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NGOs and Social Enterprises
HR for Grant-Making Foundations: Programme Officers, Trustees and Small Teams
A grant-making foundation does its work through other organisations, with a small team that must judge, support and account for money. Here is how to organise that team well.
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A grant-making foundation gives money, and sometimes advice and convening support, to other organisations working on education, health, livelihoods or the environment. Some foundations are family or corporate, others are independent or linked to a trust. The team is typically small: programme officers who look after a portfolio of partners, finance and compliance staff, monitoring and learning staff, and a head who answers to trustees or a board. Programme officers travel to partners, review proposals and reports and advise on strategy. The people are knowledgeable and often come from the social sector, and the work involves confidential information about partners and sometimes about the donors' families. Roles are few, so each person carries a great deal of the foundation's judgement. See also HR for NGOs and social enterprises.
Who does the work
- Programme officers and managers
- Due diligence and compliance staff
- Finance and grants administration staff
- Monitoring, evaluation and learning staff
- Communications and knowledge staff
- Executive director or chief executive
- Executive assistants and board secretaries
- Fellows and short-term researchers
Where HR strains in grant-making foundations
Trustees and staff pull different ways
Board members have views on whom to fund and how, and staff are left to reconcile them without clear lines of authority.
Roles are thin and overloaded
A programme officer manages many partners and also does due diligence, reporting and travel, so depth gives way to breadth.
Judgement lives in a few heads
Knowledge of partners and sectors sits with individuals, and an officer's exit leaves the foundation with files but not the understanding.
Pay and structure are unclear
Salaries have grown by negotiation, so people in similar roles are paid differently and the reason is hard to explain.
Confidential information is handled casually
Partner assessments and family matters pass through email and shared drives with no rule on who sees what.
Staff feel distant from the work
Officers deal in proposals and reports and seldom see programmes in action, and the gap makes the job feel abstract after a few years.
Growth in grant size outpaces the team
A larger corpus or a new focus area adds partners without adding people, and the same few carry it.
What a working HR set-up looks like
- 01
Write down decision rights
Which decisions belong to trustees, which to the head and which to officers, with a simple route for disagreement. The organisation design work lays this out.
- 02
Define portfolio roles
Clear scope for each programme officer, including how many partners, what due diligence they do and what is shared. The role design and job descriptions work helps.
- 03
Capture partner knowledge
A standard note on each partner and sector that outlives any one person, kept with access rules. The HR documentation process covers the files.
- 04
Create a simple pay structure
Bands for roles with a stated logic, reviewed on a fixed date. The compensation benchmarking work builds it.
- 05
Set confidentiality rules
A short policy and system rights on who can see partner assessments, board papers and personal matters. The HR policies and governance work covers it.
What to put in place first
- List the decisions where trustees and staff disagreed in the past year and how each was settled.
- Count the partners each programme officer is responsible for.
- Ask who would find the notes on a key partner if the officer left tomorrow.
- Compare pay for two officers in similar roles and check you can explain the difference.
Confirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
Where GullyHR helps
- Organisation design
Clear decision rights between trustees, the head and programme staff.
- Role design and job descriptions
Programme officer roles with a sensible portfolio size and a defined scope.
- Compensation benchmarking
A pay structure you can explain, set against comparable organisations.
- Founder dependency and succession planning
A plan so that the foundation's knowledge and leadership do not depend on one or two people.
Every engagement starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes. Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Blogs worth reading first
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in ngos and social enterprises, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
HR Management
Everyone reports to the founder: when and how to redesign the structure
A flat structure works until the founder becomes the only route to a decision. How to tell when you have passed that point, and how to redesign without a reorganisation.
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Salary bands for SMEs: building grades when you have never had any
Most salary structures grew one negotiation at a time. How to build grades and bands from what you already pay, without repricing everybody at once.
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"What if this person resigned tomorrow?" A succession exercise for small companies
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Questions owners ask
It depends on the size of grants and how much support each partner needs. Count how many hours a typical partner takes and set a portfolio from that rather than a fixed number.
Agree in writing which decisions trustees take and how they hear from staff. A regular agenda and a clear route for disagreements reduce the informal pressure.
Compare against organisations of similar size and type in your sector, and decide what you can sustain. Pay is one of several reasons people choose this work.
Decide who needs access, put the rule in a short policy and set system permissions to match. Confirm any legal duties with a qualified professional.
Plan visits into the year, share partner stories within the team and let junior staff join senior ones. Distance from the work is a common reason people leave.
Expect an unhurried first call about who decides what between trustees and staff, and how programme officers' portfolios are shaped. We would also ask where partner knowledge is held and how confidential information is handled. A sensible first piece of work is a short note on decision rights and portfolio roles, followed by a simple pay structure. Nothing starts until the scope is written down and agreed with you.
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See all HR topics for ngos and social enterprises, or another industry.