How We Score When Compared to NonprofitAFs 24 Rules Against Crappy Funding Practices

How and why #CrappyFundingPractices was started

Advocates for the nonprofit sector had been raising extremely valid complaints about how nonprofits are (not) funded and seeing little to no change.

The hashtag #CrappyFundingPractices started circulating on social media around the beginning of the pandemic.

While polite requests for reforms to nonprofit funding had fallen on deaf ears; naming and shaming online seemed to garner at least a little bit of change and you can't really argue with results.

In May of 2023 an author Vu Le from NonprofitAF posted an article clarifying what exactly constituted "Crappy Funding Practices".  And warned funders that if they do anything from the list, they were at risk of being called out by name on social media.

The author clarifies that is not intended to be a  comprehensive list.   The list may have been updated since it was published in May of 2023.  As of the time that the article was posted the list of #CrappyFundingPractices included the below 24 rules.

We highly recommend you read the full article which can be found here:

Join the movement to end Crappy Funding Practices!

For convenience the list has been quoted below.

We then proceed to grade ourselves against each one.  We describe our reasoning below so you can be the judge of how well (or poorly) we do.

Nonprofit AF's list of #CrappyFundingPractices (as of 05/2023)

"Here is a list of #CrappyFundingPractices that have been called out under the hashtag. If you are at a foundation, please check that you’re not doing these things below, because your foundation may be called out by name:   

1. Excessive requirements for small amounts of funding: No one should be required to prepare a five-page narrative, eight attachments, and sign a blood oath to give up their firstborn, for a $1,000 grant.  

2. Making nonprofits translate their budget into a funder’s budget format: It is ridiculous and self-centered for any funder to expect anyone to convert their budgets into the funder’s format, especially if the funder’s format is in—gasp!—Microsoft Word!

3. Insisting that grant applicants print out and mail in or deliver grant proposals: Let that be an option in case some applicants can’t email their proposal for some reason. Requiring it of everyone, however, is environmentally insensitive and time-wasting.

4. Not funding overhead: Funders who are still allergic to overhead, or whatever their misguided perception is of overhead, need to be called out publicly. We have been battling this for years, and we’re losing patience.  

5. Not funding staff salary: Some funders are ok with funding some overhead, just not compensation for the people doing the work. Who do they think is doing all the work? Elves? ChatGPT now, I guess?  

6. Restricting the funding of overhead to a certain percentage, usually 10%: If you have any sort of percentage restriction, you are insisting you know more about how a nonprofit should do its work than the nonprofit does. You’re silly, and you will be called out.

7. Cutting off accepting grant proposal submissions after a certain number has been reached: This is one of the “innovative” new shenanigans. To only take the first 100 LOIs or the first 200 proposals or whatever means hundreds of people wasted thousands of hours doing work for nothing. Unconscionable.

8. Requiring any sort of documentation of board approval for the grant application: Grants are operations, which the board should not be involved in. Stop forcing nonprofits to blur the lines of autonomy and responsibility between board and staff.  

9. Having nonprofits to farm for votes in popularity-based contests: If you require nonprofits to waste their time harassing their networks for votes or likes on social media, you will be called out. Forcefully. I cannot stress enough how shitty and demeaning this practice is.

10. Making nonprofits make an online account to view grant questions and requirements: Please, we’re mentally exhausted and can’t keep making new online accounts for everything, especially just to see if we even qualify to apply for a grant!

11. Not allowing questions to be seen in advance in online applications: People need time to see the overall grant in its entirety, not just one question at a time as they answer each section like an animal.  

12. Having LOIs that are basically a full grant proposal: The LOI (Letter of Interest or Letter of Intent) is the first step that many funders take to determine whether a nonprofit may be a good fit. It should be no more than 2 pages and requires no attachment.

13. Requiring grantees to pay an application fee: This is rare, but we’ve seen it. Just like with application fees for renting apartments or for college applications, this is inequitable and most hurts the organizations led by and serving marginalized communities.

