By: Scott McLellan, Executive Director
For 25 years I worked in the nonprofit sector and in my leadership post prior to becoming the Executive Director of the Julian Grace Foundation I would have varying experiences in fundraising with donors of all types. Individuals, foundations, corporations, and government agencies all have different approaches to making funding decisions and I would consistently wonder what kind of vetting conversations, if any, would take place behind closed doors… especially at private foundations. Their process and methodology just seemed so elusive.
If I could only be a fly on the wall to listen in on their decision-making conversations!
Getting a quick approval was always welcomed. But more often than not a potential funder would ask for more information, a site visit, or the dreaded rewriting of a whole proposal that took us hours to create just so we could match the familiar vernacular their selection committee might want to see. Don’t get me wrong. I deeply appreciated having a program officer championing our proposal internally, but we were often left to feel like we were jumping through hoops.
So, in the spirit of transparency of our grantmaking process, let me share the details of what goes into getting funding support from the Julian Grace Foundation using the current timeline leading up to the fall grantmaking round in November.
47 grantees are being vetted and by the time they are presented to our board in November for the vote, a grand total of 564 hours has been spent getting these nonprofits to that point of board consideration. If you are doing the math, that’s 12 hours per potential grantee partner. Keep in mind it’s an average. Some grant requests require more due diligence while others require a little less. Let me breakdown those 12 hours:
- Pre-invite: Shortly after the spring grantmaking cycle wrapped up the grants management team kicks things off the next cycle with several hours of planning by creating and refining the application process, incorporating feedback from the experiences of current grantee partners to ensure it’s clear and not burdensome. They also map out the post invite external communications touchpoints.
- Staff Deliberation on proposed invites: During this 5-hour meeting the staff shares and decides what nonprofits will be invited.
- Invitation: This is an exciting point of our grantmaking process where program officers officially invite nonprofits to apply for funding support. They take an hour on this video conference call that serves as an initial intake to best understand each other’s organizations and the process ahead. Access is granted to our online portal for submitting their application materials and the due date to submit the application is issued.
- Post invitation: Our grants management team steps in with follow up calls to make sure they received all the links and the information needed to apply.
- Tech Support: Because most of our grantee partners are small to mid-sized nonprofits (annual budgets of $3M or less), they often need a little more “hand holding” in the process for a variety of reasons but mainly due to their limited staff capacity. This is when Program Officers and our Grants Management teammates step in to provide that support sometimes even leading up to the seconds the application is due. I’m not exaggerating… seconds! This process can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple hours.
- Application Review: The day after applications are submitted, our Program Officers spend about an hour, reviewing, and taking notes of clarifying questions, concerns, and key highlights within their proposals. During this time the grants management team is providing Program Officers key reminders on deadlines and protocols related to site visits and procedures on capturing their analysis and scoring.
- Site Visit: 65% of our grantees are in Illinois (Chicagoland area), 28% are in other states, and 7% are international. Since we are based in Highland Park, Illinois 2/3 of our site visits takes about an hour or two to conduct. While site visits that require air travel to and from the national and international applicants take considerably more time of our Program Officers. On these site visits Program Officers share their clarifying questions from their application review.
- Final Evaluation: Program Officers take a couple hours to review all that they’ve seen, heard, and clarified and do one final pass. This is when they prepare their written recommendations and tally up scores with supporting narratives.
- Final Staff Deliberations: This 4-hour meeting is probably the most important process point in our vetting process. At this point the grants management team has spent several days creating a detailed spreadsheet that clarifies the proposed dollar amounts and grant term. We must balance the recommendations we plan to make to the board against our giving budget, the organization’s intended impact, and checking our own bias all while ensuring that it’s all in line with our overarching foundation strategy as articulated in our strategic plan.
- Board Presentation: A couple weeks prior to the board meeting, our trustees receive the funding recommendations along with an in-depth analysis provided by the grants management team that provides an overview of the Foundation’s grant allocations based on staff recommended amounts, detailing the distribution across program areas, grant strategy, target demographics, geographic regions, along with leadership and organizational demographics of the potential grantee partners. This is intended to help the board of directors understand where the grant dollars are currently allocated, supporting informed decision-making during final approvals. Given our Board of Director’s busy travel schedules this decision-making meeting takes place on a Sunday. The JGF Program Officers present their funding recommendations to the board for them to consider, ask clarifying questions, and cast their votes. In the days after this 4-hour gathering, our team looks forward to sharing the great news with our grantee partners.
This is what we mean when we say we do “high engagement grantmaking” at JGF. And just think that this is just the beginning! We do our best to have meaningful touchpoints throughout the year with our grantees, connecting them to other leaders and resources that might help them achieve their goals, and attending the events they invite us to when we can.
The relationship goes both ways because we believe our grantee partners have much to teach our staff and board about the issues they are addressing. In September we held our board retreat at the border of Arizona and Mexico. Our grantee partner, the Young Center, curated 3 impactful and sobering days for our board to learn first-hand about the issues facing immigrants and migrants. Our grantees truly partner with us in removing our potential blind spots.
The spirit and intent of our grant making approach is relational, not transactional, and one that we hope other grant makers will consider.