Project for Awesome 2024: Make a short video for an EA charity!

Project for Awesome (P4A) is a charitable initiative running February 16th-18th this year (2024), and videos must be submitted by 11:59am EST on Tuesday, February 13th. This is a good opportunity to raise money for EA charities and promote EA and EA charities to a wider audience. In the last years, winning charities got between $14,000 and $38,000 each. Videos don't need to be professional!

In short,

1. People make short 1-4 min videos supporting charities, upload them on Youtube and submit them to the P4A website by 11:59am EST on Tuesday, February 13th. The videos must be new videos specifically for this year's P4A and should mention P4A.
2. People vote on the videos on the weekend, February 16th-18th.
3. Money raised during the Project for Awesome is split, with 50% going to Save the Children and Partners in Health, and 50% going to charities voted on by the community. One more video for a charity lets everyone vote one more time for that charity.

This year, we want to support seven EA charities: Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, The Humane League, Good Food Institute, ProVeg International, GiveWell and Fish Welfare Initiative. Please consider making a short video for one (or more) of these charities! You will help us to coordinate if you sign up here.

Please join the Facebook group, EA Project 4 Awesome 2024! 

In 2017, we secured a $50,000 donation for AMF, GiveDirectly and SENS. In 2018 GiveDirectly, The Good Food Institute and AMF all received $25,000. In 2020, seven out of eight of the charities we coordinated around have won ~$27,000 each, for a total that year of ~$189,700! In 2022, 3 out of 11 supported charities won. Last year, The Good Food Institute got ~$37,000.

Here are some resources:

1. Project for Awesome website
2. A document with infos, resources and instructions 
3. http://www.projectforawesome.com/graphics
4. How to Make a P4A video in 20 Minutes or Less
5. Slides for a P4A video planning event from 2021

Video guidelines from the P4A FAQ:

1. Your video must be made specifically for this year’s P4A. So, you must mention Project for Awesome in the video itself, and it should have been created recently.
2. You should put reasonable effort into making sure any information you include in your video is accurate, from anecdotal examples to statistics. There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet, so we want to make sure that P4A videos are providing thoughtful, accurate context about the work that organizations are doing in the world.
3. Try not to make your video too long. People are going to be watching a ton of videos during P4A, and no one wants to sit through a rambly, unedited vlog for ten minutes. Keep your video short and to the point so that people will watch the whole thing and learn all about your cause. A good length to aim for is 2-4 minutes, unless you have such compelling content that it just needs to be longer.
4. Try not to spend too much time explaining what the Project for Awesome is. Most people watching your video will already know, so just mentioning it briefly and directing people to the website is plenty. An explanation in the description as well as a link to projectforawesome.com is also a great addition so people who stumble across your video can learn more about us.
5. Similarly, try not to spend too much time promoting your own channel in your video. One or two sentences is fine to explain the type of videos you usually make if they’re different from what you’re doing for your P4A video, but much more than that and it just looks like you’re using the P4A to help promote yourself, which isn’t what this is all about.
6. Please include a content warning at the beginning of your video if you’re discussing sensitive topics such as (but not limited to) violence, self-harm, miscarriage, or death. While there are charities doing great work in very difficult spaces, our goal is to help our community members emotionally prepare and make the choice to watch a video rather than being surprised by potentially traumatic content.