Perspective: How the Pandemic is Affecting Our Grantees
March 19, 2021 - In January 2021, we surveyed our grantees to better understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their revenue, staffing and donor engagement. About a third of our grantees responded to the survey, making its results statistically significant. Be sure to click through the three graphs via the arrows at the bottom of the page to see the full results.
The survey results highlighted a few things:
Many of our grantees are feeling the contraction brought on by the pandemic, but for most of them, the declines have not been catastrophic: about 57% reported revenue declines, but for most of them the declines were capped at 20%;
Their experience of increased support from individual donors reflected the industry-wide trend that many donors answered the call to support those in need during the pandemic; and
As expected, private educational institutions fared worse than public institutions as private fundraising was influenced by pandemic-related uncertainty while public stimulus funding was available.
Armed with this information and with the results of conversations with our program officers, we are looking at continuing to provide capacity-building opportunities for 2021 to help grantees build resilience, including a second cohort of our digital fundraising training program.
We look forward to staying in touch as 2021 unfolds.
