I go back and forth on this. Sometimes, I feel like we are funding too many underperforming projects, but then some marginal project surprises me by doing quite well, and I feel better about the hits-based strategy. Over the last three months, we have moved towards funding things that we feel more confident in, mostly due to funding constraints.
I don’t think that I have a great list of common communicable lessons, some high-level thoughts/updates that jump to mind:
in general, people will be worse than they expect when working in areas they have little experience in.
making grants to people who are either inside the community or have legible credentials is often much cheaper in terms of evaluation time than making grants to random people who apply who aren’t connected to the community, but being too insular in our grantmaking is probably unhelpful for the long-term health of the community—balancing these factors is hard
The social skills and professionalism of grantees are probably more important than I used to think they were—funding people who are extremely ambitious but are unreliable or unprofessional seems to have lots of hidden costs.
sometimes it’s worth encouraging a grantee to pursue a role at an established organisation even if they are above the bar for a grant—there are lots of downsides of grants that the grantee might not be tracking, and overall, I think it’s ok to be a bit more paternalistic than I use to think.
I go back and forth on this. Sometimes, I feel like we are funding too many underperforming projects, but then some marginal project surprises me by doing quite well, and I feel better about the hits-based strategy. Over the last three months, we have moved towards funding things that we feel more confident in, mostly due to funding constraints.
I don’t think that I have a great list of common communicable lessons, some high-level thoughts/updates that jump to mind:
in general, people will be worse than they expect when working in areas they have little experience in.
making grants to people who are either inside the community or have legible credentials is often much cheaper in terms of evaluation time than making grants to random people who apply who aren’t connected to the community, but being too insular in our grantmaking is probably unhelpful for the long-term health of the community—balancing these factors is hard
The social skills and professionalism of grantees are probably more important than I used to think they were—funding people who are extremely ambitious but are unreliable or unprofessional seems to have lots of hidden costs.
sometimes it’s worth encouraging a grantee to pursue a role at an established organisation even if they are above the bar for a grant—there are lots of downsides of grants that the grantee might not be tracking, and overall, I think it’s ok to be a bit more paternalistic than I use to think.