Assessment tool for grantseekers: personality quiz edition?

June 3, 2014 3:19 PM

I am currently working with a local nonprofit to create a new grant program focused on community engagement. This organization serves primarily as a funding intermediary, raising funds and distributing them as grants to other nonprofits throughout the region. They actually have a number of existing grant programs that already require varying levels of community engagement, education, and/or outreach, and have tasked me with creating a self-assessment tool to pair potential grantees to the most appropriate grant(s). I'm thinking I need a tool that would help me create something similar to those personality quizzes you find online, but I am finding it difficult to know what resources exist for this and how I should format the thing.

This really breaks down into two questions:

1. What free or inexpensive resources exist for creating this type of assessment? Preferably it would be the type of thing we could link to on our website, and anyone could take it and immediately see which grants they should look at. SurveyMonkey (at least the free verson) does not seem to be able to do this, and I question the reputability of the sites I've found offering to help me create free "personality quizzes" (nevermind the functionality those would offer). Does anyone have any suggestions?

2. The more difficult question here is how to format this type of assessment when there are varying dimensions of grant requirements. I have created a "Continuum of Engagement" to help conceptualize where our grant programs fit on a scale from "no engagement" to "the target community is basically calling all the shots." But there are other elements I'd also like to weigh, based on the requirements of each grant. Is there a way to incorporate multiple axes in this type of survey?

Any advice on these points would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if there's anything I need to clarify or expand upon. Thank you!

posted by a.steele to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: One common way of doing such surveys is to take each variable you want to measure (I assume that community engagement may break down to a number of different variables) and have people answer them using a Likert scale. I think the key to getting useful information from a survey structured in that way is to define the mid point and both extremes on the scale in a concrete way that the survey takers can relate back to their organization so that they can rank themselves appropriately.

It also depends what the other elements are. If the other elements are things like budget size, focus area (health, education, environmental etc), then you can just have a multiple choice question for that, and if you wanted to you could make the questions that they see after that be dependent on their answers. It wouldn't require multiple axes in this case so I might not be understanding what you want to measure.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 4:10 PM on June 3, 2014

I think you're overthinking this. My 27 years managing a nonprofit never included the use of this type of "tool" to determine which funding sources/grants I should look at.

I would suggest that you use your time creating a well crafted explanation of each of your funding streams that clearly state the goals, objectives, requirements that agencies need to meet to be considered for funding, target populations, geographic orientation, timelines for RFPs/funding, etc.

It is up to the development director and/or grant writer of your local agencies to seek out this information and determine which funding is a match for their own mission and programming.

I think you're underestimating the ability of your agencies to determine this without an artificial "tool".
posted by HuronBob at 6:03 PM on June 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

I sent you a MefiMail related to this!
posted by Kwine at 8:01 PM on June 3, 2014