Grant Hunter allows users to explore Wellington City Council grant funding. The user fills out a simplified grant application form, and Grant Hunter indicates whether the application is likely to succeed. The target audience is community groups who would be interested in seeking funding from the council.
The aim of the project is to increase awareness of available funding, and to help community groups refine their applications to increase the chance of success. Grant Hunter might also be useful for the council themselves, to understand the viewpoint of applicants, and perhaps to examine their own biases in granting funds.
Grant Hunter works by comparing an application with previous grant applications in the WCC Grant Funding By Grant dataset, using a Naive Bayes Classifier.
The prototype only examines a small subset of the fields on an actual grant application, and also only allows for limited categories to be chosen. Both of these aspects could easily be expanded. We would also like to provide more granular feedback on what contributes to success and failure. Also it would be great to make it all a bit more gamified.
