The Grantmaking Guide

The Grantmaking Guide is a comprehensive but highly accessible step-by-step guide on how to establish innovative, realistic and sustainable impact strategies and programmes.

The guide aims to strengthen and improve processes. It contains a series of user-friendly tools, tips and guidelines that can assist practitioners to adopt and apply best practices all along the value chain from planning to implementation to assessment.

The tools provided include forms, checklists, templates and questionnaires for the entire range and scope of impact strategy development, communication, budgeting, reporting, monitoring and evaluation. These tools are of particular use to those structuring or restructuring foundations, trusts, social investment divisions, projects and programmes because they are easy to understand, thorough and designed to be aligned with global thinking and trends.

The Grantmaking Guide is also realistic about adopting a shared value approach in that it takes into consideration a growing worldwide trend in the impact economy to align company community/social development objectives with overall business/investor objectives – ensuring better overall outcomes for all stakeholders.

The Grantmaking Guide adds value to your social investment and development operations in numerous ways, including:

• Offering an in-depth overview of why projects fail and how to change this.
• Providing clear, easy-to follow definitions of development sector terminology throughout the text and in a comprehensive glossary which can equip and educate us, ensuring that we all speak the same language.
• Recommending how to best select investment portfolios, focus areas, programmes and partnerships that align with business/investor objectives and company values.
• Illustrating how to identify and manage risk factors, develop appropriate strategies and implement and manage resources, operations and budgets.
• Laying out practical steps on how to remain transparent, compliant and how to apply due diligence/governance to impact operations.
• Providing tools that assist in the appropriate monitoring and evaluation of your interventions.