American Cancer Society Turns to Crypto to Democratize Fundraising
The cancer research group is hoping to tap into broad support to amplify its donations
The American Cancer Society is dipping its toe into one of crypto’s favorite ways to raise money for public goods: quadratic funding. The venerable cancer research group is now accepting donations in the most recent round of Gitcoin Grants using the quadratic set up that allots more money to projects that garner mass appeal.
“This is one of the most important things done in crypto for 2023,” Azeem Khan, head of impact at Gitcoin, said to me in an interview. The ability for crypto to be used in novel ways for fundraising and to make an impact in the nonprofit sector could be the “killer” app the industry has been looking for, he said.
“It’s the one that creates human stories,” Khan said. “It’s the one that’s indisputable. It’s not going to be expensive JPEGs or DeFi protocols. It’s going to be something like this that [U.S. Senator] Elizabeth Warren and [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman] Gary Gensler can’t fight against. I’d love for the U.S. House and Senate to sit down and try to say that the American Cancer Society getting access to more funding to do important work using crypto is bad, because they won’t be able to.”
The American Cancer Society quadratic funding round runs until Dec. 12 and allows individuals to vote on specific programs such as patient lodging, cancer screening and research and health equity. Like a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, the community decides where the funding goes. Quadratic funding is meant to help small projects or poorer communities compete with well-known projects that may already have wealthy benefactors.
As LCX put it, quadratic funding “is designed to give smaller donations greater weight, leveling the playing field and ensuring that public assets are funded on the basis of community support as opposed to the interests of a small number of wealthy donors.”
Working with Gitcoin on the quadratic funding campaign is an “exciting experiment in community-driven match funding, using state-of-the-art technologies to pool and allocate capital in a more democratic and transparent way,” said Jay Jump, senior vice president of digital products at the American Cancer Society. “We're thrilled to engage the global crypto community to rally support for life-saving programs that support our mission to ensure everyone has an opportunity to prevent, detect, treat and survive cancer.”
Moving the donating and decision-making from the philanthropic foundations and their small boards to everyday people, many who are personally affected by cancer, is one way to change public opinion about crypto, Khan said.
If done well, quadratic funding will “revolutionize giving as a whole,” he said. “People in crypto tend to donate significantly more than their fiat counterparts. The way that giving looks in web3 is extremely different than what we’re accustomed to. We’re in an interesting place where empowering people to feel like they have more of a say in where the funds go and that their small donations have an outsized impact. A dollar can mean more than a dollar. In previous Gitcoin Grants rounds, individual $1 donations were matched with $120 US dollars.”