Reality Grantmaking part 2

As promised, I'm following up my first post on the Reality Grantmaking session I attended last week with a second post about the things I learned from the panel of foundation representatives that I hadn't considered so strongly before.

The first was how much they appreciated having the project budgets included in the documents, and how much detail they liked to see in those budgets. I'm not surprised that they like the budgets, I was just surprised at how important they were even in the extremely short 2-page letter of intent type of format that these mini-proposals were required to use. I've never included a budget in such a short proposal or in an LOI unless it was explicitly required by the funder but I think now I'll start. Now, since all of these mini-proposals did include budgets I assume it was required, but the funders praised the detailed budgets so highly that it now seems like a good idea to include even if the guidelines don't explicitly call for it.

Another thing I noticed was how much the funders, especially the one from the California Endowment, liked to see a brief list of or sentence about specific accomplishments of the organizations submitting requests. I always include any particularly notable or relevant accomplishments in the proposal section dealing with org history, but I thought it was sort of just another equally important but no more significant part of the whole section unless it was a really big national honor of some sort. Now I think that I will look more closely at the histories of the orgs I write for to find some specific accomplishments to really call out, even if the orgs don't usually talk them up that much themselves.

And then there was something in one of the proposals that, as soon as I saw it, I was very curious to hear what the panelists thought of it. Apparently the proposal format called for a discussion of what other funding was being sought, or had been secured, for the project. One org mentioned some of the other foundations approached, and then followed up by saying that whatever funds weren't raised from foundations or other donors would be provided from the operating budget.

I've said this once or twice in proposals, because I thought that funders who asked about other funding were interested in hearing that the project is sustainable and would be able to move forward even if they didn't give the full amount requested. It's not an ideal answer to this kind of question, but I've done it before because I thought that it showed that the project was in fact important to the org, important enough to fund out of their operating budget even if foundations weren't able to fully support it.

Well, I'm not doing this anymore, because these funders HATED it! They said it made it sound like their funding wasn't needed, and if it wasn't needed, why should they give it? By asking for a list of other funders they seemed more interested in just knowing who else was interested in the project, since they do of course know other foundations in their fields. They wanted to know what sort of company they were keeping, and to be assured that they weren't being asked to foot the whole bill for a single project but that the responsibility was shared among other funders they knew. They didn't mention sustainability as the reason for asking the question at all.

I wish I would've thought to ask them about this during the Q & A, but the Q & A was so short that I might not have gotten the opportunity anyhow. I also would have liked to ask about evaluation plans. A lot of foundations require orgs to include an evaluation plan in their proposals, a discussion of "how you will measure success" or something of that nature, but these proposals obviously weren't required to include anything like this. I wanted to hear about how they weigh the evaluation plans when they are included, how crucial they are to the decision-making process, how in-depth they needed to be, what they were looking for in general... Evaluation is a big topic in the field right now, with some controversy over whether nonprofits really have the capacity to do meaningful evaluation for themselves or not. My opinion on this is a whole 'nother topic, so I won't go into it right now, but I would've loved to hear them weigh in on it anyhow.

Tomorrow I'm attending another Foundation Center event, with corporate grantmakers this time. It's another panel discussion, though it's not Reality Grantmaking, just a regular talk. Anyhow if it's useful to me or thought-provoking that's the next thing I'll post about.