If You Work in Grantmaking

TL;DR You sit on the side of the table with the money, and that changes everything. Your job is to deploy charitable funds effectively, but the power imbalance between funder and applicant shapes every interaction you have. The best grantmakers are rigorous about outcomes and honest about their own influence. The worst ones create administrative burdens that consume the very capacity they claim to be building. If you do this job well, you will spend a lot of time questioning your own assumptions — about what good looks like, about who gets funded and why, and about whether your processes serve accountability or just bureaucracy.

What this role optimises for

Grantmaking optimises for impact per pound deployed. You are trying to get charitable funds to the organisations best placed to use them, with enough oversight to satisfy your trustees and regulators, and not so much oversight that you consume your grantees' time and energy.

Your secondary optimisation is learning. A good grants programme generates knowledge — about what works, what does not, and where the gaps are — that informs future funding decisions and benefits the wider sector. If your foundation makes 200 grants a year and learns nothing from them, you are wasting a strategic asset.

A third, often neglected, optimisation is accessibility. If only large, well-resourced organisations can navigate your application process, you are selecting for capacity to fundraise, not capacity to deliver. The organisations that most need funding are often the ones least equipped to fill in your 12-page form.

The jargon you need to know

Programme design: The process of defining what your fund will support, who is eligible, how much you will give, and what you expect in return. Get this wrong and everything downstream suffers. A poorly designed programme attracts the wrong applicants, overloads your assessment team, and funds work that does not match your strategy.
Due diligence: The checks you carry out before making a grant — governance, finances, safeguarding policies, track record, legal status. Proportionality matters enormously: applying the same due diligence to a £2,000 grant and a £200,000 grant is a failure of judgement that penalises small organisations.
Restricted vs unrestricted grants: Restricted grants must be spent on a specified purpose. Unrestricted grants (sometimes called core funding or general operating support) can be spent on whatever the recipient needs most. The sector increasingly argues — with strong evidence — that unrestricted funding is more effective, more respectful, and more likely to strengthen organisations in the long term.
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E): The processes by which you track how grants are spent and what they achieve. The balance between accountability and burden is the central tension of your work. Too little M&E and you cannot demonstrate impact; too much and you consume the capacity you are trying to build.
Portfolio management: Thinking about your grants collectively, not individually — looking at geographic spread, thematic coverage, risk distribution, the mix of established and emerging organisations, and whether your portfolio as a whole is achieving what your strategy intended. A portfolio full of safe bets in London is not necessarily better than one that includes risky investments in underserved areas.
Regranting: Giving a grant to an intermediary organisation which then distributes it to frontline charities. Used when you lack the capacity or local knowledge to reach smaller organisations directly. Adds cost but can dramatically improve reach and relevance.
360Giving: The open data standard for UK grantmaking. If your foundation publishes to 360Giving, your grants data is publicly searchable. This is increasingly expected as a baseline for transparency, and applicants use it to research who funds what.
ACF (Association of Charitable Foundations): The membership body for UK foundations. Publishes guidance on good practice, facilitates peer learning, advocates on grantmaking issues, and provides a space for foundation staff to be honest about challenges they cannot discuss with grantees. Their resources are worth reading early in your career.
Theory of change: A structured description of how a programme's activities lead to intended outcomes. You will encounter these in applications and may require them as part of your assessment process. Be aware that requiring a polished theory of change favours organisations with the capacity to develop one, which is not the same as the capacity to deliver.
Full cost recovery: The principle that grants should cover a fair share of overhead costs, not just direct project costs. Many funders still resist this, often unconsciously, by capping "management costs" at arbitrary percentages. Many grantees still struggle because of it.
Spend-out vs perpetuity: Whether a foundation plans to spend all its assets within a defined period or to exist indefinitely, funded by investment returns. This fundamentally shapes investment strategy, annual grant budgets, risk appetite, and staffing. A spend-out foundation in its final decade makes very different decisions from one planning to exist for centuries.
Participatory grantmaking: Approaches that involve communities or beneficiaries in deciding how funds are distributed. Ranges from advisory panels to full community decision-making. Growing in practice and in the evidence base that supports it.

The metrics that matter

Track the total value deployed, the number of grants made, the average and median grant size, the proportion of funding that is unrestricted, the time from application to decision, the success rate of applicants, and the administrative cost as a percentage of total grants.

If your application-to-decision time exceeds three months for straightforward grants, you are too slow. Charities cannot plan around uncertainty, and every month of delay is a month of cash flow pressure for the applicant. Some applicants are paying staff from reserves while they wait for your decision. Speed is a form of respect.

