Learn - Continuous Improvement for Your Grants Program

We’ve come a long way. 

Let’s recap before we dive in: 

In June, we launched a book called Grants Program Design. 

The aim of this book? To share our expertise in grants. Over the years of running grants programs at Gitcoin we’ve learned that Grants = Growth. And we want to enable you to achieve growth too, through grants. 

Our four blog posts breaking down valuable information from the Grants Program Design book, are part of that.  We covered the first three stages of launching a successful grants program (as outlined in our book), in the blog posts:

• Define - Laying the Foundation for Your Grants Program
• Design - Crafting an Effective Grants Program
• Execute - Bringing Your Grants Program to Life

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What is the Learn Stage?

The Learn stage involves reflecting on the performance of your grants program, measuring impact, and identifying areas for improvement. It includes collecting data, analyzing results, and implementing changes based on what you’ve learned. This stage ensures that your program evolves and continues to meet the needs of your community.

What is it For?

This stage is designed to promote continuous improvement. It helps you understand what’s working well and what needs to be adjusted. By gathering and analyzing data, you can make informed decisions that enhance the effectiveness of your grants program. The learning step is crucial for maintaining transparency, accountability, and relevance and creating a responsive grants program that evolves based on real-world feedback and insights. 

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How to Use the Learn Stage

Retrospective: 

The most important part of the learning process is to run an effective retrospective on your program. Running a retrospective will enable a deeper understanding of the full impact of your program, especially through collection of feedback from those involved. You will make both qualitative and quantitative assessments around how close you came to your definition of success.

• We encourage Multi-Stage Retros, as there are certain times that are best for performing a retro: some text
  • Immediately after a program’s given end date to gain understanding of a given round’s performance
  • Across longer timelines to measure and report on longer term ROI of your program 
• The questions you would ask in a short term vs. long term retro also differ:some text
  • Short term retro questions serve to find out for instance how the engagement was, if the eligibility criteria bring the right proposals, or if objectives were scoped in a way that was easy to understand. 
  • Long term retro questions serve to dig into for instance the effectiveness of the mission of the program, and what kind of ROI the program is creating in the ecosystem. 

For a few sample questions and retrospective worksheets, download the Grants Program Design Playbook.

Reporting: 

Executing a proper reporting process creates more transparency, and therefore more legitimacy, for your program. This is also where you will source your case studies and testimonials from to build your program’s and your ecosystem’s reputation. The first step within the reporting process is to decide upon what will be reported. For instance: 

• How well the objectives of your program were met.
• What data should be shared to serve as back-up for certain claims.
• What was learned and how that will impact your approach for the next round.

There are some Best Practices to consider when doing reporting: 

• Data Wins: The aim is to turn as much analysis as possible into numbers.
• Granular Analysis: Sharing nuanced detail about each aspect of your grants program after a round, from the key areas of feedback received. 
• Visualizations Work: Use graphs, models and even screenshots to have key pieces of information stand out when sharing your results.
• Use Stories For The Unquantifiable: Testimonials, quotes, before & after, success stories, and case studies are great ways to highlight lessons and learnings from your grants program without over-indexing on the numbers. 



It is essential to hear how your funds have impacted the work of grantees. Through Grantee Reporting, you can decentralize impact reporting for your round and create more clarity on how the funds you’ve distributed are impacting your ecosystem. Letting  your grantees know exactly what you would like them to report on and in what cadence is key. Consider putting together a template for grantees to use as a report. 

When creating reports you also get the opportunity to create the narrative around your grants program. You want to construct a narrative that’s truthful and aligned to your objectives and vision.

Shortly after your program concludes is the best time for you to communicate to your community what you think it achieved, how you’d like them to feel about it, and what you’re hoping it will lead to in the future.

After you publish your reports, you should solicit community feedback to create the best possible version of your program and your organization!

For a breakdown of specific impact tracking tools, download the Grants Program Design Playbook.

Expected Outcomes

By the end of the Learn stage, you should have:

• Comprehensive Data: A robust set of data that provides insights into the performance and impact of your grants program.
• Actionable Feedback: Valuable feedback from grantees and stakeholders that highlights strengths and areas for improvement.
• Documented Lessons: A clear record of lessons learned and best practices that can guide future rounds of funding.
• Improved Program: A continuously evolving grants program that is more effective, efficient, and aligned with the needs of your community.

And that concludes our four-part blog series of how to successfully run grants programs, which consolidates years of learning from running grants programs at Gitcoin. 

We have worked with some of the biggest organizations and grants programs in the business including Arbitrum, Optimism, Uniswap, Polygon. Through running many grants programs at Gitcoin, we know that Grants = Growth. And we will keep sharing more essential resources for others to realize growth through grants. 

For a Case Study, and more key strategies to creating a thriving ecosystem where funded projects have a lasting positive impact, download the Grants Program Design Playbook.

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