Transcript: Simplifying & Streamlining Paperwork
Shaady Salehi: I'm thrilled to be joined today by Melissa Sines, Program and Knowledge Director of PEAK Grantmaking, Elaine Mui, Operations Manager at General Service Foundation, joined by her colleague Holly Bartling, Senior Program Officer at General Service Foundation. We'vealso got Zia Maumenee, Grants Manager at Headwaters Foundation in Montana, and Hanni Hanson, Senior Program Officer at Compton Foundation in San Francisco. All of these foundations have built streamlined processes in a range of ways, and today you’ll get to hear about the nuts and bolts of what that process looked like--how long it took, what had to be done, who had to be consulted, and what questions came up.
We want to emphasize that trust-based philanthropy is really about the broader ecosystem of your foundation. It’s about values: What are the values that drive your foundation, and how can you align those values with the way you actually practice? Even though we are diving into the individual principles of a trust-based approach, it's important to understand that this work always begins with values. It’s not just a checklist of principles--it's an embodiment of values. Oftentimes the streamlining process starts with getting very, very clear on what your values are and what you stand for as an organization, making sure there's internal alignment among staff and board prior to making any adjustments. You'll hear a lot of examples of that today.
So why streamlining? Ultimately, the reality is many nonprofits are spending an exorbitant amount of time on application processes and reporting. Some estimates say development staff or executive director spend upwards of 35 hours for a single proposal. Are we actually reviewing all the answers that people are submitting in these and these lengthy applications and reports? Are we recognizing that nonprofit leaders are stretched, especially in these times when there's a lot more variables being thrown at them than usual?
I'm going to hand it off to my colleague Melissa Sines from PEAK to share their thinking on why streamlining is so important.
Melissa Sines: I'm so happy to be here with all of you today. For those who may not be familiar with PEAK, we're a community of over 5,000 grantmaking professionals who focus on the “how” of grantmaking, thinking through the policies, the procedures, the processes that help funders conduct outreach to communities, receive applications, make decisions, and monitor and evaluate grantees. These processes are really core to who you are as a grantmaking organization.
Many of you may know Project Streamline, which was definitely successful in opening up the conversation around these processes. But the time that grantees were spending on applications and reporting actually went up pretty significantly during the 10 years of Project Streamline. We've now launched a new initiative with a broader goal, to help transform the practice of philanthropy to the practice of principled grantmaking. And so this is our white paper: Courage in Practice: the five principles for peak grantmaking.
This work began as a journey of discovery for our team through working groups, regional chapter events, surveys and conversations with members and sector leaders. We listened and we learned. Through all of this work, we heard that it's not enough to simply know or understand what a grant making practice should be--in principle we can all say it would be great to streamline our applications--but beyond that, we actually have to have the fortitude and the courage to live out those values, to change management and organizational culture in order to enact this change.
So what do we mean by values? Generally, moral constructs that are guiding people's perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors towards achieving goals. Some are explicit values—like core beliefs. They're typically developed by the organization’s board and staff. They're often shared internally at meetings, shared externally on your website. There are also implicit values, these deeply ingrained principles that are guiding actions, but are often neither stated nor even fully acknowledged. They operate alongside explicit values--and may even contradict them. And then there are aspirational values. The things that we know that we should be doing, but haven't actually been put into practice. They can align with or contradict implicit and explicit values.
In this case, we're talking about: what are those explicit values that you're stating as a grantmaker, and how can you ensure that you're living up to them. We did some research in 2018 on the top values that foundations hold, and found a lot of commonality. One thing to note is that sometimes values can also be in conflict. We may hold a value of collaboration and partnership and also hold a value of leadership. Can you be both collaborative and in partnership with somebody while you're trying to lead them? That's why it's really important to get clear on values as setting the stage for everything that you do in your organization, not just who you fund, but also how you're funding, your decision-making, monitoring, evaluation, and reporting. These practices are how the world sees your values in action. That's why I'm so excited to jump into this conversation today with a group of leaders who have embraced starting with values
Shaady Salehi: Thank you. As you’ve heard, the way PEAK Grantmaking thinks about the intersection of values and practice is really consistent with how we think about it at the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project. I love seeing this assessment of the most commonly referred to values. The big question is this: how can your practice reflect your values?
