We heard what grantees told us in our 2023 Center for Effective Philanthropy survey: Skyline needs to do a more effective job at clear communication with our grantees and potential grantees. We appreciate the feedback, and we got started immediately on meeting the commitments we made in last year’s follow-up report. Open, honest, and transparent communication is a core principle of trust-based philanthropy and supports relationships rooted in trust and mutual accountability.
Communication with grantees will remain an ongoing priority, and one year later, here are some specific steps we’ve taken:
- Grant guide shared with all grantees. For existing grantees, we wrote and shared last year a step-by-step guide to our process and what they can expect from us as a partner. We want to be as transparent as we can about Skyline’s grantmaking process. As part of our commitment to trust-based philanthropy, we are working to make the process as simple and streamlined as possible for our grantees.
- “Beyond the check” listening sessions. In the CEP survey, grantees said that expanding Skyline’s non-monetary support, including capacity building, funder organizing, and networking opportunities, would enhance their impact and sustainability. In response to this feedback, we hosted two virtual sessions in the fall of 2024 to gather input on how we can better support our grantee partners beyond the monetary support we provide. Here are some specific steps we’ve committed to and are already beginning to implement in response to what we heard:
- Sharing program or project descriptions that program staff write to recommend grants to our board with the respective grantee partner. It is our hope that a better understanding of what resonates with Skyline about your work could be useful as you develop your fundraising communications.
- Whenever possible, making connections to specific funders that we know, and building relationships with funders with related priorities.
- Creating a plan within each program area to showcase our grantee partners’ work to other funders.
- Internally tracking these efforts to create an ongoing feedback loop with grantees.
- Criteria and Process Guide posted on our website for potential grantees. To help potential grantees understand what we fund, we have recently published on our website’s Program page a guide to the factors that the staff and board of Skyline Foundation use in grantmaking decisions (whether to make a grant to an organization and the amount and term of that grant), as well as the process we follow.
We hope these resources are helpful to the communities we serve and provide a window into how we do our grantmaking. We understand that communication is not a one-off process. To be effective, it must be both two-way and continuous. We’ll continue to share updates and notes, and we welcome your thoughts and suggestions!
