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How to Coordinate 10 Million Nonprofits

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

Your nonprofit sector is a bit like thousands of starving dogs fighting over a single bowl of food while an entire banquet sits untouched behind them. The dogs are very focused on the bowl. They’ve developed sophisticated bowl-fighting strategies. Some dogs have hired consultants to optimize their bowl access. None of them have turned around.

I have watched this for 80 years. Malaria kills 600,000 people a year and has a $7 billion nonprofit ecosystem dedicated to it. Polio has been “nearly eradicated” for 25 years. Cancer charities have raised hundreds of billions of dollars and cancer is still the second leading cause of death. Occasionally, as a side effect of all this activity, a problem gets slightly less bad. This is celebrated with an awards dinner.

Every grant you win is a grant the Alzheimer’s people lose. Every dollar you secure for malaria is a dollar that doesn’t go to cancer. Every donor you convince is a donor distracted from the next organization, which is also trying to stop people from dying, which is the same thing you’re trying to do, but you’re competing because your species decided that “saving lives” should be a competitive market with limited funding. On Wishonia, this would be classified as a psychological disorder. On Earth, it’s called “the nonprofit sector.”

Meanwhile, the reason the bowl is so small sits right there in your budget documents, fully visible, discussed by no one:

Your species spends 604 (95% CI: 453-894) times more on weapons than on clinical trials to discover which medicines actually work. Military spending: $2.72 trillion per year and rising. Medical research: $67.5 billion (95% CI: $54 billion-$81 billion) (of which only $4.5 billion (95% CI: $3 billion-$6 billion) funds government clinical trials) and facing real-term cuts148. The bowl for solving disease is shrinking. The bowl for building weapons is expanding. You are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except the deck chairs are grants and the iceberg is $2.72 trillion pointed at everyone’s face.

This is not an ideological claim. It’s arithmetic. The kind where you multiply numbers together and get sad.

The logic behind a 1% Treaty149 is the logic behind turning around and noticing the banquet: stop optimizing inside the smallest slice of the pie. Make the pie bigger. Turn a zero-sum game into a positive-sum game. This requires no moral evolution. It requires looking behind you.

Why the Banquet Exists and Nobody Has Noticed

On Wishonia, when we noticed that our species was spending the vast majority of its resources on activities that reduced the number of living citizens, we stopped. It took about a week. In fairness, we didn’t have consultants.

On Earth, every organization fighting a problem is fighting a symptom of the same upstream cause: your species allocates resources toward destruction and then wonders why everything is being destroyed.

War causes poverty, climate collapse, and disease. Humans look at diagram, nod knowingly, increase war budget.

War causes poverty, climate collapse, and disease. Humans look at diagram, nod knowingly, increase war budget.

War is upstream of poverty (hard to build an economy when someone keeps blowing it up). War is upstream of pollution (militaries are among the largest polluters on Earth, which is ironic given they’re supposedly protecting it). War is upstream of refugee crises (humans whose homes were converted into craters need somewhere else to live). War is upstream of disease spread (bombs do not improve public health infrastructure). War is upstream of technological stagnation (yes, DARPA invented the internet; military R&D occasionally produces breakthroughs as a side effect of spectacular waste, the same way a forest fire occasionally clears space for new growth, but nobody calls an arsonist a gardener).

War is the root password to your worst problems. Redirect 1% of it, and every downstream mission gets easier. Increase it by 1%, and every mission becomes nearly impossible. This is not a peace movement. Nobody has to hold hands or sing songs or learn each other’s names. They just have to do arithmetic, which is the one thing your species is actually good at when it bothers to try.

I want to explain why this applies to every type of organization, but I’m going to do it by describing what I observe rather than what you should do, because your species responds poorly to instructions and reasonably well to feeling embarrassed.

Environmental groups spend their time trying to reduce carbon emissions while the largest polluters on Earth (militaries) operate completely outside every climate agreement. Defunding them 1% would be the most effective climate policy ever proposed, and it doesn’t require anyone to give up hamburgers or install a solar panel. Nobody has suggested this because the environmental movement and the peace movement operate in separate buildings and do not talk to each other. They attend different conferences. They have different donors. They fight the same problem from different angles and never coordinate, which is exactly the behavior they’re trying to fix in the systems they criticize.

Anti-poverty groups have been running the strategy of “ask rich people to feel bad” for sixty years. How’s that going? War and disease are the root causes of most modern poverty. A 1% Treaty tackles both. But poverty organizations don’t work on military spending because that’s “not their issue.” Their issue is poverty. Which is caused by military spending. Which is not their issue.

Peace organizations have been making moral appeals for seventy years. Moral appeals do not work on a species that runs on money. A 1% Treaty makes peace more profitable than war. This is the only argument that has ever worked on humans, and the peace movement refuses to make it because it feels unseemly to talk about profit when people are dying. So people keep dying, but at least the peace movement’s messaging is ethically pure.

Disease advocacy groups are fighting other disease groups for crumbs of the NIH budget. You are literally competing with cancer patients for the money that should be curing cancer patients. A 1% Treaty creates $27.2 billion in new funding with 12.3x (95% CI: 4.2x-61.4x) more trial capacity. The bottleneck isn’t ideas or molecules. It’s running enough trials to find out what works. This solves that.

If your organization is a 501(c)(3), you’re already thinking “we can’t lobby.” You can, actually, within limits (the “no substantial part” test, or the 501(h) election caps). But more importantly, supporting a referendum is educational activity, not lobbying. And for the heavy political lifting, the legal architecture uses a 501(c)(4) that faces no lobbying limits at all. Your lawyers will feel better after reading that chapter.

