Listening and learning: What our grant holders and declined applicants told us in our feedback survey 2025/26

There are usually power imbalances in relationships between funders and grant holders. This means it’s often difficult for applicants and grant holders to tell us honestly about their experiences. But their feedback is crucial and will help us to understand how our grant making is experienced and how we can improve.

Every few years we invite our grant holders and declined applicants to complete an anonymous survey, providing us with feedback about our application processes, grants and support offer, and about challenges they are facing. PHF again commissioned the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to run these surveys in autumn 2025 across our UK funding programme. The surveys allow us to compare our results with other funders and track our progress over time.

It is important for us to listen to what respondents are telling us, to reflect back what we have heard and understood, and then act on it. These contributions inform our continuous adaptation and improvement, as well as enhancing our understanding of the issues respondents feel we should be paying attention to.

Three themes stood out from the survey responses:

Respondents told us they are working in an increasingly difficult environment. Many highlighted the impact of inequality, poverty and the cost-of-living crisis. Divisive political discourse stoking security threats, hostility and anti-migrant hate was a repeated experience. The particular challenges facing young people, as well as increasing mental health needs and rising demand for services, were also critical themes. Often these issues reinforced each other in the way they were experienced.

Grant holders were generally happy with PHF’s processes once a grant had been awarded. The main areas for improvement, identified by both applicants and grant holders, are the application form and processes, which were felt by many to be onerous, particularly for smaller organisations.

Grant holders rated PHF’s impact on their organisations and fields as being significantly improved since our last survey in 2022, with both scores rating in the top 25% of funders in CEP’s dataset.

PHF provides a higher percentage of core funding and multi-year grants than the average funder in CEP’s dataset, and has increased the percentage of these grants since our last survey in 2022. Many respondents fed back that flexible, long-term funding was what they most needed and valued. We will continue to prioritise this approach wherever possible. 

Respondents rated PHF highly for its commitment to anti-racist practice, diversity, equity and inclusion. Many noted that in the face of challenging headwinds and shifting norms in public discourse, it is increasingly important for funders to be demonstrating these values. We will continue to develop our practice in this area. 

One of the most encouraging findings was that grant holders reported higher levels of trust from PHF than in 2022. The results across several other measures relating to the quality of relationships are also broadly positive. That said, there is still room for improvement: particularly in how responsive we are to queries, and a demand for more contact, including site visits, with grant holders. The open question responses demonstrate how much grant holders value these quality relationships where they are working well; this will remain an area of focus for us. 

Feedback from both declined applicants and grant holders suggested that the clearest opportunity for improvement is through reducing the burden of our application processes. These were felt to be too time-consuming and weren’t as accessible as they could be. There were requests for more opportunities to speak to Foundation staff in advance of an application, and for the Foundation to be more responsive to queries. We use different application processes across our funds, so there is no single solution. Our next steps will be to identify key opportunities for improvement within those processes, drawing on the detailed survey results. We want to improve our processes wherever we can, while taking a step back to consider both what works best for applicants and what we can deliver consistently. We will particularly focus on reducing the burden of our first stage applications in our higher volume funds.

Around 74% of PHF grant holders reported receiving assistance from PHF beyond their grant funding; this is higher than typical in CEP’s funder dataset. The perceived value of that support varied considerably across our different funds, which provides an opportunity for us to learn more from where things are working well, and where things could be improved. In the open responses, grant holders particularly requested more support with raising their profile, more opportunities for networking and collaboration and organisational development support. We will look carefully at this data alongside our other feedback from support initiatives to refine the support offer across our funds.

One of the most common suggested improvements from declined applicants is to improve the usefulness of feedback on unsuccessful applications. We understand why this is important and recognise the value that good feedback provides. At the same time, there are practical limits. The high volume of applications we receive means that providing detailed individual feedback to every applicant would require significant additional staff time. 

For now, we believe that the best way to support applicants is to reduce the time and complexity of our initial applications, ensuring our guidance is as clear as possible about our funding priorities, and that we focus on providing more detailed feedback on applications that progress further in the process.

These survey results will help shape future improvements across our funding programmes. 

We are also undertaking a broader analysis of the open-ended questions in the survey, to better understand the experiences and challenges people shared with us. We will publish a summary of those findings in due course. 

We look forward to sharing the results of this work and will continue to listen to feedback as we progress. 

We are grateful to everyone who took part in the survey. Your feedback helps us understand what is working, where we need to improve and how we can better support the individuals, organisations and communities we aim to serve.