Each year The Community Foundation for Ireland reaches out to grant applicants for feedback in relation to our processes, service delivery and funding schemes. This year’s survey received a great response from both grant applicants and grant recipients. Responses came from a wide variety of individuals working across the breadth of the community, charity and voluntary sector.
The Community Foundation for Ireland Grants Survey is part of our commitment to continual improvement in our grantmaking. It also informs how we can better perform as a funder and as a leader. Respondents were asked for their feedback across a number of areas, including:
- Effectiveness of communications
- Assessment of the quality of service provided by staff in application and grant making processes
- Responsiveness and relevancy of our grant making
- Our knowledge and understanding of local issues and needs and the relevance of the grants made available to address those needs
- Experience of the application and grantmaking processes, including how they compare to similar processes of other funding bodies.
Results
The overall assessment of The Community Foundation for Ireland from the grantees perspective was overwhelmingly positive, we have succeeded in maintaining or improving on the majority of grant making services we provide, which is the main objective our annual grants survey, to determine if we are on the right track and to constantly look at ways to improve.
In reply to whether our Social Change grants were responsive to the community the reaction was hugely positive with 35% ‘Strongly agreeing’ and 65% ‘Agreeing’. The majority of replies in this area came from funding that supported organisations in producing an Annual Report, which further confirms the feedback received from the entrants to our Impact Award competition where the Annual Report was seen as a major contributor to positive impacts within the sector, allowing organisations to improve their governance and become as transparent as possible.
The feedback from the website was once again very positive and the comments reiterated how informative, relevant, professional and easy to navigate it is. There was a slight reduction from last year in the number reading the monthly ‘ezine’ which can be looked into improving as it is seen as by those who do engage with it as a fantastic source of information.
When asked about the overall delivery of our service, we were rated as either ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ by 99% of the respondents, preserving our record from last year. When asked to compare us with other grantmaking bodies the majority of respondents chose ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ with 1% rating ‘Average’ and 0% choosing ‘Poor’.
Recommendations
This annual survey provides vital assessment and input that informs our commitment to continual improvement and we are grateful to all who took the time and effort to provide us with feedback.
In our 2017 Grants Survey we integrated some of the major recommendations from respondents in our strategic plan, Giving, Grantmaking and Growing for Social Change (2018-2020). These included the provision of a larger number of small grants and to assist charities in their governance requirements. This was achieved through our Annual Report Grants in 2018.
In our most recent Grants Survey the same issues arose highlighting the need to continue to include this type of grant making. Following on from these recommendations in 2019 we will continue to look at ways that we can support the sector in achieving the highest standards of governance and also provide support towards capacity building.
A more detailed analysis of the survey and recommendations can be found in the report here.