I want to hand it over now to Holly Bartling, program officer at GSF. Over the past few years, General Service Foundation has been going through a deliberate process to define their values and align their practice accordingly.
Holly Bartling: Hi everyone. We really see this work as a journey, not a destination. In 2016, our foundation went through a process of determining our new North star. We had had three different programs that were very siloed: reproductive justice, economic justice, and a civic engagement program. When our ED came to the foundation, one of her big questions was: Are we a series of programs or do we add up to something bigger?
So we went through a process with our board to land on justice as our overarching theme. Our board was very clear that justice was not just the mission for our grantmaking, but something reflected in all aspects of our foundation. Making justice an explicit north star for our foundation made a whole lot of things possible. For example, in the fall of 2016, right after the election, we sat down and asked, what are our grantmaking practices? And how can we think about time as a resource that we can give back to the nonprofit field? We took our entire grantmaking process and put it up on a dry erase board with stickies, and we started circling: what are the things that are legally required? What are the things that we feel are core? And then we just pulled off all the other stickies – taking away chunks of the bureaucracy. We also chose to set some defaults: to general operating support, and to multi-year commitments. We made those intentions really explicit.
We reflected on what the purpose of our practices was, and we felt really strongly that the reports we were getting didn't actually teach us very much. And many of us had been grant seekers before, so we know the blood, sweat and tears that takes to write a report. The truth of the matter is you write the report for the funder who you trust the least. So it doesn't often say very much, so we decided to do away with reports and shift to phone calls instead. That that one practice alone has really transformed our grant making.
Overall, what I would share as a headline is that this process of questioning our default philanthropic habits, and really interrogating their purpose and alignment with our value of justice, helped us to reimagine the program side and the operation side of our grantmaking, as Elaine will share.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Holly. Yes, I’d love to bring in Elaine, the lead architect implementing a lot of these changes. Elaine, can you share a bit about the challenges and considerations you had to think about, and what the actual transition process looked like?
Elaine Mui: Hello everyone. I'm glad that Melissa brought up Project Streamline because we actually did that process back when it first launched, and took our grants systems pretty far in streamlining lots of paperwork.
When I came on in 2016, I started looking for a new grants management system. We looked really carefully at every touchpoint we had with grantees, and then went through the process of transitioning to a new system and migrating data. And that was a lot of work. Eventually, though, we realized that the new system did not fulfill all our needs--so we ended up quickly pivoting and staying in our current system.
We were amazed to realize our system was much more nimble than we thought it was originally. It’s more about the mindset that you bring to it. I was quickly able to take everything that we had dreamed of in our reimagination process and apply that to the existing system, in just a few months.
Elaine Mui: We also surveyed our colleagues in the field with great practices--we sent out a survey. In addition, once we were in a beta test situation, we invited grantees that we were close partners with to apply through the system and give us some really honest feedback about their experience.
After they applied, they got an email to give us anonymous feedback. They could also click a link to give us feedback at any point during the application process. Our phone calls with program officers were another place where grantee could give feedback. Our board was very well aligned and because they trusted the staff, it made the process a lot easier. Our aspirational goal was to make it not only as easy as possible for grantees, but to make it joyful. I don't know if we have gotten there, but it really guided us.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you. Digging a little deeper on the board question: Did you experience any pushback or even a desire to hold on to some of the initial information that you used to ask for?
Elaine Mui: Our board and staff were pretty well aligned--our board trust our staff tremendously. We actually take a view of the board as being at the strategy level, we don't really review every single grant with them. We give them a strategic overview of our work at the programs level. Holly, did you want to add anything there?
Holly Bartling: Once we set justice as the course that we were on, then we could explain that paring back our application process was about creating a system that really centered our grantees. Reducing paperwork also opened up staff time, so there were benefits to our foundation as well, and that was also a selling point. As we were making these changes, we were sharing what we were learning with our board in real time too.
Shaady Salehi: I love that. It really emphasizes, again, the importance of doing that work early on to define your values and align the team around that. It can really flow from there. Another question for you, Holly: How have you seen your grantee relationships evolve as you have transitioned to these new practices?
