Support our work
Common Signals is a neutral research body that turns public attitudes to AI into tested, practical guidance for the people who explain AI to the public. Everything we produce is published free: the findings, the coded datasets, the codebooks and the method.
We are funded by grants and individual donations. Your donation pays for research that would not otherwise exist, and keeps it open for anyone to use.
What your donation funds
A donation of any size goes directly into research and its publication. Here is what specific amounts buy.
Funds a comment-reception study: several hundred to a few thousand public comments on a high-profile AI moment, coded against a published codebook, human spot-checked, and released with the full dataset in our data explorer. Our studies of the Nate Soares reel, the METR report and the Ajeya Cotra episode were produced this way.
Funds a training session or workshop for communicators, turning published findings into practical guidance for a campaign, newsroom or advocacy team.
Funds the design phase of our pilot: a values-based segmented survey of around 2,000 US adults, a tested message set, a messenger-trust battery, and a pre-registered analysis plan.
Funds the whole pilot from design to publication: fieldwork, segmentation and message-test analysis, an open dataset, a messenger map and a findings report. This is the study that tests whether the Climate Outreach model works for AI.
Why fund research on AI communication
AI safety has technical research, governance work, funders and training programmes. It has no shared evidence base on how to talk to the public. The people explaining AI, whether their concern is present-day harms or existential risk, mostly work from instinct. The little evidence that exists, including the Seismic Foundation's 2025 message-testing study, suggests the field's dominant framings often underperform.
The climate movement had the same problem and built Climate Outreach to solve it. Britain Talks Climate, its values-based segmentation with More in Common and YouGov, produced free toolkits and training that campaigns across the movement rely on. The IPCC commissioned Climate Outreach to write the communications handbook for its own authors. Nobody has built the equivalent for AI.
Common Signals is that organisation, started early in the curve while the gap is widest. We run the whole loop: audience research, tested messages, open toolkits, messenger training. Our theory of change, Creating a social mandate for AI governance, sets out how.
How we handle your money
Neutrality is the point of Common Signals, so we are careful about where funding comes from and how it is used.
Donations are ring-fenced as untied research funding. Donors do not choose research questions or see findings before publication. We publish our funder list, and our long-term plan caps any single funder at 25% of income. A clean null result is published exactly like a positive one.
How to give
Donations are processed by Stripe. You can give once or set up a monthly donation, and pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay in your own currency. You will get a receipt by email.
Common Signals is not yet a registered charity, so donations are not tax-deductible and are not eligible for Gift Aid. We will update this page when that changes.
If you are considering a gift of $5,000 or more, would prefer to pay by bank transfer, or want to fund a specific study, email [email protected] and we will send the current research plan and budget.
Other ways to help
Money is one of three things we ask for. The others are introductions to foundations that seed independent research institutes, and criticism from people who have run something adjacent and watched it work or fail. Both can be sent to [email protected].
If you communicate about AI, the most useful thing you can do is use the findings. Everything on the research page is free to apply, adapt and cite.