Let's say you run a non-profit, and you and some of your co-workers are there for EA reasons. The EA Forum is going to be hosting a Marginal Funding Week and you're trying to decide whether to post an appeal. How do you decide whether you're ready to raise funds from the EA community?
At a high level, I think you should go ahead if you can explain what you'd do with the money and are willing to share the details that will let people determine if your overall case is strong enough. As a community I think we should generally have higher standards for projects that have been running longer, and for ones trying to raise larger amounts of money.
New projects, both in the for-profit and non-profit world, generally get off the ground with the engagement of a small number of funders who are comfortable with the risk-reward tradeoffs of early-stage work. Sometimes these funders are highly engaged and provide advice and connections, other times they're giving some start-up funds and hoping it works out, but either way they're taking a substantial risk of failure on each bet in the hope of getting some hits.
In the for-profit world societies worry that most people not being sufficiently sophisticated to make this kind of investment, and generally draw some sort of line between accredited investors (who can be assumed to know the risks they're taking with early-stage ventures) and the rest of us (who might be dazzled into putting our life savings into a scam). To sell your stock to the general public you need to first disclose a lot of information about your business: detailed financial statements, risks, what you'll do with the money, etc.
The non-profit world is pretty different: while you do have to make some limited information public, the disclosure requirements are relatively minimal. There's no obligation to share facts that a reasonable donor would want to consider.
While I wouldn't advocate extending public-company-level regulation to the non-profit world, this is a place where the EA community has historically tried to shift norms in the direction of more transparency, and I think we should continue to do this:
One of the biggest flaws of the non-profit approach is how much weaker the feedback loops are than in for-profit work. There are many ways altruistically-motivated work can become disconnected from the ends it's intended to advance. A culture of sharing and critically evaluating this information can help keep organizations focused, and keep the money going to the organizations that can best apply it.
If we become a community where people can raise substantial funds by simply saying they're EAs working on an important problem we'll end up with lots of people who make the right noises but don't actually put funds to good use.
Even if most people reading an appeal don't think hard about whether it all checks out, having this information out there allows dedicated independent people to make comparisons and share their results. This amplifies both effects above.
The things I'd most like to see in public funding requests are:
What will you do with the money? Not just what do you do in general, but what will you be able to do if you raise these additional funds. Note that describing the work you'd do on the margin means that they work you're describing is, well, marginal. If instead you made the case for your strongest work, the work that you'd only cut if your funding dropped off dramatically, this would lead donors to overestimate the benefit of funding you and so allocate their funds less well.
What's your track record? Funding early-stage projects typically involves a good amount of evaluating the team as people, figuring out how much you trust them to take your money in a new direction. But if you're "going public" this kind of interpersonal evaluation breaks down: you can't have dozens of EAs on the Forum booking slots on your calendar to get a sense of whether you seem to know your stuff and be the kind of person who will execute well on your vision. Instead, point at concrete accomplishments.
What is your financial situation? What are your main expenses and sources of income? Anything people wouldn't expect? How much money do you currently have? How long is your runway?
Additionally, it's pretty valuable to also share:
Why is this worth doing? While this isn't information donors can get only from you it's probably something you're especially well positioned (and incentivized) to provide. What problem are you addressing? Why is it important? How will success at your planned efforts improve the situation?
Where does your work fit in? What are the other organizations trying to solve this problem? Why are you taking your specific approach? Are some of these other groups a better fit for donors with certain outlooks or values?
What are the key risks? What are the most likely reasons you might fail to make progress? Could your work actually be harmful? If there are major uncertainties on your path to impact, what are they and how are you addressing them?
What's your longer-term model? Are you hoping to be philanthropically funded indefinitely? Is this funding that will get you to a place where you can instead convince governments, private companies, or consumers to fund you or others to do this work? Is this the kind of project that needs long-term investment to be worth it?
How can people tell if you're succeeding? If you're posting again in Fall 2025 saying that you had a great year and asking for money for 2026, how will we be able to tell whether you actually had a great year? This is closely related to "what will you do with the money?", but instead of focusing on impact it's focusing on evaluation: how will you and others be able to tell if your efforts are working. Are there specific milestones you expect to hit? Measurable outcomes we'll be able to observe?
If you're not ok including this information in your funding request, or at least answering these and similar questions as they come up in the comments, then it's worth considering whether you're in a good position to solicit funds from the community.
