Understanding our internal review process will help make the process smoother for all.
We currently receive more than 200 letters of inquiry (LOIs) each year, resulting in 120 complete proposals per year. We also make more than 100 grant and scholarship payments and review periodic reports from grantees.
That’s a lot of paperwork. So with our limited staff, we rely heavily on grants management software to handle administrative tracking of requests, payments, and reports.
Once your LOI or grant application reaches us, we first must enter your request in our grants database. You can help our data entry if you ensure that basic information is easy to find.
Please be clear to us about who is the proper contact for your organization and especially for the request itself. Typically, an executive director is the main contact, but the development director is the point person for the request. Or sometimes a board member may sign the request but doesn’t mention who will serve as the main contact. Please provide us email addresses for the relevant people.
Although it may sound surprising, often grant applicants bury two key points—the amount requested and how the funds will be applied—deep in the text, or separated from each other, so that someone performing data entry has to read the entire request to find them. Or agencies forget to specify any amount at all. We suggest putting the specific request amount and purpose together, either at the very beginning or very end of the request.
Please review our guidelines carefully for the list of informational elements we require you to include within an LOI, and the attachments that must accompany a full proposal. It is not unusual for applicants to forget to address several elements in an LOI or to forget to include the right attachments. Failing to describe how the program will be evaluated or provide current financial statements for the proper reporting period are common oversights.
Once we have entered your LOI or proposal, and determined whether it is complete, we will send you a letter acknowledging that we received your request and notifying you when you should expect to hear from us next.
Within two weeks after the deadline for LOIs, the president and the program officer work jointly to prepare an executive summary of each LOI for the board. The directors do not review the actual LOIs submitted.
When writing your LOI, take a step back and read it anew. Based on the information it contains, would someone who is unfamiliar with your agency and project be able to describe your request accurately and succinctly? Have you omitted anything essential to a correct understanding?
The LOI executive summary describes the agency in general and the particular project or program for which funding is sought. At this stage, staff does not evaluate the agency’s finances, program results, or other factors that are part of the full grants review process; or recommend which LOIs should advance. The principal question is whether the directors believe the request is a good fit with the Foundation’s mission and grantmaking priorities.
If a majority of the directors are interested in a request, the LOI advances to the next stage. If a request cannot muster a majority, we decline the LOI unless a director has indicated a particularly strong interest in the request. Historically, the board has invited proposals from about 60% of applicants.
Within about a month after the deadline, all agencies that submitted LOIs receive a letter from the Foundation notifying them whether or not they may submit a full proposal. Successful agencies have about a month to prepare and submit the proposal. A full proposal consists of a six-page narrative, a grant application checklist, and several other attachments.
It is usually bad form to make significant changes to a request between submission of the LOI and full proposal without prior discussion with Foundation staff. For example, if the Foundation invited a proposal for $25,000 based on the LOI, it is unwise to assume the directors will be just as interested in a full proposal for $50,000.
We encourage agencies to double-check their proposals and attachments before submission to ensure that all required elements are covered, that photocopies are clear, and so forth. If you do not understand one of the items required on the application checklist, call us for an explanation instead of leaving the section blank when you submit your proposal.
After agencies submit their full proposals, Foundation staff again enters them in the grants management database and acknowledges them, as described in Step 1: Data Entry.
Then the review process begins. Proposals are assigned to one of two staff members, who review and analyze the requests over an eight- to ten-week period.
In broadest terms, reviewers will be examining the strength and weaknesses in three areas: the agency, its finances, and the program or project the Foundation is being asked to fund. On financial questions, we try to look at multiple years of data if available, so we see overall trends and ratios rather than the results of a single year, good or bad.
No single factor determines whether a request will be funded, although it is fair to say that a proposal with significant weaknesses in all three areas is unlikely to be successful.
You will find below a comprehensive list of the questions the grants reviewer might ask when deciding whether to recommend a grant. But in reading this list, rest assured that we do consider the agency’s age and maturity in formulating appropriate questions and weighing answers. We have different expectations for a 20-year-old agency with a multimillion-dollar budget, than we do for a two-year-old startup.
To answer these questions, the reviewer may decide to make a personal site visit. (See more on Site Visits elsewhere in this section.) The reviewer will also analyze the agency’s financial statements and tax returns, talk with other funders, and perform other research appropriate to the agency and request, such as checking on the agency’s status with regulatory agencies.
As with the LOIs, directors do not review the actual proposals themselves. The reviewer will prepare an executive summary, generally two pages long, that includes a description of the agency and project, the strengths and weaknesses of both, and the reviewer’s recommendation about funding. These executive summaries are assembled in a notebook that goes to the directors, all of whom sit on the Grants Review Committee, a committee of the whole. Directors bring years of business, financial, and community experience to the process.
The Foundation board awards grants at its regular meetings in June and December. The Grants Review Committee meets twice a year, about a month prior to the board meeting at which grants will be awarded.
At the beginning of each fiscal year, the board approves a tentative grants budget for the year, taking into account multiple factors such as the federally mandated 5% payout rate for private foundations, estimated expenses, and projected investment growth. Just before the Grants Review Committee meeting, the staff updates these projections and suggests revisions to the grants budget if necessary.
Going into the committee meeting, the directors have reviewed the collected executive summaries as well as a worksheet summarizing the staff’s recommendations about funding.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the committee has agreed upon a slate of grant recommendations that will be formally approved at the next board meeting. Some recommendations remain tentative, even after the committee meeting, if the committee members ask for additional research to be conducted. Or a board member may have been unable to attend the committee meeting but wishes to discuss a request with the rest of the directors. For these reasons, grant decisions are not final until the board meeting.
We attempt to notify applicants of grant decisions within one to three days of the board meeting. Successful applicants receive both an award letter and a grant contract spelling out the purpose of the grant, the payment date, and other conditions.
Unsuccessful applicants receive only a letter. But we encourage disappointed applicants to contact us by phone so that we can explain why the Foundation declined the request, in the hopes of helping the agencies strengthen future requests.
We attempt to pay our grants at a time that is optimal for both the agency and the Foundation. Grants awarded in June are paid within six months. Grants awarded in December are paid up to a year later, but most are paid sooner.
Our grant contract requires agencies to report back to us within thirty days after the grant has been fully expended, or the project is completed, whichever occurs first.
We observe a two-year window between grants. For those organizations that receive funding, therefore, the agency should submit its grant report and wait 18 months from the grant award date before submitting another LOI. For example, if an agency received a grant award in December 2006, the agency could submit a LOI in June 2008.
If a request is unsuccessful, there is no waiting period to resubmit an LOI; however, we do recommend a discussion with staff about the reasons for the decline, as described in Step 5, before resubmitting. An immediate resubmission, without addressing the reasons the prior request failed, is likely to meet the same result.