*Note: this fund is currently closed for 2024 but more capacity-building funds will be available in mid-2025.

Introduction

Nonprofit organizations often struggle to fund impact measurement activities, formally gather participant feedback, experiment with program designs, or know how best to evaluate their programs. Additionally, they are often pressured by requests to demonstrate impact or collect data but are rarely provided flexible financial resources by funders to do so in ways that benefit their goals.

The GitLab Foundation launched the Learning for Action Fund in June 2024 to alleviate these problems and increase our grantees’ capacity to deepen their impact measurement, learning, experimentation, and feedback activities. This aligns with our philosophy that greater investments in evidence-building and feedback activities lead to more effective programs. Ultimately, our grantee’s participants directly benefit from these better services, increasing their opportunities for income growth, living wage jobs, and financial stability.

1. 2024 Fund Overview:

  1. Total Fund Size: $600,000
  2. Grant Amount: Grantees may request between $5,000 to $50,000 for learning for action projects
  3. Number of Awards: 10-20 grant awards (depending on the grant amounts awarded)
  4. Additional Benefits:
    1. 1:1 Coaching and Advisory Services: All grant awardees can access three coaching sessions with one of our two partners, Feedback Labs or Project Evident
    2. Quarterly Cohort Learning Sessions: Learn from other organizations facing similar impact measurement and participant feedback challenges

2. Grant Eligibility

  1. Only GitLab Foundation grantees with a grant contract effective date before August 1, 2024, are eligible.
    1. For current or future grantees who are not awarded grants, there may be future opportunities to gain learning for action funding in 2025.
    2. Please note: Learning for Action projects are not a requirement for receiving current or future funding from the Foundation.

3. Grant Use Restrictions and FAQs

  1. The funds must be used for learning activities where the potential results or insights could unlock significant program changes or funding opportunities.
  2. The fund focuses on learning for action! Action is defined in two ways:
    1. Program Improvements - the learnings lead to changes in program or service design that result in improved outcomes for the organizations’ participants
    2. Receiving Additional Funding - the learnings build more evidence on the effectiveness of the organization’s programs, which unlocks new funding
  3. Learning activities may include but are not limited to:
    1. Outcome measurement studies
    2. Impact evaluations from third-party consultants/researchers
    3. Needs assessments
    4. Participant feedback activities
    5. Data collection infrastructure improvements (or systems to aggregate and track impact data from multiple sources over time)
    6. Qualitative or quantitative methods
    7. Experimentation - A/B testing, lean randomized control trial
  4. Can this grant project be combined with other sources of funding?
    1. Yes, this grant can be combined with other funding sources to support a higher-cost learning project
  5. Can this grant only be used for technology, or can it be applied to cover personnel costs?
    1. This grant can support personnel time spent on learning-for-action activities. Often, nonprofit organizations may have enough data but struggle to support staff time to analyze and gain insights from it. The applicant must be specific in connecting the grant use to increased learning and potential programmatic changes that result from those learnings.
  6. Can this grant only be used for learning projects based in GitLab Foundation’s priority countries?
    1. Yes, the grant activities should be focused on improving the livelihoods of your participants based in the United States, Colombia, or Kenya.
  7. Can the grant be used to fund overhead and staffing costs?
    1. Yes, but the large majority of the award should be devoted to the implementation of the project. For universities and other academic institutions, overhead expenses should be limited to 10% of the total budget or less. This maximum rate applies to the primary grantee, sub-grantees, and sub-contracts.

4. Timeline:

5. Factors That Determine Grant Award Selection

  1. Learning Questions: What will this grant enable you to learn? What learning questions do you hope to answer or hypotheses you plan to test?
  2. Impact Potential: How will this learning grant improve the effectiveness or impact of your programs? For example, will the insights generated lead to reaching more people per year or improving program outcomes? (such as job placement or program completion rates)
  3. Future Funding Opportunities: Will the learnings from this grant improve your ability to attract additional funding? (For example, by improving the way your organization can communicate its impact) If so, please be specific in the ways this could lead to additional funding. Do you have specific audiences or funders in mind?
  4. Timeliness: Why is this project important now? How will it contribute to organizational goals?
  5. Community Engagement: Will this grant enable you to listen, learn from, and amplify the perspectives of your participants or their communities? If so, how?
  6. Impact Measurement Systems: Will this grant be used to improve impact measurement or data collection systems or infrastructure? If so, will your organization be able to benefit from this grant beyond the grant period of one year?
  7. Budget Allocation Plan: Please list how the grant amount will be allocated. Do you intend to engage any vendors? Please provide details.
  8. Learnings for Action: How will the learnings from this grant lead to action within your organization? Are organization leaders aligned with the goals of this grant?

