If it didn’t work out this time: alternative funding resources

Wow! We received, read, sorted and evaluated 262 ideas from you for the 14th funding round. The impressive amount and diversity did not make the selection process easy for our jury, because unfortunately we can only fund a limited number of projects. The elimination of an application can have different reasons: some projects do not fit our application criteria in terms of content or have formal deficiencies – and other ideas are simply not yet fully developed. Many ideas are good, but cannot prevail against the strong competition.

If you received a rejection from the Prototype Fund, you can ask for feedback and we will try to answer as best we can so that you can apply again in a future round. Just remember to submit your application in German! However, it can’t hurt to keep an eye out for other funding sources. That’s why we’ve collected some alternative funding opportunities for you.

As the funding landscape is always changing, we cannot provide a complete list, but only an insight into the different opportunities. Some organisations provide funding locally, others internationally.

• NLnet Foundation
• Open Technology Fund
• Numun Fund
• Sovereign Tech Fund
• Digital Freedom Fund

See also:

• The Förderfinder des Bundes (funding finder of the federal government) provides information on additional public funds.
• In general, it is a good idea to subscribe to the newsletters of relevant funders to stay up to date.
• This Github Repo links to a number of international funding bodies.

And for everyone with a passion for data journalism:

• Grant of the Medieninnovationszentrums (MIZ) Babelsberg
• The WPK innovation fund for data journalism

We also regularly share funding opportunities on mastodon and twitter and in our (German) newsletter. Go and have a look!