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To begin, your financial support of a project
can be used to elicit the participation of other funders: A phone
call from you to a colleague at another foundation may reap immediate
results, while a nonprofit’s pleas to the same person can go
unanswered. (Your support speaks volumes to other funders.) Indeed,
if yours is a respected institswered. (Your support speaks volumes to other funders.) Indeed,
if yours is a respected institution with a strong public profile,
your presence cannot be ignored. You may even be able to broker
collaborations among business, government and the nonprofit sector
without committing a single dollar from your foundation’s grants
budget. Savvy community leaders recognize that your foundation or
corporate giving program is in business for the long haul.
Of course, you are not the only person with
leveraging power. Your peers will also be trying to leverage you.
Just remember: Leverage is not about shuffling the deck of personal
favors. Rather, it is a means of concentrating appropriate resources,
serving as a catalyst to solve important problems and galvanizing
critical and substantial support for credible programs. Over time,
you will relax into the rhythm of give-and-take.
Setting Your Course
Guidelines for Everybody
All foundations and corporate giving
programs need to debate, formulate, publish and disseminate their
program guidelines. If they neglect to do so, the consequences will
be borne by you, the staff, in the form of a constant barrage of
irrelevant, time-wasting proposals.
Guidelines inform grant applicants about what
your foundation hopes to accomplish. They illuminate the projects,
proposals and organizations you aspire to assist, and conversely,
point to what lies outside your interests. They are the most practical
manifestation of the intent of the founders and the policies of
the governing board.
Why is this public declaration necessary?
It saves everybody time and effort.
If your foundation is exclusively concerned
with child welfare projects, but fails to publicize this fact, then
you are guaranteed to receive regular requests for museum acquisitions,
senior housing ventures, ecological research in Brazil’s rain
forest and everything else under the nonprofit sun.
You already have enough to do without adding
another ultimately unproductive cycle of perusal and refusal.
Likewise, nonprofits should devote their energies to activities
that enjoy a genuine chance of achieving results.
By clarifying your foundation’s aims
and preferences, you will also find it easier to separate proposals
that warrant a closer reading from those that can be immediately
denied. Some proposals might even be returned to sender with a
recommendation attached to pursue another funder whose guidelines
fit better with the applicant’s plans.
Guidelines also serve as a tool for nonprofits
as they focus their thinking about funding aims. Guidelines establish
reasonable expectations, helping applicants to realistically estimate
their fundraising opportunities. As important, good guidelines
document changes in your interests and provide as much specificity
as possible about program emphases. For example, they should enable
applicants from the youth service field to distinguish between
foundations that specialize in direct services, research or organizational
development.
Of course, all of these statements hinge
on the expectation that your guidelines will be clearly written
and adhered to by your board. As many nonprofit applicants will
tell you, not all foundations’ guidelines are clear or specific.
Some foundations opt for that famous phrase,
“Dedicated to general welfare.” In a practical sense,
this really is not a guideline. It is a declaration of the board’s
refusal to grapple with its mission, its reluctance to set goals
and establish priorities. Nevertheless, a very general statement
of this kind may be the necessary starting place for your foundation.
It may even be sufficient if your geographic area is focused and
narrow. But generally, good guidelines take time, hard work and
the patient carpentry of successive drafts. In the process of
crafting more specific guidelines, your board may confront the
tensions and contradictions that have heretofore resided beneath
the surface of the foundation operations for decades. Indeed,
the formulation of guidelines probably should stimulate spirited
debate.
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