Okay, these ideas don't just apply to the Methuselah Mouse Prize, though that's where my mind was when I was thinking of these things. These ideas should really apply to any public cause that is in the public's best interests, even and especially if the public is not aware of this.
Being a person who lives largely in his mind (some might say in my own set of fantasy worlds), I was pondering how I could help the Methuselah Mouse Prize succeed more. Of course, more money is always a good place to start, so, being a person of limited financial means, I immediately set down the what-if path of winning the lottery. As you can tell, this is going to be a trek into the eccentric and fanciful. Feel free to skip down to my conclusions.
Well, what IF I won the lottery? How would that help? We'll start with a nice round figure, say a $50 million payout (presumably from an actual prize of something like $110 million). I'll assume for the moment that my contributions to a 501c3 org are sufficient to obviate the issue of taxes.
So, how does my $50 million benefit the cause? Well, certainly it's in the right ballpark for making the prize successful. But was that the best use of my money?
There are a couple of things to consider here. One is worthiness of those receiving the benefits of this money. If I effectively fund the catalyst for curing aging and saving hundreds of millions of lives, and if I did so through "divine" intervention, then how does that world differ from the one in which I live in which I do not single-handedly fund this catalyst? People's minds are not changed; they have no ownership in the cure for aging, no claim to it.
Since we're speaking of a hypothetical world, I can't even say that those people themselves, their mere sentience, is worth performing this act for them. An act of power is not sufficient for me to really want to do this for them.
No, I expect something in return. I expect people to get involved in curing aging for themselves. I don't mind being the catalyst, but they need to participate as well.
Of course, if I donated $50 million, would that really stop others from donating? No. But if the prize fund were that large, and 99% of it were due to the donation of a single person, would you really feel inclined to participate?
Which brings me to the second thing to consider. How do you get more people involved? A prize is already a good start. As some have said, to a wealthy philanthropist, it provides the most bang for the buck. I could donate this $50 million, and expect about ten to twenty times as much to be independently spent by others. In this case, with the financial stakes so high, those others would be corporations, not individuals, for the most part, or so I assume, so the analogy with prizes of the past is somewhat strained, but let's assume the ratios hold. Wow, for $50 million, I inspired, over the course of perhaps a couple decades, about $500 million to a billion dollars in investment!
But is that really the best bang for my buck? For an issue like funding a prize to get a spaceship up to the edge of space--a technical feat somewhat analogous to creating a BB gun, where a 0.50-calibre rifle is an orbital launch vehicle and a howitzer is required to get to Saturn--it's somewhat difficult to imagine getting the public involved in such an effort. There are a lot of geeks out there, so it's not beyond reason, but it's hardly something to have wide appeal.
For a prize to create a human-powered helicopter, the appeal is even lower.
But let's get back to our wealthy philanthropist. We want to maximize the bang for our buck. How do we get the public to want to be involved, without feeling like they're just adding drops to a bucket already filled to the brim by me, the wealthy, and probably somewhat cooky, philanthropist?
The next thought I had, of course, was to just use the $50 million as a matching fund. But if you saw that there was $50 million in the matching fund, and only $70,000, or $200,000, had been donated, you'd probably be wondering why there's even a matching fund. Why not just put the money directly into the pot? I've considered time limits on the matching fund, to show people that I don't want to put the money in the pot, I want it back at the end. I'm daring you to put your own money in. But even this seems somewhat lacking.
Here's the problem as I see it. The MMP is currently "small". Sure, it's got about $70k in cash, and including pledged funds it's at over a half a million dollars! Half a million! That's not a number to be shy about. But it's just still not enough. More is better. More money means more credibility and attention. And $50 million would certainly draw a lot of attention.
So the problem isn't that I donated $50 million to the prize; the problem is that I donated $50 million to the prize. To have all the money come from one source just isn't going to help. Dr. Aubrey de Grey once commented that he wouldn't want someone to donate more than about 50% of what had been donated so far. His reasoning had to do with the expectation that this puts on the Methuselah Foundation's board to allow that person to influence policy.
I contend that another and perhaps more important reason is that such a large donation, especially once the prize is larger, actually is counterproductive to convincing people to donate their own money.