14. Not revealing character limits on online applications at the onset: Nothing more frustrating than to write detailed grant responses only to find out that the grant portal only allowed for 500 characters or whatever.

15. Requiring the entering in of information that can be found on an attachment: This is as annoying as job applications that require the resume to be attached, but also makes the applicants type out their job history into a separate form. Maddening.  

16. Making application or report due dates December 31st, January 1st: This is when many people in the sector take a break. Don’t ruin one of the few times they get to rest and recharge.

17. Requiring more than annual reports/surveys: Some require a quarterly report. One funder required a weekly report. Another requires a NOTARIZED report every 60 days. No one has time to deal with the level of micromanagement.

18. Having ridiculous character limits: You know how I feel about character limits in general. They are an abomination. But asking grant applicants to write the community needs, programs, and evaluation strategy in 700 characters (approximately 3 tweets) deserves to be specifically and publicly shamed.

19. Asking for excessive or nonsensical information. One funder asked for the “names, dates of birth, postal codes, and genders of all program participants.” Sure they may be violating clients’ confidentiality, but at least they used the Oxford Comma.

20. Having ridiculous and nonsensical questions on impact: One funder literally asked, “How will this grant allow you to scale your impact?” It was for a $1000!  

21. Demanding that nonprofits be financially self-sustaining: The sustainability question will never not annoy me. Requiring that nonprofits demonstrate they will be financially sustainable shows complete cluelessness about how nonprofits work, and what the role of funders is.

22. Requiring attendance at quarterly trainings or meetings: The grant money provided is to fund nonprofits work. If funders want additional attendance at meetings, trainings, gatherings, etc., outside of reasonable requests, provide additional funding.

23. Asking nonprofit to return grant money for ridiculous reasons: One funder asked a nonprofit to return funding because the nonprofit had to delay the launch of their program due to COVID.

24. Rescinding funding because a staff said or retweeted something negative about the funder or about funders in general: If your ego is that delicate, you won’t like it when you’re blasted all over the internet."

Source:  https://nonprofitaf.com/2023/05/join-the-movement-to-end-crappy-funding-practices/

How well we think we did when graded against the list of #CrappyFundingPractices

1.  Excessive requirements for small amounts of funding:

As a somewhat small private memorial foundation we are guilty of giving out small amounts of funding.   However, we hope to award more grants for larger amounts as our organization grows in the future.

But we also have very little in the way of requirements.  We don't want large, detailed applications because that would mean that we would (or really should) have to assign someone to read all of that.

We are busy; people working or volunteering for our partner nonprofits are busy.  We want to keep things simple and save time for the both of us.

For the requirements that we do have, they seem fairly reasonable.

If the funds will be used to buy something, we want to know if it absolutely must be purchased new or if second-hand but in good shape equipment would meet their needs.

If it can be found used, we want nonprofits to at least try to find secondhand equipment.

But if f it's not feasible for some reason like distance, we would be okay with paying for something new.

If we approve funds to be used to buy something new, we prefer that the nonprofit checks if the seller offers discounted or a donated supplies for nonprofits.

We don't like paying for new equipment if there is perfectly good used equipment that would do the job just fine.

We also don't like paying for software, especially if there is a perfectly usable free and Open Source alternative.

We also want nonprofits to at least ask for a discount or donation based on their nonprofit status before buying something.

We have limited funds and want to make sure they can go a long way by partnering with organizations that are, for lack of a better word, thrifty like us.

Grade:  B

2.  Making nonprofits translate their budget into a funder’s budget format:

We use Google Workspace for Nonprofits, so we use Google Sheets and not something like QuickBooks.

Excel spreadsheets are fine.

We do try to push organizations towards the Libre Office suite.  Libre Office is a free, open source alternative to Microsoft's suite of software tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint that you have to pay for.

We certainly don't want to disrupt an organization's operations, but we are at least going to ask that they think about making the switch to Open Source software when their existing software license is set to expire.

