If you’re applying for funding for a project that’s already well-developed (i.e. you have thought carefully about its route to value, what the roadmap looks like, etc.), 30-60 minutes should be enough, and further time spent polishing likely won’t improve your chances of getting funding.
If you don’t have a well-developed project, it seems reasonable to add whichever amount of time it takes to develop the project in some level of detail on top of that.
That’s surprisingly short, which is great by the way.
I think most grants are not like this. That is, you can increase your chance of funding by spending a lot of time polishing a application, which leads to a sort of arms-raise among applicants where more and more time are wasted on polishing applications.
I’m happy to hear that LTFF do not reward such behavior. On the other hand, the same dynamic will still happen as long as people don’t know that more polish will not help.
You can probably save a lot of time on the side of the applicants by:
Stating how much time you recommend people spend on the application
Share some examples of successful applications (with the permission of the applicant) to show others what level and style of wringing to aim for.
I understand that no one application will be perfectly representative, but even just one example would still help, and several examples would help even more. Preferably if the examples are examples of good enough, rather than optimal writing, assuming that you want people to be satisfyzers, rather than maximizes with regards to application writing quality.
On reflection I actually think 1-4 hours seems more correct. That’s still pretty short, and we’ll do our best to keep it as quick and simple as possible.
We’re just updating the application form and had been planning to make the types of changes you’re suggesting (though not sharing successful applications—but that could be interesting, too)
What do you think is a reasonable amount of time to spend on an application to the LFTT?
If you’re applying for funding for a project that’s already well-developed (i.e. you have thought carefully about its route to value, what the roadmap looks like, etc.), 30-60 minutes should be enough, and further time spent polishing likely won’t improve your chances of getting funding.
If you don’t have a well-developed project, it seems reasonable to add whichever amount of time it takes to develop the project in some level of detail on top of that.
That’s surprisingly short, which is great by the way.
I think most grants are not like this. That is, you can increase your chance of funding by spending a lot of time polishing a application, which leads to a sort of arms-raise among applicants where more and more time are wasted on polishing applications.
I’m happy to hear that LTFF do not reward such behavior. On the other hand, the same dynamic will still happen as long as people don’t know that more polish will not help.
You can probably save a lot of time on the side of the applicants by:
Stating how much time you recommend people spend on the application
Share some examples of successful applications (with the permission of the applicant) to show others what level and style of wringing to aim for.
I understand that no one application will be perfectly representative, but even just one example would still help, and several examples would help even more. Preferably if the examples are examples of good enough, rather than optimal writing, assuming that you want people to be satisfyzers, rather than maximizes with regards to application writing quality.
On reflection I actually think 1-4 hours seems more correct. That’s still pretty short, and we’ll do our best to keep it as quick and simple as possible.
We’re just updating the application form and had been planning to make the types of changes you’re suggesting (though not sharing successful applications—but that could be interesting, too)