Further advancing an earlier study which confirmed that 39% of our grant applications are duplicative across funders, the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) has published the list of shared fields that comprise the nearly 40% of grant application overlap. The data science effort led by TAG relied upon over 130 grant applications shared by foundations throughout North America, the EU and UK.
The first phase of the work to identify the level of similarity between forms was published in August 2021 and indicates that nearly 40% of fields in the sample were duplicative across funders. This second phase reduced the roughly 3,600 form fields to 13 question groups through a multi-method and multi-analyst data triangulation approach led by data scientist Kwame Porter Robinson. The process also sanitized the data to remove foundation identifiers and prepare for publication.