(I'm erring strongly here on the side of just putting this out there instead of spending days developing, so please excuse any lack of detail)

Introduction

I propose an organization that develops common applications by cause area (CACA). 

The existing environment is economically inefficient (as a note for this section, I am talking about funding as a whole, not just EA). PF application processes are opaque, inequitable, and very costly to organizations applying to grants. If anyone hasn't seen it, Crappy Funding Practices points out a lot of bad behavior. Another philanthropic movement, Trust-based philanthropy, has also criticized a lot of PF practices (and led to substantial change!). Ultimately, this all leads to economic inefficiency in poor matching and disproportionately high costs to apply relative to the size of the grant.

From my research into major US PF grantmaking, funders care a lot about improving the grantmaking process, though I do believe common applications are a difficult sell.

Existing common applications are typically by geographic area. These appear to have had pretty limited success. Common applications by geographic area are helpful for funders that only fund within a certain geographic area, but across cause areas, the information requested likely varies quite a bit. So a funder of environmental causes and a funder of education have different needs, even if they both fund within a particular city. In other words, I believe the applications for funders within a cause area are more similar than funders within a geographic area, and thus are possibly more amenable to a cause-area specific common application.

Theory of Change

Widespread adoption of CACA I believe would lead to:

1.  Better matching of funder grants to grantees
2. Reducing the amount of internal time organizations spend applying for grants.
3. Additionally, and importantly for EA, I believe CACA can put additional emphasis on outcome evaluation/evidence of effectiveness. Each cause area has its own set of effectiveness metrics to choose from that are developed by both funders and organizations. If non-EA funders start using CACA that have well-designed outcome/effectiveness data, I believe they will make more effective (and EA-aligned) grant decisions. 

And I think the cost to develop and maintain would be fairly small, I think a small team could do this.

What would it actually look like?

It could be as simple as developing the common application and just putting it out there, but I also believe there is room for developing a database where each org can manage their own common application and apply to funders.

Base Application:

• The ask
• Org information
• Financial information (could be auto-filled with 990 data)

Cause Area specific information

• Some qualitative information about the work done and how it aligns with the cause area
• Outcome/effectiveness information

Why will this not work?

Overall, I think this is a longshot for a couple reasons:

1. Funders use obnoxious application processes as a screen. A common application may lead to more applicants for a foundation, which would increase internal time to make grant decisions, limiting the impact. One compromise could be allowing each funder to add a limited set of additional questions, which would add to the organization time to complete.
2. A lot of funders do restrict their giving to a geographic area, so it would be annoying to get applications outside your geographic scope. However, it would be quite easy to make that known and screen out automatically.
3. A critical mass of both funders and organizations using the common application is needed for it to be worthwhile for both groups. I'm sure this is the main reason that existing common applications seem to have had limited success.
4. I think having this whole idea being EA-coded would harm adoption on the funder side, so distancing from EA would probably help.

Next steps:

I'm a researcher, so honestly this whole thing might just turn into a normative research paper where I examine existing common applications, where they go wrong, and make this case for CACA. 

However, if people believe this could have legs...

1.  I'm interested in collaborators (especially folks with experience as a funder/grantwriter).
2. I'd collect information from existing common applications to understand what has and hasn't worked for them.
3. Talk to the folks at trust-based philanthropy about their perspective
4. Picking one cause area to focus on to start. So something like developing a solid animal welfare common application (by talking to funders and organizations), then advertising it to animal welfare funders (including those outside EA) and animal welfare organizations.