Complementing our existing challenge model, the open call allows funders to provide general operating support to a cohort of at least 20 organizations within a particular field (i.e., a specific geography, topic, or type of organization) with awards of $1 million each.

In March of this year, Yield Giving announced that, through the Yield Giving Open Call, 361 organizations were receiving $640 million for their work with people and in places experiencing the greatest need in the United States.

While Lever for Change has launched 14 challenges to date, this was our first open call. As with all firsts, it was a rich learning experience. Today, we are sharing three of our key takeaways about what makes an open call successful.

One goal of Lever for Change’s new service is to allow donors to make unrestricted gifts to organizations with fewer resources, thereby injecting meaningful amounts of capital into underfunded fields and organizations to support progress and collective growth. To successfully achieve this goal, however, it is essential that as many potentially eligible organizations as possible hear the call and apply. When Lever for Change launches a challenge, our team leverages our networks, now more than 14,000 strong, including partners, funders, intermediaries, and Bold Solutions Network members, to help spread the word.

For the Yield Giving Open Call, which invited community-led, community-focused nonprofits from across the United States and U.S. Territories to apply, we also reached out to hundreds of community foundations across the U.S. and U.S. Territories, asking for their partnership in spreading the word to their respective communities. This collaborative, strategic effort resulted in the Open Call receiving 6,353 applications from all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands–the highest number of applications we’ve ever received. Not only did we reach a broad swath of applicants, but we also successfully reached applicants for whom a $1 million general operating gift would be catalytic. In a post-process survey, 61 percent of applicants reported that they had never received a single grant as large as $1 million prior to applying to the Open Call.

In our original challenge model, which seeks to scale a solution to a critical challenge, applicants are asked to submit an application in which they detail a specific project, or solution. Because our open call model seeks to grow a field by supporting a set of organizations through the provision of general operating grants, applicants instead submit an application describing their organization and work as a whole, rather than one specific project. For example, while in a classic challenge process, applicants might be asked to describe their solution and the problem it aims to address, Yield Giving Open Call applicants were asked to describe the problem(s) faced by members of their community and how their work enabled community members to make significant progress to overcome those problems.

Like our original challenge model, Lever for Change’s open call model holds true to our guiding principles–a demonstrated commitment to openness and transparency, to rigorous evaluation, and to providing value to each participating organization. This means making critical information (e.g., application, eligibility parameters, scoring criteria, and timeline) publicly available on a website, facilitating a rigorous, multi-stage review process, and ensuring that applicants receive the (anonymous) feedback given by their peers and an external Evaluation Panel.

Of organizations applying to the Yield Giving Open Call, while about half reported having previously participated in a funding process that involved an external review panel, more than three-quarters had never participated in a funding process in which their peers reviewed their applications. Most applicants found the feedback they received from their peers to be insightful and actionable. Nearly three-quarters of applicants that underwent Evaluation Panel Review characterized the feedback they received at that stage to be “very helpful.” More than half of applicants indicated a preference for open calls over traditional grantmaking due to the quality of feedback they received on their application. Likewise, the majority felt that an open call offered a higher level of process transparency than traditional grantmaking.

We learned a tremendous amount from this experience–we look forward to continuing to learn, and to implementing these takeaways in the management of future open calls.