Another consideration in making a public request for funding is that by putting your org out there like this you're opening yourself up to more criticism. Asking the EA community for funding is, in some sense, quite audacious: it's a claim that your organization is one of the very best ways to turn money into a better world. That's a high bar and the EA community can be a critical group! I think on balance EA's critical outlook is positive: if I make what I think is a solid and relatively complete case for my work, and other people who've thought hard about how to make the world better don't think it measures up, that certainly hurts, but it's an important check. The history of non-profit work includes many people who've overestimated the value of their work and would have been able to have much more impact if they'd taken a different approach.
On the other hand, it's easier to criticize than than do, and it's important to nurture transparency by recognizing when people are sharing information they could have kept internal. It's important to recognize that there are real people with feelings behind each organization, who in many cases have poured a substantial portion of themselves into these vessels for positive change. We need the critical side of our culture to keep us focused on impact, but we need to balance it with empathy, kindness, and a sense that we're on one big team pulling together.
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.
I think that model works well in some circumstances, and certain appreciate the logic behind extending it to the non-profit world when that is the case. However, it's not the case that every potential founder or org has access to a "small number of high-context funders" who are in a position to support the early stages of the project without a public appeal. That means some of them are going to need to go public in a less developed state than would perhaps be ideal. Ability to self-fund, get support from one's family, or access to a good pre-existing network for fundraising do not strike me as strongly correlated with merit of either the founder, the org's theory, or the org itself. So I do have some concerns that expecting too much out of early-stage founders or ideas will give those (at most) weakly merit-based factors too much weigh in determining which founders, ideas, and orgs survive the infant-mortality period.
In general, I'd err on the side of encouraging public appeals rather than erring on the side of setting too high a bar. I think the average community member is pretty savvy, and the community's demonstrated deliberative skill in evaluating funding issues seems pretty strong. To the extent the community effort were too burdensome, I'd prefer something like people deferring somewhat to a ~randomly selected community screening jury (which could hopefully be at least medium-context) if the alternative were to discourage public appeals.
I don't know, this seems overly optimistic to me. The average community member doesn't come in with much skill in evaluating nascent orgs, and is unlikely to get the kind of practice-with-feedback that would allow them to develop this skill.
Donor lottery winners?
Or, less flippantly, this seems to me what EA Funds and the other granting groups that give seed funding do.
I do think there are cases where someone has a good idea that isn't a good match for any of these funders (ex: the Global Health and Development Fund isn't accepting applications) or where the grantmakers are overworked, not omniscient, and not able to consider everything that they would ideally fund. In these cases I do think making a public case is good, but then it should either look like:
It's reasonable to conclude that if there are enough viable major sources of seed funding in an area, those sources make decisions independently enough of each other, and an organization has struck out with ~all of them, that is probably a signal that the org should not move forward with making a public appeal. I don't think we significantly disagree on what a public appeal would ideally look like, either.
I think points that may or may not be cruxes include:
Conditional on "Alice is reading Org's public appeal for funding and deciding whether to give," it seems that Alice has previously (and at least implicitly) decided not to defer to EA Funds or a similar organization for some reason or another.[1]
Of course, Alice could decide to ignore a randomly-selected community jury too! But:
A funding circle with a shared initial screening process is probably the closest extant analogue to what I was gesturing at.
Or a funding circle may not have a mechanism for someone to donate three, four, or maybe even low five figures.
Thanks for the post, Jeff. Sharing lots of relevant information would take time, and I think applying to EA Funds and Open Philanthropy would raise funds more cost-effectively. However, orgs can simply share their applications to larger funders on EA Forum, and then add info about what they would do with marginal funding on top of funds received from the larger funders.
As someone who has raised funds from larger funders and is currently considering participating in marginal funding week, I don't think that would work very well:
Our main funders have a lot of context on our work, and so our grant applications are missing a lot of information that a typical Forum reader would need. This includes basic stuff like " what problem are you trying to solve?"
Because we have engaged with these funders previously, portions of a funding requests can be discussion of specific issues they have previously raised, which might be pretty in the weeds for a Forum reader and require extra context.
There is a lot of information you can share in a private grant request that you can't make public. For example, specific quotes you've received from potential partners on pricing, some kinds of strategic planning, potential partnership opportunities, or frank assessments of the capabilities of other organizations.
Writing for public consumption requires more attention to how a wide range of potential readers, including both low context Forum readers and potential partners, would interpret things.
Thanks for the good context, Jeff.
I think a good part of the appeal is that it is low cost strategy (relative to one where lots of context is provided).
Note the target audience will be more familiar with the work than a random EA Forum reader. For example, if you were raising funds for the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO), your target audience would be more familiar with bio and more likely to have read other posts about NAO.
Fair! Some information would have to be removed.