VDP 57.1 - Use Atila to manage the VitaDAO Longevity Fellowship

[tomiwa1a]

I propose that we use Atila to manage the VitaDAO Longevity Fellowship (fellowship proposal).

Atila is a platform that makes it easy to create and manage crypto grants.

Here is a video demo and slide deck showing how Atila works.

I’m the founder of Atila and I’m also very involved in the DeSci and VitaDAO community, crypto community, and I hold VITA tokens. I say this to show value alignment and my experience with what makes a good DeSci and crypto grants program.

Why VITADao should use Atila:

• Supports multiple people to be invited to score, rank and review applications (example).
• Message multiple applicants at once and by category (finalists only, winners only, unsubmitted applications, everyone etc.)
• Leverage Atila’s existing reach and audience. Grants on Atila will reach Atila’s over 3,500 existing registered users, 6,000 monthly active users, 121k likes on TikTok
  • The fellowship can reach a wider group of people. Especially students, an ideal market for crypto adoption.
• Atila will also help with promoting and marketing the scholarship. Atila has past experience promoting and marketing scholarships and grants: Atila marketing and design portfolio, Skateboards for Hope Case Study, past scholarship winners.

Atila’s platform make it easier to manage the applications and collaborate than the current process of an Airtable form. Atila’s marketing support will also help ensure it reaches a wider audience.

[bowtiedshrike]

Not sure how the community will be able to evaulate this proposal without knowing the cost to VitaDAO. Is this being offered for $0/year?

That user base seems low, and not targeted to researchers or biomedical science. What sort of conversions do you get?

ProposalCentral does a lot of those things as well, and is more familiar to the scientific community. What do you think Atila does better than working through ProposalCentral?

[vincent]

Awesome of you to initiate, hesitant for those reasons

• We have a smooth and easy application process via airtable that also acts as crm
• Don‘t want to rely on third party solutions we have less control over
• Distribution: wouldn’t expect many new applicants coming via this
• Additional effort: not sure it this is worth any extra cost or the additional implicit cost of having to switch over without clear benefits imo

[vincent]

Agree with this! https://proposalcentral.com/ and similar platform might be awesome to explore for our core funding proposals with VitaDAO, do you think they also might make sense for these small grants?

[tomiwa1a]

• The cost is 9% of scholarship amount. Here is the pricing page.

That user base seems low, and not targeted to researchers or biomedical science. What sort of conversions do you get?

• We get around 100-200 applications per scholarship. The constraint is usually the amount of reviewers for each scholarhip. That number can increase based on the bandwidth of how many applications the review panel can select.
• If part of the goal of these grants are to onboard more people into the VitaDAO community. I think beyond just researchers, we should target undergrad and graduate students that have published research. Atila has existing connections in this community and it’s an ideal market to onboard into crypto, because they will be more receptive towards VITADAO’s mission.

What do you think Atila does better than working through ProposalCentral?

• Atila allows multiple people to contribute funds towards an existing grant. Similar to GoFundMe
• Looking at the proposal central website, it seems a lot more sales-y (no easily accesible pricing page, have to contact sales to Get a Demo), meanwhile Atila is built to be more self-serve
• Atila will actively go out and promote the Grants for you, helping you reach a new audience

[vincent]

Imo too expensive for not that much of an improvement, makes the user experience more complicated imo and downsides of not having full control over the data and experience… wouldn’t be supportive of this being the main initiator and lead of the fellowship, seems like costly + extra work without much upside

[bowtiedshrike]

I’ve used ProposalCentral to look for grants and apply for them. I’ve also peer reviewed using that system. From an admin end, I have no experience w/them. A lot of smaller foundations use them, and even American Heart switched from their own grant system to Proposal Central.

I think it would improve the visibility of VitaDAO grants, since people searching for funding opps will see the grant information. When searching for funding opps, it was helpful to me to see one summary page for ‘here’s who’s eligible’ ‘here’s what materials you need’ ‘here’s the timeline’ followed by the details, and posted more than a week or two in advance. Need to include the F&A info, and other rules for the institutions, but that can go at the end.

Depending on the access costs and how it works from the admin-side, ProposalCentral might be worth doing everything through one system. If the current system works, though, may not need to upgrade yet.