As the philanthropy community and nonprofits ask long-overdue questions about inequitable or burdensome grant applications, it got me thinking about the point of grant application questions in the first place. I started with five questions, then four, then three, and finally landed that all grant applications boil down to only two questions:

    1. Is the team’s plan likely to succeed? and
    2. Will success achieve the goal of our funding?

Grant application sections aim primarily at one question or the other. The 2-question distillation points to opportunities and responsibilities for funders.

 If we pause the machine of grantmaking and ask, “how can we best understand how a team’s plan is designed for success?” the answer is probably not that grant application form. The likelihood of success is based on adaptive leadership and experience more than any other factor. Yet, it is remarkable how much money is granted without the in-person meetings and site visits essential to relationship-building, empathy, and assessment.

How well do application forms provide a template to illustrate project context, convey plans, and weave a coherent narrative? Good plans connect the dots among money, effort, scope, and time but many grant applications parse these into sections that separate time and cash from activities and goals. Greater flexibility to accept illustrations, direct links to project management tools, and budget integration into the narrative would favor good planning and assessment.

Project-based funding applications extract strategy, activity, capacity development, and resources from a meaningful institutional context. Project-based funders might, for example, offer unlimited space for an applicant to answer, “How does this project fit into your organization’s strategy, annual plan, and budget?” Donors should invest in project planning capacity and assistance in grant application processes. It is disheartening how many nonprofits “plan by grant proposal” rather than propose investments from well-laid plans. Traditional grant applications deconstruct plans to match scoring criteria, reviewer forms, compliance checklists, and funding recommendation forms. I caution grant applicants that proposal forms support donor decision-making and compliance and are not designed for planning. As we’re asking questions about equity and power, it is timely to ask if most grant applications are even fit-for-purpose to assess plans and capacity.

Sharing donor goals is the shortest and fairest path to helping grant applicants meet them. The donor goals may not be their public impact goals but might be goals for distributing funds to specific kinds of organizations, specific geographies, or certain underserved communities. For example, there might be goals for grant sizes, grant number, program approach, and total giving. Any funding criteria operating on explicit and tacit levels for Program Officers, external reviewers, leaders, or Trustees are important institutional goals that impact grant applicants. Why not share them?

For the last six months, I’ve presented a monthly, pro bono online workshop for nonprofits, the “Grant Winning Workshop.” My intake form asks participants about their top challenges and concerns. It is fair to say that donors’ goals and funding criteria seem shrouded in mystery to nonprofit program teams and development staff alike. I coach nonprofit staff to address the two central questions of grantmaking in every section of a grant application while telling a compelling story from well-drawn plans and an understanding of donor goals.

The time, labor, and emotional costs of out-of-scope proposals to donors and applicants are very high. Grant applicants acutely feel those costs, particularly those originating in underserved and disadvantaged communities. Donors may not appreciate the total cost, as they bake high proposal volumes into staffing models, processes, and administrative burdens that take a toll on people and mission. Grant applications are also littered with questions and information requests that are artifacts of prior people, processes, and programs. It might serve everyone to occasionally wipe the grant application form clean and ask, “what do we really need to know for each level of decision-making?” Maybe only a few questions are all it takes?

 

“Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.”

Ward Cunningham (2004)

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash