How California Wellness Reenvisioned its Grantmaking Processes

The PEAK2023 hybrid session “How to Effectively Operationalize Your Tech and Process Changes” featured Jamie Fawcett, data lead at Grantbook, a consulting firm dedicated to helping funders operationalize transformational grantmaking, and Amber López, director of grants management at The California Wellness Foundation (Cal Wellness). They described how, working together over the span of two years, Grantbook helped Cal Wellness  undertake a complete reconsideration of the grantmaking process in order to make their efforts more effective, efficient, and impactful for every stakeholder involved.

Here are a few of their top tips for managing a change process that reaches every corner of the operation. Quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Provide clarity for your team

When undertaking a change process that involves multiple people, departments, and roles, clarity is key. Fawcett described a program management approach that assigned clear responsibilities to teams that focused on better data, better grantmaking, and better experiences and clearly laid out “interaction points between them.”

“We treated it like interdependent projects, distributing ownership of different [work] streams among the team,” said Fawcett. “A lot of us were tasked more than once, but we had those roles separated so that we knew who had which responsibilities. We also had frequent touch points, enabling us to maximize the value of our team and minimize bottlenecks. It also enabled us to be really tactical and focused in those meetings, then to be strategic in prioritizing different areas of work.”

Another key to achieving clarity was ensuring that subject-area experts pulled in from outside the core team—such as program staff—could get up to speed quickly. “We knew that we didn’t have much of their time,” said López. For those participants, they prepared design briefs that focused on “really clear sets of decisions, with one or two different decision parts,” said Fawcett. “We wanted to make sure that we understood the problems that they were facing and allow them to bring that expertise to the decision-making process.”

Include everyone you can

Listening to everyone involved, Fawcett and López agreed, is not just necessary for understanding the challenges and possible solutions, it’s strategic. “We want buy-in,” explained López. “We want to make sure that this is meeting the needs of the folks that we serve.”

Take, for example, work in data governance—the cross-departmental rules and norms around decisions regarding data, including what to collect and how to use it. “We’re trying to involve folks from all over the foundation who have their hands in the data, who care about the data, who want to tell stories with the data,” said López. “For each of these work streams, we created challenge area teams representing folks around the foundation, but especially programs, our main stakeholders in the conversation around data. We brought these folks in and took them through these series of challenge areas. Breaking it down was one of the ways that we were able to operationalize this huge project.”

“We really benefited from that subject matter expertise in terms of solutions,” Fawcett added. “But we also then had champions across the organization. We got a bit of transparency around the decision-making process as well.”

Taking an inclusive approach also helps to build culture and capacity.

“We’re trying to build a culture of service, of strategic partnership, especially in grants management,” said López. “This is also a way of us developing relationships, developing trust, and really growing that partnership.”

“We were able to build up that infrastructure, flex those muscles, and then continue that work after the dedicated project ended,” said Fawcett.

Fawcett and López also emphasized the value of hearing from a diverse set of voices that encompassed a wide range of experiences in grantmaking. “We had people who were in the day-to-day work, and we also had that strategic-level overview as well,” said Fawcett. “We had people who were new to Cal Wellness who could bring in new practices, and people who’d been there 20 years who provided context for the way things were.”

Document the pain points

López shared that the program team asked to review a number of issues, including the grant process, the letter of intent, and the application–and these elements tied in directly to questions of coding, the technological interface at hand, and data. “Basically, we threw all of the grantmaking pain points into the project,” she said.

The discovery process, Fawcett reported, began with “mapping out how different people experience the system and naming pain points within the processes.” Thorough documentation, both speakers noted, is vital to this step—not only to map the work ahead and ensure that it can be picked up again easily if the work has to be paused, but also for use in the implementation process itself. Documentation, said López, will allow you to report back to any of your stakeholders: “You said X, Y, and Z were troubling you, and this is how we fixed it.”

Establish decision-making rules and tools 

In addition, it’s important to empower staff to make decisions in their departments. “There was an ability to overrule those decisions, but we knew we would only use that in the most dire of circumstances,” López noted. “I think it really allowed the executive team to build another level of trust in the staff.” Fawcett added that Cal Wellness also wanted the ability to make quick decisions that were as close to a consensus as possible. That meant they needed to create a framework for decision-making up front.

“We didn’t want to spend too much time prepping for those decisions, so we wanted to be able to really clearly communicate,” she said. “We would document why this was important to different roles, then present it to our challenge area teams with a values-led decision-making approach using some really clear rules.”

Those rules started with articulating data values: “What is the role of data gathering? What can we include? What can’t we include?” They answered those questions by looking at the foundation’s organizational values as well as ongoing conversations around grantee burden and staffer burden—including coding issues—as well as the meaning of trust-based philanthropy and the need to form better relationships and become less transactional. “We came up with these prioritizations together, and used those data values as a North Star.”

For the decision-making process itself, the five-finger voting method proved to be a simple but powerful tool. After presenting the challenge at hand and the solution being proposed, then taking a set amount of time for initial reactions, extra questions, and clarification, they moved to a vote where each team member indicated their support by raising one to five fingers. Five fingers means “totally on board”; four means “I can live with it, but it’s not the exact solution I want”; three means, “I still have some reservation”; two means “I’m not sure that this is something we should be doing”; and one means “principled objection.” Any solution that received a three or below would be reexamined in light of the questions around it, then addressed again at a different time.

Implement with understanding

In terms of implementing changes, one of the big goals for Cal Wellness was clarity around roles and responsibilities, which in part comes back to documentation. With clear documentation, Fawcett noted, you can “avoid some of the rework” that might otherwise be necessary when it comes time to implement a particular solution—only to be met with questions from those affected about who made the decision and why.

“People can be defensive when it comes to changes,” López observed, “but only because there’s a genuine concern about how changes might affect them. People learn to navigate their challenges incredibly well, so when those [self-made solutions] are taken away, we’ve kind of lost something.” Their solution to that resistance was to meet people with both clarity and kindness.

Fawcett added: “Just try to be that calm force for folks as they move through the unknown and the fear of the unknown.”