The Packard Foundation seeks to build strong, positive relationships with our grantee partners.
To that end, we’ve developed Grantee Experience Standards, and offer several ways for grantees to provide ongoing feedback on the Foundation and its work, including our biennial Grantee Perception Survey and Report.
Grantee Experience Standards
The Packard Foundation is committed to establishing and maintaining effective relationships with our grantee partners. Updated in 2020 with extensive support and input from Packard Foundation grantees, we strive to deliver on the following Grantee Experience Standards (GES) and continually monitor our efforts to meet them:
- Respect – Grantees feel Foundation staff value grantee expertise and time, and approach funder‐grantee power dynamics with humility and openness.
- Information – Grantees feel Foundation staff are thoughtful about asking for and sharing information, data, and feedback, and are transparent about how and why it is used.
- Engagement – Grantees feel they have opportunities to meaningfully engage in two-way dialogue with Foundation staff about our shared work.
- Process – Grantees feel they understand the Foundation’s grant requirements and processes.
- Strategy – Grantees feel they understand how their work connects to the Foundation’s strategy, how strategies evolve over time, and how to share input on those strategies.
- Responsiveness – Grantees feel Foundation staff provide timely responses to grantee questions.
Grantee Feedback
We encourage grantee partners to communicate directly, and often, with program staff to provide feedback on any part of the grantmaking experience. You can provide feedback directly to the Foundation, or submit confidential, anonymous feedback to EthicsPoint, a third-party ombudsman:
Grantee Perception Report
The Packard Foundation operates on the basic principle that we must be good stewards of every philanthropic dollar we spend. As a result, we are committed to soliciting feedback from our grantees, peers, the communities we support, and other experts, so that we may constantly improve the way we work. Our Foundation has undertaken biennial grantee surveys since 1996 to help us become better grantmakers.
We engage the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to survey our grantees every other year and prepare a Grantee Perception Report™ (GPR).
The GPR is a confidential survey that provides a comprehensive assessment of grantee perceptions of our performance and compares the data to data from other foundations whose grantees were also surveyed. Investing in this process is important to us because it helps the Foundation evaluate the impact of our work and make improvements as needed.
The GPR allows us to reflect on the experiences and perceptions of our grantee partners and to inform our practice of philanthropy. While pleased with the overall improvement across our ratings, we know that to maximize our effectiveness—and that of our grantees—there is always more that can be done. We will continue to strive to enrich the interactions and relationships we share with our grantees.
