Insights: How We Are Using Our Grantees’ Gift of Feedback: Echidna Giving’s 2025 Grantee Perception Report

As part of our ongoing commitment to our principles — in particular our principle to “prioritize learning about what is and is not working and iterating to improve” — last year, we asked the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to conduct a Grantee Perception Survey with Echidna Giving grantees. The survey offers a rare opportunity to learn how grantees experience their work with Echidna Giving, and how they perceive the impact we are having. 

Thank you to each of the 97 respondents for taking the time to offer us your perspectives. We received a 90 percent response rate, which tells us that grantees care about this relationship as much as we do. This year’s results come at a genuinely difficult moment for many in our portfolio as they face funding cuts and destabilizing geopolitics. That context makes their feedback even more meaningful — and makes our accountability to them even more important. Sharing back what we heard and what we plan to do about it is another way to live our values.

Looking Back

When we last surveyed grantees in 2022, we prioritized three areas for improvement:

1. We committed to better articulating and reinforcing the values, systems, and practices that contribute to strong grantee experiences. As a result, we concretized our principles and embedded them into our hiring, onboarding, and ongoing practices.
2. We considered how local community impact should become more central in how Echidna thinks about its work. As we have grown our team, we have hired staff closer to the communities our grantees serve to lead our grantmaking portfolios.
3. We have expanded our practice of providing grantees support beyond our grant dollars. In particular, over the last few years, we have brought grantees together in cities with heavy concentrations of grantees and around events like the Comparative and International Education Society conference.

What We Heard

We were gratified to hear highly positive feedback from grantees overall. As shown in the figure below (as well as in CEP’s summary findings and detailed findings), Echidna scored above typical funders on every headline measure in CEP’s comparative dataset of over 350 funders. Particularly strong areas included approachability, communications, organizational impact, field impact, and selection process clarity. 

We were heartened to see improvements across many measures since our last survey. Grantees see Echidna as having a meaningful impact on their organizations, the field, and increasingly, their communities. They point to our contextual understanding and growing regional presence — particularly in East Africa — as meaningful contributors to that strength.

In addition, we saw positive shifts in our grantmaking characteristics: we’ve increased our average grant amount and duration. Grantees also report that our support has helped them address gender more intentionally and strengthen their monitoring and evaluation practices.

What We’re Focused on Between Now and the Next Survey

Our team is incredibly proud of the work we do together with our grantee partners, and we are grateful for this feedback. At the same time, these results remind us of our responsibility to continue doing this work well — particularly in a time that is turbulent for the field. Here are the three things we’ll be working on in the years ahead.

1. Protect and formalize the relational practices that grantees value most

Grantees continue to describe Echidna as collaborative, communicative, and supportive. They feel comfortable raising challenges, and they have a clear understanding of our strategy and expectations. We will continue investing in trust-based, respectful, communicative ways of working — and we will work to make those practices durable through intentional hiring, onboarding, transition management, and attention to staff capacity. As we grow, the challenge is not just maintaining these relationships, but also protecting the conditions that make them possible.

2. Explore ways to add value for grantees beyond funding

More than 80 percent of Echidna grantees receive support beyond their grant dollars — more than at the typical funder — and grantees agree more strongly than typical that this support met an important need and was a worthwhile use of their time. Perhaps because of the value they derive from this support, the most common request in this year’s survey (again!) was for more opportunities for connection, collaboration, and learning across grantees. 

We will continue offering thought partnership, introductions, and resources to grantees. As for the request for more connections across grantees, we want to gather more input before we invest more heavily in this, because we know that bringing people together takes partners’ precious time. We want to know what would make those investments genuinely worthwhile. Grantees can expect their program officer to initiate a conversation with them about this soon, and we’re counting on you for a candid response.

3. Reduce unnecessary burden while preserving what is helpful

Grantees continue to rate Echidna’s processes as clear, relevant, and adapted to their needs, and they place our selection process in the top 20 percent of CEP’s dataset for clarity and transparency. Many describe our interactions as genuinely collaborative rather than transactional. That said, we also learned that our processes have become more time-intensive. The median Echidna grantee spent nearly twice as much time on process requirements over the life of their grant as in 2022. 

Grantees still report that the time is worth the funding they receive — but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t interrogate these results more carefully. We will take a careful look at where grantees are spending time in proposals and reporting. Our goal is to look for ways to reduce friction while keeping the parts of the process that support clarity, mutual learning, and strong partnership.

A Final Word

We feel incredibly privileged to work alongside our grantee partners and are grateful for this gift of feedback. We’ll check back in with grantees in three years through another formal survey. In the meantime, we hope grantees will continue to share with us — directly, and whenever it feels right — how we can better support them and what we could be doing differently.