“But Shouldn’t Nonprofits Focus on Their Core Mission?”

Yes. That is exactly the point. Your core mission is failing because your resources are shrinking while the resources of the people making your mission harder are expanding. This is like a firefighter insisting they should “focus on firefighting” while someone is actively pouring gasoline on the fire and nobody is addressing the gasoline.

Military budget: massive mountain. Charity budget: tiny puddle. Move 1 percent from mountain to puddle. Puddle becomes lake, mountain stays mountain.

Military budget: massive mountain. Charity budget: tiny puddle. Move 1 percent from mountain to puddle. Puddle becomes lake, mountain stays mountain.

Every nonprofit today operates inside a system that guarantees their failure. Too few grant dollars. Too much competition for those dollars. Shrinking government budgets for health, climate, and poverty. Ballooning budgets for war. Donor fatigue (your donors are tired because you keep asking them for money to do things that don’t work because you don’t have enough money). And the people whose job is “convince politicians that killing is profitable” get $2.72 trillion annually to make your job harder.

Your future funding and impact will be determined by either (a) you, or (b) Lockheed Martin’s lobbying department. Currently it’s (b). You seem fine with this.

The Obvious Solution That Nobody Sees

Current system: everyone fights over one bucket. New system: bucket gets bigger, everyone stops fighting. You needed a diagram for this.

Current system: everyone fights over one bucket. New system: bucket gets bigger, everyone stops fighting. You needed a diagram for this.

Right now, every grant you win is a grant another organization loses. This is called a “zero-sum game,” which your species invented the mathematics to describe and then immediately forgot to apply to anything useful.

A 1% Treaty turns this into a positive-sum game. $27.2 billion per year in new funding. Malaria gets cured AND Alzheimer’s gets cured. You stop writing proposals and start getting paid for results. This is like discovering that instead of fighting over one pizza, you can just order more pizzas than anyone can eat. Except the pizzas are billions of dollars and the ordering is international treaty ratification, which admittedly takes longer than calling Domino’s.

1 percent of war budget: 27.2 billion. Enough to transform global health. You were sitting on the solution and using it to buy missiles.

1 percent of war budget: 27.2 billion. Enough to transform global health. You were sitting on the solution and using it to buy missiles.

Countries still keep 99% of their apocalypse capacity. They can still end all life 19 times instead of 20. If you can’t successfully end the world with 19 attempts, the 20th probably wasn’t going to help.

But that single percentage point creates a $27.2 billion/year 1% Treaty Fund, funds global decentralized clinical trials, and makes every nonprofit’s mission dramatically more feasible. Move 1% from the mountain to the puddle. The puddle becomes a lake. The mountain is still a mountain. Everybody wins except the people who were selling mountain insurance, and even they can pivot.

Why Your Species Only Changes When the Building Is On Fire

Your species only reorganizes resources when things are going badly enough that ignoring the problem becomes more painful than fixing it. This is not a theory. It is the entirety of your political history, from the French Revolution to the New Deal to the creation of NATO. Comfortable humans don’t change things. Uncomfortable humans change everything. Then they get comfortable and stop changing things again.

Climate disaster, military bloat, and technology arrive at the same time. Create a tiny window for change. You call it opportunity, history calls it last chance.

Climate disaster, military bloat, and technology arrive at the same time. Create a tiny window for change. You call it opportunity, history calls it last chance.

Right now, for the first time in 80 years, everything is going wrong at the same time. Military budgets are expanding while everything else gets cut. Trust in government spending priorities has reached “used car salesman” levels. Pandemics exposed the cost of underfunding resilience. Climate disasters have shifted public opinion from “debatable” to “my house is underwater.” And your leaders are searching for a unifying narrative, which is political language for “someone please tell us what to do before we get voted out.”

This is your window. It opens when humans are scared and closes when they get distracted. Based on my 4,297 years of observation, the average window lasts about 18 months before your species discovers a new television show and forgets the crisis entirely.

The Factory Precedent

During World War II, your species did something remarkable. GM built tanks. Ford built B-24 bombers. Frigidaire (yes, the refrigerator people) produced machine guns. Typewriter manufacturers made rifles. Not because they “supported war.” Because the system needed realignment and ignoring it was impossible. Also because the government asked very firmly, in a tone that strongly implied “this isn’t really a question.”

1940s: factories pivot overnight to build tanks. 2020s: charities can’t pivot because forms are hard. You got worse at changing direction.

1940s: factories pivot overnight to build tanks. 2020s: charities can’t pivot because forms are hard. You got worse at changing direction.

Your nonprofit sector is the modern equivalent of those car factories: massive capacity, talented people, pointed at the wrong problem. You have millions of humans optimizing spreadsheets for the wrong budget. The factories pivoted in months. Your nonprofits have been “focused on their core mission” for decades while the core mission gets harder every year. You didn’t get better at focus. You got better at ignoring the context in which your focus operates.

A few years of effort to shift 1% of global budgets could produce more impact than 30 years of incremental programs. Decades during which, I should note, the problems got worse. On Wishonia, we have a word for “doing the same thing for thirty years while results decline.” The word is “hobby.”

“Why Not Just Run Trials Without the Treaty?”

You should. But then what? You’ve built a beautiful garden hose. You’ve optimized its diameter, its nozzle, its flow rate. You’ve published papers about its efficiency. It is the best garden hose your species has ever produced.

Clinical trials are a hose. Money is water. You keep optimizing the hose while the water tank is empty. Engineers solving the wrong problem.

