Trust-based philanthropy is a hot topic these days, and for good reason. Given unprecedented challenges, organizations and applicants are having to work even harder to serve their constituents. Funders are asking how they can help by reducing applicant burden. Listen as funders discuss the following topics...

Topics:

1. What prompted you as a funder to consider reducing applicant burden?
2. What is required to make these changes?
3. What changes have you already made?

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Welcome to connected philanthropy. In today's episode, we hear from funders across North America discuss how they can reduce applicant burden. This discussion comes from a recorded coffee talk webinar, and the first voice you'll hear is Susan Miller, who moderated the discussion.

So without further ado, here's Susan.

So here's where we're going to kick off, given unprecedented challenges, organizations and applicants are having to work even harder to serve their constituents and funders like you are asking how you can help by reducing applicant burden. So we're going to talk about the whys and wherefores, what's going on in your communities.

How can you help lighten applicants load when appropriate? And what are some changes small or big that you've already made? So what prompted you to consider reducing applicant burden? COVID 19, obviously, is a big change maker and all of our communities right now.

What how has that led you to take a closer look at your grant making practices? How how has it affected the mindset of the organizations you often partner with in such a way that it's made you rethink things?

So if anyone would like to jump in and start the conversation.

I'm with the Jacob Entries Hershey Foundation in Houston. Can you hear me?

Yep, we can.

Great. OK. So I started thinking about reducing applicant burden a few years ago when we first started with Foundant. Um, just I had to think through what the application process was going to be like and I wanted to while maintaining what we'd had in the past.

Maybe it if I could. And then it's been a continual process, and Zoey's blog has been an eye opener. We've had a change in leadership and our new CEO came in and had ideas about how we could further reduce the burden.

So that's kind of our our story. I'd say I'm still looking at it. We haven't it's it's not a finished process, I'm every, every grant cycle. I look and reevaluate and think about how, how can we make this even easier?

I love that I love that you're continually taking the look at your cycles year after year and revising. I think reflection is such an important part of all of our lives, all of the jobs that we do in our personal and private, personal and public lives.

And and one thing I heard from you, Deborah, is that going with Foundant changing how you put your applications out. There is obviously a big reason to take a look and then also a change in leadership change and always will will be a great.

A starter to start to start looking at that, you mentioned a blog and I missed that. Would you mind saying, what's that blog again that you mentioned?

I view Lee V U L e OK, gosh, I can't remember the name of his blog. I just google him. Yeah, he's he's kind of a leader in telling philanthropic organizations like it is from the applicant's perspective.

And Investec having people comment. It's nonprofit AF.

There we go. Thank you. Yeah.

I have. Yes, yes, I've definitely heard of that one. That is fantastic. Fantastic. I think that we have. Oh, go ahead.

Pete. Grantmaking also there's there is a lot of conversation and there's still occasionally about how to how to reduce that. And there is a whole. There's a whole initiative around that. It's got a name to that, I don't remember.

I'll let anybody else fill that in. I'm going to I'm going to mute myself now.

Fantastic. Did we have another had raised.

The reason that we started considering reducing the applicant burden was because we were not getting a very diverse group of students who were applying for scholarships, and we felt like we had to address this and make them more available or more convenient or whatever for every student to be able to apply.

Wonderful, Janet, did you say where what organization you're with?

Oh yeah, I did that when I was muted. I am from the Hancock County Community Foundation in East Central Indiana.

Wonderful. And then so when you realized that you weren't getting a diverse pool of students, what did you do to start changing that?

Well, for one thing, we we took out any extra letters of recommendation requirements because this seemed to be hanging students up. And there were also times when the letters weren't being submitted in time and that thus disqualifying the students from the scholarships.

We switched to the UK so that they only had to submit information once and it automatically sending them to the scholarship applications that they qualify for, and we're providing best the workshops. We've done this for a long time at each of the schools because we do ask for FAFSA information for scholarships that are based on financial need

. So we're helping them to get that done in a in a. Quick fashion.

Wonderful.

So those are the main things I think that we've done so far that we would like to make it even easier.

That's great. We're hearing a lot of trends towards eliminating that third party letter of recommendation, especially on scholarship applications. Is that being kind of a blocker for a lot of students? So interesting to hear that you are in that same in that same world.

Is anyone having conversations with their partner, non-profits or or the students if you're if you're a scholarship provider in your communities?

My name is Maximilian I'lI. I'm with the Gifford Foundation, where a small foundation in Syracuse, New York. And we've actually been addressing both the applicant burden issue, as well as trying to have more conversations with all in one with a new approach that we're taking with our follow ups process.