Grade:  A-

3.  Insisting that grant applicants print out and mail in or deliver grant proposals:

While the organization is named after people who were born in the 1930s, the Cade Moore family eagerly embraced technology and in some cases were instrumental in bringing it about.  One family member was an extremely early computer programmer back when a computer took up the size of an entire room and had to be programmed using punch cards.  In addition to the programmer, their family also has many mathematicians and electrical engineers in it.

We don't like receiving snail mail, so we would have no reason to require mailed in applications.

However, we do ask some questions about how an organization handles their mail and packages.

1. Do you send a lot of mail?  If so, did you apply for special pricing for nonprofits with the United States Postal Service?

2. Do you send a lot of packages?  Did you apply for discounted or donated shipping for nonprofits through FedEx Cares or The UPS Foundation?

Grade:  A

4.  Not funding overhead:

We love funding overhead (terms and conditions do apply).

Grade:  A+

5.  Not funding staff salary: 

We believe that nonprofit staff should be compensated fairly for their work.

That being said in his 2013 book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" author David Graeber postulates that 37-40% of jobs in the US are "Bullshit Jobs" and it often seems that those who work the hardest are often paid the least.

Another potential way to quantify if a job is BS or not is by considering how much of a particular job could be done by a shell script.

We view automation not as a way for algorithms to take human jobs but only to free up humans' time to do work that computers can't.

There is another expression, at most organizations 10% of people do 90% of the work although in reality the two percentages are probably a bit closer.  We believe our subsidy program can partially address the first issue.  We are still fine tuning our long-term stance on covering employee wages.

Before exploring ways to pay employees and volunteers more, we believe employers should first look into ways that their employees can pay others less.

We encourage nonprofits to embrace remote work and provide a remote work stipend to reimburse employees for using their internet, phone bill, additional utility usage etc.

If the employee ever has to drive for work, maybe they could be allocated a company car.

A significant percentage of an increase in pay will go towards taxes.

To reduce the tax burden on employees we recommend exploring Healthcare Savings Accounts, 401ks 529 accounts, etc.  Possibly through a 501(c)(8) Fraternal Beneficiary Society.

Grade:  B

6.  Restricting the funding of overhead to a certain percentage, usually 10%:

We are interested to know the overall overhead rate of an organization, but we certainly do not put a 10% cap on any funding from us.  We would even be fine with 100% overhead per our (situationally) pro-overhead stance on nonprofits.

Grade: A+

7.  Cutting off accepting grant proposal submissions after a certain number has been reached

We don't do this and have no plans to do so in the future.

Grade: A

8.  Requiring any sort of documentation of board approval for the grant application: 

We don't require this and have no plans to adopt this as a requirement.  Although we do like being invited to the occasional board meeting as a guest.

Grade: A

9.  Having nonprofits to farm for votes in popularity-based contests:

We don't do this and have no plans to do so in the future.

Grade: A

10.  Making nonprofits make an online account to view grant questions and requirements:

We don't do this and have no plans to do so in the future.

Grade: A

11. Not allowing questions to be seen in advance in online applications:

We use Google Forms.  If a form has multiple pages and required answers it will prevent them from moving forward.  You can get around this by typing something just to get around the "required" question error and come back to it later.

Grade:  B-

12.  Having LOIs that are basically a full grant proposal: 

We do not require Letters of Intent at this time.

Grade: A

13.  Requiring grantees to pay an application fee: 

We don't do this and have no plans to do so in the future.

Grade: A

14.  Not revealing character limits on online applications at the onset:

We do not have character limits use character limits at this time, other than what is automatically imposed by Google Forms based on the question type.

You can type as long of a response as you'd like (within reason) but we are a fan of the Bottom Line Up Front style as opposed to an executive summary.

A number of us are active redditors and are not going to judge if you include in a text field a TL;DR or ELI5.

Grade: A

15.  Requiring the entering in of information that can be found on an attachment:

We are maybe sometimes a bit guilty of this one.  It might be required because we want to be able to aggregate the data into a table and be able to filter based on certain responses.  If we didn't then we would have to have one of our colleagues transfer the responses to the table which could lead to copy-paste and other errors.  We will try to minimize reentering information but are unwilling to give it up entirely at this time.

