Announcing ... The Audacious Project

After an exciting trial run, here's a collaborative plan to inspire bolder ideas for change.

For the past three years, a group of foundations and individuals has been working with TED to design a new model for turning bold ideas into action. It’s been tried, tested, and is already delivering exciting results. With today’s announcement, we’d like to share our thinking and open the doors for others to participate.

Large-scale change depends to a huge degree on people with a special mindset: entrepreneurs. They have the ability to imagine a better future, and the courage, ingenuity, persuasiveness and determination to make that future real. Entrepreneurs can choose one of two main paths: for-profit (business entrepreneurs) or nonprofit (social entrepreneurs). But in today’s world, those two paths will take them on radically different journeys.

A tale of two entrepreneurs

Meet Marcus. He’s a passionate young entrepreneur with a vision for an innovative service. His profitable business model attracts early investors and he’s eventually able to raise $100 million by taking his company public. Within five years his company has reached 30 million customers.

But not everything the world needs can be turned into a profitable product. In the same city lives Maya. She too is a passionate young entrepreneur with a vision for an innovative service. But the people she’s looking to support don’t have any money. Maya’s only way forward is to set up a nonprofit. Her business plan indicates that to get to scale, she’ll have to invest $100 million over five years. How does she raise that money?

There are no venture capitalists she can approach; no equivalent of an IPO in her future. Instead she reaches out to foundations and individual philanthropists, one at a time. She has to spend 50 percent of her time fundraising, and it takes ten meetings on average to get any kind of commitment, which are usually for less than three years and have many restrictions on how she can use the dollars.

Slowly, Maya gets burned out and has to cut back her ambitions. She can help a few hundred people in her hometown, but millions of others around the world will never know that someone was hoping to lend a hand.

The heart of the problem

Why do these two stories have such different outcomes? There is no inherent reason why nonprofit initiatives can’t generate change at massive scale. They may not be able to self-fund through their own profits, yet there are still multiple ways they can tap into the power of the global economy, the support of the government, or the reach of the Internet.

The key problem is this: nonprofit fundraising is fundamentally harder.

Sure there is great work being supported, the best of it often unreported. Nonetheless some of the world’s best change-makers are forced to give up on their biggest dreams. The possibility space of truly audacious change is left under-explored.

What could we do about this?

A proposal

We would like to suggest a new approach we’re calling The Audacious Project, the result of four years of dreaming and experimentation with an extraordinary group of collaborators. You can think of it as an attempt to imagine what an IPO for the nonprofit world might look like. Or simply as a thrilling way for private individuals to pool resources and work together in service of entrepreneurs who could change the world. Here are the three key steps:

1) Invite the world’s greatest change-agents to dream like they’ve never dreamed before. To create ideas that are truly audacious. Ideas that truly might impact millions or even hundreds of millions of people, or have environmental impact at planetary scale, or can be transformative for science or for our long-term prospects of surviving and flourishing.

2) Vet the ideas to search for those which genuinely offer a path to execution, scale, and impact. Pick the best of them and help shape them into actionable multi-year plans that are viable and sustainable.

3) Present them to the world in a single moment with as much visibility and excitement as possible and invite people to support them … together. Use that momentum to build a community of committed supporters around each project who will sustain them over multiple years, contributing ideas, time and influence as well as money.

Taken together, these three steps could create an exciting marketplace for bold, fundable ideas.

But would this actually work?

Over the past three years, we have piloted this process twice, presenting a group of bold, but carefully vetted ideas to groups of potential donors. Both times, the result was extraordinary. In all, over $250 million was committed, far exceeding our expectations.

More promising still, the process itself was inspiring, both to the organizations who created the projects and to the individual donors who had the opportunity to work together in service of these big ideas.

So we couldn’t leave it there.

The launch plan

We believe it’s time to expand The Audacious Project further, so that anyone in the world can participate. A remarkable group of organizations and individuals have joined forces with us at TED to make this possible. They include the Skoll Foundation, Virgin Unite, the Dalio Foundation, Scott Cook and Signe Ostby, Laura and John Arnold, ELMA Philanthropies, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bridgespan Group, and more.

