What is good grantmaking?

The Nationwide Foundation on good grant-making

The Foundation has learnt much about good and bad grant-making, having fallen into both camps at some point. When we began grant-making 12 years ago, we requested lengthy application forms for one-off medium sized grants, as tended to be common among funders. We soon learned from charities’ feedback and evaluations that we could do better. We are now on our third, independently evaluated, three-year grant making strategy and we have sought to build on lessons learned across each one.

So, what do we think we do well? There are a number of elements to our core grant 'Investor' programme, which we pride ourselves on:

• Streamlined application processes – we invite one page expressions of interest for large grants which are shortlisted down through assessments and visits, until a small number are invited to submit detailed bids, which we assist with outputs and outcomes. This saves charities considerable time and effort, and allows up to 85% of detailed bids to be approved at the final stage.

• Offering substantial three year funding for core, development and project work, which is also flexible because we recognise that charities’ needs and circumstances change over time

• Providing extra support to help charities build their organisational resilience - for example, we offer paid membership of NCVO or ACEVO and Charity Trustee Networks. In addition, we have funding available to address governance, training and consultancy needs, plus help with planning an exit strategy for when our grant ends.

• Encouraging and funding partnership – we bring together grantees, which work in the same fields, to share learning and expertise. We also offer additional funding to partnership projects which arise out of this.

• Independent evaluation providing grantees with their own reports to help improve their services and enable them to demonstrate the value of their work to other funders; plus an evaluation on how the Foundation itself can improve.

Our funding approach is hands-on. We strive to know our charities and we visit recipients of large grants every quarter. However we don’t want to stifle grantees or divert them away from their good work, so we only request one written progress report from them each year.

Quarterly visits are designed to enable us to foresee and mitigate potential problems which may affect the work we are funding. They also allow us to identify any organisational needs where we may be able to offer extra support to build organisational resilience. We have received positive feedback on this approach from charities previously funded:

"The unusual thing about the Nationwide Foundation is they have taken a genuine interest in what we do, unlike any other funders and we have other organisations who have funded us…and have given me appropriate advice and hints along the way. It's been very good."

"They were flexible with change of use because our needs changed. Most funders would probably have terminated the funding or run a mile. Nationwide [Foundation] were 100% supportive."

The first year of our current grant making strategy is coming to an end and we have received an evaluation into its effectiveness by Cass Business School’s Centre for Charity Excellence (CCE).

Peter Grant from CCE says: "The Nationwide Foundation compares extremely favourably with other funders with regard to the support it gives to projects they fund. They recognise that the resources of both funder and recipient are best directed towards assisting each other after a grant has been awarded and provide their support when it is needed most."

The report from Cass Business School identified that there were areas the Foundation could still strengthen, for example greater integration of our assessment and risk management processes. However it also recognised a significant number of areas of good practice including:

• a strong staff team committed to being ‘more than grant makers’ who understand their role is to assist grantees achieve success
• a strong Trustee Board with outstanding skills relevant to the grant programme
• consultation with grantees and stakeholders during programme planning
• in depth research prior to making decisions about programme content
• early inclusion of independent evaluation
• support for grantees that goes beyond just cash
• a commitment to fund core costs through full cost recovery
• a commitment to sharing the results of their evaluation and learning as widely as possible.

We take pride in being a grant maker which supports charities, beyond providing a grant, in ways which have more lasting impacts. However, no one is perfect, and so we are committed to continually learning lessons that will feed into future grant making strategies. We also seek to share our own lessons with other funders for cross-sector learning and improved benefits for all.

Lisa Suchet, Chief Executive of the Nationwide Foundation