Project Streamline Goals

Goal 1: Increasing Awareness

The philanthropic sector has seen tremendous expansion over the past 15 years. From 1992 to 2004, the number of private foundations almost doubled from approximately 35,000 to over 67,000. With this growth, the field is evolving in a number of critical areas, from strengthening its evaluation practices (benchmarking, measurable outcomes, etc.) to better managing grantmaking and associated portfolio risks.

Today’s social and technological changes (which offer new ways for funders to find information helpful in their grantmaking and for applicants to communicate their objectives and results) are dramatic, yet it is unclear what steps modern philanthropy is willing to take to harness new opportunities to empower the nonprofit sector to achieve its own objectives. Project Streamline will create a sense of urgency around the need for sector-wide improvements.

Through national and local meetings, media coverage, blogs, training, tools, and other efforts, Project Streamline will focus the philanthropic field on the flaws in current application, monitoring, and reporting practices and facilitate a collaborative effort to address those flaws. Project Streamline will not result in a “one size fits all solution,” but it will be successful if it can make grantmakers aware of the impact of their grantmaking processes on grantseekers and institutionalize a more thoughtful approach to determining individual foundation requirements.

Short-term success in increasing awareness among grantmakers of the problems they are creating will be measured by i) participation in Project Streamline presentations, ii) media and blog coverage, and, eventually, iii) surveys of partner organization constituencies.

Project Streamline’s long-term success will be measured by the extent to which the principles are institutionalized and become part of the philanthropic culture. One indicator of this institutionalization is their adoption by individual grantmakers. A second indicator will be their inclusion in basic industry training and tools (e.g., Council on Foundations training, Association of Small Foundations’ Foundation in a Box, Grants Managers Network grants management manual, etc.).

Goal 2: Reducing Costs

Project Streamline seeks to reduce the resources used in application and reporting processes, allowing both grantmakers and grantseekers more time to focus on mission-related activities.

Grantmakers struggle with internal inefficiencies, including the amount of time spent tracking down paperwork, fielding calls from confused applicants, and transferring data from proposals and reports to online tracking systems. Some grantmakers also spend enormous amounts of time on processes that are often pro-forma, such as approving budget revisions and extension requests—changes that are almost always approved. A report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) concluded that the sum of grantee administrative costs and average foundation administrative costs results in an estimated total administrative cost of 13 percent of every foundation grant dollar.

It is difficult to estimate how much time nonprofits spend developing and writing grant applications and reports. A Rand Corporation Case Study of one nonprofit organization calculated that it spent 11 percent of its budget and 44 percent of its organizational time complying with funder requests. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) data shows the average amount of time spent on the grant proposal creation and application/selection process is 27.45 hours per grant, with a median of 20 hours. Reporting and evaluation receive considerably less attention: nonprofits indicate that they spend between an average of 20.48 hours on foundation-required reporting, with a median of 10 hours.

This means that nonprofits don’t really receive grants. They receive “net grants”—the total amount of funding minus the true cost of getting and managing the grant. Nonprofits must weigh the possibility of funding against the cost of seeking it. One nonprofit focus group participant explained that she discouraged her staff from pursuing grants of less than $25,000, because in her experience, they were almost always “ludicrously complicated for nothing much at the end.” For many other nonprofits, the cut-off point was $5,000.

Project Streamline seeks to reduce both grantmaker and grantseeker costs through i) more streamlined requirements (i.e., less paperwork) and the elimination of duplicative requirements. Strategies to achieve these cost reductions include defining the minimum legal and regulatory requirements for grant application, monitoring, and reporting; promoting “right-sized” requirements that reflect the grant size and/or length of relationship; and encouraging grantmakers to limit their requirements to just the items needed for decision making.

Project Streamline will monitor success in reducing the costs to both grantmakers and grantseekers by 1) monitoring changes in CEP data and 2) conducting surveys and focus groups with grantmakers and grantseekers.