The Grantee Voice: Feedback for Foundations

General Information

To continue to inform the attitudes and practices of foundation leaders with the nonprofit perspective, CEP created The Grantee Voice: Feedback for Foundations. 

The Grantee Voice is a panel of several hundred nonprofit leaders who have agreed to share their perspectives about their experiences working with foundations. (To see the full list of participants, please click here.) The panel members represent a diverse group of nonprofit organizations in regard to issue area and location. In addition, the nonprofits vary widely in size and age as shown in the table below.

Goals for The Grantee Voice

  • Collect timely data to inform foundation practices: The Grantee Voice will allow CEP to survey nonprofits on current issues of relevance to foundations and their grantees, resulting in research reports with timely, actionable insights for philanthropic funders.
  • Gather nonprofit perspectives of working with funders broadly: This effort is distinct from CEP’s surveys of grantees’ experiences with specific foundations, which inform the Grantee Perception Reports (GPRs) delivered to more than 200 foundations over the past decade. Through The Grantee Voice, CEP aims to gather nonprofits’ perspectives about their experiences working with their many and varied funders
  • Further contribute to funders’ knowledge of how they can work most effectively with nonprofits: With the belief that funders make progress against important goals by working productively with grantees, CEP hopes that the data collected from the panel will add to the knowledge of how to improve grantee-funder relationships.

Methodology

Invitations to join the The Grantee Voice panel were sent to a diverse sample of nonprofits that have received funding from foundations that make up CEP’s primary audience - those giving at least $5 million annually in grants. CEP used a database from the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) that consisted of information from over 365,000 registered 501( c)(3) organizations with a Form 990 filed  between 2007 and 2010. Using this data, CEP randomly selected nonprofits with annual expenses between $100,000 and $100 million. To insure that the invited sample was representative of this full range of expenses, 25 percent of the invitations were sent to nonprofits in each quartile of this expense range.

CEP then used Foundation Center’s Foundation Directory Online to determine whether or not each of the nonprofits in this random sample had received any funding from foundations in CEP's audience since 2008. Only nonprofits that had received such funding were invited to join the panel. Over 1,000 nonprofit leaders were ultimately invited to join The Grantee Voice panel, and 300 accepted the invitation, resulting in an acceptance rate of 29 percent.

 

For more information about The Grantee Voice please contact Andrea Brock at (415) 391-3070 ext. 131.