Getting feedback as a foundation
How to get honest feedback when no one is incentivized to give it
A challenge a couple of foundations have talked to me about is the difficulty in getting feedback. Once you start giving grants, all your jokes become funny and any negative comments about you are spoken in whispers. Even for foundations that are genuinely open to feedback, the risk-reward tradeoff just does not make sense for most grantees. I have written before that foundations are some of the least accountable institutions by design. One solution is a different mechanism, for example something like a fund, but I wanted to consider more how a foundation can really get feedback, even if it is hard.
There are multiple possible sources of feedback:
Grantees
Non-funded NGOs
Peer funders
Consultants
Ecosystem surveys
Each of these has its own pros and cons.
Grantee surveys
The most common approach foundations use to get feedback is something akin to a grantee survey, basically sending around a Google Form, sometimes with the ability to answer anonymously, to grantees who are funded by the foundation. I have seen the rare piece of useful feedback from this, but it really is rare. The grantees I have talked to about these surveys are pretty careful not to put anything negative and sometimes do not fill them out at all for fear they will be identified. There is also a strange selection effect in sending a feedback form exclusively to people you have given money to. A decent mitigation is to send it also to applicants who got far in the process but ultimately did not get money, but their incentives to respond are even more limited. One way to increase the response rate is to offer some sort of payment for doing so, but this makes it a bit harder for it to be anonymous. Given that the difficulty here is often getting any negative feedback, comparison questions can be highly useful, for example questions like: “We are thinking of working to improve our M&E team or operations team. Which do you think would benefit from more staff?”
Feedback from other funders
This method is one I am far more optimistic about. There is a culture of politeness between grantmakers that makes this unlikely to happen by default, but overall funders are much more likely to have the power to give more frank feedback. Another advantage is that funders often have a read on what grantees think of other funders. I think a quick feedback chat with the five grantmakers giving grants in your same area but using different methodologies or approaches will often result in pretty useful feedback with a minimal time investment. These can happen in fairly casual conversations as well, further lowering the time cost.
Feedback from consultants
Consultants often come into an organisation with a relatively unformed view. This allows them to be a useful source of feedback. They are probably best positioned to compare the internals of one organisation to another and can also be a useful reference point for what is common versus more unique to the organisation. However, they typically will not have deep enough context in the area to represent a broad sample.
Feedback from ecosystem surveys
This is the method I am most excited about. Instead of doing a specific feedback survey on one grantmaker, it is possible to do a more comprehensive analysis of the field. It is much easier to get honest feedback when it is in aggregate and about multiple actors, rather than asking about a specific grantmaker directly. You can get a sense of who the top three grantmakers in the field are and who the bottom three are. Questions can also be designed to gather more general information about what the ecosystem is missing and how key actors might support those gaps.
Top two solutions
The low-time, decent-results option
Speak to the five grantmakers in your area and ask them a handful of questions on your next casual call, with reassurance that you are curious about how to improve. Example questions include:
What do you think our reputation is in the broader funder community?
Have you heard anything from your grantees about our funding decisions or processes, negative or positive?
What area do you think we overfocus on? What might we underfocus on?
What do you, as a fellow funder, do most differently from us? Why do you do it that way?
Deeper-dive ecosystem survey
This takes more time and energy but also creates much more value, particularly if there are many grantmakers in the same ecosystem with similar questions, which is fairly common (example, example 2). Even a simpler version of this would, I estimate, take around 40 hours of a decently informed and connected person’s time, including analysis. Ecosystem reports are reasonably common, but there are still far more areas without them than with them.