Play Regrantor: Move up to $250,000 to Your Top High-Impact Projects!

Dawn Drescher; Greg_Colbourn

This is a linkpost for https://impactmarkets.substack.com/p/play-regrantor-move-up-to-250000

Summary. We have collected expressions of interest for a total donation budget of about $200,000 from donors who are interested in using our platform. How many of them will end up donating and how much they’ll donate depends on you and how many great projects you bring onto the platform. But Greg Colbourn has firmly committed another $50,000 for AGI moratorium projects for a total of $250,000!

Funding

Over the past months we’ve asked many donors whether they would consider using the Impact Markets platform to find giving opportunities and what their 2023 donation budget is. We’re now at an aggregate budget of $200,000 and counting. Of course these donors are free to decide that they prefer another project over the ones that have registered on our platform, so that these $200,000 are far from committed.

But Greg Colbourn has firmly committed another $50,000 for projects related to an AGI moratorium! He is already in touch with some early-stage efforts, but we definitely need more people to join the cause.

You want to become a top donor – a project scout? You want to support a project?

You think Charity X is the most impactful one but it’s still underfunded? Convince them to register on app.impactmarkets.io. Then register your donations to them. (They have to confirm that your claim is accurate.) Speed the process by repeating it with a few high-impact projects. When the projects reach some milestones, they can submit them for review. The better the review, the higher your donor score.

A score > 200 still puts you firmly among the top 10 donors on our platform. That can change as more project scouts register their high-impact donations.

At the moment, we’re still allowing donors to import all their past donations. (Please contact us if you would like to import a lot.) We will eventually limit this to the past month.

What if you need money

If you’re running or planning to run some impactful project, you can register it on app.impactmarkets.io and pitch it to our top donors. If they think it’s great, their donation (an endorsement in itself) can pull in many more donations from the people who trust them.

We’re continually onboarding more people with great donation track records, so both the people on the leaderboard and the ranking algorithm are in constant flux. Please check for updates at least in monthly intervals.

You want to donate but don’t know where

For now, you can add yours to the expressions of interest we’re collecting. That’ll increase the incentive for awesome projects to join our platform and for awesome donors to vie for the top donor status.

Once there are top donors that you trust (say, because they share your values), the top donors’ donations will guide you to high-impact projects. Such projects may be outside the purview of charity evaluators like GiveWell or ACE, or they might be too young to have earned top charity status yet. Hence why our impact market doubles as a crowdsourced charity evaluator.

Questions

If you have any questions:

Please see our full FAQ.
Check out this demo of a bot trained on our FAQ.
Have a look at our recent Substack posts.
Join our Discord and the #questions-and-feedback channel.
Or of course ask your question below!

Acknowledgements. Thanks to Frankie, Dony, Matt, and Greg for feedback, and thanks to Greg and everyone who has filled in the expression of interest form for their pledges!

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Toward Impact Markets

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One form to help us build a crowdsourced charity evaluator

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Linda Linsefors2y5

Is this still an impacts market? Looks to me that this is primally just a fundraising platform. I'm not complaining. I think EA should have a fundraising platform! I'm just confused.

Dawn Drescher2y8

Hiii! Thanks! Yeah, what’s a market and what isn’t… I’m used to a rather wide definition from economics, but we did briefly consider whether we should use a different or sub-brand (like ranking.impactmarkets.io or so) for this project.

The idea is that, if all goes well, we roll out something like the carbon credit markets but for all positive impact via a three-phase process:

In the first phase we want to work with just the donor impact score. Any prizes will be attached to such a score and basically take the shape of follow-on donations. This is probably a market to the extent that Metaculus is a market. They say “sort of” and prefer the term “prediction aggregator.” So maybe we’re currently an impact aggregator.
In the second phase, we want to introduce a play money currency that we might call “impact credit” or “impact mark.” The idea is to reward people with high scores with something that they can transfer within the platform so that incentives for donors will be controlled less and less by the people with the prize money and increasingly by the top donors who have proved their mettle and received impact credits as a result. We’ll start moving in that direction if we get something like 100+ monthly active users. Metaculus would probably consider this an “impact market” and Manifold Markets even has it in its name. But rebranding away from “market” and then maybe rebranding back towards “market” a year later seemed unwise to us.
Eventually, and this brings us to the third phase, we want to understand the legal landscape well enough to allow trade of impact credits against dollars or other currencies. We would like for impact credits to enjoy the same status that carbon credits already have. They should function like generalized carbon credits. I think at this point the resulting market will be widely considered a literal “market.” This is much more of a long-term vision though.