Crappy Funding Practices Gives Nonprofit Staff a Chance to Vent. It Might Also Make a Difference

Every fundraising professional has horror stories about the frequently nonsensical, time- and money-consuming, and even demoralizing process of applying for grants and managing funders’ expectations. But the power imbalance between grantors and nonprofits means that such stories have mostly been shared in hushed tones or behind closed doors.

That situation changed in January with the launch of Crappy Funding Practices, a LinkedIn page helmed by Nonprofit AF blogger Vu Le and a group of about a dozen nonprofit professionals. Via a web form, nonprofit leaders who have been the victims of 24 enumerated “crappy” funding practices can report their experiences to the CFP team. Once their practices have been verified, that funder is publicly named and shamed on the page. Nonprofit staff who file the complaints remain anonymous.

If the response to Crappy Funding Practices is any indication, this development is long overdue. As of this writing, the page has more than 11,000 followers — that’s 3,000 more than were following it when I began reporting this piece in early March. Further, when I posted on LinkedIn asking for feedback about the Crappy Funding Practices page, I received a flood of emails, comments and direct messages like this one:

As a development director for a small human services organization, I am thrilled that there is a platform for staff like me to anonymously call out the unreasonable, time-wasting and inequitable practices of too many foundations and organizations. My best hope is that the attention will inspire change across the funder industry, but in the meantime, it's a relief to be able to vent about some of the worst offenders.

Notably, in a sector filled with people with strong opinions, not a single individual reached out to me to criticize CFP’s tactics. But while the page is definitely making a stir, the question is: Will naming and shaming funders make a real difference, when decades of softer approaches haven’t moved the needle sufficiently?

To get a sense of what’s driving the effort and what impact it might have, I spoke with four members of the CFP volunteer team and several nonprofit experts and professionals. Multiple people involved asked to speak off the record for obvious reasons. And while readers can easily find the names of the funders called out by CFP, they are not named in this report due to the difficulty of independently verifying grantmaking practices.

In the beginning, there was a hashtag

The original inspiration for what has become Crappy Funding Practices hit Vu Le, Nonprofit AF blogger and former nonprofit founder and executive director, during the beginning of the pandemic. At that time, when everyone was in lockdown to avoid catching COVID-19, Le said he heard about a foundation that was still requiring applicants to print out and hand deliver their applications.

“The fact that this funder was jeopardizing people's lives because they wanted this thing to be delivered pushed me to realize that it's no longer just good enough to call things out in general. We need to call them out [by name],” Le said. And thus, the Crappy Funding Practices hashtag was born on what was then still Twitter.

After a few years of doing the work on his own, Le said that he decided to recruit a team because the field wasn’t progressing fast enough and because, as a single individual, there was only so much he could accomplish by himself. In May, Le used his website to call for volunteers, and by January, the first Crappy Funding Practice post hit LinkedIn. The team of roughly a dozen is separated into groups that review and vet submissions, and review and post the eventual writeup to LinkedIn. According to the volunteers I spoke with in March, they had received about 100 submissions. More than 20 Crappy Funding Practices were listed on the page as of the end of that month.

One of the volunteers, a former nonprofit executive director and nonprofit veteran with more than 20 years of experience, said by email that the purpose of the site is to give funders a chance to “revisit their approach, lack of transparency, low-functioning portals/websites, giving restrictions, etc.,” and to improve the lives of nonprofit professionals.

Another, who is also a longtime nonprofit professional, said via email, “I think our goal is to raise awareness about how much work it is to access funding, and especially to get the attention of the funders themselves. We want funders to understand that their ‘best practices’ are wasting so much time and energy, and leaving out so many people, that they’re counterproductive to their own missions.”

The team has made one verified reporting mistake so far, despite what seem to be thorough efforts to document the practices before calling funders out. In an email exchange with a funder whose bad practices, according to the site, include a requirement that the staff and board members of grantees make donations to the funder, a foundation spokesperson told me that their organization only suggests those donations and that grantees aren’t denied funding on the basis of whether or not grantees comply. Le acknowledged the mistake, but also said that such a suggestion still constitutes an abuse of power.