We recently did a big review of our follow up reporting process on grants and found that it was really easy for the written reports. We've been receiving the pile up. We found that we often had to reach out to applicants with more questions after we got them, and we also found that applicants loved hearing from us when

we did that. So we are now exploring a new approach where instead of having them submit a written report, we have them set up an interview and we asked many of the same questions. But we are doing it over Zoom or in person, and then we can write up our own summary after the fact.

So it allows us to tailor the conversation to their specific projects, have more conversations and stay on top of it better.

I love that. And of course, as a proponent for Foundant, I love the option that you have to sort of fill out their follow up form during their follow up form into a report that you're filling out as you have that live conversation with them, whether on Zoom or on the phone or what have you.

It gives you both that record storage, but also the personal interaction with the applicants there. That's fantastic.

They have Foundant's made it very easy and so far the feedback has been very positive.

From great love that I love that. Thank you so much, Max. Anyone else?

Hi, I'm with Jefferson Community Foundation in Washington state. You know, I think that for us, really? Look, I'm the development manager. They're looking at some of our reducing applicant burden and really came with our commitment to racial justice.

And you know, our organization has hired a consulting company, a BIPOC consulting company, to help us look over our application process. And just. A mix with a.

Real eye on equity. And I think for us, that's really been our commitment to reducing burden for applicants is an eye on equity. And some of our our president and our nonprofit liaison even took a racial justice literacy 16 week course offered by a local woman in our area.

And I think really looking at the ways in which white supremacy impacts the granting process has been really instrumental in the ways that we're looking at making changes. And I think that for us really grounding ourselves in that commitment to equity before we can even jump in and make huge changes has been important.

Not that we're stagnant, but I think that really understanding why equitable changes and grant processes need to be made is has really driven us.

That's fantastic. Fantastic. Which kind of leads us to our next question with what's required to make these changes and you kind of lead us there a little bit ashes like a a deeper look into the all the factors internal and external in your community, what systemic issues are going on in the world or in your locality?

Do you need to have conversations with your staff or board? Can you just do this on your own? I'm sure that that some of these questions are overwhelming in some ways and kind of bigger than all of us.

But but you have to start somewhere, right? So what else does anyone else have any thoughts on on? You know, you can you can change a question on your application pretty easily. But what's the thought process and what's the the smaller macro and micro ways that you are looking into this?

We really were intentional, starting about three or four years ago to turn scholarships in particular. So I'm into scholarships and grants to turn scholarships from a kind of very siloed donor product to something that was really integrated with our work.

So our scholarships are integrated now with our education program, which includes our grants and our scholarships. And there was a lot of work to get buy-in from staff, particularly the board was pretty much on board when we presented that eventually.

But a lot of that involved bringing in individual students, telling student stories, really making our staff and some of our donors as well understands that students aren't the traditional graduated 18 have their parents before moving to four-year college kind of folks anymore that a lot of students are struggling with housing insecurity and food insecurity even before COVID

. But just presenting that that student picture. So we did pre-COVID a I'll call it a field trip, but an event at one of our community colleges where we joined the food pantry there. We had students talk about, know, emergency assistance and how important that was.

And that really set us up to make changes we wanted to. We updated our scholarship policy to make everything cost of attendance and Serbian citizenship requirements. I'm happy to share a copy, happy about if folks are thinking along those lines.

We looked at our testing and our application. We realized we ask for a lot of things we didn't need to make decisions like requiring since double tax forms. So we moved to a trust based application system where students input financial information, but we do not require any verification from them.

We trust them to be telling us the truth. And that really set us up also included to very quickly launch a student emergency assistance fund for scholars where we provide non tuition assistance for housing and food, and that those changes and kind of making everything student centric made it easy for us to present that to the board

and then to understand it is an immediate need and to approve it immediately. So just really focusing on students and involving their voices. We have a scholarship recipient advisory committee. My Grants Advisory Committee is actually two thirds students, so it just really incorporating their voices and making sure that they're part of the process.

Nice. I have a couple of questions for you. So you mentioned talking to students. Where are you finding the students? Are they? Are they ones that have previously received your scholarships? Or are you reaching out further than your immediate community?

So we have about 250 to 300 active sellers at any point, so mostly we do on our current scholars and we survey students annually. So at one year after their award or the year after they're awarded and then three years out to really see the impact the scholarships have had.

