streamlining

Use an Abundance Mentality to Streamline Foundation Processes

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By Kris Putnam-Walkerly, Putnam Consulting Group, originally featured on the Philanthropy411 Blog

About a year ago, I wrote a newsletter article about grantmaking with an abundance mentality rather than a poverty mentality. That sparked a good bit of interest, some speaking requests, and an article in the December 2015 edition of GMNsight (a publication of the Grants Managers Network) about how an abundance mentality can help foundations streamline almost every process to boost efficiency, productivity and morale.

In the GMNsight article, there are several examples of what a poverty mentality looks like and how it hinders effectiveness:

  • Understaffing that subjugates networking and knowledge building with administrative tasks
  • Lack of investments in technology or policies that prohibit its most productive uses (such as working remotely)
  • Over-done board meeting preparation that overwhelms all staff
  • Vendor bid processes that waste time and don’t save money

In most cases, foundations that succumb to a poverty mentality truly believe they are doing it for the right reasons – a perception that may be driven by what they see in practice around them or by what they interpret as thrift. But, in all cases, adopting a poverty mentality prevents foundations from doing their best work and becoming more effective.

Foundations that see beyond the poverty mentality and recognize the value of their own abundance allow themselves to do things that significantly increase their effectiveness, such as:

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11 Paths to Effective Giving – Recapturing What Is Powerful

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By Andy Carroll, Exponent Philanthropy

It’s common for Exponent Philanthropy members who’ve made significant impact to reflect back and say, “Money wasn’t the most important thing. It was really about being a catalyst, making things happen.”

Philanthropy is more than transferring money. It’s about using passion, knowledge, connections, advocacy, and dollars to make change on important issues. Central to success is listening, learning, leveraging, and leading.

Yet when we teach and write about grantmaking, we fixate on how best to carry out a bureaucratic, paper-based, transactional process for getting money out the door. Guidelines, applications, due diligence, dockets, decision processes, grant agreements, reports, and evaluations absorb our attention.

Buried is the passion, the people, and the daring challenge of making change in the real world. 

It’s time to recapture what is powerful. The following pathways will guide you to the messy heart and soul of grantmaking, its nitty-gritty complexity, and its intensity and excitement. Once you place learning, relationship-building, and your powers beyond dollars at the center of your work, you will achieve greater impact, and find yourself on a journey that is exhilarating.

1) Choose a Process That Makes Sense for You

Resist the impulse to take a grantmaking process off the shelf. Allow your process to emerge after you’ve considered your mission, goals, capacity, culture—and the following tips.

2) Focus, Focus, Focus

Zeroing in on an important issue or community you care about helps you maximize your resources and leverage your dollars and time. Focusing also sets you on a course so you can accumulate experience, knowledge, and contacts.

See Exponent Philanthropy’s resources on planning for impact

3) Immerse Yourself In Your Issue

Funders have unique perspective across organizations. They also have unique access to people with knowledge. Make use of these powers. As Megan McTiernan, executive director of Thomson Family Foundation, observes, “The decadent thing about this field is that you can sit down and talk with anyone you want.”

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How Do Funders Navigate the Power of the Purse?

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By Elaine Gast Fawcett, Four Winds Writing, Inc.

Too often, grantees do the asking, reporting, and proving, while donors sit in positions to say yes or no, how much, when, and what’s required. Navigating the complex grantee–grantor relationship takes more than just good intentions—it takes flexibility, finesse, and a sincere desire to balance the power dynamics at play.

Katherine Lorenz, president of the Cynthia & George Mitchell Foundation, knows about the dynamics between funders and grantees. Before becoming a funder, Lorenz spent years as a fundraiser and grantee. In 2003, she cofounded a nonprofit in Mexico to advance food sovereignty in rural Oaxaca. That experience gave her perspective on the challenges grantees face.

As a fundraiser, Lorenz always felt “like we were asking for a favor: ‘Would you mind’ or ‘Would you maybe consider giving to us?’ ” In addition, she found that many funders were opaque in what they wanted; it was never that clear how to get in the door. “Every funder had different rules and requirements, how they wanted the proposal and budget to be,” she says. Especially with small funders, the process seemed impossible to navigate.