“I liken it to asking someone who reports to you out [on a date] — it’s gross, it should never be done,” he said. “You can be a very nice person, you can be like, ‘Well, they can always say no, and I will always respect their decision.’ But the fact that you're asking them is gross in the first place.”

It’s also important to note that Crappy Funding Practices doesn’t stop at calling out bad or inequitable practices. In the past month, two funders — Fairfield County’s Community Foundation in Connecticut and the Minnesota Council on Foundations — were lauded for positive practices, including creating a common grant application and encouraging other funders to use it to save nonprofits time. The CFP team said that 12 out of the 100 submissions they had received so far likewise complimented funders for doing things well.

But one funder also received a “Golden Poo” award. Among other things, for a performing arts grant of just $1,000 to $5,000, that funder requires a 26-page application, biographical information for team members, and tells applicants to “enter three seasons of programming information including musical works, performers and composers, but do not submit season brochures.”

Crappy Funding Practices publicly calls out the asinine, the counterproductive, the outright nonsensical, the outdated, the wasteful, and the contradictory frustrations that we all experience in the process of trying to make the world a better place. I can see how to some people, the public shaming approach might be off-putting. But frankly, playing nice from the low end of a pretty extreme power differential with funders has resulted in precious little change. Anyway. It’s 10:42 pm, and I need to get back to two grant applications that are due tomorrow. And one of them has to be printed off and mailed in. Of course.
— A program manager who started writing grants due to a financial crisis at their organization

“Can we just get real here?”

One reason so many funders continue to engage in inequitable practices is that they have no concept of the cost involved in jumping through innumerable hoops in order to secure a grant. Chantias Ford, the director of programs for the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, explained that this cost is summed up as the “net grant” — the grant amount minus the cost involved in meeting that grant’s application and reporting requirements. If a grant is $10,000, but it takes $5,000 of staff’s time to meet those requirements, the net grant is $5,000.

Ford said that today, many nonprofits are feeling more empowered to skip applying for, or even accepting, grants from some funders because “it is not worth the time, resources and capacity needed to fulfill the grant requirements.” In other words: Grantmakers that erect too many unnecessary hurdles may hamper their own missions by potentially narrowing the field of organizations willing or able to jump those hurdles.

That’s what happened when Susan Ehrman, a retired nonprofit professional with 40 years of experience, encountered a funder that expected applicants to outline how the foundation’s potential grant of around $5,000 would make a significant difference for their mission.

“What I couldn't say to this person, and desperately wanted to, was ‘Let's just take a timeout for a second and think about what you just said. Because $5,000 will buy a lot of pens and paper, and it will pay a quarter of the rent for a month for our space,” Ehrman said.

“Can we just get real here? How many individual donors would say to you, ‘I'd like to give you $5,000, but you have to prove to me that this is going to be life-changing for your nonprofit.’ I’ve never had an individual donor say that to me.” Ehrman told her executive director at the time that applying for the grant would be too much trouble for not enough return. Of course, it’s also true that many, and possibly most, nonprofits don’t feel that they can say no to even the most egregious of funders’ demands. If they could, it’s reasonable to assume that far more funders would have reformed their practices by now.

Funders also engage in these practices out of habit or because, thanks to what I call “privilege blinders,” they are unaware of the impact of their actions.

“You don't know what you don't know,” said The Justice Walk founder and CFP volunteer Abby Anderson. “And I have been around people in the philanthropy world long enough to know that some of these folks have never been in a situation where people will tell them the unvarnished truth, because they've always been in a huge power imbalance situation. So instead of saying ‘you have spinach in your tooth,’ I might put spinach on my tooth so that you don't feel bad and you think that's normal.”

According to Le, some of the funders that have been called out have actually been grateful because it is so rare for them to get such honest feedback. In fact, the only real negative reactions his team has received so far are from fundraising professionals who are uncomfortable with CFP’s tactics, which he describes as a “sort of fundraiser Stockholm syndrome, where they feel the need to protect the people in power.”

