With the consent of our adventurous board, we developed a grantmaking process that simplifies and streamlines paperwork, which is one of the seven pillars of our trust-based philanthropy approach. We accept, and request proposals that potential grantees have already written for other funders. We have an open submission policy, such that if an organization thinks they are eligible for funding, they can apply at any time.

We request a document that describes their leadership development work, but we don’t even require them to do a search-and-replace to insert ‘Robert Sterling Clark’ where ‘Foundation X’ used to be. The Apply section on our website simply states this request: Please submit a recent grant application that represents your organization well, and reflects our funding interests. Feel free to share one that you’ve used to apply to another funder.

I’ll be honest, some applicants are quite skeptical–they are smart and savvy professionals who have spent a career figuring out what foundations (really) want. It will take a while for us to build the reputation and trust in the field so that people can believe what we say at first reading. But we insist that there is no particular format or set of questions we need answered–and many organizations are more than happy to comply.

We typically find that the proposals they have written for other funders work just fine for us. They give us the information we need to get started, and then we can do the legwork to look up their 990s, talk to colleagues in the field, and — most importantly — meet with them and observe their programs. We think it is a better use of their time and ours to talk, rather than for them to sit in their offices writing to our specifications, only for us to sit in our offices, reading.

All that said, this is new for us, and we are still figuring it out. That is evident in how we work with grantees to evaluate their progress. At first, we asked them to submit reports that they had written for other funders. But we soon found that they didn’t really tell us what we wanted to know about what grantees are learning. So we have developed an oral reporting process, in the form of a set of questions that we call the Check-in Analysis Tool (CHAT–pretty clever, right?). We send the questions ahead to our grantees, and then use them to guide a conversation that serves both as site visit and grant report.

Read the full article about streamling gantmaking by Lisa Pilar Cowan at Medium.