When putting together year-end lists, it’s hard to avoid a slight feeling of déjà vu; after all, you’re not only looking back on the year that was, but repeating an annual exercise of reflection.
Yet in wrapping up 2024, I’m not sure if my colleagues and I on the Assessment and Advisory Services team would say this is true. To be sure, the essence of our work has remained the same — but it’s evolved and flourished in important and encouraging ways. (Later in this post, I’ll share a series of examples of funders acting on feedback they received in partnership with CEP. It’s these stories, fresh every year, that inspire us as we look ahead to what’s next.)
This past year, we expanded our reach, leading 125 assessments on behalf of funders and collecting critical feedback from grantees, declined applicants, donors, and staff; fielded custom surveys on topics ranging from board demographics to capacity building; and steered learning efforts for membership networks, corporate grantmakers, and funder collaboratives. On top of this, by offering additional survey rounds in 2024, we were able to provide our clients with even more opportunities throughout the year to collect timely, accessible feedback, and to turn around what we learn even more quickly.
Beyond these changes to our work, though, what feels different this past year is how persistently forward-looking our clients were, in spite of the challenges that materialized and amidst the uncertainties funders and nonprofits faced. It perhaps wouldn’t have been surprising for grantmakers to pause, retrench even, at least for a while, to get their bearings and chart out next steps.
What we saw instead in 2024 was the opposite, with so many funders that CEP has the privilege of working with striving to double down on their most powerful strategies to deliver and extend their impact, all the while reinforcing their commitment, not only in making a difference in the fields and communities in greatest need of their support, but in turning a lens on themselves. Our clients grasped more acutely than ever that the insights of their key partners, especially grantees, were the most forthright and effective way to unlocking their full potential, no matter how demanding these assessments might be.
Our clients, both the ones we’ve highlighted below and those whose public findings are hyperlinked in a full list that can be found here, have demonstrated that action matters, which necessarily began with curiosity and an instinct for transparency when asking about input (including everything from constructive criticism to new ideas and suggestions and — yes — also validation from their grantees). We here at CEP are especially proud to have helped support this work in 2024, which far from inspiring déjà vu, has felt uplifting as we look ahead to 2025.
This is all to say: thank you. We appreciate all of the funders that CEP has partnered with, including those who’ve shared their grantee feedback results publicly and reflected on what they’ve learned. The following list isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but we hope these examples illuminate a little of what we earnestly believe at CEP: that learning through feedback is always fresh, novel, and — thankfully — a cause for optimism.
Barr Foundation
“The headlines from this year’s GPR were [encouraging] … We were pleased to hear that our grantees felt and valued the changes we had made in response to the concerns and suggestions they shared with us in 2017. And more importantly, the GPR tells us that our grantees are experiencing Barr as a funder who shows up in ways that advance and enhance their work.”
Democracy Fund
“Our grantees recognize our field expertise and appreciate our efforts to advance knowledge in the field — but we can do better. Grantees gave us solid scores in our understanding of the field and see us as emerging thought leaders, reflecting the fact that much of our staff comes from the practitioner community. Still, they thought we can do more to understand grantee organizations themselves, pointing to a need to better support our field-expert staff in their transition to grantmaking roles.”
The James Irvine Foundation
“For the first time we asked custom questions about Irvine’s racial equity efforts. While grantees believe we are committed to racial equity, they want to know more about how we’re addressing racial equity across all aspects of the Foundation and what our efforts mean for our work and theirs. Moving forward, we will continue to communicate publicly about progress on our racial equity commitments in our strategy, grantmaking, and evaluation — and share, where relevant, the implications of these efforts for grantees.”
Kate B. Reynolds Trust
“All of the feedback we received was immensely valuable, and we will use it to shape the way we invest in grantees and support the day-to-day work. We will continue to bring our core values of listening to grantees and learning from the experts on the ground as we focus on equitable access to health care, equitable health outcomes, thriving residents, and thriving communities.”
Maine Health Access Foundation
“We were also happy to see that our efforts to make application and grant reporting processes less burdensome have translated into grantees reporting spending less time overall meeting grant requirements than in past surveys. The process also identified opportunities for continuing improvement. We are developing our plans to act on recommendations for ensuring grant applicants have clear and precise information to support applicants’ understanding of their likelihood of success for a given funding opportunity.”
Missouri Foundation for Health
“Notably, a refrain among partners was a desire to better understand MFH’s broad strategic goals and long-term vision, as well as how partners’ work fits into them… [As a result, we] are committed to providing partners with a deeper understanding of the Foundation’s broad vision and accompanying strategies, as well as how individual partners’ work relates. We have recently redesigned the structure and content of the MFH website to be more accessible and clear, and will seek opportunities to clarify and bring to life MFH’s broad strategic goals and commitments using the website and other channels of communication.“
Porticus (Netherlands)
“Our intentional actions, initiated after our reflections on the GPR 2020 results — especially our focus on meaningful participation and on further building our trust-based relationships — have contributed to positive 2024 outcomes. This shows that the insights we gain from these surveys are invaluable for decision-making and for shaping how we and our partners work together.”
Ralph C. Wilson Foundation
“Applicants shared that they wanted program staff to be more responsive, accessible, and fair to applicants. One applicant stated, ‘I believe it would save them time in the long run if they were to give us a few minutes to share what might be a good fit under their focus area. This feels like a difficult foundation to build relationships with and find out why your projects may or may not fit.’ Grantees echoed this sentiment by saying that when they are able to talk with staff they are very helpful. However, ‘…there were many times when it seemed responses had gone cold and we had to initiate connections repeatedly.’”
Skyline Foundation
“The CEP survey results showed that Skyline’s grantee partners want to more clearly understand our goals, strategies, and grantmaking requirements. For most of the foundation’s history, Skyline has maintained a very low profile. Informed by our core values of justice and humility, we have focused on moving money. We took an initial step toward external communications last year by launching our first-ever website, and we have seen how that small step has helped grantee partners and prospects understand how our values and priorities align with theirs.”
The Winnipeg Foundation (Canada)
“Organizations shared the need for multi-year funding opportunities, and larger, unrestricted grants… The Winnipeg Foundation piloted the multi-year grant program in 2017 and 2018; however, 2020 was not the right time to provide longer-term support to fewer organizations when so many groups needed to address immediate needs. Now that our community has begun to stabilize post-pandemic, we are committed to bringing back multi-year funding in fall 2024.”
Joseph Lee is a senior manager on the Assessment and Advisory Services team at CEP. Find him on LinkedIn.
