New Effort Seeks to Simplify the Process of Submitting Grant Proposals

Peggy Payne, executive director of Safe Passage, in Rock Hill, S.C., has felt overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork involved in seeking grants. Last year, her group suffered due to what she considers a minor mistake in a grant application.

In a grant proposal, Ms. Payne’s group, which assists victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, had forgotten to submit to a grant maker the letter from the Internal Revenue Service that verified its status as a charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. The result: The foundation, which had supported Ms. Payne’s charity for eight years, rejected the proposal as incomplete.

“We lost $30,000 in funding for that one piece of paper,” she says. “It’s not like I’m a new applicant. It hit my agency hard.”

Repeat requests for basic documents by longtime supporters are particularly frustrating, Ms. Payne says. “It makes no sense to me that the funders who fund us every year need our 501(c)(3) determination letter or a copy of our by-laws,” she says. “For me, personally, it makes sense that if there are changes, we include them. If we have no changes, what we sent is good.”

But she says she felt hopeful after she learned about Project Streamline, an effort by eight organizations representing grant makers and grant seekers to decrease the amount of paperwork involved in seeking grants and reporting on their results.

The project last spring issued a report saying that the way foundations gather information from charities creates a significant burden on those groups and has a negative effect on grant makers.

Hearing about Project Streamline “confirmed my frustration and that I wasn’t alone and others were feeling the overwhelming demands of our funders,” says Ms. Payne. “Until we can sit down at the table with funding sources and everyone agrees on what we have to have, it will remain the same.”

Banding Together

The goal of Project Streamline is just that — to bring grant seekers and grant makers together to discuss and solve the problem of excessive red tape and to develop new, more simplified standards. Richard Toth, chairman of the project and director of the office of proposal management at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J., says discussions will take place over the next year, with the hope of putting new standards into place at foundations.

Project Streamline has also set up an online forum to seek ideas, and it has created “Conversation in a Box,” a collection of resources on the issue.

The project is led by the Grants Managers Network, in partnership with the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the Association of Small Foundations, the Council on Foundations, the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, the Foundation Center, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, and the National Council of Nonprofit Associations. So far, it has received $270,000 in support from 11 foundations.

The grant-seeking process used to be more streamlined than it is today, says Sara Engelhardt, who left the presidency of the Foundation Center, in New York, this fall and previously served as a grants manager at the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

But, she says, the process is now more crowded with middlemen, including trustees and program officers. Charities, she says, often have to rewrite their budgets according to very specific requests related to a grant maker’s needs. Sometimes, she says, it cost the Foundation Center more money to apply for a grant than the grant itself was worth.

Mr. Toth credits Ms. Engelhardt with helping to jump-start Project Streamline in 2004. He developed a proposal for the project and, in 2007, began to look for money to support it, and persuade other groups that represent grant seekers and grant makers to buy in.

“The effort needs to be from the bottom up,” Mr. Toth says.

Suggested Solutions

Among the obstacles grant makers place before grant seekers, according to Project Streamline’s report, are a “dizzying range of practice” when it comes to the types of information sought for grant applications; that foundations don’t vary their requirements according to the size or type of grant awarded, or their relationship with the grant seeker; and that “applications and reporting requirements can cause nonprofits to reinvent themselves and develop strategies that are the opposite of what foundations intended.”

The report also says that the grants processes make foundations themselves more inefficient because of the time they spend tracking down paperwork, and it acknowledges that “13 percent of foundation dollars are spent on grants administration,” rather then going toward grantees’ missions.

In addition to pointing out current problems, the report recommends four steps that grant makers can take to alleviate the burden: evaluate what information they really need from grant seekers; consider the type and size of the grantee, and their relationship to the charity; use public records available online to check prospective grantees’ nonprofit status; and ensure that communications and grant-seeking processes are clear and straightforward.

“There’s a tremendous amount of bad practices in the sector and a tremendous amount of time and effort to be saved,” says Kyle Reis, a co-chair of Project Streamline and an assistant manager of program staff development at the Ford Foundation, in New York.

Some grant makers, such as the Surdna Foundation, in New York, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos, Calif., are already beginning to rethink their own policies in the wake of Project Streamline’s report.

Jonathan Goldberg, grants administrator and manager of information systems at Surdna, says the foundation is studying the report and hopes to simplify its dealings with charities seeking support. It might, for example, eliminate some paperwork for longtime grantees, he says.

Miki Akimato, vice president of Associated Grant Makers, a regional association in Boston, says her group plans to organize meetings for foundations and grant seekers to discuss together the issue of streamlining grant proposals.

“I’ve seen the impact even small changes can make,” says Ms. Akimato, who once served as director of grants management at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Baltimore. “How can you rationalize your grant-seeking process when grant seekers are increasingly working with decreased resources?”

Her group already made changes two years ago to streamline the Summer Fund, a collaboration among her group’s members that pools money to send children in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods to summer camp. Now, she says, charities can submit their final reports on each summer’s camp and their renewed request for grants at the same time: “So it’s a one-stop process.”

Grantee Feedback

Mr. Toth says he would like to see grantees offer feedback on the best ways to streamline grant seeking. He hopes to accomplish this by using organizations that represent grant seekers to act as the go-betweens in the discussion, because many grantees are reluctant to criticize grant makers for fear of retribution when grant decisions are made.

One incentive for foundations to heed calls to streamline their grant processes is that it would give them more money to spend on charitable causes, says the Rev. Ina Mae M. Copeland, executive director of operations at Valley Christian Center, a social-service group in Phoenix.

Still, says Ms. Copeland, who attended April’s Nonprofit Congress session on Project Streamline, she sees the need for accountability standards.

“I understand that some of these things are put in to be sure I’m not fraudulently using their money, but I feel there are other ways to hold me accountable,” she says. “If nothing else — surprise visits.”

A copy of Project Streamline’s report, “Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted From Purpose,” is available for free download. Go to: http://project streamline.org/doc/PDF_Report_final.pdf