Holly Bartling: I'll speak very concretely about the shift from a report to a phone call. In the fall of 2016, the first time we did these phone calls, it was a lot of work. But every single phone call would end with one of our grantees talking about how delightful and how joyful this way of doing things was. So even though it was a really hard time, it gave us the possibility of being in much deeper relationship with our grantees. It helped us really see what people were struggling with and be more responsive in real time to what was needed of us.
So one example--one of the things that came out of these phone calls was a very deep sense of the high levels of stress, trauma and burnout that our grantees were experiencing. And this is pre-pandemic. So we started giving unsolicited $5,000 grants to some of the grantees that were really very close on the front line, whether it was dealing with family separation at the border or so on. We gave unsolicited grants and just wrote a letter saying, we see that your team has really been under a lot of stress, and we want to support you. Please use this for the health and wellbeing of your staff. We wouldn’t have known to do that if we weren't in regular, deep conversation with our grantees.
Elaine Mui: This process of refining and streamlining is also very iterative. It continues to evolve as we continue to learn from the field. We’ve recently streamlined our award letter. It's only one page, we keep it really simple. We want to convey that we really do trust grantees, we don't want too many restrictions and so we just made it really clear and relational. We also recently decided to remove the grant terms from the award letter—for our general operating support grants to be truly unrestricted, we had to remove the grant period from the grant award. This allows grantees to use the funds to support their mission at any time, and to move it to reserves if needed. If you put an end date in the award letter, it doesn’t allow grantees to do that.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Elaine. Like Holly was saying before too, this is a journey, not a checklist. It's about constantly reassessing. Next we’ll hear from Hanni Hanson at Compton Foundation, based in San Francisco. Compton took a really intentional approach to solicit feedback from grantee partners to informing their streamlining process.
Hanni Hanson: Hi everyone. The Compton Foundation is a small private foundation. We've been around for about 75 years, and up until about 10 years ago, we had a very traditional grants process. Anyone could send in a full grant proposal. The staff would whittle it down and bring it to the board. The board would whittle it down, money would go out the door, and then we would receive full reports back. About eight or nine years ago, our new ED came on board, and throughout her tenure we've shifted those practices. We moved to an inquiry and then invitation only process. We would only ask for proposals from folks whom we were already fairly sure about funding through our own research, so that we wouldn't be wasting their time. We moved to mostly unrestricted grants, started doing multi-year grants, and started accepting proposals and reports that were written for other funders. So very real shifts but still fairly incremental.
Last year, our board voted to spend out the foundation’s assets. So we're currently on a trajectory to close our doors within seven years. This opened up an opportunity for us to really rethink how we do our work and to think about the values that we want to be holding in our relationships with our grantees. The decision to spend out was really a values-based decision. We fund work in climate change, reproductive justice, peace and progressive foreign policy, and democracy reform. Our board had said it's actually much more important that we move as much money as we can to these fields right now, than it is for this institution to exist forever. So within that framework, it was actually fairly easy to say that the work we do needs to be about supporting people, and not about perpetuating our institutional frameworks just because that’s what existed previously.
Last summer, I did a number of things to refresh our process. First we sent out a survey to a cross section of our grantees to get feedback, so they could tell us anonymously what was working and what wasn't working in our grants process. That was incredibly useful because we had thought that our processes were already pretty simple. And for the most part, we got positive feedback.
But we also heard that many of our grantees didn't actually believe us when we told them that they could submit proposals and reports they'd written for other funders, They felt pressured to answer our specific questions, and thought that they would be penalized if they didn't. We also found out that people were spending a lot more time on preparing proposals and reports for us than we had thought they were. And we really felt like we needed to give them back that time.
I also filled out a proposal and a report myself for my own work at the foundation. I created an account on our system. And it was an excellent exercise in empathy. It had been a while since I worked at a nonprofit where we had to fundraise, so it was helpful to be in that seat again. It also clarified what questions we thought were clear that actually weren't, or the places where our system was fairly clunky, and so on. We also grounded ourselves in values like: never asking for anything that we didn't have a clear purpose for. And trying never to ask for anything that a partner doesn't have on hand already.
