Ways to give
Our donation options offer a range of flexibility and control: you can choose whichever one feels right given your level of trust in us and our regrantors and the amount of time and thought you want to put into your giving.
General regranting
This will be used to onboard new regrantors and to raise the budgets of regrantors with strong track records. We may use up to 5% to cover our operations.
Custom allocation
After adding money to your Manifund account, you can distribute it among:
- Regrantors
- Projects
- Coming soon: cause-specific funds
Why donate through regranting?
- There are specific regrantors you would trust to donate on your behalf. That is, there are experts in the areas you support who you think, relative to you, have a comparative advantage giving your money to the best projects in that area. These people don't necessarily need to be on our site already; if you have someone in mind you'd like to sponsor, book a call and we can talk through facilitating that!
- You value transparency. When you give through Manifund, you'll be able to see where your money goes and why.
- You believe in other benefits of our approach. We think that the speed, transparency, and experimentation aspects of our approach have big positive externalities for our grantees and for philanthropy at large. When projects get funded faster, they can start sooner. By being transparent, we provide information to everyone about what grantmakers look for, help build grantmaker trackrecords, keep ourselves accountable to public opinion, and put pressure on other funders to be more transparent. By experimenting with alternative mechanisms, we have the potential to find better approaches to non-profit funding that could be applied elsewhere.
Why not donate through regranting?
You might not want to donate through regranting if you have strong takes on which projects within the cause area you care most about are the highest impact, and want to devote your own time to evaluating projects and charities yourself. In that case, you might think outsourcing your donation decisions to a regrantor would result in the money going to less impactful projects than if you distributed it personally.Some of our past grants
FAQ
If I donate to a regrantor or a fund, can I maintain veto power over grants they give?No. We think the extra coordination involved would be costly for donors, regrantors, and grantees, without meaningfully improving the quality of our grants.
Are donations to Manifund tax deductible?Yes if you're in the US! Manifold for Charity, our organization, is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Why do you take a 5% cut of donations?We need to cover our costs somehow, and we see two main ways of doing that: taking a small cut of all donations, or fundraising separately for our operations. We choose the former because we get a better signal on the value of our work by pricing it in. If the work we do building and maintaining the site, onboarding and managing regrantors, and processing grants doesn't add as much value to donors as it costs, then that's a useful signal that we shouldn't be doing it anymore.
What if I'm interested in donating through regranting, but I'm interested in a different cause from any of your regrantors?Book a time to talk to us! We might be able to set you up with regrantors you trust who have expertise in your area of choice.