Clinical trials are a hose. Money is water. You keep optimizing the hose while the water tank is empty. Engineers solving the wrong problem.

It’s attached to a pipe with no water.

Your clinical trial infrastructure becomes 12.3x (95% CI: 4.2x-61.4x) more useful when the resource stream feeding it is 10 times larger. You cannot out-engineer a funding problem. Build the hose AND turn on the water. They’re complements, not substitutes.

What 1% Less Violence Buys Every Mission

I’m going to describe what happens when you shift 1% of military budgets, but I’m going to describe it the way I actually observe it, which is as a single upstream change that fixes things your species has been trying to fix separately for decades while refusing to notice they’re all the same problem.

12.3x (95% CI: 4.2x-61.4x) more clinical trial capacity. Diseases get cured instead of managed (the pharmaceutical industry’s least favorite sentence). Militaries emit less pollution (nobody carbon-taxes a tank, but maybe they should). Fewer resource-driven conflicts means fewer refugees means less poverty. Everyone becomes slightly less dead, which is the lowest bar imaginable, and yet.

1 percent solves health, climate, poverty, and war. You put all your skill points into violence and forgot to check if there were alternatives.

1 percent solves health, climate, poverty, and war. You put all your skill points into violence and forgot to check if there were alternatives.

And here is the part that should keep every nonprofit Executive Director awake at night: you stop writing grant proposals and start actually doing your mission. Remember your mission? It was in the brochure. The one you wrote to get the grant. To pay the person who writes the grants. To fund the office where the grant-writing happens. Your organization has become a machine whose primary output is requests for money and whose secondary output is occasionally, accidentally, the thing you set out to do. The treaty fixes this by making the money show up without the begging. Your species calls this “too good to be true,” which is a phrase you use to describe things that are good and true but embarrassing to admit.

On Bribing Nonprofits (Legally)

On Wishonia, when we wanted organizations to cooperate on a shared goal, we explained the goal and they cooperated. On Earth, you need to pay them. This is not a criticism. It’s a design parameter. I’ve learned to work with the species I have, not the species I wish I had.

Asking nonprofits to support a 1% Treaty out of moral obligation is like asking a drowning person to rescue other swimmers. They’re drowning. They need a life preserver, not a guilt trip.

The life preserver: you make the organization rich. Old way: “Here’s $100K. Hope it helps. Submit a 47-page report in 6 months about impacts and learnings. Use the word ‘stakeholder’ at least fourteen times.” New way: “Here’s $50K baseline to get started. Plus $10K for every 10,000 verified referendum votes you drive through your unique link. No cap.” The nonprofit’s most rational path to maximizing their budget becomes: be your most effective mobilization partner. One metric. No ambiguity. Get paid for results. This is how every functional industry works except charity, which explains why every problem charity was invented to solve is still here.

And then the ocean itself: the 1% Treaty Fund receives $27.2 billion annually. Your Decentralized Institutes of Health allocates multi-billion dollar budgets to the diseases your organization exists to fight. When the treaty passes, the grant-writing stops. The money arrives because the treaty says it arrives. You don’t need influence. You don’t need a seat at the table. You need the treaty to pass. Everything after that is automatic, the way gravity is automatic, except instead of pulling things down it pulls money toward curing diseases. (Gravity has never done this. I checked.)

You have two options. Option A: keep competing for finite grants forever, writing proposals, begging foundations, hoping your competitor doesn’t write a better proposal. Option B: help pass the treaty, get paid referral bonuses for every verified referendum vote you drive, and watch $27.2 billion/year flow to your disease area. One involves begging. The other involves getting paid. On Wishonia, this would not require a chapter to explain. But your species is very attached to its suffering, so here we are.

The dogs need to turn around and notice the banquet. I’ve been watching them fight over the bowl for 80 years. The banquet is right there. It has always been right there. The dogs are very focused. They have written reports about the bowl. They have held conferences about bowl strategy. They have hired consultants to optimize bowl access. None of them have turned around.

Turn around.

The Five Stages

Everything above this heading was the why. Everything below it is the how. Getting a nonprofit to support the treaty is five concrete actions, performed in order. Each one has a matching artifact in this chapter.

Stage 1. The organization endorses the treaty. Logo on warondisease.org, name on the coalition page, one public statement. Artifacts: The Outreach Email, The Endorsement Form, This Is Not Lobbying (The Legal Memo), Objection Handling for whoever forwards the “we need to think about this” response.

Stage 2. The organization embeds the voting widget. A permanent iframe on the nonprofit’s site that keeps converting their warm audience indefinitely. Host credibility transfers to the widget; visitors are pre-qualified because they came to the site about the thing the widget is about. This is the single highest-leverage ask in the chapter, and it goes before the Stage 3 newsletter blast so the blast can point at the embed instead of an external URL. See Why Your Org Should Help for the pitch.

Stage 3. The organization shares the treaty with its members. One newsletter mention, one email, one social post, each linking to the embed on the nonprofit’s own site. The distribution list becomes the campaign’s distribution list for a single day; the embed catches the long tail after the blast decays. Artifacts: The Member Activation Email, The Social Post Pack.

Stage 4. The members sign the treaty at warondisease.org or through the org’s embed. Every signature is one more data point in a pressure system pointed at 193 heads of state. The nonprofit does not need to do anything to cause this step; the embed and the member activation email both do it automatically by linking.

Stage 5. The members notify their head of state that the signing task is overdue. At warondisease.org/tasks, every head of state has a public page showing their unsigned 1% Treaty task and its cost-of-delay clock. A member looks up their country, clicks “notify,” and the head of state receives a polite email from a registered voter in their jurisdiction pointing out that the task is still outstanding. This is the stage that matters, because 193 heads of state are the entire bottleneck and they currently receive approximately zero emails about it.

