Best Of
Grants Policy
I posted this earlier as a question but didn't get much traction, so I thought I would post it again as a discussion.
One of our projects for this year is to develop a written, comprehensive grant policy. We have various policies in writing and practices that we follow but need to get them in a single document that covers all of the important items. By this, I am not referring to our external grant guidelines intended for those who apply for a grant, but rather internal documents that provide our staff with guidance on all things grant-related (e.g. in addition to things like eligibility requirements and types of grants offered also things like reporting requirements and how to handle things like indirect costs, grant extensions, multiple requests from one organization, costs incurred prior to the grant period, etc.)
If any of you have a written grant policy (or maybe its “policies”), would you be willing to share that with me? Much thanks in advance for any help that you can provide.
Marian Clowes
Sisters Health Foundation
Searching for Nonprofit Surveys from Community Foundations
Hello,
Our Community Foundation is expanding our Nonprofit Capacity Building. We would like to survey our nonprofits to determine: nonprofit size in our community, staff, budgets, role (arts, animal welfare, etc), board demographics/need, facility needs, current funding streams, desired funding streams, nonprofit collaborative efforts, desired nonprofit collaborative efforts, short term outcomes, long term outcomes, volunteer needs, educational needs (board assistance, leadership/management assistance, financial management assistance, donor cultivation, grant writing, grant search tool assistance, etc).
Does anyone have a Survey that you can share? What did you like about your survey? What would you change? How has the Survey helped your Community Foundation improve your relationship with nonprofits?
Any information would be appreciated! Thank you!!
How does your organization break down fund groups, subgroups, divisions, and segments?
Hello!
We're currently evaluating how we utilize the organization of fund groups, subgroups, divisions, and segments and would love to hear how other community foundations are using these categories.
Currently we use group like fund type - as in endowments, DAFs, fiscal sponsorships, scholarships, and community funds. But actually, community funds with us are either fiscal sponsorships or endowments. And some scholarships are endowed, while others aren't
We use subgroup as physical location - like a particular community in Oklahoma. We serve all 77 counties in OK, so our "Service Area" field is by county.
Division is where we note who set up the fund - Agency or Individual established.
Finally, segment is used for how our CF interacts with the fund - is it "managed" by us or not. We use "managed" to describe funds like scholarships where we are hosting the scholarship app, administering reviewers, paying the school versus cutting an annual distribution check to a school foundation who administers the scholarship.
We suspect there could be a more helpful and efficient way to categorize funds - how does your org categorize funds?
