Make it easy to work with us
Why it’s important to us
We want people who apply for a grant with us to have a great experience—one that’s simple and helps advance their vision of what’s possible. That includes not making people guess at what our intent is or what makes for a strong proposal, so we try to provide lots of help and guidance along the way.
We can’t fund every request that comes through our door. Through a supportive application experience, we hope we can help people develop their ideas and get some value from the experience whether they are funded or not.
How we’re doing
We survey applicants and grantees and use that feedback to continuously improve the applicant experience so we can do more of what’s working well and stop doing what’s not.
For this indicator, we looked across the two main programs we operated in 2024: Bush Fellowship and Community Innovation. Our most recent applicant survey data shows 59% of survey respondents said our processes are better than other foundations.
(We ask the question in terms of comparison to others because there aren’t industry benchmarks for us to use. We’ve found that just asking how it is to work with us, without any comparison, gets us mostly positive answers that might not really reflect how applicants feel—or give us much to act on. So, we’ve chosen this metric to compare our process to our peers even though it feels a bit awkward to us to ask it this way.)
Even though we are glad that applicants are having mostly positive experiences, we want to get better on this measure. We continue to work toward improving applicant experiences including through our Contact Hub, which is a single inquiry line for any and all requests and questions. You can learn more about this in our recent Contact Hub learning paper.
What’s next
We will continue to reflect on feedback and work to improve and adapt the application experience. Recently we added the option to submit a video for part of the Bush Fellowship application—we’ll continue to learn from that and to consider other ways we can provide other options.
* Source for chart: Applicant Surveys for Bush Fellowship and Community Innovation Grant programs, January – December 2024