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This post is adapted from the CEP report, Staying Connected: How Five Foundations Understand Those They Seek to Help. The five foundations highlighted in Staying Connected all view grantees as being a crucial resource to help them develop and maintain an understanding...
Last fall, CEP released Relationships Matter: Program Officers, Grantees, and the Keys to Success, a report that takes an in-depth and data-driven look at what it takes for funders to build and maintain strong relationships with grantees. Our analysis of grantee...
As a foundation that sees relationships as a key component of philanthropy and social change, The Whitman Institute (TWI) applauds CEP’s recent report, Relationships Matter: Program Officers, Grantees, and the Keys to Success. It may seem like common sense that...
In our “post-truth” world, we are all overwhelmed by information. In-person interactions struggle to compete with the ceaseless barrage of push notifications popping up on our mobile devices. Attention, trust, and full presence are now among our scarcest resources....
At CEP we are always thinking about the ways that strong funder-grantee relationships affect the success of foundations’ efforts. This topic has been a major emphasis in our research agenda for more than a decade, as we have continually investigated the questions,...
Over the past 20 years, the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) community has championed the idea that strong relationships with nonprofit partners matter. As we say in Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter?, “When we build trust with and tap the knowledge of...
Strong relationships between program officers and their grantees are always important. But they’re especially important when disaster strikes. Hurricane Harvey brought Houston nearly 51 inches of rain and some of the worst flooding we’ve ever experienced. The...
In my position at CEP, I have experienced what it is like to navigate funders’ individual guidelines and requirements. I know sometimes selection processes can feel like jumping through a series of irrelevant hoops rather than useful experiences. And I’ve been through...
This blog post from Naomi Orensten originally appeared on the CEP blog in June 2015. It is re-posted here as part of our Rewind series. The funder-grantee relationship is one of the major thematic areas covered by CEP’s grantee survey, which asks about interactions —...
Over the last decade, I’ve been on a journey in more deeply understanding how differences in cultures and values manifest in our personal and professional lives. As an Asian-American woman, I’ve been learning more about how my culture, faith, and upbringing impact my...