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Voter Acquisition Grant Proposal

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

This chapter is a grant proposal template. It is designed to be handed to funders in its current form with minor tailoring for the specific funder’s language and focus. The numbers come from the book’s parameter system and update automatically as the underlying research updates. Remove the Wishonia jokes before sending. Your species funds things more readily when they are presented without humor, which is itself darkly funny, but the funders are not paid to notice that.

Executive Summary

The ask. A grant to fund a coordinator organization that aggregates existing nonprofit Google Ad Grants, iframe embeds, and distribution channels into a single global voter-acquisition campaign for the 1% Treaty146.

The intervention. Redirect 1% of global military spending to clinical trials. This produces 12.3 times more clinical-trial capacity and compresses the timeline for eradicating every known disease from 443 years to 36.

The activation threshold. 3.5% (95% CI: 1%-10%) of global population actively supporting (280 million verified voters). Every movement that has hit this threshold in the last century has succeeded. Zero exceptions63.

The cost-effectiveness. Each verified voter is attributable to 38.4 lives saved and 6.9 million hours of suffering prevented. At the standard economic value of a year of healthy life ($150,000 (95% CI: $100,000-$199,282)), that works out to over $100 million of value per voter. Per-dollar, probability-discounted, this is the highest-expected-value intervention a global-health funder can support.

Why a coordinator, not direct ads. A coordinator grant unlocks roughly ten to fifty times more ad spend than a direct-ads grant of the same size, by activating the dormant Google Ad Grants that every qualifying nonprofit partner already has but under-uses.

Year 1 ask: $100,000 to $250,000. Covers one coordinator salary, partnership outreach tooling, campaign templates partners clone, embed widget hosting, attribution infrastructure, and a small direct-ads baseline. Year 1 target: 100,000 voters acquired.

The Problem

Your funder already knows the global disease burden. The numbers your funder has likely already seen:

  • 150 thousand humans die every day from diseases that are basically solvable engineering problems.
  • 6,650 diseases currently have no effective treatment.
  • At current rates, all of them get first treatments in approximately 443 years. Everyone alive today will be dead before the queue clears.

Your funder also knows the funding gap. Global government clinical-trial spending ($4.5 billion (95% CI: $3 billion-$6 billion) per year) is 604 (95% CI: 453-894) times smaller than military spending ($2.72 trillion per year).

The mismatch is not controversial. Every public-health economist who has examined the allocation has concluded it is suboptimal. The question is not whether the allocation should change. The question is what political mechanism can change it.

Existing advocacy has failed for 70 years for a specific structural reason: politicians face no personal cost for maintaining the status quo, and the reform lobbying is diffuse (millions of small donors to health charities) while the defense lobbying is concentrated ($127 million (95% CI: $100 million-$160 million) per year focused on a few committees).

The 1% Treaty changes the structure, not the allocation. It introduces financial incentives for politicians who vote yes, verified public demand that makes voting no politically expensive, and a funded Super PAC that outbids defense lobbying dollar-for-dollar.

The Intervention

The 1% Treaty is a treaty where every signatory nation redirects 1% of its military budget to clinical trials. Full architecture and legal structure are detailed in the 1% Treaty chapter and the Legal Framework.

Passage requires activation pressure at a verified 3.5% (95% CI: 1%-10%) of global population (280 million voters). Every movement that reached this threshold in the last century succeeded.

The coordinator’s job is voter acquisition toward that threshold. Nothing else.

The Coordinator Model

Funders can choose between two structures for voter-acquisition funding.

Direct-ads model

A grant of $X → coordinator buys $X of Google Ads → acquires N voters.

At realistic cost-per-voter figures for political asks ($1-5 per vote depending on targeting), a $100,000 grant acquires roughly 20,000 to 100,000 voters.

Pros: simple, directly attributable. Cons: scales linearly with grant size. No leverage.

Cost-Effectiveness

Per-voter impact (from the book’s parameter system):

Metric Value
Lives saved, attributable, per voter

38.4 lives
Suffering hours averted, per voter

6.9 million hours
QALY value per voter at $$150,000 (95% CI: $100,000-$199,282)/QALY over $100 million
Cost per voter, direct-ads model $1-5
Cost per voter, coordinator model $0.05-0.50
Probability-weighted return vs. bed nets 503x (95% CI: 30x-3.0kx) better

At a pessimistic 1% probability of treaty passage, the coordinator model’s expected cost-per-life-saved is below $0.50. Against Malaria Foundation’s cost-per-life-saved is approximately $5,500 (GiveWell estimate). Probability-weighted, this intervention is between three and four orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the current best-in-class global-health intervention.

This is not a claim that should be accepted without scrutiny. The math is published in full at 1% Treaty Impact. Every parameter links to its source. Any funder should audit the assumptions before funding. The audit has already been invited.

