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# Skyline’s Grantee Perception Report: Thank you for the feedback!
* August 7, 2024
For more than 20 years, Skyline Foundation has been committed to supporting the leadership of our grantee partners by respecting their expertise and vision. Over that time, we have learned from them how to better support the communities we fund. Last fall, we worked with the  to field our first Grantee Perception Report, providing a new opportunity for grantee partners to offer us candid, anonymous feedback. We received 87 responses out of 120 survey invitations, a 73% response rate, which offered valuable insights into our strengths and areas of improvement. 
**Key Takeaways**
* **High Ratings on Organizational Impact:** Grantee partners rated Skyline’s impact on their organizations highly (93rd percentile).
* **Strong Support for Multi-Year and Unrestricted Funding:** Skyline excels in providing multi-year (95th percentile) and unrestricted funding (97th percentile).
* **Streamlined Application and Reporting Process:** The foundation’s application and reporting processes received solid ratings for being straightforward (87th percentile), adaptable (82nd percentile), and relevant (85th percentile).
* **Trust in Grantee Partners:** Skyline demonstrates our trust (88th percentile) in grantee partners, recognizing that as leaders on the ground, they have the expertise and know what’s best for the movements of which they are a part.
* **Room for Improvement on Transparency and Responsiveness:** Grantee partners expressed a critical need for greater clarity and transparency (14th percentile) regarding funding criteria and decision-making processes and a clear desire for more responsive communication (38th percentile).
It’s great to know that our commitment to flexible, long-term support and our collaborative approach have been helpful to grantee partners as they grapple with complex issues. We also recognize that we can do better. The constructive feedback we got highlights opportunities to improve our communication.
Grantee partners told us that Skyline should prioritize building on our strengths of large, multi-year grants by considering more five-to-ten-year funding commitments. And some shared that they would like the foundation to provide more non-monetary support as well.
**Our Commitment to Trust-Based Philanthropy**
Trust-based philanthropy is an approach to grantmaking that focuses on building relationships rooted in trust, transparency, and mutual accountability. Skyline seeks to integrate trust throughout our work, and we found it helpful to assess the survey results alongside the key practices articulated by the :
1. **Provide Unrestricted and Multi-Year Funding:** Skyline stands out for our unrestricted, multi-year grants. Grantee partners highly value this aspect of the foundation’s support, highlighting the freedom to innovate and plan long term.
   * *“Having unrestricted, multi-year funding provides us the flexibility to respond to emerging needs and opportunities without being constrained by specific project goals.”*
2. **Do the Homework:** Grantee partners express high regard for Skyline’s understanding of their fields, missions, and strategies.
   * *“[Skyline] understood the potential impact of our work, the context in which we operate, and was able to secure a significant investment without a ton of burdensome effort on our part.”*
3. **Simplify and Streamline Paperwork:** Grantee partners appreciate the foundation’s efforts to reduce administrative burdens, allowing them to focus on their missions. Pairing a flexible application and reporting process with large average grants, Skyline rated in the 99th percentile on CEP’s survey for median grant dollars awarded per process hour required.
   * *“The Foundation’s option to either submit a report or meet virtually was very helpful. Similarly, the option to upload a report or application for another funder or an annual report was greatly appreciated and helpful to reduce the number of staff hours dedicated to each individual grant application and report.”*
4. **Be Transparent and Responsive:** This is an area in which Skyline needs significant improvement. Grantee partners told us that they would like more transparent communication about criteria and decision-making processes and greater responsiveness from foundation staff.
   * *“Communication has not been clear, and we have been left uncertain about funding criteria.”*
5. **Solicit and Act on Feedback:** CEP does not specifically ask about this, but it’s important to note that Skyline participated in the survey to seek feedback from grantee partners. We are committed to sharing how we will adapt our practices in response to what we learned.
6. **Offer Support Beyond the Check:** Compared to other funders in CEP’s dataset, Skyline provides less non-monetary support to grantee partners. Respondents expressed that expanding non-monetary support, such as capacity building, funder organizing, and networking opportunities could enhance their impact and sustainability.
   * *“We would love to have the opportunity to interact more with other Skyline grantees and, of course, always welcome additional support for identifying and building relationships with mission-aligned funders.”*
**Next Steps: Strengthening Our Commitment to Trust-Based Philanthropy**
**Improving Transparency:**
The CEP survey results showed that Skyline’s grantee partners want to more clearly understand our goals, strategies, and grantmaking requirements. For most of the foundation’s history, Skyline has maintained a very low profile. Informed by our core values of justice and humility, we have focused on moving money. We took an initial step toward external communications last year by launching our first-ever website, and we have seen how that small step has helped grantee partners and prospects understand how our values and priorities align with theirs. We want to do more to improve transparency, including through the following commitments:
* We will add information to Skyline’s website that articulates our funding priorities, criteria, decision-making processes, and timelines.
* We will create and share an overview document for grantee partners that describes grant payment, reporting, and renewal processes.
**Improving Responsiveness:**
Between 2021 and 2023, the number of grant payments Skyline made annually in our program areas more than doubled from 79 to 165. And, compared to the median funder in CEP’s dataset, Skyline gave out about 3.5 times as much funding with half of the staff. We are partnering with many more organizations than ever before, and we expect our grantmaking to continue to increase. As a result, we need to develop new approaches to be as responsive as our growing number of grantee partners need us to be. Because of our commitment to equity, we also want to ensure that we are particularly accessible to our grantee partners that are smaller, newer to Skyline, and less connected to the philanthropic sector. We are making the following commitments to improve our responsiveness:
* We will experiment with ways to improve our responsiveness to grantee partners. One of the first approaches we will test: our program officers will begin blocking time for office hours and share Calendly links with grantee partners.
* We will host an optional virtual gathering for grantee partners with budgets of $5M or less to better understand their priorities with respect to non-monetary support from Skyline. Based on what we learn, we will develop and share a plan of action with grantee partners.
**Advancing Systemic Equity:**
In addition to addressing the areas for improvement identified in the survey, we also want to build on our strengths, pushing ourselves to give more boldly and with a longer-term vision. To that end, we commit to:
* Explore making larger and longer-term funding commitments, especially to organizations that provide critical strategic vision and support to the social change ecosystems within which we fund. We will be mindful that opportunities for these commitments are considered equitably, including to BIPOC-led organizations and organizations led by people directly impacted by the problems we seek to address.
**Our Gratitude**
We truly appreciate the feedback we received and are dedicated to evolving how we collaborate with our grantee partners. If you have other ideas for how we can strengthen our trust-based practices and better support our grantee partners, please let your program officer or another foundation team member know. We would love to hear from you!
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# Trust-Based Practices Top of Mind at Tech Billionaire Couple David and Angela Filo’s Foundation
* August 5, 2024
*Originally posted in  on August 5, 2024*
In this profile about the foundation, Inside Philanthropy highlights Skyline’s commitment to trust-based philanthropy, emphasizing relationships and flexibility in our giving practices. The foundation’s approach reflects the belief that unrestricted, multi-year support can empower grantees to change systems and that effectiveness as a funder is based on effectively supporting grantee partners. Read the full profile .