This LinkedIn page is cathartic for all of the reasons you're likely hearing from others. But for me, it's especially cathartic as a development professional to see shenanigans publicly called out because so often, foundation professionals don't respect us while making us jump through all sorts of hoops. We're the ones that register for their portals, submit applications, negotiate realistic deliverables, write reports that program officers usually don't read, shield program staff from time-consuming nonsense, explain why a budget line deviated 11% in a budget created two years before the actual fiscal year, etc. And yet, dev professionals often aren't deemed worthy enough to meet with — let alone fund our salaries and time.
— VP of development at a national nonprofit

“A funding system in desperate need of revision”

The popularity of Crappy Funding Practices speaks to just how widespread these kinds of complaints are, but just in the course of reporting this article, I received enough fundraising horror stories and appreciation for CFP’s work to write a piece twice as long as this one.

One subject, for example, told me about large funders that only accept applications from people who already know a member of their board, and a family funder that makes grant decisions while drunk around their Thanksgiving table.

In fairness, it has to be noted that not all funders engage in these kinds of practices. Many who do would probably say that they’re just trying to be responsible stewards of the wealth that has been entrusted to them. At the same time, it’s clear that inequitable funding policies are extremely widespread. And while there’s an argument to be made in favor of targeted program grants that come with some level of reporting, it’s difficult to square the due diligence argument with policies that just don’t make sense, like requiring the hand delivery of large sheaths of printed documents, or setting deadlines in the middle of the holidays. It’s also hard to see how funders believe they are delivering on their mission of supporting nonprofits if their “net grants” are thousands of dollars less than the actual award — particularly given that the vast majority of funders aren’t willing to fund the staff time involved in meeting those requirements.

Aside from the fact that these practices may be holding back funders from achieving their own missions, they also exacerbate racial and other forms of inequality in terms of who can receive funding. The higher the hurdles, the harder it is for smaller, mostly Black/POC and other minority-led organizations to jump them. CFP volunteer Abby Anderson stressed the disproportionate impact of the funder-grantee power imbalance when she told me that the majority of people involved in the Crappy Funding Practices efforts aren’t “folks who look like you and I” (we are both white women), but only she and CFP founder Vu Le, a Vietnamese American who is already a publicly outspoken critic of the sector, felt safe speaking with me on the record. Any foundation that’s concerned about systemic inequity may want to follow Crappy Funding Practices to learn what they shouldn’t be doing.

The question remains of whether CFP’s public naming and shaming tactic will ultimately make a difference. If public criticism moved billionaires, for example, we would probably have had a more equitable tax system a long time ago. On the other hand, philanthropic organizations have reputations to maintain, and the public is increasingly distrustful of the sector. A lot of foundations truly want to be — or at least be seen as — part of the solution. Winning the “Golden Poo” award on Crappy Funding Practices doesn’t exactly send that message.

Another good argument for CFP’s approach is the fact that less targeted or more genteel calls for reform have their limits, in terms of both grantee participation and funders’ response. Grant Advisor has an entire database of funder reviews, which can help fundraisers looking to avoid bad actors. But as Le said, Grant Advisors is a measured response, while Crappy Funding Practices “is more, ‘we don't have time for this, OK? You just need to cut this out right now. We don't have time to actually sit down and provide you with a measured evaluation of the whole grant process.’”

There’s also a big role for funder collaboratives and philanthropy-serving organizations that are working to improve the system for nonprofits. Chantias Ford at the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project said that while she has some reservations about CFP’s strategy of calling out funders publicly, there is clearly room for different approaches.

“There's been decades of calling funders out privately, and decades of calling people in,” she said. “I've been in the field for over a decade at this point and have been singing the same tunes in different ways. And yes, we are seeing changes, but then we are still seeing some of the same, very basic missteps.”

Hopefully, Crappy Funding Practices will inspire some of those organizations that are being called out to change their ways, Ford said. “But even if it doesn't make the organizations change, hopefully, it makes the ones that are doing it behind closed doors say, ‘Let's change so we don't get caught out like this.’”

CFP is giving a voice to the voiceless. They are a breath of fresh air that brings us together in solidarity over a funding system in desperate need of revision.
— President/CEO of a nonprofit homeless shelter

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