So now, the default is that we ask for s proposal or report that is written already for another funder. And we also we'll ask for their audit or a 990, whatever's most recent, so that they don't have to create financials just for us. From there we developed a simplified and streamlined system. Most of our grants budget is now, for the spend out, tied up in three- and five-year unrestricted grants to anchor partners. So we received one proposal that they've written for another funder. If they don't have one on hand, we ask them really simple questions: what do you want to do and why do you want to do it? We’re flexible about the format and length of what they write.
And then all reporting from there is in the form of phone calls--inspired by General Service Foundation. Every year we just ask for that phone call and financial statements so we can get an idea of what's going on and how we can best support.
For the new grants that we're making, again, we’re only asking for proposals that they already have on hand, or if they don't have one: what do you want to do? And why? Some of those grants are two organizations that we don't actually know that well, so then we ask for their financials. Maybe a little bit of background on the organization for our own context. But if we're moving, for example, a rapid response grant, for folks who are having cashflow issues, or around the pandemic response, we don’t even have them log into the system. I upload their email request to the system and move the money that way. We're two grant cycles into this new process. I already have some ideas about how we can streamline further, and we're planning another anonymous survey for this summer to solicit feedback on how this is going. We think it's going fairly well, but who knows.
Again, we made this shift to give time back to our grant partners so that they can focus on their actual the work. Taking a different approach to paperwork also invites a transformation in the power dynamic that can exist between between a funder and a grantee. There are ways in which streamlining these processes has made less work for me. And there are ways in which it’s made more work for me--on these reporting phone calls I take the notes, I put them in the backend. But I actually feel like that's a benefit too, because I'm taking on work so they can focus on what they need to do. And I can really live into my role, which is just moving money as well as I can.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Hanni. You mentioned that when you accept proposals written for other funders, you are looking at other available data like 990s or audit data. Do you do any other homework to add more depth or understanding about a potential grantee?
Hanni Hanson: Sure. We try to do a fair amount of homework before we invite anything from a potential grantee. If it's a new organization that we don't know, we'll ask around and try to take on some of that due diligence ourselves before we ask them for any of their time or resources. We used to ask for references on all grant proposals, and now we ask for a handful of references if it's an organization that we haven't funded before, so that we can get a 360 perspective on how they fit into the landscape. So we do our own digging. I'm not saying that you should push money out the door without thinking about it. The point is to take the burden off of your grant partners and take it on yourself.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Hanni. Interesting theme of a new executive director coming in and shaking things up a bit—similar with Headwaters Foundation. I’m happy to introduce Zia Maumenee from Headwaters, which had the tremendous task and joy of building up a brand new from the ground up.
Zia Maumenee: Thank you Shaady. I am the Grants Manager at Headwaters in Western Montana. Our funding region consists of the 15 Westernmost counties in Montana, with the Salish and Kootenai tribes in the center of our region. We’re working to improve the lives of the children and families in Western Montana, with a focus on American Indians and people in poverty. I had the good fortune of being hired onto this incredible team just as the foundation was getting started in 2017. I was really excited for this fresh start with a new grants management system and an inspirational and playful CEO. Some of you might know Brenda Solorzano, she came to Western Montana from California. She had been involved in trust-based philanthropy since before she arrived. She shared her trust-based vision with our board during the interview process, and they were sold right from the beginning.
At Headwaters we believe in a circle of trust. The board trusts the CEO, the CEO trusts the staff, the staff trusts the community, and Headwaters believes that the community knows best. The community is at the center of our work. In 2017, we met with all the communities in Western Montana and learned what they needed. The community determined our focus areas, our strategic priorities. The board even decided that they would approve buckets of funding upfront so that staff could get them out as quickly as possible. That really helped us with our streamlining. The best part about designing a system from scratch was that we got to simplify the process from the beginning, through the lens of trust-based philanthropy.
We took the approach of using technology to build relationships instead of building walls. I was encouraged to be innovative and think about the user experience both internally and externally. I had been working in philanthropy for five years prior to Headwaters, so I had experience working with grantees and could understand what was clunky for them. The main takeaway from my previous job was that it took six months to get funds out to grantees, and that I really didn't want to have that same experience here. I wanted to streamline our approach, and that became a real priority for our whole foundation.
