By Carolynn Mambu, Vice President, Washington Grantmakers
Two of my takeaways from the recent “Helping or Hindering?” event with Kathleen Enright were about scale.
First, common wisdom is that “taking it to scale” is the ideal outcome for a successful project, but all nonprofits don’t aspire to be all things to all people. Making a project bigger may make it harder to sustain and create redundancies. Instead, there is a national trend to support nonprofits that stay small and partner with like-minded organizations. Their leaders focus on cultivating their networks of potential collaborators rather than growing their organizations. For a great overview of this idea, check out “The Networked Nonprofit” which appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
The second point was about the need for grantmakers to “right-size” the application and reporting process to fit the size of a particular grant. If you are providing a small grant ($5k, $10K), you may want to re-think requiring a 10-page proposal, a slew of attachments and two reports. In this case, by the time the grantee is finished applying and reporting it will have spent most of the grant money in staff-time. If you are looking for creative ideas on how to right-size your application process, check out this report from Project Streamline.
What’s the smallest grant you make? Do you have a scaled-down application process for it?
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Related:
- The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle (Bridgespan Group – SSIR, Fall 2009)
- GEO’s Smarter Grantmaking in Challenging Times
- GEO’s On the Money.
- Sustainability. What’s that mean, exactly? (WGDaily)
