This list of resources provides additional information about each topic covered Working Well With Grantees: A Guide for Foundation Program Staff. These resources include past CEP research publications, CEP profiles of highly rated program officers and staff at highly rated foundations, toolkits, and blog posts to help you improve the way you work with your grantees.

Forming Strong Relationships with Grantees 

• To learn more about how highly rated program officers approach building and maintaining strong relationships with grantees, see Working with Grantees: The Keys to Success and Five Program Officers Who Exemplify Them (CEP, 2010).
• Use these questions from the report to examine your own relationships with your grantees.
• To learn more about how listening to their grantees has helped the Wilburforce Foundation develop its strategies, see CEP’s profile of Paul Beaudet, associate director of the Wilburforce Foundation, in the report Essentials of Foundation Strategy.
• To benchmark your grantmaking processes against those of other funders, visit the free Grantmaker Assessment Tool developed by CEP and Grants Managers Network.
• The Grantmaker Assessment Tool will also help you compare your grantmaking processes to the principles described in Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose (Project Streamline, 2008). 
• The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund is one of the most highly rated foundations by grantees for its understanding of the field. To read about what this means to the foundation and how its staff develop such an understanding, see this case study excerpted from Lessons From the Field: From Understanding to Impact (CEP, 2010).

 Providing Assistance Beyond the Grant to Grantees

• See More than Money: Making a Difference with Assistance Beyond the Grant (CEP, 2008) to learn more about the attitudes and behaviors of foundation CEOs and program staff in providing assistance beyond the grant, the types of nonmonetary assistance grantees receive, how grantees view this assistance, and under what conditions they report that their organizations have been strengthened by the provision of assistance beyond the grant.
• To learn about the Wallace Foundation’s approach to providing assistance beyond the grant, see the profile of the Wallace Foundation, Strengthening Education Leadership through Field-Focused Assistance, in More Than Money.
• Paul Beaudet’s blog post “Putting Grantees in the Center of your Map” about how placing grantees at the focus of their outcome maps allowed the Wilburforce Foundation to strengthen grantee relationships and invest in capacity-building to empower grantees.
• Linda Wood’s blog “More Truth-Telling and Candor?” about what the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund learned from investing in leadership development of the executive directors of its grantee organizations.

 Providing Operating Support

• To learn more about how foundation CEOs describe the decision-making processes and trade-offs for providing operating support, and to learn more about the grantee perspective, see In Search of Impact: Practices and Perceptions in Foundations’ Provision of Program and Operating Grants to Nonprofits (CEP, 2007).
• See these questions from CEP’s report to reflect on the choices your foundation makes about the size, duration, and type of support you provide to grantees.
• Paul Shoemaker’s essay “Four Flaws with Funders’ Perspectives on Operating Support” that he wrote in response to CEP’s report.
• Andrea Brock’s blog post “General Operating Support Remains the Exception” reflecting on CEP’s findings on general operating support from its report.
• Ron Ragin’s blog post “Thoughts on General Operating Support in Uncertain Times” for a view of general operating support from the perspective of a program officer in the arts program area at the Hewlett Foundation.
• Linda Wood’s blog post “It Takes Dedicated Funding to Do Leadership Development Right” to learn about the experience of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund in providing general operating support to its grantee organizations.

 Making Your Reporting and Evaluation Process Helpful to Grantees

• See Grantees Report Back: Helpful Reporting and Evaluation Processes (CEP, 2011) to learn more about how grantees experience foundation-required reporting and evaluation processes and how those processes can be more helpful to them. In particular, read interviews with highly rated program officers Amy Berman and Ken Thompson to learn how they try to make reporting and evaluation processes helpful to both them and their grantees.
• Another CEP research report shows that nonprofits do not find foundations all that helpful in nonprofits’ efforts to measure and manage their performance. See Room for Improvement: Foundations’ Support of Nonprofit Performance Assessment (CEP, 2012) to learn what nonprofits think about assessing their performance and how foundations can better support them in doing so.
• Fay Twersky’s blog post “Time for a Gold Standard of Use” on the importance of, and common misconceptions about, evaluation.