Inside The Audacious Project: How the Billionaires’ Funding Collaborative Picks its Winners

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Editor's Note: This article was originally published on August 9, 2023.

Nearly every year, some of the world’s wealthiest people gather for two and a half days to decide which from a short list of nonprofits they will bless with game-changing sums of money. It’s called, fittingly, The Audacious Project. 

Through carefully crafted investment documents and TED-style speeches, the selected organizations’ leaders make their pitches in the hope of convincing the group’s 40 or so ultra-rich backers to put tens of millions of dollars behind their ideas for transformative social change.

“It's a blank canvas to dream your biggest dream,” said Anna Verghese, the project’s executive director. “But we do also want to figure out where audacity meets with achievability.”

Dreamed up and hosted by the viral talks platform TED, the group is effectively a funding collaborative for individuals with Forbes-list-level wealth, boasting partners such as Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Ray Dalio and Richard Branson. Three-quarters of the project’s public supporters are billionaires.

In April, Audacious announced its latest and largest-ever round of funding. With more than $1 billion spread among 10 awardees, it was a demonstration of the collaborative’s growing philanthropic power, even if the checks come from the partners and not Audacious itself. Fewer than a dozen U.S. foundations distribute that much money each year, according to public tax data compiled by FoundationIQ. 

The project has helped direct $4.2 billion in funding since its 2018 launch, making it one of the most influential forces among billionaire givers, the donor class that increasingly dominates American and global philanthropy. And those totals do not capture the full extent of its clout, thanks to relationships with other guides for the uber-wealthy, like the Giving Pledge and the Bridgespan Group.

The 15-person operation’s roughly annual awards announcements thus offer a window into the types of change that often opaque billionaire philanthropists are supporting. Grantees are a far cry from standard-issue eds and meds recipients. Audacious not only gives out flexible, multi-year support, they channel much of it to causes that have not always attracted such donors, and to groups headed by leaders who have lived the struggles they seek to address. This year’s awardees span a contraceptive care initiative in the U.S., an education and support network for girls in sub-Saharan Africa and a global effort to monitor overfishing. 

It’s a testament to the team’s ability to nail their assignment that this year’s awards passed the 10-figure mark, up from $900 million last cohort and double the $500 million mobilized in 2019. Audacious is extraordinarily good at bringing together a cross-section of the ultra-rich to put down big chips on ambitious dreams, not to mention tailoring its applicants’ appeals to excite its high-dollar audience. Here’s how they do it.

What does it take to be chosen by Audacious?

Each award cycle, more than 1,000 nonprofits submit their big ideas in the hope of winning Audacious’ multimillion-dollar nod. Some apply via its public form, donors or partners suggest others, and a group of 40-some experts round up additional candidates.

Following that public call and recruitment process, Audacious requests full applications from about 75 contenders. With support from Bridgespan, the team performs an extensive due diligence process: multiple conversations, reference checks and in-person site visits. A panel of expert reviewers also weighs in. Financial and organizational health are factors; projects typically have annual operating budgets of $1 million or more. The team also interrogates each organization’s strategic assumptions, its impact, potential to scale and attention to equity.

“It’s a very intense process,” said Nicole Rycroft, founder and executive director of Canopy, an environmental nonprofit that was chosen by Audacious donors in 2023 to receive $60 million over six and a half years.

In a conversation about the Audacious-backed Drive Electric campaign last year, Verghese told me that the project curates topics by considering the diversity of donor interests, as well as their own instincts, citing climate change, criminal justice and global health as examples. Audacious aims to be agnostic on both issues and location, but the team has some internal goals, such as balancing the number of grantees from the Global North versus Global South, she said. “We're really looking for what are the biggest, boldest, most compelling solutions.”

When the team’s list is down to about 20 projects, it is sent to donors for their feedback. In other words, donors have some sway on who actually makes a pitch during the gala, whether via their recommendations, how existing interests inform who’s chosen, or this review of the short list — which Verghese downplayed as a “barometer check.”

But organizers say that influence is not prescriptive and is but one layer of feedback. Verghese notes that donors often stretch beyond their initially intended giving and most will fund multiple projects. “You come in and think you’ll fund one thing, and you come out and you’ve funded five things,” she said.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe, managing director of discovery and insight at Audacious, added that the team and its partners try to break down assumptions donors may arrive with. “We spend a lot of time trying to really broaden the perspectives on how change actually occurs,” she said. 

The gauntlet ultimately results in eight to 10 finalists. Then it’s time for the billionaires to toss their checks into the ring. With Audacious and Bridgespan helping them, nonprofits prepare investment packets and step into that infamous red circle to pre-record TED-style speeches for the donor gathering.

The two-and-a-half-day event sounds like something between a charity gala and Shark Tank. The project operates not as a pooled fund but an opt-in system, with each donor, most in attendance themselves, deciding whether to support each nonprofit and, if so, how much to give. In other words, all the finalists leave with funding, but the size of their winnings depends on those writing the checks. 

The dizzyingly rich who cut the checks

The initiative’s long and varied list of partners is sterling proof of the Audacious team’s curatorial and convening powers. It has assembled a diverse array of giving styles, bringing together metrics-oriented grantmakers like Bill Gates and no-strings-attached givers like MacKenzie Scott. There are those with small fleets of giving vehicles like Laura and John Arnold and others just entering orbit as megadonors. 

“Philanthropists come to Audacious for different reasons: Some to expand their giving horizons; others for efficiency,” said Verghese, citing the team’s curation, due diligence and proposal development. “Donors appreciate the opportunity to amplify the scale and scope of projects beyond what any single donor could take on solo.”