Grade:  C+  

16.  Making application or report due dates December 31st, January 1st:

Most of our programs do not have due dates and organizations can apply at any time.

Grade: A

17.  Requiring more than annual reports/surveys:

We are busy and requiring more data collection would add to our workload as well.

Many of us do come from a software development background and are a fan of "Agile" development which has more frequent very brief check ins.

But that also means we are a fan of automating report generation.

Grade: B

18. Having ridiculous character limits:

At this time the only character limits are what is imposed by default by Google Forms.

Grade: A

19.  Asking for excessive or nonsensical information.

The example given cited an unreasonable request for personally identifiable information.

We take privacy very seriously and do not want personally identifying information unless strictly necessary.

If a particular person is identified in an application, it should be because they are a primary or secondary point of contact or are very important for a project's success E.g. a physician on a project that has to do with the field of medicine.

It is worth noting that at least some of the founding members of The Cade Moore Foundation think that college degrees are overrated.

When it comes to hiring, being a STAR(Skilled Through Alternative Routes) is generally acceptable in place of a degree.

When it comes to questions being "excessive" or "nonsensical" that is a matter of perspective.

Grade: B

20. Having ridiculous and nonsensical questions on impact: 

We may be guilty of asking and "ridiculous" and "nonsensical" questions, at least from a certain perspective.  The example that was:

"One funder literally asked, “How will this grant allow you to scale your impact?” It was for a $1000!"

That seems like a perfectly valid question as long as the funder is okay with receiving an honest answer.  Even if the answer is "It won't, it'll pay for x, y, z and that's it".

And what may seem like a nonsensical question might make perfect sense if the reader had additional information.

To give a hypothetical example we might ask "How far is your organization from the nearest hardware store?  Is it a large chain store or a smaller independently owned business?  Etc.

Home Depot, Lowes, Office Depot, and more all have corporate foundations that we may be interested in exploring a potential corporate sponsorship.  But without that background information those questions might look nonsensical to an uninformed reader.

Grade: B

21.  Demanding that nonprofits be financially self-sustaining:

We do not demand this.

Grade: A

22.  Requiring attendance at quarterly trainings or meetings: 

In general we do not like unneccessary meetings.  We would like to reduce meetings that make a person think 'This entire meeting could have been an email.'

Time is a precious and limited resource and while we do not want to commit to not requiring attendance at more frequent meetings or trainings; we do believe that there should be an extremely good reason for scheduling those meetings.

Grade: B+

23.  Asking nonprofit to return grant money for ridiculous reasons:

We have never done this and do not plan to in the future.

Grade: A

24.  Rescinding funding because a staff said or retweeted something negative about the funder or about funders in general:

We insult funders in general all the time, so that would be far from being an issue.  If anything, we applaud you for your bravery.

It seems like this rule is referencing a specific situation and it is difficult to comment without knowing the exact details of what was said.

When it comes to insulting The Cade Moore Foundation specifically, a founding member was asked and had the following to say:

"I don't have twitter so I probably wouldn't even see it.  My reaction would depend on if what was said was factual or not.  And if it was funny.  Although if someone doesn't like how the Cade Moore Foundation operates, I would much rather they tell us directly instead of via social media.

A lot of us spent years working for "corporate America" and are absolutely sick and tired of the workplace politics and BS.  Open and honest communication is very refreshing and how we, or at least I, prefer to communicate with people.

I am going to think about this some more.  Maybe we could write a rule to automatically forward any emails sent to info@TheCadeMooreFoundation.org with the word "Complaint" or "Grievance" to my inbox.  But that only works if people are willing to associate the complaint with an email address.

Many organizations have an "anonymous" tip line that employees can use.  We would also want to make it available to partner nonprofits so they could report any issues to us as well.

There seem to be a number of anonymous tip line services available.  We would be interested in one that allows for back-and-forth communication while still protecting the person's anonymity.  Implementing an anonymous tip line is a good thing to do but probably not very high up on the list of priorities.

Let's include that on our "report card for" the sake of accountability."

Grade: A-