About Collanthropy
Collaboration platform for Grant Managers
Currently in its beta version, we are a collaboration platform for philanthropic grant makers. A platform where the grant managers of charitable funds not only network with other grant managers, working on similar initiatives / areas of interest, but they can also collaborate on practical matters, such as grantee assessments.
Service Provider to Philanthropic Funds, minimizing the administration of grantees
We also act as a service provider to the philanthropic funds, by assessing the grant recipients (grantees) on their behalf, and sharing the assessment results with other prospective funders, thereby helping the grantees in minimizing their workload and administration, and enabling them to remain focused on the more valuable grant work.
Why do we need a service provider in between a grant maker and a grant recipient?
Mostly, the grant making process works as follows:
1. Grant makers connect with grantees, or grantees approach grant makers for funding a project.
2. In both cases, the grant makers perform due-diligence on the grantee (organization) and the proposed project (the grant) before making a decision.
3. Every grant maker asks similar (due-diligence) questions to grantees, but in their own format, and requests supporting documentation, increasing the workload and administration of a grantee staff manifold.
4. Grantees with limited resources often provide documentation to grant makers via insecure channels at their end, such as public emails, which are prone to phishing, email spoofing and other cyber attacks.
5. Administrative staff at grant makers’ organization struggle to understand the supporting documentation and find it difficult to verify the legal, financial and compliance (money laundering, sanctions, law enforcement issues, negative media) related requirements. Some of them rely on expensive scanning tools, making the assessment process costlier and inefficient (multiple funders assessing same requirements).
How Collanthropy overcomes these challenges:
1. We partner with various grant makers, who in turn, retain us as their service provider, for an independent assessment of all their (potential) grantees.
2. Via our automated and secure collaboration platform, Grant makers inform us when a new grantee approaches them for funding or grantees proactively request us for an assessment.
3. We contact the (potential) grantee and request them to upload required information and supporting documentation directly on our secure grantee portal, thereby reducing risks of email phishing, spoofing or other cyber attacks.
4. We perform an independent and thorough due-diligence / assessment on the grantee organization, covering various aspects, such as their legal status, finances, compliance with sanctions regimes, anti-money laundering regulations, local charitable regulations (such as permissions to receive foreign funding), organizational capabilities, team composition, physical office location, identity documentation and procedures for safeguarding of vulnerable individuals, incident management and Whistleblower mechanisms.
5. The results of our assessment are made available to requesting grant maker within the agreed timeframe, at a much lower cost than they would have incurred themselves.
6. The assessment results are securely published on our platform, and made available to all our member grant makers, who can re-use this information, saving time for themselves but more importantly for the grantee who do not have to provide all the information again, and can spend that time on their project / initiatives.
7. The costs of the assessment are shared by all our partner grant makers collaboratively, by paying a fixed monthly subscription fee, that depends on the number of yearly grantees and number of countries the grant makers operates in, to ensure a fair share of the work.
8. The grantees never pay us, nor they can influence the assessment results, but if they want they can proactively (i.e. without a potential grant in pipeline) request an assessment via our secure portal. This provides an opportunity to them to showcase their projects / initiatives to potential new funders. We apply a curated approach for such proactive assessments.
9. The results of our assessment are only shared with grant makers; the grantees do not have access to the grant makers' networking section, discussion forum and cannot see the full assessment results.
How we differentiate against existing databases of charitable organizations?
1. We are not a database! We do not have any data, until we are asked to collect it, and granted consent to process it.
2. We do not populate / replicate publicly available data of any charitable entity, which is generally available on their own website or on (tax or charity related) regulatory body websites.
3. We perform an exclusive and in-depth assessment, only on request of potential funders or the grantees. The results of our own work are shared with multiple funders, who are our members, with secured access, so our work remains privileged and confidential information.
4. The combination of (legal, financial, organizational) aspects that we assess, and the fieldwork that we perform is generally not available on any known charity databases, and hence makes us a unique service provider to the philanthropy sector.
5. We re-verify and update the information provided to us annually, to ensure the potential funders are aware of any new developments, changes in the grantee situation.
6. In future, we will also act as an intermediary for incident reporting, auditing and periodic control-assessments (on-demand services).
Our core team comprises Philanthropic Risk and Compliance Experts, Cyber Security Professionals, Legal and Finance subject matter experts, who have several years of experience in their domains and understand the regulatory and operating environment of philanthropic organizations, as well as administrative challenges of charitable / not-for-profit entities.
Our head office is based in the Netherlands, but our team of subject matter experts is located across 5 continents. Our aim is to connect funders from developed countries with the grant recipients in developing countries.
Our secure data servers are physically located in Europe, ensuring compliance with strict privacy and security regulations, such as the GDPR. For more details: