Read About Our Company

Mission

Our mission is to simplify the art and science of giving for grantmakers and grantseekers.

History

The idea of the Common Grant Application came out of our experience working in the technology industry, founding and running a family foundation, and having college-aged children.

Jeff Lawrence previously co-founded Trillium Digital Systems, a company that developed and licensed standards based communications software. At the time Trillium was founded most computer and communications systems were proprietary and closed. Manufacturers did this to ensure their customers remained captive to their equipment and could not easily interconnect or move to other manufacturer’s equipment. Customers found this problematic and started pressuring the telecommunications industry to open up its products so that equipment from different manufacturers could interconnect and communicate seamlessly. A necessary and prior step to open systems was agreement on the standards and protocols that would be used to communicate between the equipment. These standards and protocols were developed by engineers from industry and government that participated in different international, national and industry standards bodies. Trillium was involved in the specification, development and implementation of these standards and then developed and licensed software to telecommunications equipment manufactuers to realize the vision of open, standards based communications systems.

Jeff founded The Lawrence Foundation after Trillium was acquired by Intel Corporation in 2000. The foundation has received over 3000 applications from grantseekers and made over 200 grants since its inception. These applications have been received by mail, email, and the Web. Over the years, we spoke to many grantseekers and grantmakers. This led us to the conclusion that the grantmaking process, for both grantseekers and grantmakers, was very inefficient, expensive, opaque and time-consuming. It seemed a lot of resources were being used to try and match those seeking money with those that have the money. Our family foundation was being inundated with paper applications as we reached our grant cycle deadlines. In an effort to simplify and streamline the grantmaking process, we started development in 2005 of an online grant application. We started using the online grant application in 2006 and it proved to be a very efficient way to receive and manage grant applications. Grantseekers also reported high levels of satisfaction because of its accessibility, simplicity, and the higher degree of responsiveness from us, the grantmaker.

As one of our children prepared to enter college, we became familiar with the Common Application used by college-bound students to apply to colleges and universities. The Common Application allows a college-bound student to fill out a single application and then submit that single application to multiple colleges. Hundreds of colleges participate in the Common Application and both the students and colleges find it an efficient way to manage the college application process.

The combination of these three parallel paths - technology, the family foundation, and college-aged children – led us to the idea of developing the Common Grant Application.

We took the concepts and work that we developed for the foundation's online application and what we learned from our users to expand the concept and its implementation to develop a hosted grant management system for grantmakers and a common application for grantseekers. The first beta users (one grantmaker and its grantseekers) started using the Common Grant Application at the end of 2007.

Investors

The Common Grant Application is a project of Oceanpeak, Inc., which is a privately held California corporation incorporated in May of 2007 and located in Santa Monica, California. The Common Grant Application has no outside investors. It is currently funded entirely by its co-founders.

Philanthropy

Technology

The Common Grant Application uses Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP (LAMP) open source technologies.

The system is hosted on a Linux server in Dallas, and backed up daily to another facility in Washington, DC.

The client does not require any special software. All that is required is a Web browser. The system is tested against the Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari Web browsers.