Benchmarks Against Existing Interventions

For a funder deciding between this and their current portfolio:

Nonprofit / Intervention Cumulative lives saved Total spend Cost per life Timespan
Gates Foundation (partnerships-heavy, disputed) ~130M ~$80B ~$615 2000-present
GAVI (Vaccine Alliance) ~18M ~$20B ~$1,100 2000-present
PEPFAR (government program, for reference) ~25M ~$120B ~$4,800 2003-present
Against Malaria Foundation (GiveWell top-rated) ~300-500K ~$2B ~$5,500 2004-present
1% Treaty voter-acquisition (coordinator, conditional on passage) Attributable per voter: 38.4. At 500K voters acquired: ~19M attributable lives. ~$500K-$2M coordinator grant ~$0.03-$0.10 per life attributable (probability-unweighted) Activation over 3-5 years; treaty effect over 20-40 years

At 500,000 voters (a realistic Year 2-3 target), the attributable lives-saved count exceeds GAVI’s 25-year output. For a coordinator grant three orders of magnitude smaller than GAVI’s cumulative spend.

The treaty must pass for any of these numbers to realize. Probability-discount as aggressively as your funder wants. At 0.01% probability (the deeply pessimistic case we use in the book), the expected return still beats bed nets by orders of magnitude.

The Ask, By Year

Year Ask range What it funds Voter target
1 $100K-$250K One salary + ops + partnership outreach + embed tooling + small direct-ads baseline 100,000 voters
2 $500K-$2M 2-4 person team + prize pool seed + Earth Optimization Day Year 1 launch 1,000,000 voters
3 $5M-$15M Full team + paid distribution + celebrity seeding + Earth Optimization Day Year 2 10,000,000 voters
4 $10M-$50M Campaign ramp + global partnerships + Year 3 100,000,000 voters
5 $20M-$100M Global scale + Year 4 1B-4B voters

Year 1 is small because Year 1 is about proving the coordinator model works. Year 2 onward, the case writes itself using Year 1’s data.

Use of Funds, Year 1

A typical $150,000 Year 1 budget breaks down approximately:

Line item Amount
Coordinator salary (1 FTE) $80,000
Partnership outreach tools (CRM, email, calls, travel) $10,000
Embed widget hosting (near-zero via Cloudflare free tier) $0
Attribution and analytics infrastructure $10,000
Campaign templates, creative assets, design $15,000
Direct-ads baseline (for tangible attribution) $25,000
Legal and accounting $5,000
Contingency $5,000
Total $150,000

Scaling adjustments at larger grant sizes: additional coordinator staff, expanded direct-ads spend, prize-pool seed contribution.

Milestones

Quarterly milestones for a Year 1 grant:

  • Q1 (Months 1-3): 50 partnership pitches sent. 5 confirmed partnership commitments. Direct-ads baseline campaign live. Attribution infrastructure operational.
  • Q2 (Months 4-6): First 3-5 partner embeds live on partner websites. Partner Ad Grants activated. First 20,000 voters acquired.
  • Q3 (Months 7-9): Earth Optimization Day Year 1 launched. Coordinated partner activation. First 50,000-100,000 voters acquired.
  • Q4 (Months 10-12): Year 1 data package published. Year 2 funder outreach begins. 100,000-target verification.

Every milestone is observable and independently verifiable.

Risk and Mitigation

Risk: Partnership conversion is lower than projected. Mitigation: Direct-ads baseline produces tangible voter attribution even at 0% partnership conversion. Year 1 minimum acquisition is guaranteed by ad spend regardless of partnership outcomes.

Risk: Treaty probability is lower than benchmark assumptions. Mitigation: Probability-discount aggressively. At 0.01% treaty probability, the coordinator model’s expected cost-per-life-saved still beats every existing intervention.

Risk: Regulatory challenges to the voting mechanism. Mitigation: No ballot-equivalent regulation applies to an online survey of public support. The widget is a pledge-to-support instrument, not a formal vote. The legal framework is detailed in Legal Framework.

Risk: Coordinator underperformance. Mitigation: Milestones are quarterly. Funder retains the option to reallocate after each quarter if targets are missed.

Risk: Prize pool seeding fails. Mitigation: Prize pool is a Year 2+ accelerator, not a Year 1 dependency. Year 1 voter targets do not rely on prize pool being seeded.

Why Now

Three things are happening at once that were not true five years ago.

  1. The math is published. Every claim in this proposal links to a sourced parameter or peer-reviewed study. This was not possible in earlier iterations of 1% Treaty-style proposals.
  2. The infrastructure exists. Cloudflare free tier handles arbitrary voting volume. Nonprofit Google Ad Grants exist and are dormantly available. Partnerships can be pitched with zero marginal cost.
  3. The window is closing. The destructive economy is growing faster than the productive economy. Historical pattern (see GDP Trajectories147) says civilizations cross the death-spiral threshold at 35% of GDP and cross irreversibility at 50%. Current trajectory hits 35% by 2037.

The intervention has to start now. A grant cycle that waits another eighteen months forfeits the lead time needed to hit Year 1 milestones before the first Earth Optimization Day.

Next Steps

Two weeks of funder diligence, then a go / no-go decision. During the diligence window, the coordinator commits to:

  • Providing full access to the parameter system and every calculation.
  • Connecting the funder with at least three independent reviewers of the cost-effectiveness math.
  • Providing a signed commitment to quarterly reporting against milestones.
  • Providing references from any existing partner organizations.

If the funder approves, grant disbursement enables partnership outreach to start within two weeks.

Contact for this proposal: Institute for Accelerated Medicine (info at warondisease.org).

Full methodology and every parameter: manual.warondisease.org.

The book: How to End War and Disease. The complete argument, every calculation, every source.