There are ultimately more similarities than differences among the project’s more than 40 funders and partners. Most are based in the United States, and the others are mostly across the Atlantic, in places like England (investor Christopher Hohn) and Switzerland (the Parker family’s Oak Foundation), though a few have personal connections to countries like Taiwan (Joe Tsai) and Zimbabwe (Strive and Tsitsi Masiyiwa of Delta Philanthropies). 

Tech- and investing-related fortunes dominate, whether from software, cryptocurrency, venture capital or hedge funds. The group includes cofounders from Twitter, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Alibaba, Intuit and Microsoft.

There are some other sectors represented, such as TV (Amos Hostetter) and music (Clive Calder’s ELMA Philanthropies). Many are known to back Democrats, although there are some Republican donors in the mix (cell phone entrepreneur Craig McCaw). 

Finally, of course, they’re almost all dizzyingly rich. It’s impossible to be certain of a public figure’s wealth, but based on Forbes estimates and other reputable reporting, all but 11 of its 44 listed partners appear to be billionaires or foundations created by billionaires.

Audacious has coaxed some serious coin out of those pockets, right up there with the biggest of its peers. Take Lever for Change, a similar apply-to-win platform with several of the same backers and many more institutional members, which says it is “on track to unlock” $2.5 billion from philanthropy by 2025. Audacious might have moved twice that amount by then. Another group, Co-Impact, is still working to mobilize its first $1 billion. Closer to Audacious’ altitude is the antipoverty collaborative Blue Meridian Partners, which has raised more than $4 billion. They are another Audacious partner, according to the team.

That funding power is what gives Audacious its influence, but Verghese said the goal is to both evolve and inspire wider shifts, including more long-term, unrestricted, trust-based grants made through collaboratives.

“Our hope is that this funding community not only continues to grow to be a more diverse, global community, but that this way of giving becomes more and more common outside of The Audacious Project,” she said.

The Audacious network

Audacious not only has the ear of some of the world’s wealthiest, it also has relationships with some of philanthropy’s other successful billionaire whisperers. 

The Giving Pledge, which asks the world’s wealthiest to promise the majority of their fortunes to charity, invites Audacious to do presentations to their members. Bridgespan, which serves a vast array of philanthropic clients, including running MacKenzie Scott’s giving operation, helps Audacious with operations, including performing background checks and preparing recipients to woo donors. The Climate Leadership Initiative, a powerhouse fundraising outfit behind many climate mega donations, is also a listed partner. 

Audacious donors also seem to be a tight bunch, with crossover happening outside of the program. For instance, cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen and his wife, Lyna Lam, launched a prize competition for refugee groups in 2020 that was also funded by the Sea Grape Foundation and managed on a prize platform spun off by MacArthur. All three are Audacious partners. 

The project has also helped launch initiatives that are still going. Case in point: The Bail Project, started with Audacious backing in 2018. Its supporters have included Audacious partners like Branson, Larsen and Mike Novogratz, a cryptocurrency investor, and his wife, Sukey, an author and movie producer.

What can the most recent round tells us

Audacious’ latest cohort demonstrates the project’s wide-ranging areas of focus and approaches. A theme running through this year’s awardees is “lived experience,” the increasingly recognized concept that personal proximity to social problems holds value on par with educational credentials or work experience. 

One recipient, the Clean Slate Initiative ($75 million over six years), which is working to help millions of formerly incarcerated individuals cut through the bureaucratic red tape needed to clear their records, is led by a CEO, Sheena Meade, who herself has a past conviction. 

Think of Us, a foster care nonprofit IP covered at length in May, plans to use its Audacious funding ($47.5 million over five years) to build out their Lived Experience Engine, a database of perspectives to guide interventions in the child welfare system. Its founder and CEO, Sixto Cancel, grew up in the foster care system. 

But there are plenty of projects focused on putting the latest scientific advances to use, as one might expect from a group started by TED — the “t” stands for technology, after all. Among this year’s winners is the Innovative Genomics Institute ($70 million over seven years), which plans to use the genome-editing tool CRISPR to both relieve childhood asthma and reduce agricultural methane emissions, all by creating a “genomic microbiome engineering” platform. 

Another selected group, Global Fishing Watch ($60 million over five years), aims to use millions of gigabytes of satellite data and its expertise with artificial intelligence to map 100% of the industrial fishing fleet, up from just 20% today. A project of the conservation nonprofit Oceana, the environmental watchdog SkyTruth and Google, the nonprofit will put the resulting information on its free platform to combat illegal fishing. 

A how-to guide to the only game in town

Audacious offers a gold-plated guide to appealing to some of the richest people on Earth. Not only does it have an impressive number of them as donors, their backers range from philanthropic veterans to newbies. 

The project has also directed that philanthropic power to some much-needed corners. It has sent a notable share of its support to work in the Global South and organizations run by members of the marginalized communities they serve. All funded finalists also get the chance to reach a bigger audience by doing a public version of their presentation at one of the major TED conferences. 

Dating back to its launch in 2018, Audacious has helped marshal new money for causes like global health and development, and it arguably provides a space for philanthropists to support ideas they might otherwise deem too risky. And it’s worth reiterating that Audacious awards are always unrestricted and multi-year.

There’s plenty more one could wish for from Audacious. More money to organizations based outside the United States and Europe. More support for movements and grassroots campaigns. Backing for all branches of the climate movement. Participatory grantmaking. A whole lot more money for even more recipients.

There’s also the mind-bending reality that one of the United States’ largest funders depends on a bunch of billionaires making life-changing decisions at a supercharged charity gala, featuring those high-stakes pre-recorded funding pitches. But if appealing to the richest donors is among your goals — and for most nonprofits it has to be, given the increasingly top-heavy nature of the sector — you should probably take notes. With more than $1 billion in awards in its latest round, few are doing it as well as Audacious.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Strive and Tsitsi Masiyiwa.