Application effort
Our own coarse rating of how much work a program’s application demands — light, medium or heavy. It is a GrantTrove field, not a sector standard, and no funder publishes it.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called Application burden · How hard is it to apply
In detail
This is the only field in the glossary that we invented, and it is labelled as ours everywhere it appears. It exists because the question every applicant asks first — is this worth a week? — has no published answer, and because the alternative to a coarse rating is no signal at all.
It is assigned from what the notice requires: the number of narrative components, whether registrations or letters are prerequisites, whether a budget justification is demanded, and whether partners must be committed before submission. Light is a form and a short description; heavy is a multi-week build with prerequisites.
It is deliberately three values rather than a score. A finer scale would suggest a precision that the underlying evidence does not support, and a number would invite arithmetic that would be meaningless.
Against a published requirement
Every other field in a record is something a source stated and we copied. This one is a reading of a source, which makes it the one field that cannot be verified against a page by comparing text. It is shown under our name, and it is never presented as the funder’s own characterisation. Where a notice is too thin to read, the field reads Not stated rather than defaulting to light.
How GrantTrove stores it
- The rating is presented as ours rather than as the program’s, so it is never mistaken for a published figure.
- It seeds the planning tools with a default schedule shape, which the user can override — it is a starting point, not a constraint.
Common questions
Does the funder publish this?
No. No funder in the catalogue publishes an effort rating. This is our reading of what the notice requires, and it carries our name for that reason.
Why only three values?
Because the evidence supports three. A ten-point score would look more precise and mean less, and it would invite people to average it.
What if the notice is too thin to rate?
The field reads Not stated. A default of light would be the most damaging possible guess, because it would understate the work on exactly the records we know least about.