Photo credit: Flickr user Ernest Duffoo.

You were elated to receive that grant you applied for, but then the phone calls stopped. Email responses that used to come within minutes started taking days – or even weeks. What happened? Did you do something wrong?

The probable answer is no; it’s just part of a normal relationship between funders and grant recipients that Knight Foundation is trying to improve.

Michael Maness, Knight Foundation’s vice president for journalism and media innovation, has a term for it: “The Big Fade.”

“At first there’s a lot of attention,” he said. “People apply for something. We react to it. They send in documents. We verify them. There’s a lot of back and forth. We set the pace, and then we sort of disappear because our job is moving on to the next project or idea.”

That can leave grant recipients, many of whom may have received such an award for the first time, feeling adrift. It’s a problem that we at Knight Foundation, a leading funder in media innovation, the arts and communities, are addressing by changing the way we work and building support mechanisms for our grantees.

Maness said transparency is one of the first tools for combatting The Big Fade. “Moving forward, we need to tell our grantees up front that this will happen. People who don’t know that think something’s wrong when the nature of communications shifts happens.”

That can be especially important for people working alone or in small teams on their first projects. At some point, they are likely to encounter “the dark night of the innovator,” a time when they believe the way forward is hopeless. “That often happens when you are the farthest away from interacting with us,” Maness said.

Forming cohorts and hosting convenings also helps. It helps grantees build personal connections that make them feel comfortable reaching out to others later via email or telephone.

Recipients of grants from the Knight Prototype Fund, which awards $35,000 to take early-stage information projects from idea to demo, receive human-centered design training as part of a cohort, and for six months they are part of a “class” that allows them to self-check their progress.

Cohorts also give Knight an organizing principle to bring people together. It’s an idea that was reinforced by the first-time gathering last summer at the Stanford University d.school of 42 people from projects we’ve funded through the News Challenge and the Knight Enterprise Fund.

One of the attendees described it as “the most important event they attended all year,” Maness said. “Some grantees believe that convening is as important as the money. Of course, they can use that check, but being a part of the Knight network helps accelerate the project.”

At Knight, however, it isn’t just about the program officer’s relationship with a grant. Everyone at the foundation has a role, from the receptionist who may field an initial question on the phone to President Alberto Ibargüen.

“Everyone here has a piece of this,” said Dennis Scholl, Knight’s vice president for the arts. “That has a lot of value to me in how we do our grants.”

The arts program, which sponsors open contests in Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia and St. Paul in addition to broader community arts funding in eight Knight cities, focuses on having “quality contact” with its grantees, an effort that has gained momentum as we’ve outsourced some of the administrative functions. It’s allowed the small arts staff of four to spend more time with grantees, he said, especially as it’s focused more funding on smaller, grassroots projects.

“I don’t think of myself as a funder,” said Tatiana Hernandez, the arts program officer who manages the Knight Arts Challenge. “I’m a community organizer who gives money away.”

Scholl also emphasized the power of convening and cohorts, saying the arts program has expanded its invitation list for events, often including current, past and potential grantees when it holds celebrations, lunches, Q&As and other gatherings.

 “The energy in the room for those things is what we’re getting up every single day to do,” Scholl said. “You can feel the community moving forward when you put, like we did in Detroit, 60 Knight Arts Challenge winners and 150 CEOs, politicians and other civic leaders all at the same table and watch what happens. There’s a moment that comes out of that.”

Scholl added that three things happen: synergy, where the artists develop their own efficiencies; collaborations, which creatives often resist when they’re forced into them; and the formation of informal cohorts.

“When you see that happen and projects emanate from it, that’s what this about,” Scholl said.

Knight is also working to increase the professional development of its grantees in many ways. It can take many different forms, through providing arts management training in partnership with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center; by funding projects such as the Venture Law Project in Miami to provide novice entrepreneurs with advice; or by sharing lessons from experienced grantees with new ones.

Carol Coletta, Knight’s vice president of community and national initiatives, said working across multiple sectors across the country and sharing the lessons internally and with the wider world, helps everyone work with grantees better.  

“The only way we learn is through our grantees,” Coletta said. “That for me puts us on a more level playing field.”

Michael D. Bolden is editorial director of Knight Foundation.