And we're on our fourth year, we just finished our fourth survey. So we do have some longitudinal data there. We have the Scholarship Recipient Advisory Committee, which is about four to five current scholars, and we really do lean on them to when we have specific questions about the application or things are coming up.

We look at student semester reports. We added some coded questions in recently, probably about a year ago. Now it's been three cycles and we look at those and surveys and we do have a scholarships intern who is a current student.

So we lean on them as well to help us understand what being a college student is like.

Wonderful, wonderful. And then my second is more of a comment, not a question, but I I find it lovely and interesting that you refer to sort of trust based process with your students, which is something we definitely are hearing as a hot topic in the grant-making world.

But as in terms of scholarships, you know, it's such a you're in, you're out, you know, it's hard to get those long term relationships. So it's it's great to hear that you're using sort of a trust based approach with students as well.

Fantastic. Any other hands.

I'm with the Veach program and we are we're we're consistently trying to figure out how to reduce burden applicants for our grants, many of which are our renewal. General operating support grants. The nitty gritty that we just did this past year was printed out all of the questions and put them in an Excel sheet and had our

program officers who are the ones that are using this information. The most rank each question on a scale of one to three. four. How how much work is this for the applicant? How much how important is this information for our internal processes and how important is this information for our board members?

And that was a really helpful way to to see where where there is a difference of opinions. But also like very clearly, these are the questions that we can eliminate. There are there are a lot of work for applicants.

We're not getting much information out of them, so we're still working on it. But I thought as a sort of nitty gritty process that that was one that really helped us get the ball rolling sounds.

I love that. I love that. I mean, and how often do we do that kind of really deep dove reflective work to say, you know, sometimes we're so used to asking the same thing. It's we're doing it because we've always done it right.

You know why? Why change now? But to actually take a look with a fresh perspective, fresh eyes and to say, Do we really need this information? And and what's the what's the burden on the applicant to be asking this fantastic.

Anyone else have any thoughts on that?

Yes. Hi, this is me., and I'm the program manager for the GWB Geoscientist Without Borders program. So for us, it's also a beginning process because we are also new and we do very technical and science based applications because it's geosciences.

So we're mostly applicants are geoscientists or postdocs and all those in the same job profile who are applicants. So thinking that how can we reduce the burden of applicants? We had an advisory task force formed which was tasked with doing other things, but at the same time, this was also one of their one of their agenda items

to discuss one. And one of the items that came out as they suggested that, first of all, we should try and reduce the burden in terms of our analyze and pull proposals from. So we're trying to do a template in Foundant and again, try to do it pretty lean now from what it is.

So our committee chair and our committee members are all weighing in and trying to refine it as much as to put it into maybe two or three pages for the applicant instead of the 1215 pages that they have to submit right now.

And doing the same thing with follow ups doing the same thing with progress reports, whatever is possible to automate it and send it in fondant and not do anything with attachments and other things. And another thing that came out of it was the task force's recommendation was that they are trying to also do video based.

Some colleagues have already shared some kind of video based, maybe application process that they can submit a short video of maybe two to three minutes, seeing what they feel strongly about the project and then saying with the follow up reports that they can submit a short video instead of too much writing involved.

So those are the kinds of those are the kinds of suggestions that we are trying to incorporate in the new year. Our applicants.

Wonderful. And hopefully without putting you too much on the spot here. What kinds of questions have you decided could go by the wayside if you've come to those conclusions already? What what kinds that are absolutely necessary and what's what's maybe not so necessary?

Yeah. So the committee, its chair, was very, very careful about asking them as little information as possible to validate. So making all the information from basic information of asking them about their names. Organization profile just quickly putting a new world of began in the space and sending other items out as attachments of possible, like seeds or something

like they need a technical report because it's a technical grant that's being made, so they definitely need to make sure that their technical report has foolproof. So those are the questions that are there, but in the new form that it looks it won't be more than two or three pages or the applicants as we see it.

Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Thank you. You're my welcome. It's my pleasure.

Yeah. And sounds like you have a wonderful helper with you there today, too.

Yes, it's juggling, homeschooling and everything.

Yes. Well, and at a great reason to reduce up. We're all sort of under under a lot of extra stresses right now. In some ways, reducing applicant burden may actually reduce your own burden and reviewing all of those questions.

What other changes are being made? What are some small ones? What are some really big ones? Has anyone been doing this already for a year and has some results they'd like to share?

Hi, this is Laurie. I'm with Ashaiman Family Foundation.

Hi, Laurie.

