Impact and Outcomes becoming even more important in grant process

The Byerly Foundation Board has recently spent time having strategic conversations within the Board to determine if our grant processes are as good as they can be.  We know that our grantees have been able to make big differences in Hartsville and at the same time we wonder if there are other ways The Byerly Board might help focus even greater results.

One tool that the Board is thinking of implementing for our coming grant cycles is a set of five questions that have been constructed by the independent sector organization that we were introduced to by Charles Weathers of The Weathers Group. 

These questions seem to make sense for any organization looking at its programs and we think they make sense for a grant making board as it looks to which of the many solid requests it will be able to fund in a grant cycle will likely be:

1 – What is your organization aiming to accomplish with this funding?

2 – What are your strategies for making this happen?

3 – What are your organization’s capabilities for doing this?

4 – How will your organization know if you are making progress?

5 – What have and haven’t you accomplished so far?

If this were a discussion instead of a blog many people around the table might be thinking this is what we always include in our grant proposals. And, for many organizations this may be the case. At the very least, it is going to get both our Foundation Board and our grantee organizations focused on the impact/outcome discussion. As The ByerlyFoundation begins to plan for the coming grant cycle the idea of impact and outcomes is probably going to be taking more central focus in the thinking.  The Board has often done this with major grants and the thinking is moving toward this process becoming more critical for all the grants. We are in fact looking at this discussion as if we might be a grant seeker. Strategically, we are working to answer one of the major questions put out by the independent sector tool, "If someone unfamiliar with out work were to read about our grants, would have they have a clear definition of what long-term success means to our efforts?"

This blog is an opening in the discussion and we are looking for ways to extend this discussion. One of those ways will be some grant preparation workshops that will be held in April to get input and provide a little more direction to the grant seeking process.