Building Trust through Choice: A Different Approach to Grant Reporting

By Gillian Knight

While at a conference last year, I remember listening to grantmakers debate what was “best” for grantee partners during a session about verbal applications and reports. A cohort of them had pivoted to all conversation-based grantmaking (from application to end-of-grant reporting), and a few raised some valid points about the limitations of foundation staff doing all the report writing on partners’ behalf. Sitting there, I was curious that no grantee partner was in the room talking about what they would prefer—grantmakers were talking to each other about the topic without partner insight. We had just implemented our Learning and Evaluation framework around that time, so I asked our Director of Programs:

What if partners get to choose how they want to engage with us?

That conference experience reinforced why we center trust-based philanthropy principles in our grant processes and engagement with our partners. From offering applicants the option to chat with us before submitting a proposal to allowing partners to schedule a more extended site visit, embedding choice in our partner engagement has been critical to executing our trust-based approach.

Because we know that capacity looks different across organizations when engaging with us, it prompted me to consider how we could also offer choice in our grant report process. Shifting to a reporting process defined by our partners would allow us to build deeper relationships and having them lead the way for this made sense.

In the Summer of 2022, we launched a pilot that offered our partners a choice between submitting a written grant report or providing a verbal one at the end of the grant term. We received positive feedback from our partners and were eager to roll it out and share what we learned. I presented those learnings at the 2023 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) Conference in Washington DC this May and shared how we implemented the process. After the session, some funders told me how much they appreciated the transparency and how the pilot was a good example of trust-based philanthropy in practice.

With that in mind, the following summarizes what I shared at the GEO conference, what we learned from this pilot, and how we plan to roll it out this Fall. I hope it inspires others to consider implementing choice in their grant processes or other aspects of their partnerships.

Start Small but with Intention

Transforming processes, especially with an equity lens, does not happen overnight. Before we began, we asked ourselves these questions:

The answers led us to pilot this idea with a subset of grantee partners, particularly those with less capacity. We knew we could learn from their experience and then build it out for partners that have more capacity.

To start, we asked two 2021 partners to choose between discussing the answers to thegrant report questions verbally with a Program team member over the phone or via Zoom.

Do the Legwork and Use the Data You Have…

If partners preferred to submit a written report, we informed them that we had pre-filled some of it based on data they had already shared throughout the grant term. We did this to reduce the time they had to spend answering questions we already knew the answers to.

Our two pilot partners were really helpful in talking through how the process worked. They helped us adjust our questions to make more sense and encouraged us to consider offering the option to record our verbal reports.

We decided to offer the reporting choice to the rest of our 2021 partners as an extension of our pilot. Afterward, we had conversations with partners and conducted a brief survey to learn about their experience. What we heard indicated that verbal grant reports were not necessarily better than written reports, but the ability to choose which type of report to do is what they wanted us to continue to offer.

…But Find Internal Efficiencies, Too.

While we knew this was the right way to go, we also needed to find efficiencies to make our internal processes sustainable.

Each verbal report utilized roughly 95 minutes of staff time to prepare, conduct the conversation, review the notes, and enter them into the grant report portal. The process took approximately one full-time workweek for one person. (!)

We wanted to adapt all we learned so far to our 2021-2022 grant report process for our 20 multi-year partners. However, this time, we further refined our questions, recorded conversations and transcribed them using Otter.ai. We then entered the information into the grant report portal, and submitted the full report on behalf of our partners.

All 20 partners participated, and each conversation took approximately 75 minutes. Using Otter.ai saved us 15 minutes of note-taking—multiplying that by 20, this tool saved us a lot of time!

Some partners were not able to schedule the appointment in the given time frame, so they were okay with submitting written reports instead. The lesson there: Do not lead with assumptions when developing, and in this case, testing new processes.

Offering Choice Fosters Trust

Over half of our multi-year partners stated that our multi-year commitment, process, and approach demonstrated that we trust them as partners.

Over half of 2021 partners shared that our grant report process made things easier on their end.

Leanly staffed organizations expressed that our approach meant they can focus their limited staff time on mission-critical work vs. duplicative application and reporting processes.

Taking Our Learnings Forward

We plan to fully roll out grant report choice to 2022 grantee partners this Fall. Our multi-year partners will only have to provide an update on their organizational demographics as they close out Year 2. Our Program team will complete reports on their behalf and will review them with each partner in early 2024. 

For our 2024 grant cycle, we want to streamline the grant process further by helping all returning partner applicants get a head start on their Letters of Intent. We plan to pre-fill as much information as possible based on our conversations and the data we have collected in the past year.

We will continue to center our relationships with partners to guide how we refine our grant processes to meet their needs and preferences. As always, we are committed to being in right relationship with our grantee partners and continuing to align our actions with the values articulated in our strategic plan.