Grantee Perceptions: Feedback we received from grant recipients, and how we’re responding

For almost two decades, the Hewlett Foundation has partnered with the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to survey our grantees so we can learn from their feedback and continue to improve our grantmaking practices. These surveys of grantee perceptions — answered anonymously to ensure candor and benchmarked against our past performance, as well as our peers — help our ongoing efforts to live up to our guiding principles: Are we making a meaningful impact in the world with our grantmaking? Are we forging strong partnerships based on mutual respect with the organizations we support?

Our latest survey was administered in the midst of the pandemic, after more than a year in which Hewlett Foundation staff, who are largely based in the San Francisco Bay Area, had halted grantee site visits and convenings and so missed the learning that comes from the candid back-and-forth and relationship-building of such interactions. We are grateful to all of our partners who, while continuing their own work under challenging conditions, managed to share their views in the survey. The feedback was particularly important as Hewlett staff have been responding in real time to uncertainty and compounding crises — adapting our own operations, retooling our strategies, and announcing new commitments. Against that backdrop, the survey, administered late last spring, offers results that, while encouraging in many respects, identified important places where we can continue to improve.

What’s working well …

“Overall, Hewlett’s grantee ratings generally remain strong,” CEP’s analysts report, “at or above grantee ratings of other very large funders on most measures explored in CEP’s grantee survey.” Underpinning these generally strong ratings are some key grant practices, including flexible funding, true cost funding, and streamlined processes. The foundation’s practice of offering largely unrestricted grants is a vital factor correlated with a host of positive ratings. We know that flexible funding — whether general operating support or general program support — provides grantees, from arts groups to tribes to think tanks, the freedom to make the best choices and adapt to changing conditions; it was a critical factor empowering many of our grantees to nimbly adjust when the pandemic first hit.

Other grant practices were also important and well-received: Even among grantees who receive restricted support, roughly two out of three Hewlett grantees indicate that their grant covered the full direct and indirect costs of the work it was meant to fund — a healthy and improving percentage, but one we won’t be happy with until it reaches 100%. At the same time, drawing on feedback from past surveys, Hewlett has, for several years, been working to streamline our grant practices to make the process of applying for and reporting on grants less burdensome for our partners — and the latest survey indicates that grantees are seeing the benefits of those efforts. The CEP analysts report: “The combination of relatively large grants and efficient processes results in grantees receiving a larger amount of grant money per each hour spent on foundation processes than do grantees of more than 97% of funders in CEP’s dataset.”

Grantee ratings of whether the Hewlett Foundation is having a “significant positive impact” on their fields remain high, and higher than the typical very large funder in CEP’s cohort. The foundation’s investment in knowledge and advancement of public policy are viewed as “distinct strengths, providing ratings in the top 20%” of funders who were measured, according to CEP. In open-ended comments, grantees describe the foundation as a “source of strategic insight,” “frontier pushing,” and “the center of a network of grantees and other partners.” Grantees also provide solid ratings for trust, transparency, and respectful interactions with their foundation contacts. The CEP analysts call out ratings as “particularly strong” for perceptions related to responsiveness and approachability when a problem arises for grantees, and report that, the “vast majority of grantees, 97%, note that Hewlett staff spent at least equal or more time listening than talking.” This is part of the seven habits that we encourage our program staff to adopt as everyday behaviors for excellent work with grantees.

… and what’s not

While grantees rated the Hewlett Foundation’s approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion higher than is typical for foundations — 82% of grantees are aware of Hewlett’s actions in response to the movement for racial justice — they also urged us to provide more information about our efforts, and especially to communicate more about the work we are funding as it relates to specific fields. The survey also shows that we can and should do more to develop and demonstrate understanding of the people and communities served by our grantees, which we aim to improve when resuming site visits and by building on some early investments we’ve made in more systematically listening to those most affected by the conditions we want to change. One recent example of this type of systematic listening comes from our Education Program, which commissioned survey research to understand the information needs of parents regarding K-12 education.

A key challenge exposed by the survey concerns maintaining clarity and consistency of communication — an area where Hewlett had improved greatly in recent years, but saw a decline during the pandemic, leaving us similar to the typical funder in the overall dataset and our peer cohort of large funders. While disappointing, this was not entirely surprising; after all, Hewlett does not maintain offices or staff in other countries or in U.S. states beyond California. We rely to a great degree on travel, site visits, field conferences, and our own grantee convenings — all of which had been on hold for more than a year when the survey was taken. Complicating matters further, we were simultaneously making adjustments in our grantmaking strategies in response to inequities laid bare by the pandemic, the overdue racial reckoning in the U.S. and worldwide, a worsening of the climate emergency and biodiversity, and a crisis in U.S. democracy. The survey showed that grantees want more information about these changes and, specifically, where their individual organizations fit into these evolving strategies. This feeling was particularly acute among grantees who experienced a change in their primary contact (i.e., whose program officer had left the foundation). Such grantees were significantly more likely to offer lower ratings on clarity of communication. Against the backdrop of the pandemic and its accompanying uncertainty, such turnover — which is baked into Hewlett’s practice of using term limits — and the lack of sufficient communication caused even more anxiety among grantees, something we are strongly committed to addressing.

How we’re responding