Why It’s Important to Track Grantee Time to Complete Grant Reports

When we were managing the hope & grace fund, we thought we had developed a streamlined reporting process for our grantees– at the end of their grant, we asked them to:

  • Write a 1- to 2-page executive summary of the results of their grant and lessons learned / challenges encountered / possible next steps
  • Fill out a spreadsheet template with some basic metrics of the people they served (outputs — # of women, race/ethnicity, age group, etc.) and a couple extremely high-level outcomes.

One thing we neglected to do initially was to explicitly ask our grantees how much time they spent on the reporting. We allowed them to allocate up to 10 percent of their budget for reporting (with the assumption that they’d spend no more than 10 hours on reporting). But in one case, we found that our grantee had spent 40+ hours tracking data to fill out the metrics spreadsheet (and for a grant that was $25,000, that means they had only allocated at most $2,500 to this task). As such, we ended up giving them an additional $2,000 to compensate them for their time. 

Lessons learned:

  • Ask grantees to keep track of how much time it takes to fulfill reporting requirements and make sure that they are being compensated in a reasonable way for this. 
    • Potentially track this metric for large vs. small grantees and large vs. small grants
    • I’d suggest tracking this metric as part of your DEI grantmaking dashboard
  • Let grantees know in advance how much time it should take on average to complete the reporting requirements, so that they can budget accordingly
  • If the reporting is taking much longer than expected, help the grantee troubleshoot why this is occurring. Is it an issue with the reporting tool / metrics not being a good fit for their grant project? Is it a matter of the grantee lacking the capacity (and points to the need for further investment to build this capacity)?
  • Compensate for additional efforts when necessary, especially for smaller organizations which cannot absorb the costs.

For links to our resources including our checklist of recommendations to incorporate DEI in grantmaking practice, our suggested dashboard of DEI metrics to track, our Stanford Social Innovation Review article, and a video presentation of our work, please go to our homepage.