Of all the rituals we associate with the new year — stowing away the suitcases from holiday travel, returning unwanted gifts, tacking a new calendar onto the fridge — for many of us, the moments of introspection and reflection are what hold the most meaning. The punctuation of a fresh, uncluttered start to the year brings with it a clear sense of possibility, a promise not only to restart but to imagine a different path by setting new goals. In extrapolating about what lies ahead in 2024, we’re compelled to ask ourselves: what kinds of lessons can we take with us into the new year?
Those of us on CEP’s assessment and advisory services team are as keen as anyone to undertake a bit of self-examination — our work, after all, is largely about posing challenging questions on behalf of funders, and then trying to make sense of the answers. Looking back, and in lieu of the typical summary of our proud accomplishments — like the redesign of our online reporting platform or the 107 assessments that we led on behalf of funders in 2023 — we thought we’d instead turn outward and see what some of our clients have said about what they learned from their work with us in the last year. What follows (in no particular order) is a year-end list — or, better yet, a year-commencement list — of a selection of funders who utilized CEP’s Grantee Perception Report (GPR) and made their findings public in 2023.
As background, following the assessment process, a number of CEP’s clients choose to share their results more widely as a way to close the feedback loop with their stakeholders and reinforce how much they value the opportunity to engage with their feedback. In other cases, funders share their GPR results in order to hold themselves accountable, ensuring that they’ll commit to acting on their feedback and improving in their practices with grantees.
What these funders also have in common — both those we’ve included below and those whose public findings are hyperlinked in a full list that can be found here — is their commitment to transparency, and the belief that, by taking this leap, they will actually become better, more effective funders. This type of transparency can invite scrutiny, criticism, as well as a sense of vulnerability — but it doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. As you’ll see, many of the funders note that some of their grantee feedback wasn’t positive. But each understands not only how important it is to listen carefully and authentically, but also how to learn openly and honestly in partnership with grantees — and even the entire field.
With that, we hope you enjoy, as we have, this non-exhaustive list of funders who have shared their survey results publicly, presented with some of their own reflections on the work.
Ford Foundation
“Even as we celebrate [our] strong results, there are places where we see need for improvement, particularly areas where we’ve made little progress over the years, where we lag compared to our peers. The first is our relationships, responsiveness, approachability, and engagement with grantee organizations. While we were able to maintain our gains from 2020 on a number of these measures, some of these results were still lower than we believe they should be. One of the most common suggestions for improvement was more frequent and substantive interactions between Ford staff and those we fund.” -Darren Walker, President and Hilary Pennington, Executive Vice President of Programs
Archstone Foundation
“I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on one of the most important measures of our impact and success — the expert opinions of our grantees. Given that a foundation like Archstone can only be successful through the excellence of its grantees, these are more than just opinions, like ‘I like chocolate’ or ‘I ‘heart’ New York.’ Instead, they are the considered views of some of the people who know our work best and whose very efforts create ‘our’ success.” -Christopher Langston, CEO
The Greenwall Foundation
“We heard suggestions, for example, to deepen and clarify the Foundation’s approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Grantees and applicants both conveyed that the Foundation could improve the way we communicate our efforts to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion in the work we do and the projects we fund. In acknowledgment of this feedback and in alignment with our strategic priority to shape and support a broad and inclusive bioethics, we have sought to be more transparent about how diversity, equity, and inclusion shape what we do.”
Humanity United
“We are commissioning an additional body of work with CEP to dig deeper and better understand the difference in feedback by gender. We have actively incorporated GPR feedback into the implementation and communication of new portfolio strategies. And teams are creating dedicated time to reflect on how we can improve communications, transparency, and reciprocity of learning as well as how to document and continue those best practices that have contributed to incredibly positive results — such as the strength of our relationships.” -Srik Gopal, Managing Partner and Sandy Nathan, Managing Director of Operations
Inter-American Foundation
“We are encouraged to see that the changes we have made in recent years are translating into less burdensome processes, us understanding their work, and grantee partners experiencing our stronger commitments to racial equity. One of the most promising findings from the survey is the significant decline in hours grantee partners spend on applying, reporting, and meeting our requirements. Grantee partners who completed the survey reported spending an average of 20 hours on Foundation requirements, down from an average of 30 hours in 2020.”
McConell Foundation (Canada)
“We will invest time and resources in developing a better understanding of the cultural and socioeconomic factors that affect the work of our partners and the communities they serve. Linked to the Foundation’s EDIA (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility) efforts, we will place a particular focus on the perspectives of communities most directly impacted by our fields of work.”
Fetzer Institute
“Relationships are the bedrock of our work, and we wanted to deepen into different ways of listening to our partners. Are we helpful? Do we understand the nature of partners’ organizations and work? Are we transparent? The survey was anonymized as one way to level power dynamics, and it was designed to identify patterns that transcend individuals…. The feedback was humbling, a cause for both joy and reflection.”
Resources Legacy Fund
“More troubling was the finding that nearly half reported the grant did not cover the full cost of the work … We endeavor to provide flexibility to grantees but are often constrained as an intermediary, aligning funds going out with objectives of funds coming in. Nonetheless, we must look for creative solutions to offer as much flexibility as we can.” – Avi Garbow, President and Helena Choi, Vice President and Chief of Staff
SHINE (U.K.)
“A majority of our grantees expressed ambitions to scale their work more widely, and felt that SHINE should offer more follow-on grants and support around scaling … We will refine and promote our opportunities for grantees, including providing a clear pathway to responsive follow-on funding and a more structured trajectory to scale.” -Helena Rafferty, Ph.D., Interim CEO
Stupski Foundation
“We are encouraged to see that the changes we have made in recent years are translating into less burdensome processes, us understanding their work, and grantee partners experiencing our stronger commitments to racial equity. One of the most promising findings from the survey is the significant decline in hours grantee partners spend on applying, reporting, and meeting our requirements. Grantee partners who completed the survey reported spending an average of 20 hours on Foundation requirements, down from an average of 30 hours in 2020.”
Lists can help sharpen our insights, and they’re fun to compile, but they’re also inherently limiting. So, think of what preceded as a kind of thank you note to all of the funders that CEP worked with in 2023. By participating in the GPR — as well as our other assessment tools — the Applicant Perception Report, Donor Perception Report, and Staff Perception Report — your stakeholder feedback was used to build CEP’s comparative dataset and, as a result, to support our collective efforts to deepen our shared understanding of the sector. Your data also helped fuel some of CEP’s important research, for example the ways grantees’ experiences are associated with gender identity, and the before-and-after effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on grantees’ perceptions of funders. Quite simply, we wouldn’t be able to do our work without the learning you did in community with each other.
We at CEP are so appreciative and humbled by your dedication as funders to amplify your impact in meaningful ways. We’re proud to count each and every one of you as a partner — a thank you list couldn’t possibly do you all justice. Here’s to 2024, a year where we’re certain philanthropy will continue to play a unique role in creating a better and more just world for us all.
Joseph Lee is a manager on the Assessment and Advisory Services team at CEP. Find him on LinkedIn.
