As in all organisations, a culture of continuous improvement is crucial to the sustained success of a grantmaking trust. But when you’re holding the purse strings, it can be hard for people to give you the critique you need to improve.

Anna de Pulford, Director, shares how the Dulverton Trust addressed the problem of feedback in the grantmaking sector.

‘The feedback problem’

“I’ve never been as funny as when I was a grant-maker”.

This is a comment I’ve heard A LOT from colleagues in the grant-making sector. And I’ve felt it too. That uncomfortable sensation when you know you’ve made a weak joke, but people are laughing as if you’re Sarah Millican. 

I was acutely conscious of this when I rejoined the Trust in early 2018. Endowed grant-making trusts, unlike I think any other organisation type, do not have embedded accountability loops. There is little relationship between your performance as a grant-maker and your ability to be a grant-maker. You can have awful practice but it’s unlikely to stop the money piling up or the applications rolling in. And people will keep laughing at your jokes, all the while. 

Of course, that dynamic impacts a grantseeker’s readiness to share their experience candidly. And that’s our loss! 

Our solution: make is easy! 

So we introduced an anonymous feedback form. Now a quick caveat. I know this isn’t a silver bullet. It doesn’t give us a direct connection to the people and causes we exist to serve (for another blog, but Blagrave Trust has done some great work (https://www.blagravetrust.org/blagrave-feedback-fund-first-steps/ ) on exactly this). It is also, arguably, just tinkering on the edges. We’re asking people for feedback to improve an open-call grant-making system. Should we be open-call at all? Should we have forms at all? These are of course questions we need to keep asking. But in the meantime, this form is really easy to implement, provides an outlet for applicants, and has given us crucial information to help us improve the experience of people applying to us.

Have people used our feedback form?

Yes! A few years in and we have received hundreds of responses to our form. We are so grateful to the charities that have taken the time to give us their thoughts, and we want them to know that we have acted on it.  

What have we learned?

Here are some of the things we have learned, and what we have done in response:

Applicants like to know what to expect

Clarity on what to expect is essential. We have heard that our application form is refreshingly light-touch, but that applicants have been surprised by the depth of our second-stage assessment and reporting process, especially on financial forecasting, which can feel burdensome.  We may not be able to reduce this, as we feel a clear assessment on risk is important. But we can be clearer about what to expect, why we are asking these questions, and how we use the information. We’ve updated our FAQ to this end. Our Head of Grants has also blogged to provide additional insight – and we’re planning more insight articles like this.

Communication is key – with unsuccessful applicants, too! 

Relationships, relationships, relationships. So much of the good feedback we receive is about the time the team have taken to get to know an applicant, build a relationship and provide feedback (especially to unsuccessful applicants). The Trust has always prioritised this, but we now dedicate more time to providing full feedback wherever possible. 

Timely responsiveness benefits everyone 

Connected to the above, the value of being responsive is clear.  We increasingly prioritise being accessible via the telephone, responding quickly to communications (even if it’s with a holding reply) and processing appeals rapidly. It currently takes us an average of 11 days from the receipt of an appeal to notify an applicant of an unsuccessful outcome. It’s longer for a successful appeal (around 80 days) – which is apparently comparatively quick (although we still think too slow, and are looking at ways to speed this up). 

Simplify the application process  

Our website required a bit of clicking around to get the information needed to apply. In response, we have launched a new, simplified website. Instead of reams of guidance, our priorities and exclusions are embedded into our eligibility quiz. If an applicant wants to know more, they can see our FAQ, which we add to based on responses to our anonymous feedback form. 

 Don’t overlook small ways to make the process user-friendly 

Small, technical changes can make a big difference. We heard that it was easy to lose passwords to login and return to our online forms, especially when there is a change of staff. In response, we implemented Cognito as our form builder. This gives the option of saving and returning to the online form using a url link. We also heard that knowing what questions we will ask *before* attempting the form was helpful (as it lets applicants make a judgement on the time required). We therefore added a downloadable word document of the questions we ask. 

Be flexible! 

Feedback isn’t always consistent. So being flexible is key.  For example, we have a short reporting form. It’s free text with some pointers on what to include. Some grantees like this. It’s pretty generic, meaning grantees don’t usually have to create something totally bespoke. Others don’t. It doesn’t allow photos to be included and, even though it’s fairly generic, it still requires editing to fit our framework. We now accept reports provided in other formats (eg PDF) and accept reports provided for other funders (provided the grant purpose and period is the same). We’re offering telephone calls much more in the hope this enables applicants to provide what we need in a more efficient way for them.

 Improvement is a continuous process

This can’t be one and done. There will be grantees and applicants reading this thinking of areas of our practice we have let them down on. Please tell us! We will also continue to read the excellent briefings put out by IVAR and others on this topic and challenge ourselves – while welcoming your challenge. 

Thoughts for fellow funders

We welcome any funders to lift from our form and our learning. We use the platform Cognito for the form. It has a good drag and drop interface and we use it anyway for our other online forms. Though Surveymonkey and others will be just as good.

A few of tips from our experience:
– try to make the form as easy to complete as possible. This will help keep the burden on applicants to a minimum while increasing the response rate. 

– embed in your declination and reporting emails. It’s great hearing the positive feedback from people who have the warm glow following notification of a grant award. But you’re more likely to get actionable feedback from people you have disappointed.

– as well as implementing the form, it’s important to embed the processes to act on the feedback. We review responses to the form as a team on a regular basis and consider the feedback as part of our appraisal system. This is a great motivator for staff.

– complete the feedback loop by explaining what changes we’re making as a result of the feedback, in your annual report and in blogs like this.

 Get in touch

As always, we welcome challenge and critique. We’re also really happy to share our experience. Please get in touch at grants@dulverton.org or via our anonymous feedback form. And thank you again to every charity that has taken the time to give us feedback.