This has been a long series, and if you've made it this far, it's time to pull things together.
Common Grant Application started with a vision of making nonprofits' lives easier by letting them reuse their information across applications. Our name reflected that promise, drawing inspiration from the college Common App and from what Regional Associations of Grantmakers were doing at the time. We believed - and still believe - that the problem was real and worth solving.
But after 20-plus years in this space, what we've learned is more complicated than what we set out to prove.
There have been many attempts at data sharing - paper common grant applications, the Cultural Data Project, hGrant, eGrant, Simplify, and others. Most have come and gone quietly, with no formal accounting of what went wrong. The Philanthropy Data Commons is still early in its life. The only data sharing service operating at significant scale in the nonprofit world today is Candid - and notably, Candid succeeded by keeping its data sources clearly separated and not attempting to blend them into a single authoritative record. That's a meaningful design choice, and probably part of why it works.
Why have so many other efforts failed? First, they face a genuine economic mismatch: the people who benefit most (nonprofits) can't fund them, and the people who could fund them (grantmakers) don't feel the urgency. Second, they require a level of governance - around data authority, schema management, conflict resolution, and long-term maintenance - that consistently proves harder than anticipated. Third, and perhaps most importantly, they are technology solutions to what is fundamentally a culture and process problem.
We started out focused on simplifying the steps to submit an application. We were looking at things from a technology perspective. Over time, as we listened more carefully to nonprofits, we realized we had been solving the wrong problem. What nonprofits told us they needed - simpler forms, greater transparency, fewer restrictions, better communication - isn't something technology alone can deliver. The bigger burden isn't filling out fields. It's navigating a process that is often opaque, and disconnected from the actual work of the organization.
The sector periodically rediscovers the idea that technology can simplify grantmaking, and that data sharing will be the mechanism. The intention is good. But pre-populating data fields is a modest improvement at best. The time saved by auto-filling a field is small compared to the time a nonprofit spends actually thinking through, drafting, and editing its answers - particularly because those answers often need to be tailored to each grantmaker's specific interests and priorities.
This raises some questions that the sector hasn't fully confronted: Which questions on a typical application or report are actually reviewed and used to make decisions? Which documents are genuinely evaluated, and which are collected out of habit or because the form has always included them? Would grantmakers be better served by asking five well-chosen questions rather than fifty standard ones? Does the application process create something that is genuinely objective and repeatable, or is it largely a reflection of the subjective judgment of the people doing the reviewing - in which case, more data fields don't necessarily lead to better decisions?
These are uncomfortable questions. And for many grantmakers, the practical ability to change deeply ingrained processes is limited. Inertia is a powerful force. Processes have evolved over decades, and the current practices of the field reinforce themselves. So the sector continues to pursue data sharing as a way to show responsiveness to nonprofit concerns - even when the evidence suggests that the bigger changes need to happen inside the grantmaker, not in the technology stack.
Our conclusion, after all of this, is a simple one: real improvement in the nonprofit grantmaking experience requires grantmakers to examine and simplify their own internal processes - not just the interface through which nonprofits access them. Data sharing can be a useful tool. But it should be seen as a complement to process reform, not a substitute for it.
In future posts, we'll share more specific observations from our experience running Common Grant Application - what grantmakers do well, what tends to create friction, and what we think is worth trying. There's a lot more to say.
Oh, and stay tuned about our company name. 😊