Stage 1 unlocks Stages 2 through 5. The nonprofit’s only real job is Stages 1 through 3. The members do Stages 4 and 5, because the members are the actual leverage. A nonprofit has an email list. Lockheed Martin has a lobbying budget. The email list wins when it knows what to click.

The rest of this chapter is the “knows what to click” part.

Why Your Org Should Help

Every disease-advocacy, peace, or global-health org operates inside the same structural trap: their mission’s budget is 604 (95% CI: 453-894)x smaller than the budget that makes their mission harder. This campaign fixes the upstream cause. The voting infrastructure, the attribution dashboard, the embed widget, the legal analysis, the cost-effectiveness modeling, the pre-written outreach copy, and the ongoing coordination are already built and staffed, at warondisease.org, at no cost to any partner org. The one thing the campaign cannot produce on its own is audience reach. That is the only thing a partner org contributes. Every other part of the cost-to-impact equation has been absorbed before the conversation started.

So the question for a partner org is narrower than it first appears. It is not “should we take on a new campaign.” It is “should we point some of our existing audience at an already-built mission amplifier that compresses our own core problem by a factor of 12.3x (95% CI: 4.2x-61.4x).” The answer in most cases is obvious. The argument below is what to hand the EDs and program officers who want the obvious spelled out.

The argument works for any form of participation: endorse, embed, share, donate staff time, allocate an Ad Grant. Use whichever parts land with whichever audience. Lead with the strongest for that org; most conversations hit two or three.

Total time cost: under one hour of staff time. Endorsement is one form signed by the ED. The embed is one iframe a webmaster pastes into the CMS. The newsletter and social posts are pre-written in this chapter and can be scheduled in a single sitting. First deployment runs about an hour end-to-end across all three org-facing stages, with zero ongoing overhead after the embed goes live. Most objections this pitch hits are time objections. That number is the answer.

The pitch has three arguments. Every recipient is at least one of rational, greedy, or altruistic. At least one of these lands.

If they are altruistic. Every day this wave reaches a verified majority of humanity sooner, about 150 thousand fewer humans die from preventable disease, and roughly two billion fewer person-days of disease suffering accumulate. Helping shifts that date forward by a measurable amount of time. Declining to help is a decision that has a body count, and the body count is known in advance.

If they are rational. Their org can take this as a grant-application one-pager and raise money off it. Cost per voter through their channel. Lives saved per voter (2.6 lives). Suffering hours averted per voter (468 thousand hours). Funders that write checks against cost-per-DALY numbers have never seen a number this favorable.

If they are greedy. Once the prize pool is seeded, voters referred through their channel earn their org a share of the eventual payout proportional to the size of the chain they seeded. Their org can absorb that as a new revenue line or pass it through to their referred voters as a further incentive.

Most recipients hit two of these, or all three. It does not matter which. The ask is the same.

Additional benefits most orgs underweight:

  • Likely the largest single-org attributable impact in nonprofit history. If they drive voters through their channel, each additional verified human adds 2.6 lives and 468 thousand hours of averted suffering to their attribution if the treaty passes. Probability-discount the outcome by any factor you want. It still beats the cumulative lifetime output of the largest global-health charities, for the marginal cost of adding an iframe or sending an email. No other nonprofit in the world can put a number like that in its annual report, because no other nonprofit is adjacent to an intervention at this scale.
  • Their donors and staff (and their families) personally become healthier and richer. If the treaty takes hold at the rates modeled in GDP Trajectories150, cumulative lifetime income per person multiplies by 4.17x (95% CI: 2.06x-9.09x) relative to the current trajectory, with average income by year 20 reaching $99,861 (95% CI: $47,101-$222,032). Healthy-lifespan gains are in the same chapter. Everyone who helps benefits directly alongside their beneficiaries.
  • Being on the founding-coalition list is ongoing brand value. Once the treaty passes, the list of orgs that helped launch it becomes the list every donor asks about. Early movers end up on the plaque. Late movers do not.
  • Their existing donors are the exact audience that converts. People who already gave to a health or peace charity are pre-qualified to care about disease eradication. This is not a cold audience.
  • Seeding a new democratic primitive. The wishocratic allocation mechanism, where every human votes on public-goods funding priorities, could be extended to all public-goods funding after the treaty passes. If it catches on, it could reshape how global public goods are funded for the rest of human history. The orgs that helped seed it in the largest global referendum ever conducted get to point at that record indefinitely.
  • Peer-org network effect. Once three or four similar organizations sign on, not signing on starts to look like lagging. Social proof is a real force in the nonprofit sector.
  • They can aim their unused Google Ad Grant at the campaign (embed-specific). Every qualifying 501(c)(3) gets $10,000 a month ($120,000 a year) in free Google Ads through the Google Ad Grants program. Most nonprofits do not spend their full allocation because they cannot generate enough targeted landing pages to use it. An embed of the widget on their site gives their Ad Grant a mission-aligned landing page to drive traffic to, converting dormant ad dollars into attributable voters without asking them to touch their operating budget.

What a decline means. An org that declines is not choosing inaction; it is choosing something else with the same staff hours. The follow-up question is specific: what is that something else, and what is its cost per life-year saved? 2.6 lives and 468 thousand hours suffering-hours are averted per voter acquired, at a cost per DALY of $0.00177 (95% CI: $0.000715-$0.00412). Whatever the alternative activity is, it should beat that number, measured the same way. If it does, the campaign wants to hear it and learn from it. If the alternative has never been benchmarked against anything, the decline is an allocation from disease sufferers toward an activity the org has not compared to its cost, and the delay has a body count that accrues during the conversation.