Most of our grants are invite-only. We do all the work to build relationships in the community to figure out who our funding partners will be. We also asked the community to pick anchor organizations to hold funds for groups working in collaboration. We literally had them vote anonymously on an app. It was interesting because it shook up the idea people had of us, and really gave community voice in the process.
And then we fill out the applications for them. We get the audited financials and the 990s, without having to ask them to do anything. This is for our invite-only proposals. We use Smart Simple as our grants management system, and have been able to customize our workflows to include one-click buttons, which are also part of our rapid response. So our board approves grantmaking buckets upfront annually. We don't have to go back to them for review of every grant application, which helps us again speed up our process.
Our Go! Grants program is open all year round, where anyone who qualifies based on the funding criteria can apply. Go stands for general operating funds. These grants are $5,000 per organization, and they go to our most rural communities with the focus on the most vulnerable populations. We figured out our urban areas were very savvy at getting funding, and we needed a way to spread the funding across Montana. So we developed this as a rural funding program. You can apply in less than an hour and get funds within a week. When I was building the system, my CFO kept saying, make it as easy as applying for a credit card. I had some organizations I knew would qualify apply as testers, they were able to give me feedback before we went live. It took them less than an hour to apply that very first time. Most of our first-time grantees report back that it took about 45 minutes. And in the repeat funding cases it’s taken them about 15 minutes to log in and click submit. So 45 minutes to apply for $5,000, and they can get a check in about a week.
The key to this speed is getting the board to approve things upfront, and making the process as intuitive as possible. We don't have a webinar that you have to watch to apply. We don't have any downloading instructions. In my previous work in traditional philanthropy, I was very familiar with making webinars and videos on how to apply for grants. I really wanted to avoid that. It starts with a quick eligibility quiz, which gives immediate feedback on if the organization should even continue with the application process. The next page is our registration page, where they can just put their EIN in and then it auto-populates all of the other fields. And then the next page is the portal page. The really key thing here is the organization profile. Because we're giving general operating funds, we care more about the organization profile and less about the details of the application--if organizations are mission aligned, ie serving people in poverty or serving the American Indian community, then they qualify. That way the actual application is really, really short. They can then click on the Go! Grant button to apply for grants. We have a lot of repeat grantees, they can just go directly in here, click on that button. And our go! grant application is five questions. Three of them are just buttons. And if you don't know the answer, we just say make your best guess.
Internally, we have a go grant scorecard. This is what makes our internal process so fast. It takes different details from the organization profile and application and puts them into s very quick visual. Our program associate or program officers are able to just look at this and go, Oh green, like great, this is good to go. Or yellow, which means maybe you need to make a phone call. It doesn't mean that they're not going to be funded. It just means that we need to have a conversation with them, get some more information. Red is usually a no-go--something didn't align. But in most cases, we'll still call them and ask questions, make sure they didn’t click the wrong thing. Our scorecard has been a really awesome innovation for our team because it really speeds up our process. Our program associate is also able to approve grants. They don't always have to go to our CFO or CEO, because with the go grant scorecard, we have a pretty clear picture of who's eligible and who's not. We also try to make a lot of the buttons in our system one-click. We have an approval button. When you click it, the grant agreement is created, and an email goes out to the grantee saying, please sign the grant agreement.
But we are continuing to learn and grow and we continue to streamline. And one of the things we've done recently is we developed a COVID response. The board approved those buckets up front for food security and childcare and support for our past grantees. We called the grantees, making sure that they actually needed the funding, especially for the food banks. Most of them were really excited to hear from us. And then we filled out the application for them. We adapted the general service foundation grant agreement, and put it in an email, saying that if they cash the check that we send them that they agreed to the terms in the grant agreement. It’s really just unrestricted funding. It doesn't have a lot of grant terms. It doesn't have any dates or anything like that, they don't have to log in, they don't have to sign, we just mail them the check. So that COVID process has really taught us a lot, and we want to apply that going forward to our other general operating funds.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much. How are board meetings structured now that the board is not approving individual grants?
