Through our practice-based research, GEO has identified a number of grantmaker practices that support nonprofit success. When selecting areas of work to explore, we consider whether the work will support our long-term goals, as described below. These practices fit within four broad categories, with our Scaling What Works initiative cutting across all of these issue areas:
I. Grantmakers increasingly fund outcomes/results
We know this is happening when grantmakers:
- Give increased levels of operating support
- Give more multiyear support
- Provide capacity-building support, including leadership development
- Make larger average grants
- Take a more active role in raising money (e.g. capital aggregation)
- Don't set caps on overhead, so that grantees are the ones defining what they need
- Know the difference between business as usual vs. growth and invest accordingly
- Pay for evaluation activities
II. Grantmakers more broadly adopt mechanisms for engaging stakeholders
We know this is happening when grantmakers:
- Have foundation staff and boards that, through their make-up, better reflect the experience and knowledge of those they are trying to serve
- Conduct needs assessments
- Solicit and use anonymous feedback from grantees
- Engage external voices in decision-making and strategy setting
- Practice empathy and bridge knowledge gaps
III. More grantmakers embrace evaluation as a learning and improvement mechanism
We know this is happening when grantmakers:
- Build the evaluative capacity of grantees
- Base funding decisions on evidence of success elsewhere (like the medical field does, e.g.)
- Improve grantee outcomes
- Embrace failure
- Practice collective/collaborative learning
- Right-size application and reporting
- Use evaluation as a real time practice to guide decisions
- Advance field outcomes
- Build an internal culture that supports learning
IV. More grantmakers support collaborative problem-solving
How we know this is happening when grantmakers:
- Form co-funding partnerships
- Participate in public/private partnerships
- Engage with colleagues as they develop strategy
- Accept common reports from grantees receiving co-funding
- Transcend idiosyncratic cycles and deadlines set by their own organization in service of the larger work
How can grantmakers most effectively help the nonprofit organizations they support make significant and sustained impact for people, their communities and our planet? GEO helps private and public sector funders leverage learning, relationships and resources to grow social impact.
Launched in 2010, Scaling What Works is a multiyear learning initiative of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Through this initiative, we seek to support the success of the Social Innovation Fund and address continuing disparities in human and environmental health, education and economic opportunity by expanding the number of grantmakers and public sector funders that are working together to broaden the impact of high-performing nonprofits.
