In our work with foundations, we’ve noticed an interesting tension.
On the one hand, foundations want to understand the impact of the work that they fund and they often use grantee reports and evaluations to gauge that impact.
On the other hand, many foundations also want to simplify reporting and evaluation for grantees so that these nonprofits can spend more time doing their work.
But what is the grantee perspective on foundation-required reporting and evaluation processes? How helpful do they find them? What actually matters most to grantees?
Our newest research, Grantees Report Back: Helpful Reporting and Evaluation Processes, provides a detailed look at grantees’ experience of the reporting and evaluation processes, what makes them most helpful, and how foundations could improve them. To understand grantees’ views, we collected survey responses from more than 24,000 grantees that have received funding from 130 foundations.
To give a sense of how strongly grantees feel about these processes they are required to undergo, look at their response to our survey question: How helpful do you perceive the reporting or evaluation processes in strengthening your organization or the program funded by the grant? Grantees, on average, rated this question a 4.6 out of 7.0—the least positively rated measure in our 50-plus question grantee survey.
Our data, however, do not suggest that grantees object to spending time submitting reports and participating in evaluations. Rather, they want the opportunity to discuss that work with their funders or the evaluators with whom they worked. Helpful processes aren’t all about the opportunity to discuss the report or evaluation submitted, though. In fact, the most important element of helpful reporting and evaluation processes is the strength of the relationship between grantees and their funders. This finding might sound familiar — as CEP has found in so much of its research over the years, the importance of funder-grantee relationships cannot be underestimated.
In our report, grantees speak about how foundations can make these processes more helpful to them. In addition, we interviewed two program officers whose grantees gave them high marks when it comes to reporting and evaluation. Ken Thompson of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Amy Berman of the John A. Hartford Foundation provide insights into how they structure their requirements to make them most helpful both to their foundations and to their grantees.
You can download the piece in CEP’s Content Library.
