Project for Awesome (P4A) is a charitable initiative running February 17th-19th this year (2023), and videos must be submitted by 11:59am (noon) Eastern time on Wednesday, February 15th. This is a good opportunity to raise money for EA charities and promote EA and EA charities to a wider audience. Local EA groups can also run events based on P4A. In the last years, winning charities got between $14,000 and $32,000 each. Videos don't need to be professional!
In short,
- People make short 1-4 min videos supporting charities and upload them to the website by 11:59am (noon) Eastern time on Wednesday, February 15th. The videos must be new videos specifically for this year's P4A and should mention P4A.
- People vote on the videos on the weekend, February 17th-19th.
- The charities with the most votes, the total across all their videos, win money. One more video for a charity lets everyone vote at least one more time for that charity.
We already finished voting on which charities to coordinate to support, and based on video sign-ups, we will reduce the list to 6-8 charities. We're aiming for eight or more videos per charity. Please sign up to make a video for one or more of the charities here.
Charities to choose from: Animal Society, Animal Advocacy Africa, Good Food Institute, The Humane League, Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Initiative, GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund, Ploughshares Fund.
Please join the Facebook group, EA Project 4 Awesome 2023!
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 charities we coordinated around won. One of them was The Good Food Institute which got ~$32,000.
Here are some resources:
- Project for Awesome website
- A document with infos, resources and instructions
- http://www.projectforawesome.com/graphics
- How to Make a P4A video in 20 Minutes or Less
- Slides for a P4A video planning event from 2021
Video guidelines from the P4A FAQ:
- 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.
- Try not to make your video too long. People are going to be watching a ton of videos on February 17-19, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
