How a Norwegian foundation turned grant-making into learning.
- Client
- Skipsreder Tom Wilhelmsens Stiftelse
- Sector
- Foundations
- Where
- Norway
- Scope
- Every inbound application
- Status
- In production
The situation
The Tom Wilhelmsen Foundation has funded projects in Norway since 1965. Each year it receives applications asking for tens of millions of dollars in funding, assesses them by committee, and follows the grants it makes across years. That is a great deal of material to handle: every application, the progress and final reports on every active grant, and the board papers that draw on them, each arriving in its own format and read by hand.
At that volume, the learning inside the material is hard to reach. What the foundation had seen across the last portfolio, what worked and what did not, was not in front of the people deciding the next one.
What we did
We built one platform for the whole grant-making lifecycle, on the foundation's own data. Every inbound application now arrives through it, structured and checked against the foundation's criteria, then assessed with the history of similar grants beside it, so assessors see the evidence alongside the pitch. Every active grant, with its milestones, reporting and spend, sits in one view for the secretariat and the board, and the reporting that used to be assembled by hand is generated from the record.
Outcomes are captured against each grant and rolled up across the portfolio, so the foundation can see what its funding changed and carry that into the next round. Underneath it is a single governed record, built before any assistant sat on top, with access agreed with the foundation's leadership. We built it beside the people who run the rounds today. It runs in the foundation's own environment, and it stays theirs.
What changed
- Every application, one route in. All inbound applications, tens of millions of dollars a year in requested funding, arrive structured and checked against the criteria.
- One record per grant. From application to final outcome, in one place, for the first time.
- Reporting from the record. Portfolio reporting generated from the live record instead of assembled by hand each quarter.
- Each round informed by the last. Assessors decide with the foundation's own history of what worked in front of them.
Other projects
