Our refreshed commitments to being an open and trusting funder

In 2022, we signed up to IVAR’s eight commitments of being an open and trusting funder, which were designed in partnership with charities. Last year, we reflected on how we have been living up to these commitments. This included an accountability peer review session with another funder and two charities to review and challenge our progress and future plans in light of what matters most to charities.

There was recognition of the progress we have made against each of the commitments, but we also identified three areas that we can improve on:

• Acting with urgency and making decisions in a more timely manner.
• Being clearer about our grant reporting requirements, and specifically sharing how we will use the information that our grantees provide.
• Being more open and visible about our commitment to being an Open and Trusting funder.

In response to this feedback, we have made changes in each of these areas which are outlined below.

Acting with urgency

We understand that charities need us to be clear about funding timeframes so that they can plan for the future. When we open a grant programme, we now provide a timetable of our decision-making points and when applicants can expect to hear from us. We have also increased the number of decision points, so that we can let people know earlier in the process if they are not eligible.

Across our open grant programmes, we have a process that enables us to sift out applications which do not fit the criteria very quickly. Charities that are taken forward have conversations with our team and either don’t have to complete further forms or receive support from us to develop their proposals.

Our criteria are narrow but well-defined. We have introduced pre-application meetings with potential applicants to enable them to chat with a member of our team to discuss their work, and whether or not it is a likely fit with the programme aims. We also run pre-application webinars for all grant programmes with an opportunity to ask questions.

For our programmes funding frontline delivery organisations, charities who go through to the final stage of the process will get a decision within four months of the application closing date. We recognise that four months feels like a long time for a charity to hear if they have been successful and we continually reflect on how we might make decisions more quickly in each grant round, balancing the tension for a quicker decision with an open and equitable process.

Being clearer about our grant reporting requirements

We know that charities often have multiple funders, each asking them to gather different data and complete different monitoring reports, which can be extremely time consuming, when charities are already time poor. We have committed to only asking for information we will use, sharing how we will use it, and to having a copy of the monitoring reports available on our website so charities can see what our monitoring requirements are.

We analyse the monitoring information quarterly, via a cross-Foundation group, to look for trends and feed these back to the sector. We are committed to, where possible, only asking for the data a charity would normally collect rather than asking for specific outcomes.

For our restricted grants we regularly review our application processes. We have a similar process to monitoring as our unrestricted grants, with the addition of asking charity partners to report on the objectives and outcomes they have identified.

Being more open and visible about our commitment

We’re proud to be part of the Open and Trusting grantmaking community; it provides accountability for us to ensure that we’re mindful of not placing additional burdens on our charity partners.

We want to be more open and visible about our commitment to being an Open and Trusting Funder and now proudly display the Open and Trusting badge on our website. You can read all of our commitments to being an open and trusting funder on IVAR’s website.