Build Transparency and Trust

Lorenz says the greatest gift funders can give upfront is clarity about what they do and do not fund. “When you have a focused strategy,” she says, “it enhances the relationship with the people you say yes to, as well as the people you say no to. This kind of transparency helps ease the power dynamic.” To this end, one of the first things Lorenz did as president of her family’s foundation was create a website. “Even in the midst of transition, we’ve tried to be as transparent as we can about what we fund, the program areas we think we’re moving into, and the timing of it all.”

Although the Mitchell Foundation doesn’t tend to fund many unsolicited grantees, it nonetheless offers an online grantee portal, where any organization can engage with the foundation. “This is an entryway for organizations to apply and be seen by program staff, and it helps us, as funders, to know who’s out there.”

“There’s a lot of talk in the funder world about grantees being partners, but it does not feel like that in the grantee experience,” she says. “To be able to be honest with a funder and be treated as a true thought partner—that’s a rare and wonderful experience.”

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Inverting the Power Imbalance: Testing a New Grantmaking Program That Enables Nonprofits to Do Their Jobs

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By Suzanne Skees, Skees Family Foundation

Excerpted from the original post that appeared on Seeds of Hope, the Skees Family Foundation blog, on June 28

It sounds ludicrous—and it is: Often we donors throw roadblocks in front of the very programs we seek to support. Requiring reams of application pages, hours of preliminary meetings, and acrobatics of performance if and when we fund, is crazy-making for the social entrepreneurs and nonprofits we supposedly trust to solve our most entrenched environmental, financial, educational, and social problems.

This is not just theory. It’s not overworked, underpaid employees whining. We’ve gleaned an inside view of this reality through field visits with and story gathering for our partners, some of the world’s smallest grassroots organizations. Because our grants are tiny and our ambitions are mighty, we’ve always approached our work as if the time we give to partners’ communications, strategy, program development, and fundraising matters more than money. Our multifaceted style of partnership allows us to see a lot more than our partners’ websites, fundraising events, and annual reports. We try to work with them and for them, rather than the other way around.

No one engaged in grantmaking or impact investing wants to believe we’re thwarting our partners’ best intentions. I tried for years to convince myself that the power imbalance between the donor and recipient didn’t have to exist, if only we approached people with honesty and humility. But guess what? It does. To change that dynamic, we asked, could we change the structure of how we give?

Seeking Ways to Bring Greater Efficiency to Grantmaking

We wondered, when we undertook a landscape analysis of our own funding area (global access to education and jobs), if nonprofits could operate more effectively if they didn’t need to spend so much time, energy, and yes, even funding, on chasing down the next grant dollar. [Editor’s note: See Project Streamline’s Guide to Streamlining, a set of tools to help funders reduce the burden on grantees and themselves]

Our grantmaking committee and all-family board engaged in some wonderfully deep conversations about our intentions. Since we have such a small budget (~$150,000), we want to direct every dollar for maximum impact. We agreed on some core objectives:

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How Funders Can Address Nonprofits’ Key Challenges

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We are pleased to share excerpts from a tear sheet co-created with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO).

As funders, your success is tied to the success of organizations you support. Yet there is often a disconnect between the ways funders support nonprofits and the types of support nonprofits say contribute most to their success.

In its publication, “On the Money,” GEO describes several challenges faced by nonprofits:

  • Restrictions on funding. Funders overwhelmingly prefer to support direct programs and services, resulting in underinvestment in the infrastructure nonprofits need to sustain and grow.
  • Assumptions about sustainability. Some funders imagine that successful grantees will eventually reduce their reliance on grants and pay their own operating costs. For many nonprofits, this is not a possibility, and sustainability simply means having the capacity to raise adequate funds to do their work well.
  • Too many masters. Diverse funding sources are considered an ideal for nonprofits, but this may be a myth. Securing multiple funding sources can make for hundreds of applications and reports, a staff- and time-intensive endeavor. Some organizations even shift from their core missions to secure funding from multiple sources.
  • Onerous grantmaking practices. From grant applications that take days to complete to involved reporting requirements that differ for each donor, many funders inadvertently place enormous burdens on their grantees.
  • Knowledge gaps. Perhaps the biggest money problem facing nonprofits and their funders today—and a problem that underlies all the others—is a knowledge gap on both sides about the nature of money in the nonprofit sector.

