Giving Compass' Take:

• Michael Kilpatrick details the high cost of administrating, including grant reporting, that burdens nonprofits and funders and offers the Good Financial Grant Practice as a solution. 

• Do your grant reporting requirements unduly burden organizations you are attempting to support? Could this standard, or another change, improve your process and increase efficiency? 

• Read about streamlining your grant reporting process. 

Funders have a right to expect that their nonprofit grantees have systems and structures in place to manage grants effectively and ethically. But does that right also imply that funders have a responsibility to invest in the grant management capabilities they expect from organizations they entrust with funds?

According to Caroline Fiennes, author of It Ain’t What You Give, It’s The Way That You Give It, roughly $125 million in the United Kingdom alone is “lost” by grant recipients in the production of reports required by funders and government agencies; much of that is spent on duplicate assessments as part of the submission of multiple grant proposals.

Rather than going to the angels, this $125 million could be seen as the “admin share,” with both funders and their nonprofit grantees spending significant amounts of time and money on multiple due diligence assessments, diverting funds to needless administrative tasks that could be used to change lives for the better.

Most grant proposal forms use different criteria, leaving many would-be grant recipients unclear about what funders expect of them. This also means that many nonprofits end up spending hundreds of hours a year filling in different forms that ask for the same basic information in slightly different ways.

Nowhere is the problem more acute than when it comes to filling in forms designed to assess a nonprofit’s grant management practices. In part, this is because funders are under increasing pressure from watchdog groups, the media, and taxpayers to demonstrate that the funds they award are being spent effectively and ethically.

The Global Grant Community (GGC) was established to address this broken model and reduce the “admin share” of funds being lost to paperwork. Its mission is to enable more money to flow to the people who need help by using standardization and the disruptive power of technology to reduce the cost, in time and dollars, currently entailed in connecting funders with potential nonprofit partners.

Our antidote to “admin share” is the world’s first international standard for Good Financial Grant Practice (ARS 1651:2018). For the first time ever, there is now a global standard for good grant management practice that CBOs, CSOs, NGOs, and higher educational and research institutions can adopt, bringing rigor and trust to even high-risk funding environments and creating a level playing field between state and philanthropic funders and their beneficiaries.

Read the full article about Good Financial Grant Practice by Michael Kilpatrick at Alliance Magazine.