Funding Director Sam Grimmett Batt discusses the importance of anonymous feedback with Ellen Smyth, Programme Lead at CAST
As a large, independent funder, anonymous feedback is vital to the work we do. Each year, City Bridge Foundation distributes more than £30m in funding across Greater London, and we couldn’t do that effectively without honest feedback from the organisations we fund. Their evaluation of our procedures, what we do and how we do it, help to shape our work.
An important tool in this process is GrantAdvisor UK, an online platform designed to encourage open, honest dialogue between grantseekers and grant-makers.
The website allows grantseekers to write reviews for any grant-making organisation listed on the service. It’s also easy to share an experience working with other funders, including trusts and foundations or corporates, even if they’re not yet listed on the site.
City Bridge Foundation fully supports the work of GrantAdvisor UK, and, as a large funder, we have received more than 70 reviews over the last year. All are important to us, whether positive or negative.
In two recent interviews, Sam Grimmett Batt, a Funding Director at City Bridge Foundation, discussed the importance of this anonymous feedback with Ellen Smyth, Programme Lead at CAST (Centre for the Acceleration of Social Technology).
In the first interview, Sam describes how feedback provided by GrantAdvisor and other sources is a powerful tool for influencing decision makers, and how it has helped our team improve their approach.
Sam also outlines the process for reviewing feedback (and assessing it against IVAR’s Open and Trusting Grant-making criteria) — and shares some words of encouragement for any funder keen to join GrantAdvisor.
In the second interview, Sam explains how collecting authentic, anonymous feedback from grantseekers has helped City Bridge Foundation’s funding team to build stronger relationships throughout the grant-making process.
Sam also explains why the team take time to read and respond to every single grantseeker review — and how the feedback received via GrantAdvisor UK has played such a key part in helping bring about positive changes to initiatives such as the Foundation’s learning visits programme.
GrantAdvisor UK is just one of the tools we use to gather feedback. We also have a dedicated Impact and Learning team, whose work supports and informs the charity’s funding work across Greater London, and we undertake regular Learning Visits to funded organisations, based on a format which is much closer to conversations between respected colleagues, rather than formal check-ups.
You can read more about this work below.