Zia Maumenee: Every board meeting is a learning opportunity for a different issue. In the beginning they’ve learned about trust-based philanthropy. We bring in grantees to share and showcase their work. The board members also go to conferences with us. They've gone to GEO, to Grantmakers in Health. We try to keep them at the strategy level, and they really appreciate that because they're busy and don't really want to spend a lot of time getting into the weeds. At my previous job, we had a grant review committee on the board and at the end of every committee meeting they always said, well, we'll defer to the staff because you guys know best anyway. And so it's fascinating to go from that to this type of board where they are just so thankful to stay out of the nitty gritty.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Zia. A question from the chat: When you were mentioning the community voting via app for prospective grantees, how did you define community?
Zia Maumenee: When Brenda first came to Western Montana, she went and did 500 cups of coffee with everybody in Western Montana that she could get her hands on. That included businesses, librarians, nonprofit, government, schools, and all different kinds of people. So she built this network of people across Western Montana. And then we just broke it out into regions and invited all of them again to this meeting and to bring all their friends. It didn't matter if they were retired, it didn't matter if they were a business owner or nonprofit staff or not. We wanted everybody in the community to be able to come and share in that conversation.
Shaady Salehi: Wonderful. Thank you. There were a number of questions in the chat inviting our panelists to reflect on the differences between invite only versus open application processes. What are the considerations there? How can you think about the power imbalance that exists when it's invitation only?
Holly Bartling: I appreciate the question, it's something that that honestly I feel like we still struggle with. I can share how our thinking has evolved and some of the experiments we've tried. When I started at the foundation, we had an open LOI process, and it was actually kind of cumbersome to go through it. It took a lot of time. So one of the first things we played around with was making it simpler. But then, we were getting so many LOI, maybe one or two out of hundreds would get funded. That also didn't feel right in terms of the time grantees were putting in to apply. So now we don't have an open LOI process. We took an idea from the legal field of doing intakes, we would set aside a certain number of staff hours every quarter and just have open 20-minute phone calls with people that were interested. And often, we would find that even if we weren't a good fit for funding, we had ideas about others who funders that might be and could refer people. But that process was very labor intensive, and often the referral to another foundation would require a whole bunch of extra work. That was really hard to keep doing with a staff of four. After trying that process for about a year, we sat down to look at who actually made it past the intake phone call to the next level. And almost every single one of the groups that ultimately got funding had gotten to us by referral from one of our grantees. So now we do our open phone calls with our grantees, we're super open to hearing them tell us who's doing good work that we need to know about. Then we can actively reach out to the group instead of just getting a lot of people coming at us that may or may not be a fit. We’re also part of something called the Defending the Dream Fund. We’re running all of our grant proposals through the Amalgamated Just Fund portal, where applicants can be seen by anyone on the platform. Right now I think there's something like $10 million running through that platform. It's a way for groups that are coming to us for rapid response funds to also be seen by lots of other funders, both individual donors and foundations. So some of the groups that have been coming through that pathway have been getting grants from other folks that are part of that network too, so that’s also been super helpful.
Hanni Hanson: We went through a very similar process. We also used to have an open inquiry process. We eventually looked at the numbers and realized we were also getting most of our new grantees through referrals from folks who were already working with. But it's definitely something that I still struggle with. We try to be really careful to watch how our own biases and blind spots might be showing up in who we eventually invite to to apply. We have to be really careful.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you. Another question that comes up a lot is: What about evaluating impact? How can you do that if you're having conversational reporting?
Hanni Hanson: Because we fund a lot of advocacy organizations that are trying to build movements and shift culture, those are things that are really hard to measure. So internally we try to think about it more as learning and course correcting, rather than straight up “evaluation” or anything really quantitative. That shows up in the kinds of conversations that we have with people. We're much more interested in learning about what they're learning and what they're grappling with in their work, than we are in trying to get particular measures or numbers. Those sorts of conversations questions help inform our own strategic thinking much more profoundly than any data point, like how many people showed up to your event or how many people did you reach? In part that is just the nature of the work that we fund But it also fits really well with our overall approach and values.