Hi. So I was going to mention two things if that's OK. The first one is, and most people probably know about this because I am aware that there seem to be a lot of fans out there, but there is a website called Grant Advisor Board that I think has been a little slower to take off than I

would have expected. And I've seen a lot of chats going on about trying to get applicant feedback. Grantee feedback and brand advisor is basically a yelp for foundations to help nonprofits know what approach they can take when asking particular funders for grants.

So if everyone out there, I think, would spread the word a little bit more about Grant Advisor. I think we get some good feedback or a more good feedback about what the pain points are. And I also wanted to share.

And still on the last topic, so I'm sorry, but not so much.

Oh no, that's quite all right.

So one of the things that we did in 2020 is a group of us in our community that all use Foundant works together to do COVID funding as a collaborative approach. And our community foundation took on the bulk of the burden of that by having the applications go through them.

But and it had a lot of positives and we were able to get a lot of money out the door.

For.

Basic human needs that are pie in the sky. What we'd really like to do eventually is to actually have truly collaborative grant making, where the nonprofits that we all tend to support could just submit one application and it would be somehow through found in or some other method distributed to all of us so that we could say

how much of the pie we were going to to handle as our piece of it. The.

Yes, and that is it. That is a great big picture idea that I think does require some collaboration on the part of companies like ours to link Foundant and other other grant companies to figure out how in the world we could do that.

But but definitely that's that's that was a topic in that tag webinar that wouldn't that be wonderful. Regarding Grant Advisor talk, just a small tip for anyone who wants to link to them as perhaps like the last question an instruction field on your application, you can.

You can always put your link for your foundation from Grant Advisor. Talk as the last question on your application and invite applicants to go and anonymously review your process. And you know, it just depends like make sure they know it's totally anonymous because I can tell you, as a former applicant, you don't ever want to say anything

that makes your funder feel like you don't absolutely appreciate everything they're doing. Because, you know, as that applicant, we look to the funders as the ones who hold all the power. So make sure they know it's completely anonymous, but maybe you'll start to be able to get that, that feedback in there.

Any other hands?

All right. This is Sara again. We're trying Community Foundation as well. So something we're doing right now is, you mentioned we have to open grant cycles. Something we're piloting is instead of instituting metrics on our grant reports, telling nonprofits what they need to report on the application, we ask for up to three at least one, but up

to three metrics. Then they will be measuring related to the work they're applying for and then the. So both of these grants are two year grants, so they'll be an interim report and a final report and then asking them to report on how they've done with their own established metrics and knowing that things could change and they

might end up using different metrics, but just allowing them to set their own, which is something that we really heard when we're building these programs, that nonprofits wanted not to impose our own metrics on them, but ask what they're already measuring.

Wonderful, wonderful. And that's, of course, really reportable and Foundant to which is helps you out in the long run.

I'm with the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, and one of the things that we've been doing is we have the alloy stage and we have the application stage. And if we have applicants and we don't take unsolicited applications, so if we have applicants that are asking for the same project year after year, you know, we oftentimes give them

a multi-year grant so that they don't have to apply for the same project multiple times. And then the other thing that we do, if we don't know from year to year, if they are going to apply for the same project, but if they do and we see it come in on the yellow, why we make a much

simpler application form so that they don't have, you know, they can provide us from financial information, but they don't have to answer a lot of the text questions.

Wonderful. Yes. And that that kind of. Dovetails into the idea of quote unquote right sizing your application, this is one of the ideas from grant adviser talk that. It's a little bit different than what you were just saying, but if you have, say, a small award for maybe a smaller organization with a smaller budget, you know, maybe

not making them jump through quite as many hoops as the really large, you know, 5 million dollar budget nonprofit who who is asking for $100,000 grant. You know, obviously there's a lot they think they've got a lot more staff, they've got more capacity to really jump through those hoops.

They're so right. Sizing your application is another idea.

I mean, I'm happy to just briefly share a little bit that we realized a few years ago that our committees were really getting in the weeds and financials, and that is not why we have convened them. So when we launched, we launched some kind of revamped programs last year and something that we did.

So we got a pretty high number of applications in comparison to how many you can grant. So I'm expecting 100 150 applicants and I can award about 20. So what we've instituted is an internal review where our staff will use that.

We publish the new criteria that we're looking at and we try to make it as transparent as possible. But our staff will do an internal review first and determine that only if applicants are a good fit for the program, but also identify any of those financial red flags.

So it's our staff, it's focusing on that. And then when it gets to the committee level, sometimes there is conversations about big financial things and we do try to put the finances in there, really, just to make sure our guarantee pulls equitable in terms of number of small organizations versus number of large ones.

