Hey everyone,
We’re considering developing some kind of ‘impact grant’; offering an organisation a donation of products and services from our business to help them (and us) move towards creating our collective impact.
I’d love some advice on developing an ethical framework for creating this, the application process (privacy, ethics etc.) and even reporting the outcomes.
Any examples, insights or even discussion welcome.
Warm regards,
JA
Hi Jim,
My name is George. I am a lawyer and a corporate advisor. I recently decided to turn my professional focus towards helping for-purpose and purpose-led organisations. I might be able to help you in some way to formulate a path forward and to work out the steps needed to get your project up and running.
My LinkedIn profile is here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeparamananthan/. There is a one-page bio in the Features section of my profile.
Let me know if you’d like to e-meet (I am in Sydney) to connect and to see how I can help. My contact details are below.
Cheers,
George
george@paramco.com.au
0414618664
Hi Jim,
At FTD we invite applications for our 6 monthly intake of pro bono projects. We haven’t called it a grant. We just put a call out via social media and our newsletter etc, get people to fill in a form and prepare a short pitch submission that they email back to us directly. This has worked well to provide structure to what used to just be a constant flow of requests that we couldn’t always serve. Now people better understand that they need to apply for our support and that we can’t help everyone. Sometimes we still take on other projects in between at low or pro bono. There’s far more need than we can service so we’ve had to reduce our pro bono work since COVID-19 unfortunately (we’ve taken a big hit ourselves with that).
In terms of reporting impact we’ve experimented with collaborating with Uni students to undertake research/evaluation and that has been ok. It’s not at a really high professional level but we usually get some useful outcomes and the students seem to love learning with us on something real, whilst also meeting their course requirements. They also discover our clients so it’s usually great for the client’s exposure too. It’s a win/win.
Happy to share ideas as I’ve been doing this type of stuff for almost two decades now and still don’t have it all optimised but do have lots of learnings!
Vanessa
Hey @vanessacullen!
Thanks so much for your insights. Would love to dig deeper and learn about the process.
We’re consistently getting stuck on ensuring that the application process is strict enough to get the right orgs to apply and vetted, and ethical as well as there would be (I imagine) quite a lot of sensitive information being shared in applying for a grant.