grantee feedback

A Powerful Kind of Call and Response

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A community funder on the power of seeking grantee feedback and being responsive

This past summer, Exponent Philanthropy released Outsized Impact 2015, which centers around the stories of 7 inspiring funders, including the one below. Download the full Outsized Impact report >>

Newaygo County, MI, home to Fremont Area Community Foundation

The bucolic backdrop of Newaygo County, Michigan, looks like a living, breathing postcard. More than 350 miles of waterways glisten with natural splendor, and trees topped withjewel-colored leaves stretch for acres. Its beauty makes it an attraction for outdoorsy tourists and a point of pride for people who call it home.

Inside that picturesque wealth, Fremont Area Community Foundation serves Newaygo County’s network of five rural towns and 50,000 residents.

Preserving the county’s natural resources is one of the foundation’s five primary focuses, along with community and economic development, education, nonprofit sustainability, and poverty reduction. The challenge for the community foundation, one of the largest per capita in the country, is to avoid overextending any of its limited resources in the process of doing the work in those areas. It’s an often complicated science of weighing priorities against funding and support.

“When you’re working in that space, you can have the ‘S.T.P.’—the same ten people—and you find yourself tapping the same individuals for multiple things,” says program officer Wes Miller. “Grassroots organizations have limited capacity, so we have to be cognizant of how often we’re engaging them and making sure we’re doing that in a strategic fashion.”

The importance of actively listening to grantees is something he’s learned in his four years with the foundation. Findings from a grantee perception report prompted broad, empowering conversations about what the foundation is doing right and what it could be doing better.

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Using Evaluation to Become an Effective Learning Organization

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We are pleased to share this content co-created with our colleagues at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), a diverse community of 500 grantmakers working to reshape the way philanthropy operates. 

Philanthropists have an obligation to learn. The best way to make smarter philanthropic investments over time—and get better results from those investments—is to generate good information about what’s working, what’s not working, and why. And evaluation is key in this process.

Evaluation can be a daunting topic for any grantmaker. Not only can it conjure up memories of being graded or scored, it can remind some grantmakers of huge expenditures that resulted in nothing more than a hefty door stopper. But just because evaluation has been overwhelming or unproductive in the past doesn’t mean it has to be going forward.

Reconsidering evaluation
More and more grantmakers are looking at evaluation in a new light. They are redefining its role in philanthropy in the five ways that follow.

1. It’s about improvement, not just proof. Evaluation is not solely about tracking the results of past investments. It is also about learning how to do a better job of achieving your goals—and then doing so. Grantmakers are making the connection between evaluation and improvement in a variety of ways. Some are using evaluation and learning as the basis for wholesale changes in grantmaking strategy. Others are investing in real time monitoring of funded programs to allow for adjustments and course corrections along the way.

2. It’s about contribution, not attribution. Evaluation has often been viewed as a way to render definitive judgments about success and failure. In many instances, however, grantmakers and their grantees aren’t necessarily able to make these sorts of judgments, for any of the following reasons:

  • One grantmaker is rarely the sole source of funding for an organization or initiative.
  • Many grants are simply too small to allow grantmakers to attribute results directly to their investments.
  • Cause-and-effect evaluations are complicated by the fact that grantmakers often focus their grantmaking on complex problems that do not lend themselves to easy answers.

In the previous cases, evaluation becomes a way to learn about the range of factors that affect progress on an issue, rather than directly attributing outcomes to specific grants.

3. It’s about learning with others, not alone. Evaluation is not solely about measuring (and improving) a funder’s results. It is also about improving the work of everyone involved in helping to achieve shared goals for social change. Funders are working alongside grantees to set evaluation measures that will be useful to both parties as funders seek to learn from their ongoing work. Funders are also providing grantees with better and more tailored support to do evaluation well. By embracing participatory evaluation and building learning communities that involve foundations, grantees, and community members, grantmakers help ensure that evaluation meets the needs of all stakeholders.

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