Ideas in Action

Elevating the Role of the Foundation Program Officer

Several years ago, my client and I waited patiently in a small but bright conference room adorned with local art in Chicago’s Loop. My client was the Executive Director of a Chicago-based nonprofit that was concluding year one of a two year program grant with a local private foundation. As my client was new to her role, she asked me to join her as our firm had been providing strategy and management support to the organization.

Once the program officer arrived, we meticulously reviewed my client’s approved grant application, and she shared progress on the funded activities. We next went through the program and organizational budget while the program officer asked pre-planned questions and was checking them off a list as we responded. The entire meeting took less than thirty minutes at which point we left and collectively wondered:

1. What was the program officer’s depth of knowledge about the organization’s work?
2. How else could this funder and program officer help the organization excel?
3. Why were we answering rote budget and operational questions rather than having a more robust discussion about the organization?

Having served in funder and nonprofit management roles, I have experienced both sides of this often unbalanced yet necessary relationship. More importantly, I have benefited from positive and additive collaborative relationships with skilled and experienced program staff. Those experiences have informed my understanding of how the program officer role can evolve to be more meaningful, supportive, balanced and productive:

1. Shift from Activities to Outcomes

When I ask program officers about their jobs, they often share the processes they engage with to get a new grant approved or an existing grant renewed. They discuss reviewing a written grant application, having follow up discussions or site visits with the grantee, preparing a grant summary for internal review, preparing a more formal write-up as part of the board docket, presenting the opportunity to the board and/ or board committee, and then finally going through the grant disbursement and reporting processes.

I hear pride in an excellent process, which falls into the necessary but insufficient category, and a bit of relief after the board has approved a grant docket. However, that focus on the grants management process sometimes overshadows a focus on outcomes and how funders can strengthen grantee organizations and their programs.

Our most successful funding clients are clear and unapologetic on what outcomes they are trying to advance, and their program staff are extraordinary in helping prospective grantees both understand their goals as a funder as well as how a particular funding opportunity may fit. More importantly, they can confidently share when alignment is lacking so neither funder nor prospective grantee is wasting their time. Many of these highly effective funders provide general operating support rather than trying to craft programs that meet their own needs. An outcomes-lens by funders can mean supporting aligned and crafted programs but is increasingly about supporting organizations and teams at nonprofits and letting them assess how best to deploy granted resources to advance agreed upon outcomes.

For example, the team at A Better Chicago is vigilant about advancing critical outcomes for Chicago youth by supporting organizations with general operating support and management guidance to increase the likelihood that funded organizations can achieve shared outcomes as they improve and scale.

Highly-effectively program staff are also able to help grantees improve how they discuss their organization and their work. They work closely with grantees on strengthening their view of programmatic and organizational budgets. They open grantees’ eyes about what is possible with their strategies and help them think through larger funding opportunities with both their own foundation and potentially peer funders. In short, if grantmakers are in the outcomes business, then program staff can think of their roles as grantee-maximizers continuously asking, ‘How can I help our grantees excel?’

2. Shift from Transactions to Partnerships

Many early career program officers are overwhelmed by grantmaking processes which can force them into transactional relationships with their grantees. During a recent client engagement with a funder, as we reviewed a pivot table of more than 100 grantees, our client was visibly distressed knowing the amount of (virtual) paperwork that would be involved in monitoring and renewing the grantees. That ‘desk time’ would be a barrier to fully engaging with the grantees and their leadership and program teams. I imagine most program staff enter the field eager for that deep grantee engagement, to learn about the field, and to uncap the potential of so many effective and dynamic organizations. However, their role is often reduced to the procedures and the sheer volume of grants makes it nearly impossible to engage meaningfully throughout a grant term.

There are two variables that can help program staff shift their role from transactions to partnerships. The first is acknowledging that deep engagement with all grantees may be unnecessary or impossible. In those situations, grantmakers can reduce the application and reporting burden around smaller or less strategic grants so program staff can focus their limited time and attention on sizable and more strategic grants. This approach can reduce the time that both funder and grantee spend on process steps and can help program staff be a better partner to grantees that are of higher strategic import to the funder’s theory of change.

With the program staff’s time freed up, they can genuinely dive in and learn with their prospective and active grantees. As Christopher Cardona and Shireen Zaman of the Ford Foundation[1] note, “In our experience, inclusiveness happens when officers express curiosity about and support for a grantee’s entire organization, not just the parts that relate to the foundation’s strategy and goals.” Having the space and time for curiosity, however, requires a shift in program officer time toward a partnership mindset.

