Virtual Site Visits
Hi! I'm new to Foundant and new to the funder side of the non-profit world. I work for several foundations which fund around the country/globe and which have board members scattered about. We are investigating doing virtual site visits.
Does anyone have experience with Virtual Site Visits? What worked? What didn't? Any pitfalls to avoid?
On a separate but related note, has anyone used GLM for site visit evaluations? I think I have it figured out but would be interested in hearing if anyone else has done this.
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Hi @TammyPrater, We have used virtual site visits for the past three years. I am new to Foundant and am building out our GLM processes right now. We are a small family foundation and virtual site visits have worked very well for us because we don't have the bandwidth to visit in person. All applicants that we invite to apply for a grant have a virtual visit with us, we no longer require grant proposals in certain focus areas. I create a summary of what we learned in our virtual visit and am building out our Foundant site so that I can upload that summary under Applications and our board can logon to Foundant to read the summary and submit their own evaluations during the process. Happy to talk through our thinking if that would be helpful. My site visit questions vary for each applicant depending on what I already know about them. Typical questions are around the project/work, staffing, financial stability, outreach, board priorities, challenges, etc. We do a 60-minute virtual site visit. This is all part of our new trust-based philanthropy approach where we are focused more on building relationships. We still require the applicant to submit financials though. Email me if you'd like to talk: michele.goodman@gmail.com. I'm with the JW & HM Goodman Family Foundation.
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Thank you @MicheleGoodman! I work for a company that does back-office work for multiple foundations. One of them likes to fund start-ups for 3 years out of 5 and then move on. They will make exceptions. We are looking at doing the site visits to determine who might get invited to re-submit an LOI for further funding. That makes FOUNDANT a little tricky. I think I have figured out to create a Site Visit process with all internal questions that can allow all the evaluations to be done in the system. Then I think I can manipulate the data to create reports. I'm still in the Sandbox, but in theory, it works. I'll keep you posted.
What platform did you use for the virtual visit? Zoom? TEAMS?
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We use Zoom for our site visits. I also do what I call a pre-screen on occasion with a potential applicant but don't usually share those notes with our board but maybe I should upload them to Foundant so our board has access to them too. Thanks!
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