Holly Bartling: We also have a learning board that's deeply curious about how change happens. And the questions that we get are often around curiosity. But for example, there was a moment that summer that Kavanaugh got confirmed where we had a couple board members reach out to us asking, what is happening? Is our grantmaking strategy wrong? How do we understand this moment? And we got on a call with our board to talk about backlash, about the idea that progress is linear. The questions we asked were, how do we think about the moment that we're in and the windows of opportunity? So I would say it's much more of an active dialogue that starts with our phone calls with grantees, and gets then gets brought into our board meeting discussions.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Holly. That's such a great example of how to take advantage of the role of a learning board. A couple of super practical questions are coming up: Does reporting change depending on the amount of the grant? So if it's a small grant, are you looking at lighter reporting or are those reporting processes uniform?
Zia Maumenee: Our reporting process is really evolving. It started out as these brief final reports, like radio button questions. We just wanted to get a few little details and be able to produce a quick chart or a graph. It was really data-driven, and we were trying to save grantees time. We then hired an evaluation team to help us develop a theory of change. And through the work with the evaluators, we had them do interviews with all of our grantees, asking them what they wanted. And our grantees were like, we want to be in relationship, we want to have conversations. We don't want to just log in and fill out some form. We want to talk to you.
We had already known that to some degree, because we had been doing a few interviews and site visits. But that prompted us to take a whole different approach. We’ve developed a conversation tool where we can pull out themes that connect to our theory of change. It’s definitely a journey.
Elaine Mui: Our reporting now is mostly phone calls, but if it happens to be a project support grant, then we do require a financial report at the end of the grant period. And that's just for legal compliance reasons because it's project support. If it is a general support grant however, we do not require a financial report at the end of the grant period. With smaller grants, we do not require any reporting. We just send out the award with no requirements.
Holly Bartling: We’re iterating as we go. We used to require a phone call every year as part of a multiyear grant contract, and we got rid of that. So now the protocols are not required except for at the end of the reporting period.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you. Another question: How, if at all, have any of you modified internal financial controls or policies to align with these values-based grant-making practices? Have you had to have other financial considerations on how you're documenting your just kind of financial reporting?
Holly Bartling: What we learned from Project Streamline a long time ago is that you don't need a financial report if you have a general support grant. So a project support grant, which for us is usually given only if an organization is fiscally sponsored, in which case the only grant that you can give is a project support grant, those require a financial report. We do ask for previous year's financials on the front end as we are evaluating the renewal. But we figured that's enough to know whether an organization is in good financial health. And then we ask one other question about whether an organization has reserves or not. And we're very clear in that question. There’s no right or wrong answer. We just want to know, how are you thinking about your financial health? And that actually gives us a lot of information about a group’s plans and potential future issues that might not be visible in a budget
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Holly. With a general support grant, detailed financials are not required by the IRS. So that's one easy thing that can be streamlined. Melissa, what are some general takeaways for our participants today?
Melissa Sines: Something that really struck me as we were having this conversation was that it's really about making the connection between the operations side of the house and the programs side of the house. Folks in operations, finance, compliance, IT, grants management, really have an impact on the way that you're doing your work. Including them in conversations about trust-based philanthropy or other values based grant-making practices really helps to inform the conversations at the board level or at the senior staff level. Folks on the operations side really bring that practical component to understand implementation. So it's really important to elevate the operations side, the grants management side of the house as a strategic component of the work that you are doing. PEAK has been a home for grants management folks now for 10 plus years. We are really focused on giving people the resources that they need to approach these questions of values-based grant making or trust-based grant making in their own context. It’s going to look very different for each of you. That opportunity for folks on the operations side to feel that mission alignment between what you say your values are and what you're doing also really increases their own kind of personal satisfaction with their work. My encouragement for you is to not have operations sit over here on the side and think, we'll just tell them what to do once we've decided everything that we're going to do. Invite them into the center of these conversations about your values and about how they're showing up in your community.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Melissa. I’m going to close us out with some key takeaways:
It pays off to spend front-end time building internal understanding around values and practice.
Streamlining paperwork saves time for everyone. It's not just for grantees.
When you're streamlining, a question to ask yourself is: How will we use this information? Do we really need it?
You don't need to take a one size fits all approach for your entire grant portfolio. It can look different for different grant programs.
Streamlined processes can probably be even more streamlined.
So what can you do now? Per Hanni’s suggestion--fill out your own grant application, and see what the experience is like. How long does it take? Are all the questions clear and necessary?
Thank you all for joining us!