I was excited to see an invitation to nominate U.S non-profits for awards in eight different categories of social sector impact. The attractive award website includes inspiring stories of past winners, how the award jump-started fundraising, and 15 pages of rules, regulations, criteria, questions, and advice. Searched as I might, there was no information to be found regarding the number of applicants and winners in prior years or a forecast for 2021.
The first questions any nonprofit asks of an award process are: “What are my chances of getting this grant? Is applying for this award worth my time?” Odds of getting an award is a simple number that every funder knows after the first year of a funding program. Another simple number that is easy to know is how many applicants were in the scope of the call for proposals (or how many applicants were ‘dead on arrival’ for being out of scope or far from meeting basic requirements). That number helps to focus applicants upon how well they meet core requirements and focuses funders on clarity.
Time is the scarcest resource for nonprofits and time is the scarce resource for staff at foundations and other charitable donors. So why do we waste so much of each other’s time on long-shot or no-shot award applications? There is a tempting luxury for funders to maximize their options by inviting applications, seeking exposure to lots of ideas, creating a strategic analysis from the incoming applications, mining proposals for the rare gem, or demonstrating the timeliness of their offering to leadership and Boards. In my recent foundation leadership role, we extracted all of the partnering relationships from several years of grant applications to map the networks among the institutions in our program areas across multiple countries .
Instead of making difficult strategic decisions on the front-end of a Request for Proposals, it is easy for a donor to say “let’s cast a broad net and see what comes in.” But loose grant guidelines shift the burden of work to the nonprofits and keeps them running ever faster on the fundraising treadmill. Loose guidelines also bury Program staff under a deluge of applications, instead of mentoring and listening to applicants and grantees.
How big a sample size does a funder need to have diverse applications and to extract information to support learning? How would funding 15% of all applicants work as a goal? If we can expect that 25-30% of applications are quickly eliminated for not meeting the lowest bar for scope, eligibility, completeness, and quality, that raises the “in scope award percentage” to about 20% of applicants. Funding one in five applications leaves a healthy margin for all the other strategic purposes of receiving an excess of grant applications and one in three would be even more respectful of applicants.
At the JRS Biodiversity Foundation, we offered several ‘low-friction’ paths for grant applicants to get feedback including ‘real-time’ comments on proposals in progress (see Seven Roads to Easier Grant Applications). We were transparent about application numbers and approval rates. The most common questions boiled down to “should I apply?” My answer often began: “I can’t judge the best use of your fundraising time, but your idea is well within our call for proposals and in the last two years we funded 10-20% of applications in scope.” Over time, we tweaked our guidelines to get a high approval rate, while specifically calling for “innovation” proposals to hedge against distorting the field and missing breakthroughs.
We are in a time of extraordinary innovation in philanthropy and of a shift in consciousness to the needs of communities, to sharing voice and power with underserved and marginalized people, and to combatting systemic racism and injustice. The attention and energy to advance those causes takes creating time for nonprofit and donor staff who are already at their limits. Every action that respects and saves the time of people on the frontlines creates time for mission and meaningful change. Transparency can unfold in steps that are not individually profound, but collectively shift power and accountability. Clearly posting the historical or expected number of award applications, the percent of applications in scope, and percent funded is a simple act of respect with benefit for the entire funding community.
“We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.”
John F. Kennedy (1961)