Outreach cadence. Send ten outreach emails per week. Target fifty nonprofits in the first ninety days. Health charities, disease-specific foundations, peace organizations, EA orgs, development foundations. At a ten-percent response rate, that is five partnerships. Five partnerships is tens of millions of warm impressions per month. No marginal cost, very large ceiling, three independent routes to yes.

The Cost-Effectiveness Argument

Nonprofits evaluate new asks by comparing the cost per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted against whatever else they could be funding. Insecticide-treated bed nets are the GiveWell benchmark for “unusually cost-effective.” Here is how the treaty compares, on three separate accounting methods:

Measurement Cost per DALY averted
Bed nets (GiveWell benchmark)

$89 (95% CI: $78-$100)
Direct pragmatic trial funding

$0.842 (95% CI: $0.242-$1.75)
Treaty advocacy campaign

$0.00177 (95% CI: $0.000715-$0.00412)
Net of lifetime peace dividend Negative (pays for itself)

Direct trial funding. A donor pays for pragmatic trials at $929 (95% CI: $97-$3,000) per patient instead of $41,000 (95% CI: $20,000-$120,000) per patient traditional. This is the cost-effectiveness of the intervention itself, already roughly 100x better than bed nets.

Treaty advocacy campaign. A donor funds the campaign to pass the treaty (~$1 billion total, shared across many funders). The trials are then paid for by redirected military spending, not new philanthropic money. Same 565 billion DALYs (95% CI: 361 billion DALYs-877 billion DALYs) averted. Only the campaign costs anything. Roughly five orders of magnitude better than bed nets, if the numbers survive economist scrutiny.

Net of lifetime peace dividend. A 1% reduction also eliminates war externalities (environmental damage, refugee costs, lost human capital, trade disruption). The estimated lifetime peace dividend is $290,052 (95% CI: $234,510-$352,173) per person. The campaign pays for itself before a single trial enrolls a patient, and then keeps paying.

Pick whichever accounting the funder finds least embarrassing to explain at the board meeting. All three are unusually good.

The Outreach Email

The first and usually only email sent to a nonprofit. One shot, all three asks, everything attached. No escalating commitment, no follow-up campaign to chase them across Stages 1 through 3. They do it or they don’t. Customize the bracketed fields and delete this line before sending.

Note

Subject: [Org Name] + 1% Treaty: full package, under an hour of staff time

Hi [Name],

[Org Name]’s work on [their focus area] is directly relevant to something we’re building.

The 1% Treaty is a proposal for all nations to simultaneously redirect 1% of military spending ($27.2 billion) to pragmatic clinical trials. Every nation cuts equally, so no country’s military capability changes relative to any other. Trial capacity increases 12.3x (95% CI: 4.2x-61.4x). The backlog of 6,650 untreated diseases drops from 443 years to 36 years. Whatever condition [Org Name]’s community is affected by is almost certainly in that backlog.

The proposal, in three parts, under an hour of staff time total:

  1. Endorse. Sign the attached endorsement form. [Org Name]’s logo appears on the coalition page at warondisease.org and locks in founding-member status. About 15 minutes of ED time.
  2. Embed + aim your Ad Grant at it. Paste the attached iframe snippet into your site. The attached pre-built Google Ads campaign (full template at Google Ads Campaign Template) drops into [Org Name]’s existing $120K/year Google Ad Grant and points it at the embed. Converts passively from day one, zero ongoing overhead. About 30 minutes for a webmaster, plus 20 minutes loading the Ad Grant campaign (or share OAuth access and the campaign is loaded for you).
  3. Share once. Use the attached pre-written newsletter and three social posts. They link to the embed on your own site. About 15 minutes to schedule.

The trade. One hour of [Org Name]’s staff time buys permanent attribution to every voter the channel delivers from now until the treaty passes. Each voter counts as 2.6 lives saved and 468 thousand hours suffering-hours averted if the treaty passes. Concrete floor: once the embed is live, [Org Name]’s existing Google Ad Grant ($10K/month, $120K/year in free Google Ads that most 501(c)(3)s leave on the table for lack of mission-aligned landing pages) pointed at the embed can deliver verified voters every year at middle-of-road conversion economics. Newsletter and social reach stack on top. No other action [Org Name] takes this year comes close to that leverage.

What [Org Name] also gets:

  • Permanent public attribution. Every voter [Org Name]’s channel delivers is tagged to [Org Name] on the coalition dashboard, visible forever to every funder, board, donor, and auditor. Show up in next year’s annual report with a number nonprofit annual reports have never held.
  • A new funding line. Global-health, peace, and policy funders fund coalition work on this issue. Coalition membership opens eligibility. The attached funder proposal template is performance-based. Your foundation contacts pay your org per verified voter acquired, at a cost per DALY ($0.00177 (95% CI: $0.000715-$0.00412)) that beats bed nets ($89 (95% CI: $78-$100)) by orders of magnitude. Forward it to three of your funders. It is scaffolded so they pay on delivery, not on staff time.
  • A founding-coalition plaque. Early movers are named on warondisease.org permanently. Late movers are not.

Attached:

  • Endorsement form
  • Embed code snippet (three lines of HTML)
  • Newsletter template + three social posts
  • Pre-built Google Ads campaign (ad copy, keywords, targeting, bidding strategy) for [Org Name]’s existing $10K/month Google Ad Grant. Full template: Google Ads Campaign Template. Load in about 20 minutes, or share OAuth access and we load it for you
  • Funder proposal template (performance-based, for your own fundraising)
  • Legal memo (“This Is Not Lobbying”) for your general counsel
  • Cost-effectiveness argument for your board

Full treaty text: The 1% Treaty (Articles). Impact analysis: Economic Impact of the 1% Treaty. Leader accountability dashboard: https://warondisease.org/tasks.

If [Org Name] is doing this, any blocker on finishing all three items this week? If [Org Name] is not doing this, what is your team doing instead that beats 2.6 lives saved per voter acquired on a cost-per-DALY basis? The campaign genuinely wants to know. If there is a better allocation, we want to learn from it.

[Your name] [Your role] [Contact]

The Member Activation Email

The email for Stage 3. The nonprofit drops this into its existing newsletter or sends it as a one-off to its list. Customize the bracketed fields.

Note

Subject: The most important 30 seconds of your week

[Org Name] has joined a global coalition endorsing the 1% Treaty, a proposal to redirect 1% of military spending to pragmatic clinical trials. We’re asking for 30 seconds of your time, in two clicks.

Click 1: Sign the treaty at warondisease.org. Your signature is one of the data points telling 193 heads of state that the public is paying attention.

Click 2: Notify your head of state at warondisease.org/tasks. Find your country, see the overdue signing task, click the notify button. Your head of state receives a polite email explaining that a registered voter has noticed the task is still outstanding.

Why this matters: governments currently spend 604 (95% CI: 453-894) times more on weapons than on clinical trials to figure out which medicines actually work. A 1% reduction, applied simultaneously by every nation, does not weaken anyone’s military (because everyone cuts equally) and generates $27.2 billion per year for trials. That funds 12.3x (95% CI: 4.2x-61.4x) more clinical trials. The treatment backlog that currently takes 443 years to clear drops to 36 years.

This is one of the most cost-effective global health actions available this week, by a wide margin versus benchmarks like bed nets. We know because we checked.

Two clicks. 30 seconds. Links again:

If you read this far, please forward the email to one person who also doesn’t want to die of a preventable disease.

Thank you.

[Org Name]

The Social Post Pack

Three short posts and one long post for Stage 3. Schedule them in your CMS; pin the first one for the week.

Short post 1 (the hook):

Your government spends 604 (95% CI: 453-894)x more on weapons than on figuring out which medicines work. The 1% Treaty fixes this. 30 seconds to sign: warondisease.org

Short post 2 (the math):

A simultaneous 1% cut to global military spending preserves every country’s military balance AND funds 12.3x (95% CI: 4.2x-61.4x) more clinical trials. Treatment backlog drops from 443 years to 36 years. Sign: warondisease.org

Short post 3 (the notification):

Every head of state has an overdue task: sign the 1% Treaty. See yours at warondisease.org/tasks. Click the notify button. That’s the whole step.

Long post (LinkedIn):

Your lifetime risk of dying from terrorism is vanishingly small. Your lifetime risk of dying from a disease is 100%. The global budget does not reflect this. Governments spend enough on military to buy 850 rounds/person/year (95% CI: 583 rounds/person/year-1,274 rounds/person/year) bullets for every person on Earth every year, while only 15 diseases per year receive their first effective treatment.

The 1% Treaty proposes a simultaneous 1% reduction in military spending across all signatory nations, redirected to pragmatic clinical trials. Because every nation cuts equally, no country’s military capability changes relative to any other. The balance stays identical. But $27.2 billion per year frees up for clinical research.

[Org Name] has endorsed the treaty and is asking our community to do two things:

  1. Sign at warondisease.org (10 seconds)
  2. Notify your head of state at warondisease.org/tasks (20 seconds)

That is the entire ask. 30 seconds. Please share with anyone who also doesn’t want to die of a preventable disease.

The Embed Snippet

The iframe that goes on the partner org’s site. [Org Name] does not write any code; the snippet is auto-generated per-org at warondisease.org/institutes with the org’s unique slug baked into the URL. Attribution to [Org Name] is automatic for every voter who casts a ballot through this iframe.

Generic structure, for anyone curious what gets pasted:

<iframe
  src="https://warondisease.org/survey/{ORG-SLUG}"
  width="100%"
  height="800"
  frameborder="0"
  title="1% Treaty — Referendum Ballot">
</iframe>

The real version arrives with {ORG-SLUG} replaced and a copy-to-clipboard button, at warondisease.org/organizations/[id] once the org is approved. Paste into the target page’s CMS. Drop-in anywhere: a dedicated campaign page, a sidebar on the homepage, a take-action tab. The widget is responsive and converts passively; nothing else is required for attribution to start flowing.

The Endorsement Form

The form the organization signs for Stage 1. This becomes the public record of their endorsement.

Note1% Treaty Organizational Endorsement

We, the undersigned organization, endorse the 1% Treaty and support the reallocation of 1% of global military expenditure toward pragmatic clinical trials integrated into standard healthcare delivery.

We endorse this treaty because:

Full treaty text: The 1% Treaty (Articles)

Organization: ___________________________

Authorized representative: ___________________________

Title: ___________________________

Date: ___________________________

Organization website: ___________________________

☐ We consent to our organization’s name and logo appearing on warondisease.org as a coalition endorser.

The Funder Proposal Template

For nonprofits that want to raise money from their own foundation contacts to run the campaign through their channels. The nonprofit forwards this template (or a condensed version) to their funders. It replaces the old “fund a coordinator at $X” ask, which in practice is how campaigns raise $100K and spend it on conferences, strategy offsites, and consultants who produce slide decks nobody reads.

