Caroline Hartnell

What can strengthen credibility, improve grantee relationships, facilitate greater collaboration, increase public trust, reduce duplication of effort, and build communities of shared learning? Funder transparency, according to the latest GrantCraft guide, published last week: Opening Up: Demystifying Funder Transparency.

‘Transparency has been a buzzword several years, but we wanted to specifically draw the connection between funder transparency and good grantmaking,’ says the GrantCraft blog on 7 February. ‘Through in-depth interviews with more than 25 funders from around the world and input from more than 700 of you in a survey last summer, we boiled transparency down to a mindset in which funders default to saying, “let’s publicly share this”.’

In the forthcoming March issue of Alliance, Fran Perrin, founder and director of the UK’s Indigo Trust, one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, takes up the transparency issue from the perspective of individual philanthropists. ‘Grantmakers should be able to see at a glance who is funding in a similar area,’ she says. ‘They can then choose to collaborate or simply to learn from the other funders’ experience. This will take us one step nearer to a more strategic approach to philanthropy for donors and recipients.’ Read the full article in the March issue of Alliance.

Caroline Hartnell, is editor of Alliance magazine.