TL;DR
Manifold Markets spent ~$3k in opportunity costs just applying for grants. A common application, shared between different funders in the EA space, could save time for applicants and surface more projects to funders.
Background
- Sources of grant funding Manifold has applied for:
- Ballpark estimate: writing these applications up took about 1 fulltime day each
- Let’s call it 7 days * 8 hours * $50/hour = $2800 spent on writing applications
- Seems high? Yeah, it seemed high to me too. Some funders (e.g. EA Funds) try to be nice and explicitly say “this should only be a 30min process”
- But think about incentives: if we apply for a $100k grant, then a 5% increase in success rate is worth $5k. So if writing a good grant takes our probability of winning from 20% to 25% (which feels conservative), it’s easily worth at least one person’s entire day to do it.
- Also: think back to how long you spent on each of your college applications!
- Applying for grants sucks (through no fault of the funders)
- Takes a long time to hear back
- You get rejected a lot
- Wastes time that you could be spending on Actually Doing Things
Proposal: Create a Common App for EA funding
Examples of existing Common Apps
- Common App for undergrads
- Triplebyte for software engineer jobs
- Angellist for startup angel investments
- National Resident Matching Program for med school residents?
V0: A new standard
- Two or more grantmaking orgs standardize on a set of questions to ask (eg Google Form). Here are the common questions we’ve seen:
- Two sentence intro
- One page project explainer
- Bios of people running the project
- How much money do you want
- What you’ll do with the money
- Opt-in public database where other granters can see proposals (eg Google Spreadsheet)
V1: A new website
- Funders can set up profiles, listing:
- What they’re looking for
- Funding timelines
- Decision criteria
- Applicants can submit grant proposals to multiple funders at once
- Grantmaking orgs can browse through public proposals on an ongoing basis
V2: And beyond