Wallace Foundation Study on Funder and Recipient Engagements

Check out this wonderful and comprehensive study that was recently released by the Wallace Foundation.

Called More Than Money: Making a Difference with Assistance Beyond the Grant, this research documents the role of charitable and in-kind giving and the relationship between grant recipients and funders.

Here is a summary of the report:

More foundations report increased non-monetary support to bolster the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations, using such means as convenings to share ideas and practices, training and technical assistance and strategic communications. This report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy addresses the effectiveness of such non-grant support and finds, among other things, that providing only a few types of assistance tends to be less effective than providing more comprehensive help. Accompanying the report’s analysis and survey findings are three case studies of foundations that the authors say exemplify efforts for providing such non-grant assistance: the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving; Winter Park Health Foundation; and The Wallace Foundation.

And here are the four key findings of the research:

• Foundation staff believe that assistance beyond the grant is important for creating impact – and, in particular, for grantees’ achievement of their goals – but they know little about the actual results of the assistance they provide.

• The majority of grantees of a typical large foundation receive no assistance beyond the grant, and the 44 percent that do receive assistance generally receive just two or three types.

• Providing just two or three types of assistance to grantees appears to be ineffective; it is only in the minority of cases when grantees receive either a comprehensive set of assistance activities or a set of mainly field-focused types of assistance that they have a substantially more positive experience with their foundation funders than grantees receiving no assistance.

• Providing assistance beyond the grant in ways that make a meaningful difference to grantees calls for a significant investment on the part of the foundation: Program staff at foundations that provide assistance in these ways to more of their grantees tend to manage fewer active grants and give larger grants.

Click here to go to the page on the Wallace Foundation website where you can download the .pdf directly to your computer.