What if your default settings are creating a fault line in your community?
Dear funders,
Recently we’ve been helping an innovative organization to seek grant funding to accelerate BOLD goals. Along the way we’ve STRUGGLED to walk through the simple steps of writing a grant proposal. I’m sorry to report that many grants management systems are discouraging people from applying, and that’s leaving some people - and their needs - invisible to you. There are people in your communities who have amazing ideas, incredible strategies, and exceptional commitment who you are not meeting with, hearing from, or investing in because some of the processes foundations are using are cumbersome and exhausting.
On the plus side:
The switch to online grants management systems has removed significant stressors for applicants such as whether the postal service will deliver their grant application before the due date.
Previously I was CEO of a private foundation so I know that these systems are not all bad. In fact, they provide super reports that used to take hours to manipulate manually in a spreadsheet.
Website communication for foundation purposes has improved greatly over the last few years, and online information can be more equitable -- if we’re sharing all of the information.
So, where are the pain points and who might our grants management systems be leaving behind? We’re going to point out two challenges on the front end of the process, before we even get into important things like strategic match.
Are we eligible? Because so many funders are using eligibility criteria well beyond what’s legally required, it can leave grantees, especially the most innovative among us, needing to know more, or wondering if we can check the boxes. Without some flexibility in your criteria and a real-person to ask, you might be leaving behind your community's most creative and collaborative leaders who just can’t mark the boxes so easily!
For example, if a funder doesn’t fund organizations with budgets over $1m, how do we account for collective and innovative structures like networks and coalitions? What if we’re a start up with a fiscal sponsor, a practice that actually saves community resources, does that count? How about an innovator with an address in one place that wants to serve another neighbor in your area?
What are the questions? Recently we reviewed a funder’s website. Thankfully, they provided a tidy list of 52 words (just four bullet points) to tell us what we needed to gather to fill out the application. However, we couldn't see the actual questions until we made it through the obstacle course of system sign-in.
When we finally opened the application, there were more than 65 questions, including 42 questions before we were asked for project information, including 35+ questions about the organization, most of which were publicly available on the organization’s website.
While SWIM can tackle this complexity on behalf of our clients, others in our community cannot devote the time to a mountain of questions. Imagine a dedicated leader faced with 65+ funder questions, who is also faced with a crisis of affordable housing, food security, or climate change. Where do you want them to spend the next four hours?
But, it’s not just the number of questions that turn people away, it’s the complexity and the acronyms and tiny little character counts that can be a mismatch. The skills it takes to traverse these applications - jumping through hoops, understanding jargon, and squeezing your idea into 150 characters - are NOT the same skills that make change in our community. Instead we need organizations that have the skills to listen to their neighbors, design a new offering with their clients, compel powerful collaboration, and paint a vision of change. Application systems may be producing the wrong measuring stick; judging the capacity of an organization to persist in the paperwork, but not necessarily to be effective in their community.
We know that funders face pressures for more accountability and reports and data, we also know that they are mission driven. We call on you to consider who your system’s default system might be weeding out, ignoring, mismatching, or even silencing, and make changes.
Sincerely,
An exhausted grant writer
Ready to rethink your default settings? Consider taking our Grantmaker Openness Assessment.
Looking for more? Peak Grantmaking offers Courage in Practice: Principles for Peak Grantmaking.