Article by Alex Daniels: “Could the soul-sucking process of applying for philanthropic grants be on the way out? That is one of the goals of a new $8 million effort supported by the MacArthur Foundation.
The project, dubbed the Philanthropy Data Commons, is an attempt to bring a huge reservoir of foundation and charity information into a single database. Grant seekers and grant makers can drill into the data to find partners that share the same goals, among the vast universe of tax-exempt organizations.
“It should take nonprofits less time to apply for grants and allow them more time to spend on their missions,” said Elizabeth Kane, co-director of the Commons. “By the same token, many funders struggle to find and support organizations that are aligned with their goals. It could make the grant application process more efficient for both sides.”
Currently, the publicly available data from Internal Revenue Service filings that nonprofits can scour for grant information is limited. It only provides basic personnel and financial information and lacks detail about what work funders want to support and how well nonprofits have performed.
If enough organizations provide more granular information to the Data Commons — things like due diligence reports on potential grantees, project timelines, and impact data — the database and the applications created to use it could play matchmaker. Grantees and grant makers could be connected through a largely automated process. Grantees would be able to search grant makers and vice versa. Applications for many grants could be completed with a minimum of keystrokes. For instance, if a grantee located several foundations that matched some basic criteria, it could auto-populate fields in an application using its stored data and send it off to all of the grant makers at the same time…(More)”.
