Non-Partisan Pooled Funds: Elections Edition

Last updated September 6, 2022

As the democracy field has grown over the past few years, pooled funds in the space have proliferated, each using their own frameworks and strategies to guide grantmaking in support of American democracy. Pooled funds can be a useful resource for donors looking for strategic and nimble giving opportunities. This is particularly true in the fast-moving landscape ahead of a major election. This donor guide is intended to help donors navigate the space and identify pooled funds that align with their own giving interests, with a focus on funds supporting non-partisan work that helps ensure free and fair elections. This guide is an updated version of a resource that the Democracy Funders Network created in 2020. A revised edition later this year will extend beyond a focus on elections to include additional pooled funds that support other important democracy-related causes.

Why Pooled Funds

A pooled fund is a collaborative funding vehicle that allows donors to contribute resources to be regranted to a variety of organizations and initiatives through an expert-driven grantmaking process. While they are not a fit for all funders, pooled funds have several distinct benefits for donors and for the field more broadly. They:

  • Help money move efficiently to top organizations in an aligned manner, increasing the likelihood that funds will be deployed where and when they are needed most.

  • Often offer an added layer of accountability through the inclusion of data tracking and evaluation practices.

  • Connect donors with experts who can offer nuanced, field-wide, strategic insights.

Why Election Funds

This guide is intended to orient donors to non-partisan pooled funds working to strengthen election infrastructure, engage voters, and broadly ensure that free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power endure as key aspects of American democracy.

The integrity of the U.S. election system is under threat like never before. Since 2016, we have seen rising threats of violence against election administrators, legislative and legal attacks on voting rights, and a flood of mis- and dis-information attempting to mislead voters. These threats are now acute, and we anticipate that they will continue to escalate through at least 2024. The pooled funds featured on this list are supporting urgent work to prepare for the 2022 election, and are resourcing and building the nonpartisan election support field in anticipation of the 2024 election.

These pooled funds are approaching the work to protect our elections with a variety of strategies, tactics, and priorities. Their work ranges from turning out low-propensity voters to responding to political violence or other election crises.

We welcome your questions or comments in response to this guide Our hope is that it is a helpful orientation tool to the landscape of options for election-related pooled funding, and that any discussion it sparks can contribute to further alignment and impact in the field. For questions or more information, contact Carly Straus, Program Director of the Democracy Funders Network, at carly@thirdplateau.com.

Criteria for Inclusion

We distinguished “pooled funds” from other collaborative funding efforts for this resource by including funds that 1) allow donors or foundations to easily contribute without requiring deeper engagement and 2) aggregate and disburse money to groups on the ground through an expert process. That said, these are subjective assessments, and inclusion on this list is not a perfect science.

This guide is exclusively focused on pooled funds doing election-related work; an expanded guide also featuring pooled funds working in other realms of the democracy field such as social cohesion and media and journalism will be available in late Fall 2022. As a cross-ideological network, we chose not to include funds in this guide that we deemed to have explicitly partisan or ideological goals. However, there are a number of pooled funds doing important election-related work with a partisan or ideological lens, and if you’d like to learn more about those we invite you to reach out to our team. We also did not include pooled funds with a regional focus, which were beyond the scope of this resource. Finally, we determined funds to be funder collaboratives as opposed to pooled funds if they require ongoing and deep participation by donors or if participating donors collectively make funding decisions.*

How to Use This Guide

An interactive gallery of pooled funds is embedded below. Each fund is listed along with the institution that hosts it (if applicable), primary categories it works in, a short description, contact person, and website link if available. We have also indicated whether the fund is 501(c)(3) or (c)(4), or both; if (c)(3) and (c)(4) funds are related, the complementary fund is listed in the “associated funds” area.

Click anywhere in a fund’s card to expand it and see all its category tags and full description. You can use the filter button to narrow down the list by category or by (c)(3) vs. (c)(4) activity. The list is alphabetical by fund name by default, but you can sort by any other piece of visible information using the sort button.

We have tagged funds with the following category designations, which you can use to sort or filter the list:

  • Civic & voter engagement - educating voters about key issues and voting processes, registering them to vote, and mobilizing them to turn out

  • Voter protection - preventing voter suppression and other forms of disenfranchisement; ensuring all eligible voters are able to cast a ballot and have it be counted; expanding voting rights

  • Information environment - strengthening fact-based and local journalism, combatting mis- and dis-information, and building the storytelling, narrative development, and communications capacities of the democracy field

  • Democracy reform - promoting structural and policy reforms aimed at creating greater representation, fairness, participation, transparency, and predictability in the American political system

  • Election administration - ensuring election administration systems are modern, secure, well-funded, and well-staffed

  • Election crisis planning - preventing and responding to efforts to interfere with or overturn election results

  • Political violence - preventing and mitigating the effects of political violence, defined as acts or threats of violence targeted towards specific groups or individuals with the intent or effect of chilling civic and political participation

You can expand the view or download a CSV of this information using the buttons at the bottom right of the interactive gallery.

To download a PDF version of this information, click here.

* Even though the Piper Fund and Piper Action Fund call themselves donor collaboratives, they meet the criteria for pooled fund based on the parameters we have outlined here.