People are often confused by our name. It sounds like we are a common app - but more accurately, we are a grant management system. Our name reflects a long history of change, which I’ll say more about in the Conclusion.
My wife and I started a family foundation in 2000. It is still going strong, and over its lifetime it has received more than 30,000 applications. During my 25-plus years of making grants, I have heard many stories about the grantmaking process from nonprofits - most of them frustrating ones. Around 2007, when we were first thinking about building this business, our motivation was straightforward: we wanted to make the lives of nonprofits and individuals seeking grants and scholarships easier.
Our thinking was that a web-based system modeled on the college Common App - but designed for the nonprofit world - could do exactly that. We built our software with a great deal of flexibility and with one underlying principle: that the data nonprofits entered could be reused and shared between grantmakers. This would save effort for nonprofits and support grantmakers who genuinely wanted to make their applicants' lives easier. We also designed a system that would allow applications to be shared between grantmakers and evaluated by multiple funders simultaneously. It was, in short, an integrated data sharing system.
We pitched that idea to grantmakers for many years. It didn't gain traction. Competitors were focused on providing more straightforward grant management systems, and that turned out to be what the market wanted. Data sharing was a minor consideration at best. In all our years of sales calls, we have never once been asked whether we support data sharing. It simply doesn’t appear to be a factor in how grantmakers make buying decisions.
And yet, over the same period, there have been many attempts - mostly through independent, external systems - to solve the data sharing problem that we and others identified more than 20 years ago. The ideas have come and gone. Few, if any, have achieved long-term success.
This series is our attempt to make sense of why - and to ask whether the problem everyone keeps trying to solve is actually the right problem.