Strategic Insights: How Funders Leverage GLM/SLM for Optimal Results

Welcome to Connected Philanthropy. In today’s episode, we are hearing from grant makers and scholarship providers talk about how they’re using GLM and SLM.

This conversation is going to be a little bit more technical, and for those of you who aren’t using our GLM or SLM solutions, this might not be the most relevant to you, but for those of you who do use those solutions and are looking for

potential changes to consider, this is the perfect episode.

It’s going to be a 15 minute compilation of some of the tips we heard at our latest coffee talk webinar

Where users are talking about topics like question branching.

How they’re using GLM to capture feedback from trustees.

Getting video submissions from applicants, among other things.

Hopefully, as you’re listening to this episode, you might get some ideas that you can implement yourself.

let’s dive right in.

Hey, good afternoon, everybody. I’m Frank Cordell. I’m with the United Way of Greater Richmond and Petersburg in Virginia. One of the things that we are we actually just talked about it this morning at a at a data meeting. We’re talking about the possibility of using sound in internally, not just with our external grantees, but to capture some of the results data from our own in-house run programs so that when we talk about total client service or any specific demographic breakdowns, we can pull those fields together and have a picture of both what our grantees have done and what we’ve

done and mesh that at the same time.

can I ask how you, how you determined that need in your organization or how you use that? Okay, we got to make this happen now.

Sure. We we’ve got well, we have a new CEO just came in and we’ve got we will be having a new vice president of impact coming in in the fall. And we really are looking at just the number of different

programs that we have. Software software programs, I should say, that don’t talk to each other. Mm hmm. And and having one piece of data stored here and one piece of data stored there.

And I’m the director of research and evaluation, I should say that. So a lot of the data flows through me. And when people ask for, you know, hey, do you have numbers on this? Do you have numbers on that? I’ve got to pull it from multiple places. So the idea of having more of a one stop shop for some of our data and reporting is certainly attractive.

The the balance that we have to strike is now asking internal staff to basically send year end reports the same way we ask our grantees to give us year and program data reports as a as an extra step than what they’re used to normally doing. Do you feel like you have pretty good buy in? We’ll find out, as with anything else.

Part of it is making the need case and salesmanship, you know, on the issue. But I think if if what I can give them back is a better product because of the extra work that they put in, then it makes the case itself. If they know that they can, then get more robust data for their own needs, then having that extra step to go to give us that information in the first place is worthwhile investment.

Yeah, I’m excited. I want to hear how it goes. So we’ll find out if it’s successful and let us know. Yeah, we haven’t done it. And I will say this. The one thing that concerns me about it, just as I think through iterating the process is how processes from different forms or forms from different processes, I should say talk to each other and how we’ve used copies of a previous process to build the next one and then realized, Oh, if we don’t put a unique date and rename that form, then we’re breaking another process by trying to pull too many fields.

Yeah, it’s kind of a it’s a balance of of having your data. Those fields match up versus getting the correct field that you really want and that data point, right? So yeah, that is a challenge.

Thanks for sharing, Frank. That’s awesome. I can’t wait to hear how it goes

Lisa

at Goldring in New Orleans. One thing we did this year is I did a survey with my trustees, and so I built a

process that was for them to go in and answer questions and that way they didn’t have to talk about it.

We have a family foundation. They didn’t have to talk about it and get into a family fight. I was able to just gather some bits of information about how they were feeling about mission and just other random things, which have ended up being very helpful. I didn’t share it among the whole group, but for me as the executive director, just to kind of know how they’re feeling was good.

That’s also a great idea. I love that, especially for family foundations. Like you said, you don’t want to start a family feud and just even if you don’t share it amongst themselves, it’s nice for you to know and have that direction in your role as the executive director. So again, I think that’s a great idea. Lisa, thank you so much for sharing

Hi, everyone. I’m joining from Minnesota. I work as the grants manager for the Lake Region Arts Council, which is one of the 11 regional arts councils in the state of Minnesota. And one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of success with and it was definitely kind of a trial and error, is taking our master template for the multiple grant rounds we run and using the question branching feature, which I know isn’t one that everyone has access to, but we found incredibly helpful with our applications to Logic Branch.

The entire thing so far, entire application at this point, the application form and all subsequent forms hinge on two questions which is are you an individual or an organization? Because that’s the two kinds of grants we offer. And then furthermore, or and then which grants program are you applying for? And the ability that found and has gained in the last couple of years to be able to on those multiple choice questions toggle answers on and off that you want the applicants to have access to really enable that.

So it has saved me a lot of work on my end organizationally because I’m not having to go through and like delete whole sections or weed out questions that we don’t want to be asked on certain applications. It’s now just a matter of making it wise and changing which of those questions are enabled for that particular grant. It still makes for a monster of a of a master template, but it is has really streamlined things using that that question branching so that that’s a brag I’ll have veranda.

That’s one of my favorite functionalities in the whole system by the way. It’s very it can be very powerful. Yeah. And to use it to save you time and your applicants time and just confusion is awesome. And I love that idea. And yeah, it’s just, it’s nice to point your grantees and applicants in the right direction instead of offering every grant they could possibly apply for just kind of narrowing their their field view as such.

Make it such a different. Okay. And Lisa has her hand raised again to get her off me And we have Lisa and then Ashley you’re up on deck next. I’d love to hear from my own selfish reasons how you’re capturing multiyear grants and and found it. So. All right, Lisa’s up first. Well, I was just going to echo I guess it was Miranda talking about the branching.

That is amazing that I don’t have to have so many different processes each year. It’s just the same one for the year. And then I can weed out or been the trustee, I mean, the grantee that applies every year. I don’t need all the information from them. So one of my questions is have you received funding before? And but I totally agree.

That’s a huge save. Save your and I am interested in hearing about the multiyear grants because I, I keep multi year grants in one can process and just keep adding the installments. That’s how I do that And so thanks Lisa

Hi, This is Ashley again from Confluence Institute on the organization that gives domestically and internationally. And a lot of our international partners are multiyear partners. And we actually have received a lot of coaching from requests on how to address this.

So and Lisa, you kind of hit it how we’re utilizing found it right now for those multiyear grants is creating one process that’s named after the cohort and the year we bring them on. So that kind of distinguishes, you know, maybe we have two cohorts in one year and we are limited in the number of grants we’re going to give.

So we were only getting up to six cohorts total. So that makes it manageable for us at this state. And then we just use that same process as and we don’t ask for an application every year. We do ask for a grant report and there is one one piece of it which is pretty a template based and then another piece that is very individualized, which we just ask them to fill out and attach to on the follow up form they submit as their grant report.

So that’s that’s kind of we scaffold by adding that installment the next year we we react and then just use those follow on forms for the grant reporting, the check ins, that sort of thing. So that’s where we are right now.

We I have started collecting video applications in my with my Youth Philanthropy program, and I find it a challenge to get all the same video. I mean, sometimes they come the link is a YouTube video, sometimes it’s a Google video, Sometimes it’s this special program that teachers use.

So I’m just wondering if anybody else is doing video applications and how you are collecting those and then making them available for your evaluators

and Tony Wildhorse Foundation here in eastern Oregon and sort of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. And we’ve had grantees submit links to videos for a number of different things.

One of my favorites came from an organization, Out of Willpower, The Well, Our Mountains, the Forest Project and it was wonderful. They took up aa1 of those drones and flew around and and explained what they did. And this is where your money went. It was really wonderful. We haven’t done anything like that for applications, but we’ve done that for the final report.

I think that’s great.