Grantee Perception Reports

In the latest report, we saw results that affirmed practices that we have put in place to be good grantmakers – and pointed to ways in which we can do even better.

Under the heading of “what’s working,” CEP reports: “Grantees’ ratings of Hewlett’s impact on their fields continue to be more positive than typical, have significantly improved since 2015, and are now at the 80th percentile in CEP’s comparative dataset.” In particular, the foundation’s overall ratings on measures like understanding and advancing knowledge in grantees’ fields are high – rating in the top 15 percent of funders. These measures are strongly related to perceptions of field impact, and our programs are all committed to ensuring that we maintain the strong practices that enable us to understand the fields in which we work. We’ve made efforts to improve our grant procedures, ensuring that all aspects of the application, reporting, and evaluation processes have a meaningful purpose and make wise use of the time of foundation and grantee staff – and the results are visible in overall data: the amount of time that the typical Hewlett grantee spends on these processes has dropped by 33 percent. We’ve also made special efforts in recent years to increase our openness about our grantmaking approach, so we were pleased to see positive ratings in the overall clarity of communication about our goals and funding strategies. And we were particularly gratified to see significantly higher ratings since our last survey, in 2015, of the foundation’s openness to ideas from grantees.

Learn more about what we learned and how we’re responding to the feedback we gathered in the 2018 Grantee Perception Report in this blog post.

Download previous Grantee Perception Reports:

• 2015 Grantee Perception Report
• 2013 Grantee Perception Report
• 2011 Grantee Perception Report
• 2009 Grantee Perception Report
• 2006 Grantee Perception Report
• 2003 Grantee Perception Report