We understand that our grantees’ (and potential grantees’) time is valuable. We also understand that our process for investigating grants can be quite different from what grantee organizations are used to, and — in particular — that it sometimes asks for substantial time from senior members of an organization, without a guarantee that a grant will be made.

In order to make this process less demanding on our potential grantees, we have a policy that may be activated when we have asked for significant time from a potential grantee but have then decided against making a grant. The policy is generally to recommend up to $2500 of funding for the first 2-10 hours of time invested by the grantee, plus up to $250 per hour for additional time, for the total time we deem to have been reasonably spent by you in connection with this process.1

This policy is activated at Open Philanthropy’s discretion; if you are uncertain whether it applies to your grant, ask your grant investigator.

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1.Note that we provide this funding by making a recommendation to our advised fund. Although in practice we generally expect grants that we recommend in this way to go through, we are legally unable to guarantee that funding will be directed according to our recommendation in any specific case. Final discretion rests with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), which houses our advised fund, and is subject to SVCF’s grantee eligibility requirements.