For the first 13 years, P4A took place at the end of the calendar year. While it was a lot of fun to coincide with the holiday giving spirit, December is an extremely busy time for all of us. So in 2020, after careful consideration, we decided to move Project for Awesome to a different time of the year. The 2021 P4A was the first to take place in February, and the next P4A will take place February 17th-19th, 2023.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at [email protected].

It will be live at projectforawesome.com/live on February 17th (beginning at 12:00pm EST) to February 19th (ending at 11:59am EST). Follow @proj4awesome on Twitter for updates on the livestream when we get closer to the date.

We go all day and night, so just show up whenever you can.

There’s no magical formula to getting your video featured. If we featured them all, we’d be streaming for several years. However, you can increase your chances by following these guidelines:

1. Submit your video to the Project for Awesome website! Submissions will open at 12am EST on February 1st, and they’ll close 48 hours before the livestream starts at 11:59am EST on February 15th. The earlier you submit your video, the better, because people will have more time to watch it and vote for it.
2. Make sure your video looks nice. Have a bright and engaging thumbnail. See this year's graphic assets here. Lighting the video well also does wonders for its appeal! More video making tips are at the bottom of this page.
3. Talk about a charity that’s important to you! We try to avoid featuring multiple videos about the same charity, so if you can share a story or experience with a unique charity, your video is more likely to be selected.
4. It should be clear that your video is a Project for Awesome video. It should be uploaded near the dates of the campaign (if it was on YouTube long before submissions opened, that’s a pretty clear indicator it wasn’t made for P4A). Don’t forget to mention the P4A in your video, and encourage viewers to go to projectforawesome.com and vote for their favorite charities.
5. Keep it clean. There will be young kids watching the livestream and the videos we feature, so stay away from any NSFW content.
6. In the end, don’t be too upset if your video isn’t featured. Send it to your friends and family and also to the charity you advocated for, and take pride in the fact that you’re participating in a worthwhile service project.

It would be awesome if all of the P4A videos had the same or similar thumbnails. You can download the thumbnail here, and edit it if you have software that can edit PSDs (Photoshop files). When you upload your video on YouTube, there will be an option to add a custom thumbnail.

You will only be able to submit your video to this site while submissions are open February 1st-15th, but if you’re unable to do that and can’t get a friend to help you out, there’s always a place for more philanthropic videos on YouTube. It won’t count as a P4A submission, but it will still be doing good in the world!

You don’t need a fancy camera to make a good video. Use whatever you have, even if it’s a webcam or a phone. If you’re uncomfortable showing your face, make a video showing only your hands or using only text. Here’s an old video from Hank explaining how to best use the resources you have.

Yes! We love it when charities get directly involved with the Project for Awesome, and we highly encourage you to make a video and share it with your supporters.

That’s all fine! Of course, many people promote the same charities because they’re so great. And any size charity is eligible and will benefit from your promotion and possibly getting a portion of the money raised during P4A. For us to donate to it, however, the organization must be a non-profit organization that is a 501(c)3 or foreign equivalent classified charity.

However, “pass-through” or "flow-through" organizations will not be eligible to receive Project for Awesome grants. Our goal is for our community to learn about organizations doing a lot of good and collectively decide via voting where to allocate funds. Organizations who then continue to distribute funds elsewhere are counterintuitive to that mission.

1. Your video must be made specifically for this year’s P4A. So, you must mention Project for Awesome in the video itself, and it should have been created recently.
2. Try not to make your video too long. People are going to be watching a ton of videos on February 17-19, and no one wants to sit through a rambly, unedited vlog for ten minutes. Keep your video short and to the point so that people will watch the whole thing and learn all about your cause. A good length to aim for is 2-4 minutes, unless you have such compelling content that it just needs to be longer.
3. Try not to spend too much time explaining what the Project for Awesome is. Most people watching your video will already know, so just mentioning it briefly and directing people to the website is plenty. An explanation in the description as well as a link to projectforawesome.com is also a great addition so people who stumble across your video can learn more about us.
4. Similarly, try not to spend too much time promoting your own channel in your video. One or two sentences is fine to explain the type of videos you usually make if they’re different from what you’re doing for your P4A video, but much more than that and it just looks like you’re using the P4A to help promote yourself, which isn’t what this is all about.

