Hello,

I am wondering if anyone has engaged a consulting firm for help with grant program design/re-design? Specifically things like auditing existing grant programs/applications, creating a rubric for application evaluation, strategic application design, etc.? If so, how was your experience and do you have any consultants you might recommend?

Thanks!

Hi everyone, just wanted to share here in the forum a follow up resource from Jeff Hamond’s ProNet guest speaker webinar from March 19. An attendee asked for recommendations for publications, e-newsletters, or platforms to follow to try and keep up with things coming out of Washington re: taxes, laws, potential changes/ideas, etc. Jeff’s…

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Thanks for posting this here Laundrea! I’ll share it with my colleague who oversees our scholarship funds.

This is helpful to know James! Do most of those donor advised fund driven grants typically come with specific timelines/grant terms? If they don’t, how do you all determine when a report is due?

The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee is conducting research for student emergency funding programs that will assist college students with unforeseen financial circumstances. By collecting this data, this aids in the search for best practices and structures for future funding.

Please access the link to complete our …

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Hello Kent,

I’m late to the conversation, but we have many donor-designated funds that are restricted to a specific purpose. We do require reporting for these to preserve donor intent. We believe it’s our duty since they entrusted us with their legacy. Having said that, we try to make the reporting as streamlined as possible. The report…

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We have some DAF holders who have private foundations. Some of them want to get some of our additional services.

Hi Gus – we do allow grantmaking to nonprofit organization endowments. It may be a grant to the nonprofit with instructions that it is designated for endowment OR it may be to one of the agency funds that we have established to receive third-party contributions. Each of our agency funds has two components. Hoping this helps!

Hi Kent, we actually don’t require a report or even unofficially ask for a summary from our Designated Fund grant distributions. It’s not posed an issue in the past that I am aware of, but in all fairness I guess we don’t really know if those funds are used for the specific purposes since we don’t follow up. Sorry I can’t be helpful to…

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Hi everyone! We are curious as to how others manage restrictions that are placed on Designated Fund distributions. We’ve required reporting from grantees on these in the past, but it has become difficult to get reports back from some recipients. We certainly don’t want to withhold distributions from year to year waiting for reports. Any…

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Thanks, Ashley!

Hi Gus, as far as I am aware, our field of interest funds don’t support nonprofit endowments, but I a number of our DAF fundholders direct funds to endowments outside of our foundation in addition to the many nonprofit organization endowment funds that we hold.

Hi Kendra, just now seeing this! I’d like to be upfront first in that I don’t have an answer or examples for you, but I am curious if others do as we currently do not have our volunteer grant panel members document their site visits/phone call interviews with applicant organizations. Do your staff and/or board do these, and therefore…

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Do any of you allow grantmaking to support nonprofit endowments? I’d love to hear any perspective on why you do – or why you don’t. Thank you!

Hi everyone! Is anyone will to share with me what their procedures are for conducting site visits? Do you have a form you fill out?

We had been recording our observations in our management system until recently when we ran into a child safety issue on a visit. We recognized that we needed a more formal way to document these issues should…

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Hi all!

Does anyone have funds that have maintained their private foundation identity but are funds of the Community Foundation? I’d love to connect on what this looks like for you! Thanks!

I just want to encourage everyone to fill out their profile and add a picture. It would be great to connect and get to know each other better. We have 2 great FREE Summer Series webinars coming up. I hope to see you there!

Hi Megan, I’m not sure if we do exactly what you’ve outlined but thought I’d share. We recently overhauled our fee structure for all of our fund types and supporting organizations. I think some SOs are considering switching up how they do their grantmaking and involving us more on the front end rather than on the tail end of a cycle, but…

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Thanks, Tom! In this case I am not asking about outgoing grantmaking from the fund (we have no trouble with that), but rather with funds that receive grants, usually unrestricted but also restricted funding, which require our participation in the application process.

From what I can tell, many large community foundations just don’t allow this…

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For a long time we just used the traditional 1% fee for endowed funds that had their own grants committee. We do the administrivia, award letters/declinations, gather the grants, share a hyperlinked proposal with the grants committee, but they do the review and let us know what they want to fund. We had a few like this. We also had…

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Hi all,

We have a couple of funds that essentially use us as a fiscal sponsor to receive grants into their funds as part of their donor-initiated fundraising efforts.

Per our policy, they are required to notify us ahead of application. We review the application, often have to include additional organizational paperwork that the fundholder…

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