A new organizational readiness tool helps applicants determine if their project to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems is a good fit for the 100&Change competition.
Are you ready to solve a problem? We are ready to fund a single $100 million solution.
While many organizations say, “yes!” others have wondered, “are we really ready?”
Since our inaugural 100&Change competition, we are frequently asked by the diverse field of philanthropy—including donors, potential applicants, and partners—what made certain projects compelling? What types of projects did well in the first round of the competition? And what are the characteristics of organizations that rose to the top? We are also commonly asked why only 800 of 1,904 applications we received made it through the administrative review process. Many proposals were deemed ineligible due to the rules and guidelines of the competition: it did not have a clear charitable purpose, organizations lacked proper financial documents, or the project was too early stage.
Many organizations interested in 100&Change must make a calculated decision whether they should dedicate time to the application process. CEOs, directors, academics, and grassroots leaders are weighing the costs and benefits of having their teams put together a robust proposal. But what they really want to know is whether their project and/or team will be competitive. To this end, we have created an organizational readiness tool that will hopefully provide some valuable guidance.
The core values of 100&Change are openness, transparency, and our desire to create benefits for all applicants. In order to live up to these values, we want to help organizations better identify whether they are competitive for 100&Change before they start the application process.
Applicants in the first round of 100&Change estimate that it took them approximately 40 hours to put together a proposal. We do not want any organization to feel like it is wasting its time. So we designed the tool to help teams determine how well-suited their organizations and proposals are for 100&Change.
We combined our learnings from what made certain proposals compelling (the strength of evidence, size of organization, and level of partnership) with the most common reasons applications were deemed invalid and we created a short interactive questionnaire.
We truly value all applicants’ time and want organizations to have a sense of whether this is the right competition for them. Since we launched the tool at the end of April, we have already had more than 1,300 potential applicants use the anonymous questionnaire. We encourage you to assess your organizational readiness. Our hope is that it will provide your organization with the confidence to say, “Yes, we are ready to solve a $100 million problem!”
