• What it Takes to Get the Work    Done
 • Beyond Skills
 • A Growth Opportunity
 • Occupational Hazards
 • Special Opportunities
 • Setting Your Course
 • It Takes Time

 • Quiz
 • Study Guide

Appendix
 • Council on Foundations (COF)
 • AffinityGroups
 • Regional Association of
   Grantmakers

What should your guidelines contain?

• A statement of purpose, declaring in broad terms the goal of your grantmaking program.
  
  
• An indication of your foundation’s fields of interest characterized in general, familiar terms, such as housing, the arts, education, the environment.
  
  
• The geographical range in which you will consider funding, thereby indicating whether you will review proposals exclusively from your city, county, region, state, nation or the entire world.
  
  
• A brief description of your decision making process, including dates for proposal submission and review.
  
  
• Declarations of anything you definitely will not fund, such as building construction, endowments or out-of-state programs.
  
  
• Examples of grants that you have previously awarded.
  
  
• Any special interests or emphases not otherwise indicated in the statement of purpose.
  
  
• The typical dollar range of your grants.
  
  
• How to proceed with an application: what to include and what not to include with the request.
  
  
• Name and contact information of the person in charge of reviewing proposals.
  
  
• The guidelines’ publication date.

Once the board approves the guidelines, your job is still not over. You must decide how to make them available and easily accessible to grantseekers. Many avenues are available and multiple approaches may be advisable: Web sites, printed brochures, even face-to-face discussions with potential applicants. At least annually, you should review the guidelines and ask yourself if they honestly reflect your board’s recent history of grantmaking. If you have been receiving a large number of proposals outside your program interests, then you should check to see if your guidelines are sending the wrong message. Or if you have persistently awarded grants outside your declared aims, you and your board should strive to reconcile the guidelines with your actual philanthropic practice.

Growing Into the Job
Soon you will learn what is required of you on the job. You will pick up new skills. You will set goals for yourself and make progress toward achieving them. With time, you will become increasingly effective in every aspect of your job.

Time: That is what it takes to grow into your job. Time coupled with effort.

In your first months on the job, you might take the opportunity to meet with your grantees. You can ask them the questions that you might have been struggling to answer on your own and in the process open up the lines of communication.

• What are some things that I need to learn about your organization, your field, the nonprofit sector?
  
  
• Is there anything in our guidelines that is not clear, something that should be excluded or included?
  
  
• What in your experience constitutes a successful site visit? A good grant proposal? An effective collaboration between a nonprofit and a foundation?
  
  
• From your perspective, what are the key issues and challenges grantmakers and grantseekers will face in the coming years?

Over time, you may want to experiment with various grantmaking strategies. You might measure the conventional responsive approach (in which you wait for the proposals to pour into your office and then take action) with an orientation that is decidedly proactive. You and your board will decide what kinds of efforts you most want to fund and then you will comb the nonprofit sector to find them.

You may want to cluster your grants, reviewing at one time all the proposals dealing with a single issue; proposals originating from particular geographical area; or proposals that address an area of special interest to your foundation.

Gradually, you will become a minor expert in more subjects than you thought possible. You will learn what a really good organization looks like—the odd rumblings of its inner operations. You will learn what constitutes a good proposal. The feel of how things really work in the nonprofit sector. You will learn that in the foundation world, there is never just one way to achieve great things. You will witness the accomplishments and false starts of your colleagues. You will learn from their example, too.

Chapter 1: Study Guide