So, let's go back to smaller numbers, for the sake of illustration. Let's say I had a million dollars to donate. If I donated that million dollars, the prize total would go up to about $1,070,000, give or take. If we looked at the donation list, we'd see:
John Doe: $1,000
Thomas Anderson: $10
...
Jane Doe: $500
Jack Smith: $20
Mary Jones: $50
...
Jay Fox: $1,000,000
That number just stands out way too much. It detracts from the credibility of the prize, because it practically insults the comparatively small donations of others.
Of course, let's take an alternate approach of having a thousand people donate a thousand dollars each. Is this better?
John Doe: $1,000
Thomas Anderson: $10
Dave Jackson: $1,000
...
Chris Corbin: $1,000
Jane Doe: $500
Ned Meyers: $1,000
Mary Jane: $1,000
...
Jason Clinton: $1,000
Jack Smith: $20
Cindy Bright: $1,000
Jose Vargas: $1,000
It's better, but still somewhat bland. It shows a lot of people support it, but it's not inviting to big players, and the little players stick out like a sore thumb; more to the point, it's not reflective of the fact that we all have different means of supporting this cause.
So, where does my fancy lead me from here? Well, as I see it, we need a fairly even mix of amounts donated in various ranges. For a one million dollar prize, I'd like to see a few donations in the $10,000 to $100,000 range. But I'd also like to see a few hundred thousand dollars worth in the $1,000 to $10,000 range. And I'd like to see a few hundred thousand dollars worth in the <$1,000 range.
A breakdown like this is much more natural. It shows that a lot of people can support the cause: the legitimacy of numbers. But it also shows that big players can step up and do their part to advance the cause by leaps and bounds. At the same time, by not dominating the total, these big players do not obviate the need for the little players. Everyone's invited.
What's more, as the prize gets bigger, bigger players can step up without thwarting our momentum. At $5 million, we could even have a single donation of a million dollars and it wouldn't hurt the cause. One $1 million donation, two or three $250,000 donations, a dozen $100,000 donations, and hundreds of donations in the $2,500 to $25,000 range, with thousands more donations in the $100 to $2,000 range. A very healthy mix, and one we can continue to build on and attract everybody to our cause.
Conclusion:
At this stage of the game, looking over the numbers that have been donated so far, I think the biggest thing we need in the year or two to come is more little players. Quite a few have already donated $1,000 or more, up to a little over $5,000 in a single donation. In fact, approximately half of the money donated so far is from people/institutions who have donated $2,000.00 or more, and over 80%, in fact about 5/6 of the money has come from people who have donated $1,000 or more. This overwhelming discrepancy makes the $100 donations of people like myself seem futile by comparison.
If there's one positive thing I can pull from these numbers, it's that people/institutions donating in the $1,000 to $1,800 range are very well represented at the moment. But we need a lot more people in the $100-$600 range, and even a lot more people in the $10-$90 range.
This part's tough: it involves getting a higher quantity of donations. Which in turn requires getting to the hearts and minds of a higher quantity of people. People like you and me, everyday people with small checking accounts and the daily struggle to put food on the table. People who willingly make donations to the American Cancer Society because it's a good cause. Convincing a few hundred more of these people in the next year to donate should be a high priority. If we could get 200 people to donate an average of $50, and another 100 people to donate an average of $100, and another 40 people to donate an average of $250, that would only get us another $30,000. But it would add so much more legitimacy in numbers. Once we can get to over $100,000, much of it from the little people, the "comman man", as it were, then I think we'll have the legitimacy and appeal to move to the next step:
Once we've reached $100,000, assuming that at least a third of it is from donations of less than $1000 per person, then we need to start going for people of greater means. Businessmen, investors, etc. People who have $1,000 or $2,000 or $5,000 to donate to a charitable cause. Really, this step should not be ignored now, but I think that if we had a choice of audience, this one is better saved for later, and the people like myself of more limited (or more "realistic") means should be our current priority. We need to get "the people" involved; the people are more important than the money. Not just philosophically, but in the long run I think we'll be in a better position with a base that's larger numerically rather than larger financially.