Policies
Monitoring Arrangements
The Trustees of the Foundation make their awards to bring about positive change in the circumstances of an organisation and its staff or beneficiaries to achieve the objects in the Foundation’s Mission Statement.
The Foundation monitors the awards that it makes in order to assess their impact and provide lessons and experience for future grant making. Agreement to take part in the Foundation’s monitoring process is a condition of all awards. The Foundation seeks to apply monitoring in proportion to the level and type of award and the size and capacity of beneficiary organisations to participate in the monitoring process.
One-off Grants
One-off grants are paid soon after the Grants Committee meeting. A short follow-up report may be requested. The report seeks to establish what impact the award has on the applicant organisation’s situation, for example with improved service delivery, benefits to clients, income flow and stability or other factors as appropriate. There is no format for this type of report: a short letter suffices.
Periodic Grants
Periodic grants are made to achieve positive change over time, normally a period of three years. Potential change is usually specified as one or more outcomes that the applicant believes that it is able to achieve with the added resource of the Foundation’s funds. Outcomes will be quantitative or qualitative, hard or soft and short or long-term. They will be measurable against targets, benchmarks, milestones or other identifiable achievements by the applicant organisation, its staff or clients.
Monitoring of the progress of a grant takes place at intervals throughout its life. Depending on the size of a grant, annual instalments may be paid at six-month or twelve-month intervals. Each payment is triggered on the receipt of a satisfactory monitoring report in the format of the Foundation’s Grant Progress Report. Agreement to this arrangement is a condition of Foundation grants. A copy of the Progress Report questions is sent out with the Terms & Conditions of the award.
Amongst other things, the Progress Report seeks to establish the extent to which progress has been made towards achieving the outcomes originally stated by the applicant organisation. Assertions of progress will normally be supported by data such as inputs and outputs collected by the applicant organisation in the routine course of monitoring its own performance.
Evaluation
The Trustees of the Foundation are always pleased to see evaluations that have been commissioned by or on behalf of applicant organisations.
Each year the Foundation commissions a small number of self-assessment evaluations by successful grant applicants. Using data collected over the lifetime of a grant and measured against the outcomes agreed at the time of application, an organisation is asked to analyse the impact of its activity, reaching conclusions and making recommendations. The Foundation pays a small sum additional to the main award to cover the cost of this activity to the organisation.
Performance Reviews
All Foundation periodic grants are treated as conditional liabilities. That is, payment of instalments of the award is conditional on applicants complying with the Terms & Conditions of the grant issued at the time the award is notified and on the Foundation achieving sufficient income during the relevant financial year to meet its liabilities.
Each year normally in January or February, the Trustees of the Foundation carry out a review of the performance of every current periodic grant and those that have been completed in the financial year under review. The review panel authorises payments of instalments of the award for the comming year or other action as appropriate.
An important element of this review is the availability of a set of final accounts from the most recent completed financial year.
In March each year the Trustees review income receipts for the financial year ending and meet with the Foundation’s investment manager to consider estimated income for the following year.
