Before You Write the Check, Someone Needs to See the Work
A colleague of mine was working as a contract major gifts officer when someone in his network called him, inspired by a nonprofit they had come across. The writing was sharp, the visuals were compelling, and the mission felt urgent and alive on the page. He facilitated the gift, $200,000.
Six months later the donor started asking questions. The social cause the nonprofit had promised to move was not visibly moving. The marketing kept coming, polished and confident, but people in the community were scratching their heads about whether anything was happening on the ground. My colleague and the donor both ended up with the same feeling: a sour taste and splash of regret.
This is not a rare story.
There are organizations out there that are exceptional at sounding like the work. Their proposals are tight, their impact language is fluent, and their photography or videography is some of the best in class. When the dollars arrive and the months pass, what happened on the ground is nowhere close to what those resources made possible.
Essentially, the marketing was the product.
The sector does not advertise this risk, but it is real and more common than most funders want to acknowledge.
Here is what makes this especially difficult to solve.
There are over 150,000 private foundations in the United States, collectively employing just over 31,000 people, roughly one staff person for every five foundations in the country.
Only one in six foundations with assets over a million dollars has any paid staff at all, and the majority of private philanthropic capital is being deployed by people without the infrastructure to get off the page and have boots on the ground.
Most foundations could write checks to pre-selected organizations, never visit, never call, and remain well within the norm of how this sector operates. Many do exactly that.
The Robert D. and Marcia H. Randall Charitable Trust does not.
The Randall Trust, based in Portland and focused on education, youth development, and community services in the Pacific Northwest, conducts site visits as a standard part of their grantmaking process, not because anyone requires it and not because it is common practice across the sector, but because they decided that writing a check without seeing the work is an incomplete act of stewardship.
I know this firsthand because I’ve been on a few site visits with them.
One of my clients, Our Village Gardens, grows fresh produce and sells it blocks from where it is harvested, in a neighborhood that needs it. We submitted a letter of inquiry to the Randall Trust, were invited to apply, and after the application was reviewed, Brian and Lynn from the foundation requested a site visit. They wanted to see if what we wrote in the grant was true.
When they arrived, Our Village Gardens created a welcoming space. The board chair, both co-directors, and operations staff were all present. Before anything else, we paused, introduced everyone, and shared a few laughs. It was a bit like setting the table before a meal.
Then we walked.
The first stop was the Village Market. When Brian and Lynn walked in, they could not help but smile. Customers were purchasing food, fresh produce was on display, and every question the foundation asked was met with a thoughtful, in-depth answer from the staff who had built this thing from the ground up.
Then we walked to the garden, about three minutes away. Fresh grapes hung from the rafters inside the gazebo, and when one of the staff members noticed the foundation leaders admiring them, he said, pick some and enjoy. Everyone did.
The foundation was seeing exactly what we had written in the grant.
A month later, the Randall Trust board met. Our Village Gardens received their first grant from the Trust, funded for the full amount requested, $14,000, a rare outcome for a first time applicant.
That is what a site visit makes possible, not just for the organization being visited but for the funder. Brian and Lynn left that afternoon knowing something true about where their dollars were going. They did not have to wonder whether the marketing was accurate. They had walked the garden and tasted the grapes.
Funders do not need a site visit for every grant, and you do not need a large staff or an elaborate process to start. But they do need some version of presence, some moment where someone from your foundation gets close enough to see what the application cannot show you.
The organizations that will disappoint you are counting on the fact that most funders never do.