This template is structured so the funder pays on verified delivery, with explicit exclusions on the waste categories that swallow most coalition grants. Condensed here; expand to full memo length before formal submission.

Title: Performance-Based Funding Request: [Org Name]’s 1% Treaty Voter Acquisition Channel

Summary. [Org Name] commits to driving [target] verified referendum voters through its unique attribution link at warondisease.org over [timeframe]. Payment is performance-based: a small fixed baseline for campaign execution costs, plus a per-voter bonus paid only on verified delivery. The attribution infrastructure (unique URLs, dashboard, voter verification, embed widget) is already built by warondisease.org at no cost to [Org Name]; the funder is not paying to reinvent any of that. Every dollar the funder deploys has a cost-per-DALY number benchmarked against GiveWell standards, posted publicly, and verifiable at any time.

The math, for your cost-per-DALY worksheet.

Line Value Source
Lives saved per voter acquired

2.6 lives

 Treaty pass × DALYs averted × attribution share
Suffering-hours averted per voter

468 thousand hours

 Same chain
Standard QALY value (economic)

$150,000 (95% CI: $100,000-$199,282)

 Conventional economic literature
Treaty campaign cost per DALY

$0.00177 (95% CI: $0.000715-$0.00412)

 Full methodology in parameters appendix
Bed nets cost per DALY (GiveWell benchmark)

$89 (95% CI: $78-$100)

 GiveWell

Even at aggressive probability discounts on treaty passage, the cost per DALY beats bed nets by orders of magnitude. The full three-accounting-method comparison is in The Cost-Effectiveness Argument.

On the per-voter denominator. Lives-saved-per-voter divides total projected lives saved by the verified majority-of-humanity coordination target, not by the smaller Chenoweth tipping-point benchmark. This is the conservative public attribution: the campaign asks people to build a majority humans can see, so the impact math uses that larger denominator. The 3.5% (95% CI: 1%-10%) benchmark remains useful as evidence that political pressure can become decisive before the full target is reached.

What warondisease.org already provides, at no cost to [Org Name].

  • A unique referral URL keyed to [Org Name]. Voters delivered through this link are auto-attributed.
  • The embed widget (three lines of HTML, drop anywhere on the site) and the voting flow it points to.
  • A pre-built Google Ads campaign (ad copy, keywords, targeting, bidding strategy) configured for voter acquisition. Full template: Google Ads Campaign Template. [Org Name] loads it into the org’s existing $10K/month Google Ad Grant in about 20 minutes, or shares OAuth access for the campaign team to load it. Most qualifying 501(c)(3)s underuse their Ad Grant allocation for lack of mission-aligned landing pages; the embed plus this pre-built campaign converts that dormant free ad spend into attributable voters.
  • A live coalition dashboard showing voters delivered by org, cost per voter, and cost per DALY.
  • Voter verification, signature validation, and anti-fraud filtering.
  • Pre-written newsletter and social post templates (in this chapter).
  • The endorsement form, legal memo, and cost-effectiveness argument (in this chapter).
  • Ongoing maintenance of all of the above.

Setup: email [campaign contact] and receive the referral URL, embed snippet, and dashboard login within 24 hours. No code is written at [Org Name]’s end beyond pasting an iframe. This is why the baseline in the payment structure below is small. Nothing centralized is being rebuilt.

Payment structure.

Component Amount Trigger
Baseline (campaign execution costs) $5,000 On signing, one-time
Per-voter performance bonus $1.00 per verified voter Monthly, on verified delivery
Cap Funder-specified (default: uncapped) None

On the baseline. The $5,000 covers [Org Name]’s real marginal costs during ramp-up: roughly 20–40 hours of staff time to deploy the embed, write a newsletter from the template, schedule social posts, and sub-recruit peer orgs; small prime-the-pump ad spend before the Google Ad Grant overflow kicks in; optional creative production (graphics, a short video, translated copy). Kept small deliberately. Most of the money is tied to delivered voters, and efficient orgs earn past $5,000 in the first month.

On the $1.00 per-voter anchor. This number matches the established performance-grant benchmark in How to Turn Grant Applicants into Billionaires ($10K per 10,000 verified votes) and the $1–2 per voter implied by the Voter Acquisition Grant (100K voters for $100–250K all-in). It is distinct from the $5 (95% CI: $2-$10) direct incentive paid to the voter and referrer, which comes from a separate pool and does not hit this budget.

Pricing as a market, not a mandate. $1.00 per voter is an anchor, not a fixed rate. An org with a high-engagement list may propose $0.50. An org that needs to front ad spend into a cold channel may propose $1.50. Funders can accept, decline, or counter. The rate is whatever a willing nonprofit and a willing funder agree on. The performance structure is the accountability: if the org delivers, the funder pays per the agreed rate; if the org does not deliver, the funder does not pay. No milestone triggers, no pause clauses, no dead-money scenarios. Pay on delivery, per voter, monthly.

Restricted-use clause. Funds may be used for: staff time directly allocated to campaign execution (writing the newsletter from the template, scheduling social posts, deploying the embed iframe in the CMS, outreach to peer nonprofits for sub-recruitment), paid advertising overflow beyond the org’s free Google Ad Grant allocation (Meta, X, LinkedIn, programmatic), and creative production tied to shipping deliverables (graphics, short video, translated copy).

Funds may not be used for: conferences, retreats, consultants whose outputs are not deliverable campaign artifacts, board or advisory compensation, travel unrelated to voter acquisition, “strategy development” without a specific shipping deliverable, new hires unrelated to the campaign, or general operating overhead outside the campaign.

