising for.
tldr of that application:
core ops
staff salaries
misc things (software, etc)
programs like regranting, impact certificates, etc, for us to run how we think is best[1]
additionally, if a funder was particularly interested in a specific funding program, we’re also happy to provide them with infrastructure. e.g. we’re currently facilitating the ACX grants, we’re probably (70%) going to run a prize round for dwarkesh patel, and we’d be excited about building/hosting the infrastructure for similar funding/prize/impact cert/etc programs. this wouldn’t really look like [funding manifund core ops, where the money goes to manifund], but rather [running a funding round on manifund, where the funding mostly[2] goes to object-level projects that aren’t manifund].
i’ll also add that we’re a less funding-crunched than when austin first commented; we’ll be running another regranting round, for which we’ll be paid another $75k in commission. this was new info between his comment and this comment. (details of this are very rough/subject to change/not firm.)
i’m keeping this section intentionally vague. what we want is [sufficient funding to be able to run the programs we think are best, iterate & adjust quickly, etc] not [this specific particular program in this specific particular way that we’re tying ourselves down to]. we have experimentation built into our bones, and having strings attached breaks our ability to experiment fast.
we often charge a fee of 5% of the total funding; we’ve been paid $75k in commission to run the $1.5mm regranting round last year.