Less Process. More Impact. Here's How.

See how to spend less time managing the grantmaking process and more time on the mission and community work it's supposed to serve.

Across community foundations nationally, administrative costs make up more than two-thirds of the average foundation's operating revenue — a sector managing nearly $159 billion in assets and distributing over $16.5 billion in grants each year. That's not overhead in the abstract. It's staff time: forms rebuilt from scratch every cycle, reminders and status updates sent one by one, reviewers comparing notes after the fact because there was never a shared standard, and application data sitting scattered across spreadsheets instead of showing what's actually working.

That load doesn't stay flat, either. Foundation-sector research names it directly as an operational capacity strain: lean teams handling expanding workloads, where manual process consumes a disproportionate share of staff time as a foundation adds programs, applicants, or reviewers. At the same time, governance expectations are rising — newer trustees increasingly want real-time access to grant data and outcome tracking, not an annual spreadsheet summary, adding pressure to have organized, reportable data, not just organized applications.

None of that is what a grantmaking process is supposed to do. It's meant to create space for the mission and the community work a foundation exists for, not compete with it for time. Foundations already doing this well describe the shift plainly. As the Walton Family Foundation's Brett Hembree put it, "Dashboards don't replace judgment. They don't make decisions, but they improve the conditions for good decisions by making that evidence visible, organized, and easier to discuss." When the Connecticut Council for Philanthropy pulled its member foundations' funding data into one shared view, it revealed nearly every funder in the group was independently investing in the same issue area — a pattern no one could see until the data was finally organized in one place. The value isn't the software. It's the staff time and clarity it returns.

If your foundation is heading into a new grant cycle, adding a new program, or preparing the next report for your board or trustees, this is the moment that gap between process and impact becomes visible — the moment you have to explain not just what you funded, but what it accomplished.

This session is for community foundation program officers, grants managers, and executive staff responsible for running a grantmaking process end to end — from the application through the award to the report that shows what it all accomplished. Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the full recording. Want to talk through your foundation's specific setup first? Reach out and we'll set up time to walk through it directly.

What You'll Learn

• How to spend less time managing the process and more time advancing your mission, using automated communications, reminders, workflows, status updates, and reusable program structures to reduce repetitive administrative tasks
• How to make every step of review more efficient with reviewer assignments, customized evaluation forms, weighted criteria, generated values, and AI-assisted summaries — without sacrificing thoughtful decision-making
• How to give applicants and reviewers a smoother experience with intuitive, mobile-friendly applications, easy document uploads, built-in chat support, and organized reviewer assignments and resources
• How to keep the entire grantmaking process connected — applications, supporting documents, communications, evaluations, decisions, awards, and post-award information — instead of pieced together across systems
• How to keep collecting information after the application is submitted, using supplemental forms to gather outcomes, project updates, populations served, geographic information, and financial details without a separate process
• How to turn grant activity into actionable insight with reports, dashboards, structured application data, and historical information showing where funding is going, who's being served, and how needs and outcomes change over time
• How to use what you learn to strengthen future grantmaking, comparing applications, awards, and post-award information across cycles to sharpen future questions, priorities, and evaluation criteria

Structured data doesn't replace judgment. It makes good decisions possible, visible, and yours to make with the time you have back.