To make this shift possible, however, we need to activate a second variable. Program staff need a broader range of skills than is typical of program officer job descriptions today. Many funders ask nonprofits about their growth, scale and sustainability plans; however, program staff are often unable to either assess or support those plans in a material way. When program staff lack operating experience (i.e., they have run an organization, a sizable department, have had hire/ fire/ revenue/ expense/ budget/ planning responsibilities), their ability to support grantees meaningfully on growth, scale, and sustainability questions becomes limited even if these issues are important to their leadership team and board.

When I speak to early-career program staff who are looking to excel in their role, I often encourage them, if they have not had these experiences to:

1. Consider a career path that includes experience within a nonprofit organization. This will help them better understand the important decisions made by ‘operators’ and then understand how funders can be more effective in their roles.
2. Engage with finance/ accounting, operations and human resources colleagues at their foundation to better understand what to look for during the grant application process and to be able to ask better questions of prospective grantees; and,
3. Pursue additional reading and formal education on how organizations grow and scale and reflect on sustainability models that are relevant to areas of funding. When working with funders and operating nonprofits, I always encourage them to read What’s Your End Game by Alice Gugelev and Andrew Stern to begin to understand what scaling options look like and to understand what capacity they need to execute.

By far, some of the most valuable engagement I have had with program staff while in an operating role at StriveTogether was with our funders at DRK Foundation. They took the time to learn about our work and about how we could be successful together. They partnered with us, helping us refine our program model and dramatically reshaping how we saw our economic model for growth. Our lead contact at DRK Foundation had operating experience in both the nonprofit and corporate sectors while also serving in venture philanthropy roles. This partnership required a unique set of skills from our program team at the DRK Foundation which made our collaborative work together valuable and productive.

3. Shift from Approver to Accelerator

Finally, program officers can think of themselves as accelerators rather than approvers. While directly approving funding and promoting those grants through strategic communications and social media is helpful, the greater opportunity for funders is to ensure grantees can leverage the funding they are providing. This often takes the form of discussing recent grants in greater detail on communications platforms, ensuring peer funders are aware of investments and opportunities for complementary or additive funding, seeking out speaking opportunities (conferences, panels, webinars) to promote a funder’s grantees and writing about grantees in relevant media publications.

In the late 1990s as a funder with KnowledgeWorks, I always wanted to validate our investments by helping to find other funders who might be able to bring complementary dollars to the organization and who also may have access to other funders through their networks. While this is work that happens outside of the pure grantmaking process, it can bring incredible value to grantees and ensure the program officer role is that much more valuable — both to the funder and to others in the field.

Another area of acceleration is finding the connection points across and between grantees in a funder’s portfolio. Given the intensity and focus that often comes with running high-performance nonprofits, leaders may lack the time and bandwidth to know what else is happening in the field. Having funders be the eyes and ears in the field can be an important accelerator for grantees. Of course, sometimes the introductions can be too voluminous and far afield, so thoughtful curation (that comes from deep organizational understanding) is important.

The final area of acceleration is for program staff and funders to recognize their incredible convening power. Gathering grantees around a specific set of desired results — such as sharing promising practices, understanding data and outcomes or informing policy change opportunities — can help advance organizations and remove common barriers.

There are real costs to some of these acceleration strategies. If we want grantees to spend time developing a partnership or to convene multiple times a year around an area of shared interest, funders should be ready to pay for that time and provide the resources necessary (e.g., facilities, food, facilitators, experts, and consultants) to honor the time commitment and to ensure that these engagement opportunities are well conceived, designed and executed.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Thinking back to that funder meeting with my client, I wish we could have discussed outcomes, partnership and acceleration in some depth. Much of what we spent time on could have been handled electronically and was not of much value to either organization. Program officers today, given the ability to dramatically streamline the process steps of grantmaking, can elevate their role and become wildly useful and valuable well beyond the dollar value of the grants they provide. While some processes are certainly necessary for good governance and audit purposes, it seems the best program officers are driving better results for their foundations and their grantees through thoughtful engagement and unending curiosity on how they can bring more value to their communities and grantees.

[1] Cardona, C., & Zaman, S. (2023). It’s time to reimagine the role of program officer. Ford Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/learning-reflections/its-time-to-reimagine-the-role-of-program-officer/

Pranav Kothari is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Public Action and Social Compact Program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, teaching in both MBA and executive education programs. He speaks nationally on measuring social impact, education data, education philanthropy, and nonprofit effectiveness. He is also Founder & CEO of Revolution Impact® LLC, a Chicago-based social impact consulting firm.