Grantee due diligence: what to collect and why

What is usually collected

The common set is remarkably stable across grantmakers, which is precisely why re-collection is wasteful.

• Legal and tax status, including determination letter and current registration
• Governance: board roster, bylaws, conflict-of-interest policy, recent minutes where relevant
• Financial position: audited financials or reviewed statements, current operating budget, funder concentration
• Programme evidence: what the organization does, for whom, at what scale
• Policies relevant to the grant: financial controls, safeguarding, data handling
• Prior reporting: how previous grants were used and reported

Where the time actually goes

Reviewers rarely spend their time deciding. They spend it chasing a missing document, reconciling a figure against a different year, and re-establishing context an earlier colleague already established. The decision itself is often the last ten minutes of a multi-week process.

Separating the record from the decision

The evidence a grantee holds is the same regardless of who is asking. The criteria applied to it are specific to each funder and are usually confidential. Treating those as two different layers means the organization can maintain one record while each funder keeps its own decision lens private.

• The record: organization-maintained, provenance-stamped, reusable across funders
• The lens: funder-specific criteria, weightings, and thresholds, never exposed to other institutions
• The decision: made by a human reviewer, with the reasoning attached to the evidence

What a reviewer should still do by hand

A shared record does not remove judgement. Programme fit, strategy alignment, relationship history, and risk appetite stay with the funder. What changes is that the reviewer starts from complete, dated, sourced evidence rather than assembling it.