Project summary

VoiceDeck is an online giving platform modelled on a Pay for Success mechanism where donors pay retroactively for impact already achieved.

We make use of impact certificates, currently limited to the carbon credits industry, to fund verified impact created by citizen journalists and investigative reporters.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

Traditional fundraising in the social sector is heavily reliant on marketing, brand-value (big names) and in developing countries like India, the availability of English speakers.

VoiceDeck aims to improve the existing model by focusing on three goals:

• Outcome-based online giving: make contributing to a cause similar to purchasing a t-shirt, by letting donors purchase verified (past) impact for a fixed price. A feedback loop between outcome creation and revenue generation leads to greater alignment between fundraising and impact evaluation teams at social enterprises.

• Prevent double selling of impact: The optimal strategy for social enterprises is to create some positive outcome and then market that to as many funders as possible. Enforcing single sale of outcomes can make impact creation at least as important as marketing

• A level playing field: Service contract based grant agreements usually favor incumbents, compared to products ecosystems where startups can outcompete the big names. With impact certificates, donors can choose a cause and then simply buy a cert that they think sufficiently advanced it, irrespective of brand.
  

  We have designed a prototype in collaboration with three civic participation organizations in India - Gram Vaani, Video Volunteers and CGNet Swara. For over a decade, these organizations have diligently recorded over 5000 "impact reports" from their network of civic activists on their website, spanning cases such as repairing poor infrastructure, breaking trafficking rings, teacher absenteeism and discrimination against women or lower castes. We quantified the beneficial outcomes from 27 of these reports and formatted them for sale as ’impact certificates’ on a public blockchain network (Ethereum testnet), so that donors can support these organizations by purchasing the certificates. 

The demo is currently accessible at app.voicedeck.org

How will this funding be used?

Funding raised in this round will be used to

• create more impact certificates out of the corpus of 5000 impact reports from the 3 partner organizations (currently we have created 27 impact certificates)

• sell impact certificates to relevant donors (currently zero sales)

We commit to creating 1 impact certificate for every $100 raised in the round, so even a minimal funding amount to VoiceDeck in this round will create a tangible output.

If the entire amount of $2300 is raised, we will have 50 impact certificates ready (27 + 23) for purchase at a price of $1000 each.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Team : VoiceDeck is led by a journalist (Devansh Mehta) and an urban planner (Nidhi Harihar). We also have 10 contributors to our open source repo - https://github.com/VoiceDeck

Track Record

• We took part in the very first iteration of the ACX mini-grants forecasting challenge - https://manifund.org/projects/impact-assessment-of-social-programs

• At the end of the grant period, Scott Alexander assessed our project as having potential but needing a longer timeframe to realize - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-results

• We have since built a prototype and got a paper documenting our demo accepted to ACM CSCW - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xPzQnK1bullhLc2VwYbWFdhaqR9a-NQF/view?usp=sharing

  VoiceDeck is a team that delivers!

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The idea of impact certificates was first proposed in 2014 on the EA forums by Paul Christiano, as a coordination mechanism bringing together people with the ability to undertake a project, the means to fund it and knowledge to evaluate it.

Since then, they have not taken off primarily due to the lack of buying pressures. The most likely cause of failure is simply no donor wants to purchase the impact certificates we upload.

We think the time is right for a fresh go at impact certificates because;

1. Increased growth in algorithmic funding mechanisms, like this QF round, which impact certificates naturally tie into.

2. Grant funders in the social sector are also increasingly adopting an outcome-based framework of giving 

3. Impact certificates have not been tried before in our initial use case with civic participation organizations

4. Infrastructure improvements in blockchain scalability through layer 2s, which Paul Christiano saw as a prerequisite for storing an impact certificate and preventing it from being sold multiple times.

5. Advances in LLMs enabling easier quantification of outcomes recorded in an impact certificate

What other funding are you or your project getting?

VoiceDeck has received funding from the following sources

• Incubated at Microsoft Research India and winner of Columbia University SIPA Deans Public Policy Challenge

• Recipient of Optimism RetroPGF funds through a regrant from Hedgey finance

• Quadratic funding from Gitcoin and Dora Hacks

• Next Billion Fellowship with Ethereum Foundation

• EA grants from ACX mini-forecasting challenge and the present QF round