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Case Study:
gos funding —
The Impact of five years of grantmaking
Project
Brief
Richmond Memorial Health Foundation had spent five years running its General Operating Support program, funding grantees with unrestricted grants built on trust rather than tight programmatic strings. By most measures available to a funder, the program looked like it was working. Grantees kept applying. Relationships stayed intact. Reports came in on time.
Underneath that surface sat a harder truth every funder eventually has to reckon with. A grantee who depends on your funding has little incentive to tell you, directly, where your program is falling short. The candor a funder needs to actually learn from its own grantmaking is exactly the candor its structural power makes hardest to get. RMHF wanted to know what was really working in its General Operating Support program, including the parts it might not want to hear, and it needed someone outside the funding relationship to ask the question in a way grantees could answer honestly.
We hired Strategic Disruption Consulting to independently evaluate five years of our general operating support grantmaking, including the parts we might not want to hear. She ran a thoughtful, participatory process that earned real candor from our grantees, and the resulting report didn’t pull punches. It named what worked, but also named where we fell short, with the kind of specificity that only comes from someone who knows how to build trust in a room. Those findings are now directly informing our next strategic framework. Highly recommend Danielle and the team at SDC to any organization that actually wants to learn from its work, not just showcase it.
— Albert Walker,
Senior Executive, Richmond Memorial Health Foundation
How SDC designed and implemented the impact assessment
Strategic Disruption Consulting was brought in to independently evaluate five years of RMHF's General Operating Support grantmaking, serving as a confidential intermediary between the foundation and its grantee cohort of 20 organizations. That role mattered as much as the research design. Grantees needed to know their individual responses would never be traceable back to them by the funder who decides their next grant, so every organization and every grantee-side individual involved in the study was anonymized throughout the research and the final report.
The research groundwork came first: a full interview guide, grantee survey, webinar package, logic model, and alignment memo, each built to surface honest signal rather than diplomatic answers. From there, our team conducted interviews and surveys across the full grantee cohort, examined how GOS funding was actually used on the ground, and ran a participatory grantee review process so the people closest to the funding had a voice in shaping what the findings meant, not just supplying the data behind them.
The result is a report written for a public audience, RMHF's own leadership, its grantees, peer funders, and the broader philanthropic field, in a direct, liberatory voice rather than a hedged internal memo. It names what the General Operating Support program did well and where it fell short, with the kind of specificity that only comes from grantees who trusted the process enough to say what they actually thought.
What Changed
RMHF now has an independent, five-year evaluation of its General Operating Support program built on real candor from the grantees closest to the work, not a self-report. The findings are specific enough to act on, and RMHF is already using them to shape its next strategic framework.
Why it matters
Most grantmaking evaluations measure whether a program did what it said it would do. Fewer are built to surface what grantees will only say when they trust the process protecting them. A funder evaluation case study like this one is only as useful as the honesty it manages to earn, and that honesty rarely shows up when the funder is the one asking the questions directly.
RMHF's willingness to commission an evaluation that could name where it fell short, and to build in the confidentiality and participatory design needed to get an honest answer, is itself a marker of a foundation trying to learn rather than perform learning. The resulting findings are now shaping RMHF's next strategic framework, which is the outcome every grantmaking evaluation is meant to produce and few actually reach.