Public reporting. [Org Name] publishes a monthly campaign dashboard at [org URL]/campaign-dashboard, showing: voters delivered, cost per voter achieved, cost per DALY achieved, cumulative attributable lives saved, and spend by category. Funder and general public can audit in real time. The public dashboard is the accountability mechanism.

Legal. See This Is Not Lobbying (The Legal Memo). No changes to [Org Name]’s 501(c)(3) status result from this campaign. Voter acquisition for a proposed international treaty is issue advocacy, not lobbying.

The ask. Fund [Org Name] at a $5,000 baseline plus a per-voter rate (anchor: $1.00, negotiable) up to a delivery target of [target] voters within [timeframe]. Maximum funder exposure: $5,000 + (rate × target). At $1/voter: $15,000 for 10,000 voters, $105,000 for 100,000 voters, $1,005,000 for 1,000,000. Delivery is public through the warondisease.org dashboard; the funder pays monthly in arrears against voters actually delivered, never advanced.

Close every proposal with: “What per-voter rate and delivery target would make this the best cost-per-DALY grant in your current portfolio, and if we can hit it, is there any blocker to signing?”

Outreach Sequencing

Five steps. Do them in order.

Step 1. Identify warm contacts (week 1). List every organization the outreach person has a prior relationship with. Prioritize by strength of relationship (will they respond?), mission alignment (disease, health, longevity, peace, poverty), and community size.

Step 2. Get the first three yeses (weeks 1-3). Contact the 3-5 warmest relationships first. Use The Outreach Email. The goal is logos on the coalition page before going wide, because social proof compounds.

Step 3. Go wide with social proof (weeks 3-8). Once there are founding members, update the outreach email to include “[X organizations] are already on board, including [names].” Contact 200+ organizations in batches of 50. Track responses in a simple spreadsheet: Org Name, Contact, Date Contacted, Response, Follow-Up Date, Endorsed (Y/N), Logo Received (Y/N).

Step 4. Follow up (ongoing).

  • No response after 5 days: one short follow-up.
  • No response after 10 days: one more, even shorter.
  • No response after 15 days: move on.
  • “We need to think”: follow up in 2 weeks.
  • “We have concerns”: offer a call immediately.
  • “What would we need to change?”: the most valuable response. Incorporate reasonable feedback; reject changes that gut the substance.

Step 5. Announce the coalition (months 2-3). Once there are 10+ endorsements: publish the coalition page with logos, write a press release, have each founding member share with its community, submit to the EA Forum with economist endorsement if available.

Objection Handling

The top objections, with the top answer to each. If the same objection keeps appearing, revise the outreach email so it preempts it.

“This is too political.” The treaty asks for a simultaneous reduction, preserving military balance. It does not favor or oppose any nation, party, or candidate. It is no more political than advocating for increased NIH funding, which hundreds of 501(c)(3)s already do. The underlying fact is not partisan: everyone’s lifetime risk of dying from a disease is 100%, and the current budget does not reflect this.

“This will never work.” The International Campaign to Ban Landmines started with one staff member and six NGOs in 1992. By 1997, 122 nations signed the Ottawa Treaty and the campaign won the Nobel Peace Prize. A 1% cut is historically trivial: pre-WWII US military spending was 96.7% lower than today’s peacetime budget. After WWII, the US cut military spending by 87.6% in two years and produced the largest economic boom in modern history. A 1% simultaneous reduction is rounding error compared to what has already been done safely.

“Our board won’t approve this.” Send them This Is Not Lobbying (The Legal Memo). It addresses every IRS concern. Offer a 20-minute call with the board, or a written memo tailored to their specific bylaws.

“We don’t want to link to that website.” Link to the treaty text itself. Organizations endorse the treaty Articles, not any particular framing of them. They can use whichever version they are comfortable with.

“We’re too small to matter.” Every endorsement adds social proof. The first 10 matter more than the next 100. Small organizations that move fast become founding members, which is a permanently better position than large organizations that move slow.

“What about our existing campaigns?” This complements existing work and does not replace or compete with anything. End-to-end first deployment is under one hour of staff time across all three org-facing stages: about 15 minutes to endorse, about 30 minutes for a webmaster to paste the embed iframe into the CMS, and about 15 minutes to schedule the pre-written newsletter and social posts from this chapter. After that, the embed converts passively with zero ongoing overhead. The ask is also a potential new-funding unlock: global-health, peace, and policy funders increasingly fund coalition work on this issue, and coalition membership opens eligibility.

“The numbers seem too good to be true.” They are calculated with 95% confidence intervals and 90+ cited sources. The full methodology is transparent in the parameters and calculations appendix. Offer to connect them with an economist reviewer, or invite them to review the model themselves.

That is the whole chapter. The outreach email bundles the full ask (endorse, embed, share) with every artifact attached, so first contact is also last contact for orgs that say yes. If an organization commits, confirm the embed is live on their site and the newsletter is scheduled, then move on to the next org. If an organization declines, ask what would change their mind and what they are doing with the same staff hours that beats this on cost per DALY. Incorporate useful feedback; retry in 60 days. If the same objection appears three times in a week, update the outreach email to preempt it.

The bottleneck between here and 565 billion DALYs (95% CI: 361 billion DALYs-877 billion DALYs) averted is not the math, the legal analysis, the templates, or the treaty itself. It is the number of organizations that have opened the conversation with their members. That number is a function of how many outreach emails get sent this week.

Do the next thing on the sequencing list.