In 2016, The Boston Foundation (TBF) launched an open grantmaking portfolio to distribute $2 million per year in a completely open grantmaking process. Grants are between $10,000 and $50,000, and TBF encourages grantees to leverage TBF’s grants to garner additional funding.  The Open Door Grants are intended to build an ecosystem of strong organizations beyond TBF’s grantees in their five core strategies and to strengthen communications and collaboration with the broader community.

TBF engaged Impact Catalysts (through its predecessor firm, Root Cause) to assist in developing the strategy and criteria for the open grantmaking portfolio. We helped TBF to define success for the first year of implementing the portfolio and to determine how to measure whether or not it is achieving its success markers. Markers of success include: establishing a sense of openness and accessibility with the community, catalyzing innovation and new ideas, surfacing alternative ways to address key issues in the community, building the health of the local nonprofit sector, promoting the ability for grantees to leverage TBF’s grants to gain more funding, and building goodwill with the community. We designed a performance measurement system that TBF uses to track outcomes against these key indicators of success, allowing TBF to measure and communicate the impact of its open grantmaking portfolio both internally and externally.