On April 11, 2018, we will unveil the plan simultaneously at the TED Conference and at the Skoll World Forum. We will present five projects that we discovered during our pilot phase.

These five projects range from ocean exploration, to climate change remediation, to rethinking criminal justice, to empowering communities and expanding public health. Their inspiring creators will share their dreams in the form of short TED Talks, and we will invite the world to join those already committed to helping make those dreams real. We have allocated $1 million for 2018 TED Conference attendees to distribute among the projects and we will encourage them to specify where they would like their share to be contributed.

That same day we will launch a website at AudaciousProject.org, enabling anyone in the world to support these projects. And the website will offer something else: the ability for any change-maker or change-making organization to pitch their own idea for impact at scale, and to describe in compelling detail how they could execute it with the right financial backing.

We expect many projects in the $25 to $50 million range. But some projects may need funding upwards of $100 million, perhaps even many times that amount. Whatever the dollar amount, the key is to show that this money would be used effectively to do something truly amazing.

From our experience, most of the successful projects will come from existing, proven organizations, ready for a whole new level of ambition. But we are also open to ideas from individual change-makers with stellar track records, or from multiple organizations teaming up to propose a major collaboration, provided their respective roles are clear. In fact, anyone can apply and make their case. The only fundamental rules are: Dream big. And then show how that dream can come true. 

The flood of project proposals we’re expecting will eventually be distilled to a few dozen that will go through significant due diligence, searching for those that best combine audacity with feasibility. From this year forward, the five most compelling projects will be presented annually at the TED Conference.

Maya, are you listening? This is for you! Instead of hundreds of meetings, you might be able to fund your beautiful dream in a single burst.

Marcus, this might be for you too! Part of the fortune you’ve made could be reinvested for the public good in ideas that are every bit as bold and entrepreneurial as you are, have been credibly vetted, and will bring you together with other visionary funders.

And as for you, dear reader, this truly is for you as well. This is something we can all participate in. Yes, the scale of funding required for these projects is way out of reach to most individuals. But that’s the whole point. This is intended as a means of pooling our efforts. A shared focus on large-scale initiatives is likely to have far more impact than fragmented efforts by siloed individuals.

Scale matters

Scale brings with it all manner of efficiencies, leverage, brand visibility, and network effects. With scale, you can build a platform, attract partners, and get to critical mass. Even a small contribution to such an effort is likely to achieve more than the same money spent elsewhere. That’s because it’s helping accelerate a train that’s already moving; helping make it unstoppable. And it’s not just your money that can help. It’s your ideas, your encouragement, and your ability to spread the word. All of these projects can benefit hugely from a committed community of supporters, cheering them on through thick and thin. Change at scale can’t be something that only rich people dream of. It’s for all of us.

The initiative will be housed at TED under the leadership of Executive Director Anna Verghese. The Bridgespan Group, a leading global social impact advisory firm, is playing a key role in supporting this collaboration and working with entrepreneurs on investment-ready plans.

This initiative will face numerous challenges. Some of the audacious plans we back may fail, as do many venture-backed investments. Indeed if none were to fail, we probably aren’t taking enough risk. But if we fail, we fail together. And we learn together.

And what of success? There’s a chance something transformative could happen here, even beyond the direct impact of the projects. There’s a chance some of the world’s change-makers may be encouraged to dream more creatively, more boldly than ever before. To truly explore what humanity is capable of. We may be amazed at what they come up with.

We invite you to witness the launch of The Audacious Project first-hand. We’ll be live-streaming this special session of next week’s TED Conference, at 5pm PST on April 11, 2018. You can come and be part of a global community of change-makers, watching as the first projects are shared. If inspired, you’ll have a chance to become a founding supporter of one of these projects, to help create meaningful impact, and to be part of something bigger than any of us.

Are you ready for a little hope? Come join!