Grantseekers rate their funder's performance

Posted on 13 Sep 2018

By Matthew Schulz, journalist, Our Community

Each year, as part of the Grants in Australia research study we ask grantseekers to rate the performance of grantmakers in several areas, including:

  • Guidelines
  • Staff responsiveness
  • Communication
  • Feedback

Here's what we found in the new study.

Grantmakers rated fundamentals
How would you rate the efforts of the grantmaker in the following categories?

Grantmakers, give yourself a tick

In order of satisfaction levels, grantseekers are most happy with the availability of guidelines (98% approval), acknowledgement of applications (92% approval) and clarity of guidelines (95% approval). These results have remained consistently high since we started measuring satisfaction rates in 2015.

Not bad, but room for improvement

Grantseekers are largely happy with the responsiveness of staff to phone queries (86% approval) and email queries (87% approval), and we note that approval rates in both these areas have improved in recent years.

Grantmakers, you suck at this

Grantseekers are still most unhappy about the level of useful and relevant feedback they receive about unsuccessful applications, with 47% describing the amount of feedback as bad, and only 23% as good.

A significant number of grantseekers are also unhappy about the timeliness of communication, with 28% rating grantmakers as "bad" in this area.

The good news is that nearly all grantseekers rate the help they are getting from funders overall as either good or okay.