Grantmaking: how funders decide where money goes
Grantmaking is the practice of a funder distributing money to organisations or individuals to advance a cause. It covers not just the act of giving, but the strategy behind it: what to fund, whom to fund, and how to decide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related terms
The newest terms we've added, the words teams managing grants, sponsorship, and CSR come across most often.
International Grantmaking
International grantmaking is awarding grants to organisations based outside the funder's own country, which adds verification, currency, language and reporting requirements that domestic grants do not carry.
The additional work is front-loaded. Establishing that a foreign organisation can be funded is harder than paying it, and the route chosen at the outset determines the obligations for years afterwards.
Data Residency
Data residency is the country or region where a platform physically stores the data you put into it. It is a contractual commitment, not a technical preference, and a supplier should be able to state it in writing.
For grant, sponsorship and volunteering programmes the data in question includes applicant and employee personal data, which is what moves residency out of the IT conversation and into procurement.
Post-Award
Post-award is the phase of the grant lifecycle that follows the funding decision: disbursing funds, tracking how they are spent, collecting grantee reports, measuring outcomes against the objectives set at the start, and closing the grant.
Post-award is where impact is either evidenced or lost. A funder whose attention stops at the payment has spent the money without being able to say what it produced.
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