How to Apply for Funding from Effective Altruism Funds

Effective Altruism Funds accepts applications from individuals, projects, non-profits, and institutions, with grants ranging from $1,000 to $500,000. The application itself takes less than an hour to complete. If your work fits one of the four focus areas below, you can start by going to the site and selecting "Apply for funding."

Who can apply

The site states it funds "people, projects, non-profits and institutions" — so you do not need to be a registered charity to apply. This matters because two of the four funds (Transformative AI and EA Infrastructure) explicitly make early-stage grants to individuals and new organizations, not just established nonprofits.

The four funds you can apply to

Each fund has its own remit, and your project needs to fit the one you apply to:

If your project spans more than one area, pick the fund whose stated scope most directly describes your work rather than trying to fit all of them.

What the application involves

The site gives three concrete parameters:

• Grant size: $1,000–$500,000
• Time to apply: under 1 hour
• Who reviews it: each fund has its own fund managers, who work in the relevant field

The application is designed to be short. Expect to describe your project, its expected impact, and why it fits the fund — not to produce a full grant proposal. The $1,000 floor means small, early-stage ideas are in scope; the $500,000 ceiling means this is not a route for large-scale institutional funding.

How your application will be judged

The site lists seven criteria its grantmaking approach uses:

1. Expected value
2. Marginal impact
3. Counterfactual impact
4. Track record
5. Information value
6. Direct and indirect effects
7. Scope and limitations

The expected-value logic is worth internalizing before you write. The site's own example: a 1% chance of $100,000 and a 50% chance of $2,000 both have an expected value of $1,000. So a high-risk project with a large potential payoff is not automatically disadvantaged against a safer, smaller one — but you need to make the probability and the size of the payoff explicit. "Marginal" and "counterfactual" impact mean reviewers will ask what happens because of your grant that would not happen otherwise, so frame your project against that baseline rather than against doing nothing at all.

Steps to apply

1. Go to funds.effectivealtruism.org.
2. Read the four fund descriptions and choose the one matching your work.
3. Select "Apply for funding" / "Apply."
4. Complete the application (under 1 hour) covering your project, its expected impact, and your track record where relevant.
5. Submit and wait for the fund managers to review it.

Common sticking points

• Applying to the wrong fund. The Transformative AI Fund is specifically for reducing global catastrophic risks from advanced AI; a general AI-for-good project belongs elsewhere or not here.
• Skipping the counterfactual. Reviewers weigh what your grant changes, not just what your project does. State what would happen without the funding.
• Vague probability claims. The expected-value framing rewards explicit estimates, even rough ones, over unquantified enthusiasm.
• Assuming you need nonprofit status. Individuals and new organizations are explicitly eligible for at least two of the funds.

If you are a donor rather than an applicant

The same site lets you donate into any of the four funds, pooling your money with other donors. It lists 52,000 donors and $100M+ in grants across 1,544 grants awarded. Donation routes differ by location: every.org is recommended for donors outside the UK or Netherlands, and Giving What We Can for donors in the UK or Netherlands.