Five Ways for Individual Donors to Give Better

Striving for Transparent and Responsive Communication

Giving Compass' Take: • Philip Li shares lessons in transparent and responsive communication from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. • Are your communications with grantees made with them in mind? Are you collecting feedback to understand where miscommunications are occurring?  • Learn more about being a grantee-centric giver.  Being clear in sharing what we’re doing and the whywe are doing it is important for all foundations, and even more so for us because our trust-based approach is somewhat uncommon. Recently we have had some reminders of what we need to get better at — being transparent by framing and setting context in order to bring about better understanding. As we’ve written about before, we accept grant proposals that have been submitted to other funders. We do that because most, if not all, of the information we want to know is already captured in other applications. Our desire is for grantseekers to focus more time on their important work rather than spending hours writing to educate us. We think it is our responsibility to get to know them. Interestingly and somewhat paradoxically we’ve gotten some comments that we’ve made the process harder by not being specific enough in what we’re asking. Development Directors have looked at our website and wondered, ‘what are they really looking for?’ For us, the application is the beginning of the process, not the complete set of information from which a decision is made–and we realized that if we were extra clear about that upfront, applicants might feel less anxious. We read that first submission, and if there’s a possible match, we talk with the nonprofit to get a better understanding of its work, and then if there’s continued interest, we go see their leadership program in action. We need, and want, to be better communicators — to help others understand our approach and rationale and what’s in our heads. Read the full article about transparent and responsive communication by Philip Li of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation at Medium.