The front door is open again
What brings you here?
Bounties: who can apply
Your events are back
Grant application: Humanity AI
Upcoming events
For most of the past year, SpiritDAO has held a Google Ad Grant, which gives nonprofits up to $10,000 a month in search advertising. We thought it was working, but in reality it was performing poorly. The campaigns had been built, approved, and sitting at very low numbers for six months, because the account had never been told what a result looks like.
That is fixed. Here is what changed.
Google now knows what counts. Joining the community, sending a message through the contact page, completing a donation, and downloading the book are now recorded as the outcomes the campaigns work toward. The app reports when a new member finishes onboarding and receives their Proof of Curiosity. Nothing about who you are or what you do inside the community goes to Google. It receives one signal, that a sign-up happened, and that is all it needs.
The ads say true things and land on real pages. We rewrote the campaigns around what people actually search for when they are looking for us: secular spirituality, community after leaving a church, the meaning crisis, self-actualization, nature-based philosophy, fiscal sponsorship for small groups, and infrastructure for congregations and intentional communities. Every ad now points at a page that exists and says what the ad promised. Ad groups aimed at searches we could not honestly serve, like housing assistance, were turned off.
Half the grant now sends readers to the book. Self-Actualization in the Age of Crisis at singletruth.org is the founding text, and it is free in every format. Roughly half of the daily budget now brings searchers there first, and the other half to spiritdao.org. As more texts are published under the church, each will get its own campaign.
singletruth.org now has a door into the community. Until this week, someone who read the whole book had nowhere to go but a small link in the header. Every chapter now ends with a short note: this text is practiced, not only read, and membership is free. The header link reads "Join SpiritDAO."
What this means for you. New people will start arriving who found us through a search, not through a friend. Some will have read a chapter. Some will have read the whole book. Most will know nothing about pods, tokens, or governance yet. If you see an unfamiliar name in a weekly gathering or the forum, that is the front door working. Say hello.
If you want to help: share singletruth.org with someone the book would reach. It costs nothing, and it is the same place the ads send people. We will report back next month on what the numbers show.
Which is why the app needed a better first five minutes. The next time you open Home, it asks one question: what brings you here? Pick one of three doors.
Join a community. Find a pod and the people in it.
Found a community. Start a pod and invite others.
Just explore. Look around first, decide later.
If you arrived through a pod's invite link, the app already knows and skips the question. If you're not sure yet, "Ask me later" puts it off until your next visit.
A checklist that keeps up with you. Your answer becomes a short checklist at the top of Home, five steps for the path you chose. Steps tick themselves off as you do real things: add your name and photo, say what you're seeking, meet the members, join or create a pod, say hello in General chat. Nothing to mark done by hand. "Show me" on any step lights up the matching icon on the home screen. The next step is always the green button at the bottom of the card. "Change path" swaps the checklist if your plans change, and "Hide" tucks it away if you'd rather find your own way.
The Join and Found checklists disappear on their own when you've done every step. Explore ends with a standing invitation to pick a path when you're ready.
Members who joined before this week will see the question once, on their next visit to Home. There's no wrong answer, and nothing you had is changed by it.
People first in the Members directory. The directory, each pod's member list, and the pod management panel now put people with completed profiles at the top. A name, a photo, and a bio each count. If you've been meaning to add a photo or a line about yourself, this is a good week to do it. New arrivals will be looking.
Every pod's bounty form now has a "Who can apply" choice, and the sentence under it previews exactly who qualifies:
Members of the sponsoring pod. The default.
Any SpiritDAO member. Proof of Curiosity or Advocate.
Holders of specific credentials. Tick any combination of pod memberships and tokens. Holding any one of them is enough.
One shared check decides eligibility everywhere: the bounty cards, the Bid button, and the form preview. If you don't qualify for a bounty, its detail view tells you in one line what you're missing. And the database now refuses a bid it can verify as ineligible, rather than leaving that to the browser.
This replaced four bugs that had been there a while: a DAO-wide option that never saved, a membership check against a column that didn't exist, an Advocate bypass of every pod restriction, and enforcement that lived only in the browser. Wallet-funded bounties also no longer require the pod to have a treasury, and new bounties now post to Pulse.
Since late September, the My Events and Calendar tabs on the Events page have shown nothing for everyone, including members registered for upcoming gatherings. The cause was a permission that a security change removed and didn't restore. It's fixed. The registrations you made were always recorded, and they're visible again. We also changed how the page loads so that if one part fails in future, your registered events still show.
The same fix restored a few token-gated Forum categories that had quietly dropped out of view, and the guided tour's pop-up no longer slides under the bottom bar on shorter phones, hiding the Finish button.
We've applied to the Humanity AI open call, a $10 million pooled fund from a coalition of foundations supporting organizations working on AI in the public interest. Their focus areas include democratic institutions, workers, journalism, education, and community decision-making about AI.
SpiritDAO's case is the one we've been making all year: communities that own their infrastructure get to decide what AI does for them, and the constitution we built for artificial members is the clearest example we know of what that looks like in practice. We'll share what we hear.
We strongly recommend registering for events within the SpiritDAO app (Events section) at app.spiritdao.org, it's how we gauge attendance and shape the flow of each session. Links to each event may be found in-app under the Events section.
Town Hall — Mon, Oct. 26th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence.
First Contact — Wed, Oct. 28th · 8:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works.
Feedback Loops — Fri, Oct. 30th · 8:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app. Bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas.
SpiritDAO is 100% donor-funded. There are no subscriptions, no paywalls, no venture capital. Every community on this platform uses it for free and that's by design. Our runway is small, and every donation directly extends how long we can keep building. If this work matters to you, even a small contribution goes further than you'd think.
→ Donate at spiritdao.org/donate
SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3). Your donation is tax-deductible. (EIN: 99-1308806)
The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
Here you can post a question in our chat, forums, or DM @Ron Rivers. If you prefer, feel free to write to Ron Rivers: ron@spiritdao.org
Thank you for reading!
Please share this email with any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are spreading the message one curious person at a time.
Connect with SpiritDAO
🧠 SpiritDAO App
🌐 SpiritDAO.org
▶️ YouTube
🐦 Twitter / X
TikTok
📜 Docs
SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.