Reflecting on Our 2025 CEP Results

As a data-driven funder, we intentionally seek out information and feedback—whether from grantees, philanthropic peers, or the sector at large—to continuously improve our work. Learning from partners and peers plays a crucial role in deepening our understanding of the education landscape and the challenges facing nonprofits; it also informs how we help organizations unlock innovation, evidence, and growth.

To gather candid input from our grantees, we partner with the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to administer the Grantee Perception Report (GPR) every two years. This report gathers anonymous feedback from our grantees and benchmarks our results against more than 350 foundations. In the 2025 report, 79 grantees—representing 64 percent of those invited—shared their perspectives on Overdeck Family Foundation’s impact, relationships, and processes. We’re deeply grateful to each of these organizations for taking the time to provide thoughtful insights.

Here, we detail key findings from the 2025 GPR, which point to meaningful improvements since the 2023 survey, as well as opportunities for our team to refine how we serve as catalytic partners in the years ahead.

Areas to celebrate

Greater impact on grantees

Our rating for impact on grantee organizations jumped from the 40th to 56th percentile, with notably strong ratings from grantees we’ve supported for more than four years. This marks the highest rating we’ve achieved to date for this question, aligned with our 2023 commitment to deepen our impact. We believe that gains in our understanding of grantees’ organizational goals and strategies—which increased from the 37th to the 87th percentile—have better enabled us to positively impact our grantee partners.

Stronger, more trusting relationships

Following our 2023 survey, we committed to strengthening grantee relationships to more effectively impact and support grantees. This meant having more open lines of communication, more site visits and other opportunities for connection, and increased capacity-building support. In 2025, we were thrilled to see dramatic improvements, many in the top quartile, across nearly every measure of relationship quality, which we believe played a key role in our high ratings for greater impact on grantee organizations. For example, grantees shared that they feel more comfortable approaching staff with challenges (30th to 93rd percentile), find our team highly responsive (64th to 97th percentile), and view our relationships as rooted in trust (33rd to 84th percentile). This progress reflects the deep expertise of our program and cross-functional staff, as well as our focus on multi-year funding commitments and willingness to offer capacity-building support that helps grantees address challenges more proactively and effectively.

Higher value capacity-building support

Eighty-seven percent of grantees reported receiving at least one form of non-monetary support, an increase from 80 percent in 2023, placing us in the 92nd percentile among funders. Notably, we saw a sharp increase in grantees’ agreement that this support met a critical need (27th to 63rd percentile) and that it was worth their time (32nd to 74th percentile). This improvement likely stems from our increased efforts to offer a broader suite of capacity-building supports and our proactive approach to aligning these offerings with grantee strategies, goals, and challenges.

Clearer, more consistent communications

Ratings for our communication with grantees continue to improve. In particular, we saw increased ratings for the clarity of our strategy and goals from the 5th percentile in 2019 to the 82nd percentile in 2025. We also received higher ratings compared to our 2023 survey for consistency (50th to 81st percentile) and transparency of our communications (63rd to 86th percentile). This strong trajectory reflects our team’s internal collaboration to sharpen our messaging and ensure strategies are coherently communicated across channels.

Advances in grants administration

We were pleased to see improved feedback related to our grantmaking processes. Grantees reported that they found our grant selection process more transparent (27th to 77th percentile) and helpful (27th to 56th percentile) than in 2023. And, we saw improvements in perceptions of our grant reporting process, with grantees increasingly rating it as more straightforward (42nd to 70th percentile) and conducive to learning (74th to 88th percentile). These gains reflect our ongoing efforts to clarify and systematize our grants management function, including the implementation of an updated grants management system in 2022 and a reduction in the number of steps and forms required in our grantmaking process.

Areas for Improvement

Declines in fieldwide impact

While we saw increases in our ratings for impact on grantees, we also saw a decline in ratings of our impact on the field, which decreased from the 61st to the 40th percentile. At the same time, we continue to receive positive ratings for advancing the state of knowledge in grantees’ fields (83rd percentile), which tells us there’s an opportunity to ensure our knowledge generation efforts lead to measurable field-wide impact through an increased focus on evidence-based adoption and policymaking.

More intensive grantmaking process

Despite our commitment to alleviating administrative burdens, we saw an uptick in ratings for the intensity of our grant reporting process. Grantees reported spending a median of 60 hours on grant processes, up from 40 hours in 2023, placing us in the 85th percentile among funders. Newer grantees report spending significantly more time on processes than long-standing grantees (69 hours vs. 50 hours), and we improved, but remain in the bottom quartile of funders for effort required in our selection process in relation to the amount of funding received.

Learning and looking ahead

Feedback from our grantee partners is always an essential input for our annual strategic planning process, but this year it feels particularly important. Not only has it been a year of rapid innovation and learning, but it’s also been five years since we launched our venture funding-inspired model, which was designed to strengthen our grantee relationships, offer clearer grantmaking guidelines, and deepen our impact—transforming much of how we do our work.

Since then, we’ve seen incredible progress in our results, both in terms of what our grantmaking has achieved and how external stakeholders—including grantees—perceive us in the field. As we engage in a review of our five-year progress, feedback from our grantees and the field will play a key role in informing the road ahead.

Here are some questions that are top of mind for our team as we engage in strategic and operational planning:

• How might we continue to deepen our impact on grantee organizations? This year’s positive results showed that our efforts to support grantees are paying off, especially when it comes to positively impacting the trajectory of their organizations and work. For 2026, we will plan to build on our existing efforts at strengthening grantee relationships, providing multi-tiered capacity-building support that ties into timely challenges and opportunities, and offering funding that helps grantees take advantage of opportunities to innovate, improve their evidence, and grow. We’ll also look at ways to be even more strategic in our advisory roles, offering a unique bird’s-eye view of the ecosystem to guide future planning and decision-making.
• How might we more effectively influence fieldwide outcomes? We will look for opportunities in the year ahead to be more focused in our grantmaking, ensuring that our strategies are clear about what impact they hope to achieve. GPR results as well as field interviews made us realize that we are effective at creating and funding knowledge products but don’t always do as well translating those resources into desired actions. For the year ahead, we’ll consider opportunities to complement our investments in knowledge creation with approaches that promote dissemination and adoption.
• How might we streamline grantmaking processes and administration? While we recognize that rigor is an important part of effective philanthropy, we also know efficiency matters. As we continue to grow our grantmaking, we’ll explore ways to right-size grant requirements, especially for pilot grants, and approach interactions with an eye toward balancing thoroughness with grantee time and capacity. We also want to ensure our processes can serve to encourage investments in innovative solutions, especially during a time of so much transformation in the education sector.

Thank you to our grantees for your partnership and transparent feedback, and thank you to CEP for your support in gathering and considering this invaluable input. We look forward to delving deeper into these critical questions and will transparently share our journey on our blog, LinkedIn, and in our newsletter—we hope you’ll follow along.

Explore more highlights from the 2025 Grantee Perception Report:

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

Header image courtesy of AbsolutVision on Unsplash