Follow-up

At the Eisner Foundation, we don’t consider a grant to a non-profit organization to be the last step of the process. In fact, in some ways, the writing of the check is only the first step in our work. Once the grant is approved and distributed, our relationship with the charity truly begins.

At the conclusion of each year that the group receives funding, we require that our grantees update us on the status and results of the gift. This accomplishes three main goals:

1. We believe our grantees will be more responsible and effective with our funding if they are required to be accountable
2. We are passionate in our belief that benchmarking is an effective way to gauge a charity’s effectiveness and by requiring our grantees to account for their programmatic results, we believe that they will be more likely to measure their own impact, and be thusly be more effective and efficient moving forward, whether we fund them again or not
3. Perhaps most importantly for us, by asking charities to document how they allocated the Eisner funding and the outcomes they achieved, we can assess our own operations and determine if we are being as efficient and effective as we ask our grantees to be. To be more impactful grant-makers, we must know when grantees are unable to reach the lofty goals they set forth in their initial proposals, and thusly learn from our mistakes moving forward. Conversely, when a charity fully meets its goals, we should be able to identify the conditions that are present, and attempt to replicate our successes. Follow-up and full documentation makes this possible.