There is a bit of spam, but the largest issue is what @EWDurbin said here:
There are many, many applications for organizations that have names with corresponding domains, but the user that requested it just has a @gmail.com email address on their account. Since this doesn’t prove any affiliation with the given organization, we must follow up with the user to get them to add and verify an email address with a matching domain, if possible, which is time consuming.
There are also:
- instances when large, for-profit companies have requested free ‘community’ organizations (either intentionally or accidentally), and we need to follow up with them
- community/educational/government projects which are generally harder to approve because they may not have a verifiable domain, or verifiable affiliations
- plenty of typos / user confusion / domains that don’t resolve or seem unrelated to the organization
all of which require extra effort on our part.