Foundation Directory Online?
Good afternoon all,
Do any of my community foundation peers offer grantee access to Foundation Directory Online (either as funding for individual subscriptions or onsite access through the foundation)?
We are considering an onsite subscription and I'd love to hear best practices from any of my colleagues. Thanks in advance!
Michelle
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Hi Michelle, We've talked about offering this as well but have not set up anything yet. Our thought was to provide appointments for nonprofits to come into our office (before COVID) to search for grants. Interested in any other responses as well!
We do!
I find it is a unique added value for our nonprofit services. We have a volunteer that meets with nonprofit folks in the office for their first use, then they can come in whenever our office is open to use it. It has been a great way for us to connect with folks.
During COVID, our volunteer zoomed with them, allowing full access without sharing the password. This was more onerous for our volunteer - but FDO asked us not to share our password. We are in a high vaccination/low case rate zone and are now offering both in-person and zoom sessions to local nonprofits. We know of at least a few grantees who have used the FDO to land significant awards.
We do too!
We provide a grant to cover the yearly fee for our public library to provide access to this. It's in a Grant Seekers Resource Center within the library that our family foundation helped start. (We also periodically provide books and audio books to the Center.) The staff there is trained to assist with Foundation Center online.
We offer use of 2 resource computers in our office space for our NPO's to make an appointment and come use the FDO software. During Covid, we were able to offer a "watered down" version via a link we could give to them. This is a fairly recent endeavor of ours and we have only seen a handful of grant seekers come in so far. We have a staff member that is trained on the software and can offer guidance if needed. Prior to us housing this software in-house, we supported the software to be available at a local library. We felt it was beneficial for us to have the NPO's come in our office for this resource.