The act of raising funding from “EA general public” is quite rare at the moment—most orgs I’m familiar with get the vast majority of their funding from a handful of institutions (OP, EA Funds, SFF, some donor circles).
I do think fundraising from the public can be a good forcing function and I wish more EA nonprofits tried to do so. Especially meta/EA internal orgs like 80k or EA Forum or EAG (or Lightcone), since there, “how much is a user willing to donate” could be a very good metric for the how much value they are receiving from their work.
One of the best things that happened to Manifold early on was when our FTX Future Fund regrantor offered to cover up to half of our $2m seed round—contingent on us raising the other half from other sources. We then had to build the muscle of fundraising from regular Silicon Valley angels/VCs, which especially served us well when Future Fund went kaput.
Manifund tries to make public fundraising for EA projects much easier, and there have been a few success cases such as MATS and Act I—though in the end most of our dollars moved come from our regrantors.
The act of raising funding from “EA general public” is quite rare at the moment—most orgs I’m familiar with get the vast majority of their funding from a handful of institutions (OP, EA Funds, SFF, some donor circles).
I do think fundraising from the public can be a good forcing function and I wish more EA nonprofits tried to do so. Especially meta/EA internal orgs like 80k or EA Forum or EAG (or Lightcone), since there, “how much is a user willing to donate” could be a very good metric for the how much value they are receiving from their work.
One of the best things that happened to Manifold early on was when our FTX Future Fund regrantor offered to cover up to half of our $2m seed round—contingent on us raising the other half from other sources. We then had to build the muscle of fundraising from regular Silicon Valley angels/VCs, which especially served us well when Future Fund went kaput.
Manifund tries to make public fundraising for EA projects much easier, and there have been a few success cases such as MATS and Act I—though in the end most of our dollars moved come from our regrantors.