There are two sides to optimizing philanthropic performance: maximizing revenue (donor gifts and endowment portfolio performance) and investing in grant-making that fulfills the intended mission.

Much work has been done to rationalize and maximize revenue, yet the field is just beginning to assemble the data and develop the knowledge framework to enable broad sharing of funding activities. Building upon this work, it is now possible to use this aggregated data to analyze strategy performance. Understanding what has been tried, and segmenting results by the many cultural and societal boundaries generates enhanced knowledge to maximize grant making efficacy. This includes systematically distinguishing what is working from what is not and why… enabling persistent testing of philanthropy’s evolving ‘change hypotheses’ with known ‘theories of change’ as a means to improve the impact of grant dollars.

KUITY understands there are many facets of effective philanthropy and that some factors are considered intangible. Love and care, for example, are often thought to be immeasurable and can make the difference between a successful intervention or not. We understand this is complicated and it is not simply numeric. Consequently, we help organizations get at the factors that matter most.

These complex factors can in fact be evaluated using sophisticated sentiment analysis and other analytical methods enabling effective/ineffective strategies to be distinguished from effective/ineffective grantee/segment performance. Additionally, grant makers are now able to measure potential impact and examine these complex factors across potential grantees using a rationalized framework that captures the “bright lights” (leadership talent, effective strategies and impact potential) enabling them to invest in strategies and people to further their mission and enhance their value to society.

To enhance the visibility and insight into effective grant-making practices, KUITY has developed specialized services that enable grant-makers to achieve a deeper understanding (quantitative and qualitative) of their operations and set the stage for the longer term ability to track and discern systematic alignment of outcomes to organizational goals.

KUITY uses a broad array of analytic science and technology to help foundations, endowments, and other philanthropic organizations build a technology foundation enabling ongoing, organization-wide, analytical processing and data visualization capabilities including, dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), scorecards, adaptive reports, and data mining and analytics. This technology foundation enables timely insight and adaptive ongoing iterative learning at the organizational as well as the user level.

Organizations are able to more easily and more quickly address practical daily questions, such as:

Grantee pre-grant evaluation:

• Is a given grant based on a proven theory of change or are we being asked to fund innovation?
• How closely does this grant application align to our objectives?
• How might this grant drive price, quality or access improvements?

Grantee comparison and selection:

• Of the potential grantees, which are based on proven strategies and have proven leadership?
• Which grantees are the most likely to succeed?
• How do grant operators compare to each other?
• Which grants best support our objectives and should be funded?

Grantee post-grant evaluation:

• How well is this grant meeting its objective?
• Is this grant supporting the change hypothesis / theory of change?
• How well do our grants meet their objectives?
• How well do our grants overall support the change objective?

Field:

• How well do the field’s grants meet their objectives?
• How do we compare with the field broadly?
• How do we compare with others in the field in the area we are working (e.g. violence prevention, health, human trafficking, etc.)?
• How are our grants (past and present) aligning with other investments in the field?
• How much funding has been made to solve this problem broadly and by region of interest?

Operations:

• What are the current trends of grant applications and grant approvals (subject, geo location, timing, number, value)?
• Are we getting grantee engagement across the board or are we limited in who applies to us?
• Are we funding the same organizations over and over or do we have a culture of reaching out and funding new grantees?
• How long does the average grant approval take? Does this differ by grant type, staff, value, or area of our organization?
• Are we supporting or inhibiting time sensitive grants with our process? How will we know?
• How do grants differ by grant-maker (staff), geography, etc.?
• Is our grant-making aligned with our strategic mission?
• What outcome indicators are being gathered to inform if what we’re doing is working? And, what threshold should we use to help us know if we need to adjust?

KUITY helps grant-makers achieve timely, actionable intelligence, presented in simple ways that inform better systematic decisions enabling further fulfillment of their missions.

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