You! Our biggest source of revenues come from our individual donors. When you donate to the Project for Awesome through our Tiltify campaign page, you can get some pretty sweet perks while helping us decrease world suck.

After the Project for Awesome event ends, donations continue to come in through fightworldsuck.org. Half of the money generated through ads displayed on the Vlogbrothers channel is donated to the Foundation, and all profits from the P4A items on dftba.com go to the Project for Awesome. We also get some support from people who use Tab for a Cause, which is a free way to support nonprofits just by using the internet.

100%, less the cost of perk production and fulfillment, Tiltify fees, and merchant (credit card) fees. The Foundation to Decrease World Suck does not pay for staff time related to the Project for Awesome.

Yes! Your donations are tax-deductible, less the fair market value of any perks you received. The email receipt you get from Tiltify when you purchase your perk is also a tax receipt.

Please note that in order to get a tax receipt from Tiltify you need to make a Tiltify account before donating or purchasing any perk, and you will need to pay via card on Tiltify directly. If you’d prefer to pay via PayPal or AmazonPay then your receipt will come from that platform the way you normally receive invoices from them.

These receipts will not list the perks you receive with your donation, only the amount donated.

If your shipping address is outside of the United States you may be charged customs based on the item’s value. Please email us at [email protected] if you need a receipt that confirms the amount you donated to P4A and the value of the perk you’re receiving.

Not all fundraising elements of the Project for Awesome occur on Tiltify. The Foundation to Decrease World Suck gets donations throughout the year and begins the P4A with money in the bank. We also sometimes have other funding sources like matching donations and generous anonymous donors.

In 2023, the money raised will be split two ways:

1. From 12:00am EST on February 15th through 11:59am EST on February 18th, donations will go to Save the Children and Partners in Health.
2. From 12:00pm EST on February 18th through 11:59pm EST on February 21st, donations will go to community-chosen organizations, based on votes on the Project for Awesome website. (This is, however, subject to the approval of the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck Board of Directors and Project for Awesome Advisory Board, partly because the law is complex and partly to prevent a trolling group from coming in and hijacking the vote.) Note that Save the Children and Partners in Health will not be eligible to receive community-voted grants. So votes on videos for these two charities will not be counted.

The Foundation to Decrease World Suck was informally created in 2007, and became a real entity in November 2011, when it was incorporated as a nonprofit corporation in the State of Montana. The IRS designated the Foundation a 501(c)3 charity on January 23, 2013. The FTDWS is 100% volunteer operated and exists solely for the purpose of fundraising for the benefit of other non-profit organizations. The majority of fundraising is transacted through and during the annual Project for Awesome. The board members for the Foundation to Decrease World Suck are John Green, Hank Green, Mike Green, Benny Fine, Valerie Barr, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Marie Ann Fernandez-Silva, Angela Lin, and Taylor Behnke. The Foundation to Decrease World Suck can only donate money to nonprofit organizations that are 501(c)3 or foreign equivalent classified charities. Unfortunately, we cannot support any general project or individual; it has to be an actual designated charity.

Please do! Our biggest goal is to get people excited about giving their money and lending their time and talent to nonprofits.

We will send out all perks AFTER the Tiltify campaign closes, including digital downloads. Perks take a varying amount of time to prepare and send out, sometimes months, so we will update you in the coming weeks via email and Tumblr. Make sure to check the email account associated with your Tiltify perk purchase.

Not to fear! As long as your perk has not been sent out yet, you can fill out this form to update your address.

Yes! We also welcome anyone interested in becoming a matching donor for P4A. For those looking to give $500 or more, the matching fund will be accepting donations from Tuesday, January 17th at 12pm EST to Wednesday, February 15th at 12pm EST. Please go to https://projectforawesome.com/matching for instructions.