10 things funders can do to help stressed out grantees

There’s been much debate recently about the volume of funding applications increasing, and how this is leading some funders to change their strategies and systems. Funders are in a bind: they can’t fund everybody, and often have limited staff capacity themselves to do more. 

We have to view this important debate in the context of the huge strain that many charities are under right now. There has been a compounding effect of repeated crises and organisational resilience is weakened. Lots of other sources of funding are disappearing, especially from local government, while service demand and costs have increased. Charity leaders and fundraisers are often under huge amounts of stress. 

The good news is there are some simple, free or low-cost things that funders can do to make things easier. After all, if the CEO of your brilliant little grantee charity has a nervous breakdown, that’s not going to help deliver their mission or yours, right? 

1. Have clear deadlines and stick to them. There are few things worse for a stressed-out charity CEO or fundraising director than expecting a decision on an application and it gets delayed, or there’s just no news at all. Don’t add to the stress! If you must delay a decision, explain clearly when applicants can expect to hear more so they can (re)plan. Remember that the trustees of grantee or applicant charities need reliable information from fundraising or executive teams to make strategic decisions. 
2. Pay early and up front. The timing of when a grant or payment is received could be the difference between a grantee charity having to give redundancy notices to valued staff, deferring payments to the charity’s creditors, or having a negative balance sheet in the charity’s accounts. Most charities can’t afford to front-load staffing or capital costs to get grant-funded projects up and running. Delayed grant payments could put an organisation into insolvency. Early payments, especially if they’re substantial or for most of the grant, are a god-send. 
3. Simplify your information to the minimum required. Do you really need a 27-page application form? Are you really going to use all that monitoring information? Be ruthless and cut out what isn’t absolutely necessary. Charitable foundations have the freedom to cut bureaucracy and to just be better. Think: how little information can I ask from applicants and still get the applications I want? 
4. Make sure your information is still accurate and process is optimised. While you’re slimming down those 27 pages, make sure the information is up to date, not what it was 10 years ago. In particular, what the application deadlines are and when an applicant can expect to receive an answer. Is it still ‘8 weeks’, ‘quarterly’, every ‘six months’? Could your grants committee meet more often to give quicker responses? Should you bring in a two-stage application process to weed out ineligible applicants more quickly? Being specific and accurate supports good planning and governance. 
5. Use clear language. Grants assessors understandably hate applications that are full of obscure jargon and acronyms. As you revise forms and web information, advise your applicants not to use them – but also check your own language! Is it jargon-free? Could it pass a ‘plain English’ test? Read the text aloud and see if you sound like a human. Make sure your process and requirements are clearly explained. 
6. Be proportionate. Does a £5000 grant really need an impact analysis, 25 terms and conditions, and weekly monitoring meetings? No. Why would you want to take up more than the value of the grant in your grantee’s staff time completing paperwork? 
7. Be clear and up front about applicants using Artificial Intelligence. The rise of AI tools like Chat GPT are likely contributing to an increase in the rate at which fundraisers can submit applications. Some funders are now welcoming the use of AI and others aren’t. Be clear about whether you’ll allow it and why, either way. If you allow it, advise your applicants to have a human overseeing and editing the final application text to avoid robot-speak. 
8. If you need to pause grants programmes, say why, for how long, and what’s next. It’s far better for prospective applicants to know that a favourite funder is stopping activity for a few months and will start again on a certain date, rather than leaving an information vacuum. Explain why you are pausing and if you’re still funding current grantees or just paused to new applicants. Give early indications wherever possible about how priorities or strategy may be changing in the future. 
9. Ask grantees what they need, don’t give them what you think they need. Funder plus initiatives can be brilliant, but when they’re directed by the funder they can be yet another stressful hoop to jump through. Ask grantees what they could benefit from most apart from the grant, and how you could help. Then make it as easy as possible for them to get what they need. DSC has a huge range of products and services we can package up for your grantees to make it super easy for grant-makers. 
10. End your grantee relationships well, with plenty of notice. Actually there’s something even more stressful than Point 1: when funding ends at short notice, especially if a lot of work has already gone into the relationship and there was an expectation that the grant would continue. It’s critical that grantees receive early notice of funding ending and a clear timeframe for the term of the grant, so they can look for alternative support. The Decelerator has some helpful ideas.  

We know that people who work or volunteer for funders and grant-makers care a lot about the welfare of the people in the organisations they fund. They also may have limited capacity themselves – boosting internal capacity is another thing to consider (and a topic to return to in another article!). 

But even relatively small changes like the ones above can make a big difference. In the current environment, if you’re in the privileged position of making funding decisions, the more you can do to relieve the stress of your applicants and grantees, the better! 

And if you’re sensing that the people you fund are under pressure, why not ask them about it, and maybe support a place for them on DSC’s upcoming Wellbeing Conference?