Before figuring out your funding & sponsorship strategy, you should have a robust understanding of what your club will look like and what funding would go toward. A great way to do this is by:
Most universities offer funding to your group — if you can, try to take advantage of this. You can learn more about how to get funding from your university on the website of your Student Union, or looking up “[YOUR UNIVERSITY] club funding.”
However, university funding sometimes doesn’t work well:
In short: most universities are heavily bureaucratic, and getting funding from heavily bureaucratic institutions often involves dealing with loads of bureaucratic red tape.
Fortunately, the world finds forecasting useful — sufficiently useful that your club is quite likely to find funding sources externally! Most forecasting clubs find most of their funding from external sources.
Before you continue, however, note that many universities have policies for using external funding as a club. Be sure to follow whatever policies your university has.
Open Philanthropy (OP) is interested in funding general expenses for university forecasting groups (e.g. food and supplies for events, outreach materials like posters and flyers, website costs — see full list below), and some forecasting clubs have both applied and received funding from OP. The application should take less than an hour, excluding time spent thinking about how to make your club go well (e.g. completing the Semester planning guide, etc).
<aside> 🔗 Info; direct link to the application form.
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Open Philanthropy has been quite interested in forecasting, and given grants to many organizations central to the forecasting community — you can see some of them here.