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What Is Financial Due Diligence Really All About?

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By Andy Carroll, Exponent Philanthropy

Carol Cantwell, founder of Fun With Financials, works with nonprofits and foundations to build financial literacy and align philanthropy with true financial health. We spoke with her about her Financial Health Assessment Tool mentioned in a recent Project Streamline blog post, designed to dig into grantees’ financial health without requiring budgets, and about ways foundations can let go of preconceptions when they approach financial due diligence. Follow Carol on Twitter @FunFinancials.

Andy: The challenges of financial due diligence on nonprofits are many, for a variety of reasons. Some foundation board members and staff lack the necessary skills, but maybe a bigger reason is a lack of clarity among foundations about what they are looking for, and why. 

Carol: You’ve hit the nail on the head here. I’d say this isn’t unique to small-staffed foundations either. I’ve always thought it was unfair to expect that foundation staff or board members will just magically know how to understand financial information. Funders can’t ask for better information until they know what that would actually look like.

I’ve also found, in my work in philanthropy, that there’s an inertia around financial due diligence. Everyone has a vague idea that it’s a good thing to do but not many people are asking the questions about what it is really for. So most of my work with foundations is creating a space for people to ask this question and figure out an answer that matches their organizational values and capacity. The capacity piece is especially important for small-staffed foundations. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to spend precious grantee time or foundation staff time requesting budgets and financials that don’t get used in a meaningful way.

Andy: Some funders are searching for signs of financial weakness, because they want to fund only “strong” organizations. But others understand that a group that does excellent work in its mission area may have some financial weaknesses; these funders want to help the nonprofit become stronger. Would you say that your financial analysis tool is really intended for the latter type of funder?

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Grantmaking by Conversation Not Proposal—Could You?

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Earlier this month, Project Streamline’s lead consultant, Jessica Bearman, talked with ASF members June Wilson and Lenore Hanisch of the Quixote Foundation about the small foundation’s unique style of grantmaking and the values that underlie it—a grantmaking program that includes conversations in lieu of proposals and “Bright Spots” funding, in which they sent unanticipated, unrequested grants with no strings attached to organizations doing work they believed in.

One of our core values is standing shoulder to shoulder. This is why we don’t accept proposals. When we see something interesting, we have conversations with the people who are behind it. We are trying to achieve our mission of free people in fair societies on a healthy planet… and our grantees are the ones doing this important work. We think the best way to do it is for the grantee to lead and we try to learn and share what we know.

When we say partnership, we really mean it.

Do you have—or do you want to cultivate—relationships with grantees that allow you to give in this way?

Read the full post on Project Streamline’s blog.

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Streamlining Our Grant Process

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By Gail Vento, Lana Vento Charitable Trust

streamliningLana Vento Charitable Trust (LVCT) recently tailored its grant process to fit a local theater’s organizational capacity and reflect the size of its grant. Read about the steps it took to minimize the theater’s paperwork and maximize its time spent on programs.

For the past 7 years, Lana Vento Charitable Trust (LVCT) awarded Pistarckle Theater program-specific grants. Pistarckle is a small nonprofit theater that provides educational programs to youths in addition to running a regular performance program. It is a relatively small organization with an operating and program budget of $330K.

Initially Pistarckle was asked to submit a complete grant application, but, during the grant evaluation process, it became evident that Pistarckle is truly a grassroots program with few staff, none dedicated to grantwriting.

LVCT saw the need to minimize the theater’s time spent gathering paperwork and maximize its time spent on programs. In an effort to do so, and only after establishing a healthy grantmaking relationship, our application process was streamlined in the following ways.

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