If your success rate is below 10%, your eligibility criteria are too broad or your programme is oversubscribed to the point of inefficiency. Either way, you are generating a huge amount of wasted effort — mostly by the applicants, not by you. Consider whether you are marketing your fund too widely, or whether your criteria need tightening.

Also track who you are not funding. Look at the demographics of successful vs unsuccessful applicants. Examine geographic distribution. Look at organisational size and age. If your portfolio maps neatly onto organisations that already have capacity to write good applications — large charities with dedicated fundraising teams — you may be reinforcing existing inequalities rather than addressing need.

Monitor grantee feedback — not just formal reports, but honest assessments of your processes. Organisations like the Centre for Effective Philanthropy offer grantee perception surveys that provide data most foundations find uncomfortable and useful in equal measure. If you have never asked your grantees what they really think of you, you are operating on assumptions.

What you will spend your time on

Reading. You will read applications, reports, accounts, strategies, impact assessments, and due diligence documents in volume. Your ability to read quickly, identify the signal in the noise, and make fair comparisons across very different organisations is the core skill of the job. Develop it consciously.

Beyond that: assessment meetings (internal panels, trustee committees, external expert review), relationship management with grantees and potential applicants, programme design and review, site visits, sector engagement (conferences, networks, peer learning groups), and data analysis and reporting on your own portfolio's performance.

A significant portion of your time goes to saying no. Most applicants will be unsuccessful, and how you communicate that matters. A generic rejection email after weeks of silence is not good practice. A clear, timely response with specific feedback — even brief — is a baseline courtesy that many foundations still fail to provide. The applicant who receives a thoughtful rejection is more likely to come back with a stronger proposal than the one who receives silence.

If you work in a larger foundation, add internal coordination: working with investment teams (who manage the endowment), comms teams (who manage public positioning), and senior leadership (who manage trustee relationships and strategy). You may also spend time on field-building activities — convening grantees, commissioning research, publishing what you have learned, or contributing to sector-wide initiatives.

If you work in a family foundation, add the complexity of family dynamics. The founder's values, the next generation's priorities, and the professional staff's expertise do not always align. Navigating this requires diplomacy, clarity about roles, and a willingness to have difficult conversations about purpose.

What people in this role often misunderstand about the rest of the organisation

This section works differently for grantmakers, because the "rest of the organisation" that matters most is outside your own — it is the charities you fund.

The application burden on small charities is real and significant. A 10-page application form that takes your team 30 minutes to assess may take an applicant 40 hours to complete. When you add bespoke budgets, tailored theories of change, supporting documents, references, and mandatory registration on your online portal, you are consuming a substantial proportion of a small charity's capacity — with no guarantee of funding. Every requirement you add should pass the test: is this genuinely necessary for making a good decision, or is it there because it has always been there, or because your trustees like comprehensive paperwork?

You hold more power than you think. Grantees will rarely tell you what they really think about your processes, your timelines, or your reporting requirements. They depend on your goodwill for future funding. The feedback you receive is filtered through that dependency. A grantee who says your process is "fine" may mean it is a nightmare they have learned to tolerate. A grantee who thanks you effusively for a grant may resent the conditions attached to it. Seek honest feedback through anonymous channels, peer networks, and intermediaries. Assume that what you hear directly is more positive than reality.

Unrestricted funding matters more than most funders acknowledge. When you restrict a grant to a specific project, you force the recipient to find other sources for the organisational costs that make that project possible — management, finance, IT, HR, premises, staff development. The cumulative effect of an entire sector of funders restricting their grants is organisations that are project-rich and core-poor. They can deliver programmes, but they cannot invest in the infrastructure, staff development, or reserves that would make them sustainable. If your foundation restricts most of its funding, ask yourself honestly why — and whether the answer is about accountability or about control.

Your foundation's brand is not as well-known as you assume. Many applicants research funders just enough to submit an application. They do not know your strategy in detail, they may not have read your latest annual review, and they definitely do not follow your social media. Communicate clearly, assume nothing, and do not penalise applicants for not knowing things you have not made easy to find.

The debates that affect your work

The conversation about power dynamics in grantmaking is one of the most important in the sector. It asks whether the traditional model — funders set criteria, applicants compete, funders decide — is the best way to deploy charitable resources, or whether it entrenches inequalities and centres funder preferences over community need. Trust-based philanthropy, participatory grantmaking, and community-led funding models are all responses to this critique. None of them is a simple answer, but all of them are asking the right questions.

Closely related is the debate about application burden — whether the sector's collective application and reporting requirements are proportionate to the accountability they provide, or whether they represent a massive, uncoordinated tax on frontline organisations. If every funder asks for slightly different information in a slightly different format on a slightly different timeline, the aggregate cost is enormous — and it falls disproportionately on the smallest organisations with the least capacity to absorb it.

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