But really enforcing that their role is not to debate finances, that their role is really to look at applicants in terms of overall program goals. And I think I mentioned earlier that two thirds of my committee and our current students are really drawing on their expertize focused on youth leadership, which is what my grant program is focused

on and not not financials that we've identified any big red flags and have addressed those and that their role is really to look at things from a program.

Wonderful. Yes. And that that's a big win is to, you know, ask yourselves, what can the staff take off the reviewer's shoulders? What what questions can you answer for the reviewers and not even have them review? You know, financials can get really into the weeds there with that.

I think we have some more hands. Anyone else would like to speak to that?

James Patterson's Community Foundation of northern Illinois, and I guess I've always looked at application really is it's a compromise really between what the reviewers feel they need and then what the applicant has to provide. So we always ask the question when we revamped the application, which we've done periodically, it's just do we really need this information?

Pretty much every question. So the ones that we have on there, we really feel like we do need. And then there are times and looking at the financial information specifically kind of the serious point when it comes to the organizational financials.

We don't really stress for them, to the reviewers to look at that data. It's more of the budget for the actual program or project or event or whatever they're they're applying for. And the reviewers I they would not do well without reviewing the budget because there's so much you learn from the budget.

You know, you learn exactly what's being paid for, what the dollars are actually going for. So I can't imagine them ever letting go of that piece, and I'm not sure they should. So in the case of the budget sheet, we've kind of said, OK, the reviewers sort of win this one, you know?

But that's not to say that there aren't a lot of situations where we trim things down to make it much easier on the applicants. In many ways to do so. I mean, I guess what I'm getting at is I always feel like it's a it's a real compromise between what they both need as far as staff goes

. I mean, we can go either way, right? So but yeah, that's the way we look at it.

For sure. I mean, obviously, there's always going to be things that you absolutely need to know. You can't grant in thin air. So it is definitely a reflection process with yourself and your staff and your board like, what do we need to know and what can we let go?

I'm Lindsey. I'm from the Community Foundation of McHenry County in Illinois. We previously were under a larger organization, and so now we have the freedom to kind of update our processes one because we have Foundant into now we don't have this criteria that's already in place for us.

So we're kind of moving towards I know a lot of organizations are doing the general operating and we're doing project and general operating. So and I kind of saw that in the chat that some people are saying, well, if we don't have project based grants, then what financial information is provided.

So I'm just curious from like a Foundant perspective how people are kind of handling a grant cycle if they are allowing the projects and general operating because we're finding that problem with the financials. And it's just making things really tricky.

So it's almost like getting to the point where we may have to do a lot of branching, but I'm curious to know how everyone is kind of handling kind of scaling those applications for grantees to allow them to apply for both project and general operating.

Do you mean to apply for both project in general, operating within the same grant cycle of the grant?

Oh, OK. And was it found? So it's like we have one standard application and they can apply for either using the same application, but it's like, Oh, well, maybe having only a project based application and the general operating separate, because right now we're using the same application.

So I'm curious and then that affects their budget information they're submitting. So we're kind of trying to work through that. And I'm just curious and other foundations are handling it that way, allowing applicants to choose how they want to apply.

But then how does that affect their application?

Sure, I see we've got a couple hands that I think may want to respond to your question there.

Yeah. James Patterson Community Foundation, Northern Illinois Again, and just as a response and how to use the application, we don't we don't do operating support specifically, but we have different types of support that we offer. So maybe for an event or for a prop program or for a project, each of those or actually just for consumables to

each of those sort of require different information or different types of questions. So we use the branching functionality quite liberally to really be able to asked just the questions that we need for those specific support types. And in that way, I think it keeps the questions down for them.

And when we do the same thing, actually in terms of right sizing the application with regard to financial information. So if they're requesting, you know, less than I think it's like 10,000 or something like that, if if they're requesting less than that and they don't have to provide as much financial information backup.

So but we do a number of those things with the branching capability. Which has been really helpful.

Fantastic. Well, we are getting close to the end here. I just want to say thank you so much, everyone, for your participation today. Thank you, Britney, for organizing. Thank you, Rick, for co-hosting here. The conversation has been fantastic.

Obviously, this is a super hot topic. We're really glad you joined us today and everyone have a wonderful day.

So that was our conversation. New episodes of Connected Philanthropy Release every other Monday, so make sure you subscribe. If you'd like to hear more conversations like this, connect directly with other members of the philanthropic community by joining Community.Foundant.com.

From all of us here at Foundant, thanks for connecting.