Giving Compass' Take:
- Yvonne Belanger reflects on how the Barr Foundation has transformed its funding practices by incorporating grantee feedback to streamline processes and support equity.
- How can your foundation create meaningful change by listening to and learning from grantees and adjusting its practices accordingly?
- Learn more about best practices in philanthropy.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits in your area.
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In philanthropy, it’s often an unquestioned expectation that funders will ask grantees to assess the progress of their own work and to apply what they learn to improve. At Barr, we think it is equally important to ask our grantees to assess how we are doing as a funder, listen deeply to their responses, and close the loop by sharing back what we heard and taking action to improve our effectiveness. We have consistently found CEP’s Grantee Perception Report (GPR) to be a valuable listening tool for this endeavor to incorporate grantee feedback.
In our most recent GPR results, we got positive feedback on the cumulative impact of changes we’ve made over the past six years. Alongside their feedback, our grantees also asked us to share what we’ve done and the positive impact the changes have had in an effort to encourage other funders to adopt similar practices of incorporating grantee feedback.
Since Barr last conducted the GPR in 2017, we had made many changes based on what we heard. For instance, in 2017 our grantees shared that they were spending an average of 22 hours on their proposal, and we benchmarked quite low (in the 25th percentile of our peer group) for the usefulness of this process. Subsequently, going through our own application processes ourselves (what we called “walking a mile in our grantees’ shoes”) inspired us to streamline, be more personalized, and be clearer about our expectations. We reduced the number of application questions and custom forms, made use of public data wherever possible, and provided better guidance on how we intended to collaboratively assess progress and results.
We also learned, from our 2017 GPR feedback as well as from the field, about the high value grantees place on ‘beyond the grant supports,’ so we sought new opportunities to provide these.
These steps were a good beginning, but we had more work to do. In 2020, with support from foundation leadership and trustees, the urgency of the pandemic and racial justice uprisings motivated us to make further changes. Here’s what that looked like.
Read the full article about incorporating grantee feedback by Yvonne Belanger at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.