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WAYS TO USE THIS GUIDE
This guide is designed to help grant makers understand and manage the dynamics of decision-giving with applicants. Because it explores ways you might navigate difficult situations more effectively, you may find it useful to review this guide at different times, including:
- When you're stuck in a particularly difficult decision-giving muddle — you find yourself procrastinating, worrying, and doubting yourself — and want to unpack and deal with the situation.
- If you find you have a chronic reluctance about decision giving, and would like to develop a better understanding and approach to it.
- When your foundation is reviewing its processes and approaches, and you would like to identify ways it could support a more effective decision-giving process.
This guide is meant not only for grant makers, but for anyone in a grant-making organization whose responsibilities include communicating with the people who apply for funding:
- Grant makers may find it helpful to share this information with their legal, administrative, and executive colleagues, to make sure that all communication with applicants is consistent, clear, respectful, and useful.
- Support staff are sometimes the first contact — maybe the only contact — with people who approach your organization with questions about funding. This guide may be as useful for them as for grant makers. In some organizations, legal staff or grant managers, rather than grant makers, are the ones who acknowledge proposals, prepare grant letters, and field some questions from grant seekers. They, too, will find this guide helpful in thinking about their responsibilities.
- Some or all of the information in this guide can be used as part of a training curriculum for grant makers and other employees. It offers a simple compendium of basic issues in dealing with grant seekers, and it may provide background for a discussion about how to establish the right relationship between funders and those who seek support.
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