For funders
High-leverage capital for evidence-generating pilots.
The deficit in evidence-based civic policy is rarely about ideas, talent, or political will. It is almost always about funding the design, delivery, and honest reporting of pilots that might fail. Foundations and aligned funders sit in a uniquely powerful position to close that gap. Here is what we can offer in support of that work.
What we do
The Experiment Society maintains a public registry of civic experiments, develops packaged pilot templates that cities can adopt, supports preregistration of new trials, and partners with municipal and agency teams to design and evaluate interventions. Every entry in the registry is published under an open licence; null and negative results are published with the same prominence as positive ones.
We do not hold an ideological commitment to any specific policy outcome. We hold a procedural commitment to public institutions that can learn — and to a public evidence base that supports their learning.
How funders typically engage
Direct pilot funding
The most leveraged grants we have helped place are in the $50k–$500k range, paying for the marginal cost of evaluation alongside an already-funded program. A city has the operations budget; the funder pays for the randomization, the data infrastructure, and the public write-up. The result is a pilot that produces a permanent public record where there would otherwise have been only internal anecdote.
Replication grants
The registry currently flags 60+ findings as "open for replication" — strong single-site results that have never been independently re-tested. A replication grant to a second jurisdiction is among the highest-value uses of philanthropic capital in this space, both because the marginal evidence is unusually informative and because replications are routinely under-funded relative to original studies.
Gap-filling on documented open questions
Our open-questions page aggregates roughly 70 specific unresolved questions where the field needs evidence. Each is tagged with a domain and linked to the relevant evidence synthesis. Funders looking to support evidence-generation in a particular policy area can use the page as a curated brief.
Capacity and intermediation
Some of the most useful funding we have seen pays for the people who broker between researchers, agencies, and implementers — the connective tissue that turns a paper into a pilot. We are happy to help map where that capacity exists, where it doesn't, and what the realistic options for plugging the gap look like.
Sustaining the registry itself
The registry and the broader Experiment Society infrastructure are designed to be a durable public good — accessible at no cost, openly licensed, and useful to the field regardless of who is paying. Like any public good, it requires ongoing philanthropic support to continue existing. If you would like to support the work directly, our support page is here.
What we ask in return
We ask that any pilot funded with the registry's involvement be published in the registry on completion, regardless of result. That is a commitment we make to the field: the evidence base will reflect what actually happened, not a selective sample.
We do not require attribution to particular funders, but we are happy to credit funders on registry entries when that is desired and appropriate.
What we will not do
We will not run pilots that test interventions designed to deprive participants of rights or essential services, that pre-commit to a politically motivated conclusion, or that we judge to fail the registry's ethics criteria. See our ethics framework for the longer list.
We will also not promise that any specific pilot will produce a positive result. A null result honestly reported is, in our view, often more valuable than a positive result quietly buried — but a funder who needs guaranteed positive outcomes is not well matched to evidence-based experimentation in general, and we will say so.
Start a conversation
We work with funders at every scale — individual donors with a specific question, and foundations placing a portfolio of grants. The first call is usually 30 minutes; there is no obligation, and the most useful outcome is sometimes that we point you to existing work rather than start something new.