6. Application, Review, and Award Process**:**

  1. Preparing to Apply for the Fund
    1. June 25th, 2024 - Application Portal Opens - Application Link HERE (Only GitLab Foundation Grantees Are Eligible)
      1. This includes any grantee that has received a grant from GitLab Foundation and any future grantee that has been approved for a grant before August 1, 2024.
    2. Please browse our list of featured feedback tools, vendors, and consultants!
      1. This list includes vendors that we have prior experience working with or have been recommended by our grantees
      2. These vendors are not required to be used, but we are happy to introduce grantees to these vendors
    3. We highly recommend interested applicants set up a 25-minute meeting with GitLab Foundation over Zoom here (for GitLab Foundation grantees only) to:
      1. Learn more about the potential project and clarify any questions
      2. Provide strategic feedback on project ideas
      3. Identify how the impact measurement or learning grant will lead to a greater impact for program participants
      4. Refer interested applicants to an impact measurement and feedback advisory meeting with Project Evident or Feedback Labs
    4. July 2nd, 2024 - Come join our kickoff webinar!
      1. Register **HERE** (for GitLab Foundation grantees only)
    5. July 9th, 2024 - Feedback Labs Webinar
      1. Come learn about best practices in collecting feedback with an Introduction to Feedback webinar hosted by Feedback Labs
      2. Register **HERE** (for GitLab Foundation grantees only)
  2. Review Applications August 16th - September 6th
    1. After applications are submitted by August 16th, 2024, the Learning for Action advisory committee will review applications and score them based on a rubric that is centered on the core factors.
    2. The grant awards will be announced on September 6th, 2024.

7. Grant Reporting

  1. At 6-months:
    1. The GitLab Foundation impact measurement team may check in with grantees 6-months after the grant award to discuss any preliminary learnings or insights
  2. At 12-months:
    1. Complete a brief impact report due 60 days after the one-year anniversary of the grant (<5 questions)
    2. Share any materials that were produced with the grant (e.g. research summary, needs assessment report, impact evaluation report, etc)
    3. Impact report questions may include:
      1. What were the primary learnings generated from this grant?
      2. What actions were taken due to these learnings?
      3. Did this learning grant help lead to additional funding?
      4. How have your programs changed or improved due to the learnings generated by this grant?

8. Learning for Action Fund Advisory Committee

The group listed below will be responsible for selecting the grant awards and advising the GitLab Foundation on ways to improve the design of future Learning for Action Fund opportunities.

Raj Borsellino, Director of National Philanthropy, Truist Foundation

Lucy Brainard, Director, Portfolio Success & Operations, Overdeck Family Foundation

Laura Budzyna, Founder, Beyond Measure

Rahim Fazal, GitLab Foundation Board Member, Co-founder of SV Academy

Elisa de Rooij Mansur, Principal, VelezReyes+

Daniel Muraya, Senior Regional Awards Manager, Aga Khan Foundation East Africa

Jessa Valentine, Deputy Director - Learning & Impact, Ascendium

9. Publications That Have Inspired Us

  1. Ten Reasons Not to Measure Impact—and What to Do Instead,By Mary Kay Gugerty & Dean Karlan - A nonprofit must be strategic when making the decision to conduct a rigorous and reliable impact evaluation. Rather than always focusing on experimental (RCT) designs, there are important intermediate monitoring and research activities that should happen first.
  2. Why we are keen on "learning organizations”, By Richard Sedlmayr - Learning organizations see implementation as an opportunity to have some impact immediately, while simultaneously learning how to become even more impactful in the future.
  3. The Promise of Lean Experimentation, By Peter Murray & Steve Ma - If you’re ready to make the leap into lean, start by testing it out. You do need buy-in from your team to embrace rapid experimentation, and you need to be willing to look at the data that you gather and to change your approach accordingly…build MVPs fast, and test them in the field. Then respond to the results—and iterate.
  4. How to gather high-quality nonprofit client feedback, By Valerie Threlfall and Megan Campbell - Nonprofit organizations are always looking for ways to increase the impact of their work. One way to serve your clients more effectively is to gather feedback from participants, then use what you learn to improve services and support organizational change initiatives.
  5. Why Customer Feedback Tools Are Vital for Nonprofits, By Fay Twersky and Fred Reichheld - In an era where customer feedback is ubiquitous in the for-profit world, very few nonprofits (or their donors) systematically collect, analyze, and use feedback from their recipients. Fortunately, new tools are becoming available that can help nonprofits gather beneficiary feedback at low cost.

10. Acknowledgements

Thank you to the many individuals who provided feedback on this fund concept:

Dan Rearick, Code the Dream

Goldie Chow, Generation.org

Kelly Fitzsimmons, Project Evident

Sarah Di Troia, Project Evident

Lindsay Smalling, 60 Decibels

Britt Lake, Feedback Labs

Daniel Muraya, Aga Khan Foundation