Best Of
Creative ideas for Donor Recognition events or themes?
Hi there - we would like to hold a donor recognition event for our fund advisors, and were wondering what others do that may be unique or creative. We have had charities speak before, and were thinking of a charity tour, but also wondering how others added some ooomph and value, for the donor and for us an organization?
Evaluating Community Quality of Life/Vibrancy Projects
I are interested in learning how other funders evaluate projects that improve quality of life and/or create vibrancy in a community (parks, recreation, arts, community spaces & places).
Re: Grant Review Practices
Hi @AbbeyCameron!
This is a great question. I don't know what your grant cycles or programs look like, but I did want to share what we've been doing at Triangle Community Foundation with great success.
We have five grant cycles for discretionary dollars (one for each impact area) every year or two and each has it's own committee. These committees do NOT involve our Board members or staff. In the past, these committees were made up of community members that worked in that field, were a very involved donor that wanted to volunteer in this area, nonprofit professionals who were not eligible for this program, etc.
We have recently made a shift with a few of our grant programs to a participatory grantmaking model. For these programs, we have invited the previous year's grantees to be the reviewers for the grants. There is a lot of research on the effectiveness of participatory grantmaking, and we are planning to implement it across our programs. We have also started to include high school students on our education/youth grant committees and their perspective is invaluable!
Finally, we have also budgeted into each program area a line item for paying our committee members. We use an internal process in GLM to get committee members to sign their conflict of interest forms and in that form we ask if they would like a stipend. For those working at nonprofits (in the case of participatory grantmaking) we also ask if they want it personally or to go to their organization. Many people accept it, but several do not, especially those who work for organizations who allow/offer volunteer time or flexibility to do this work.
A few different ideas for you to consider here--I'm happy to talk more or to connect you with one of my team members who have more experience implementing the participatory grantmaking committees!
