One way to give or receive funding for projects on Manifund is through impact certificates. The impact certificate ecosystem is like Kickstarter meets the stock market, for charity!
For donors: “In an impact market, you (as the final oracular funder) only need to figure out which projects did work, which is much easier: for example, penicillin obviously worked, and flying cars obviously didn't. Then you buy the shares of those projects, and your job is done. Private investors still have to do the prediction behind the scenes, but they're only risking their own money, not charitable dollars, and they're properly incentivized to get the right answers.”
—ACX
For investors: If you have a good eye for what projects and founders are likely to be successful, you can now earn profits off of your skill — while helping early-stage projects get off the ground.
For founders: Manifund is like a Common App for charitable funding: instead of applying one-by-one to a bunch of different grantmakers, you only need to create a single project proposal. This makes it easy to apply, even for very small amounts of funding (as low $250). Interested investors can then offer to fund your project through our site.
Like startup equity, you can keep a portion of your impact cert shares, to sell later or distribute to other people who help your project.
On Manifund, project proposals start with a fundraising auction, where investors can offer to fund the project at a different valuations. At a predetermined auction close date, typically a week or two after the proposal is posted, the auction will resolve as follows:
Bids will be read in order from highest valuation to lowest valuation. Bids will be paid out until all shares are bought at the price set by the lowest successful bid. If the total amount bid exceeds the minimum funding but not all shares are sold, then all bids will go through, the project will be funded, and remaining shares will go up for sale at that valuation on the market (this only happens if all bids were above the minimum valuation for the project). Otherwise, the minimum funding bar was not met by all bids combined and the project will not proceed.
Use this widget to play around with different auction scenarios and see what would happen!
$1K minimum valuation
For example, let’s go back to that research team with a forecasting project to prevent pandemics with a minimum funding bar of $5,000. Here are a few ways the auction could go:
First three bids go through at a valuation of $6k
Both bids go through at a valuation of $10k, leaving 50% of the equity to be sold on the market at that same valuation
The bids did not meet the minimum funding bar so no bids go through and the project is not funded.