The Insider's Guide to Grantmaking: How Foundations Find, Fund, and Manage Effective Programs

Field Notes and Follow-Up

The site visit is not completed until you have shared the field notes with your colleagues and placed them in the file. The term field notes implies a precision that the article itself only rarely possesses. Unless a foundation has a specific format for field notes (which few do), the style is left to you, and the result is as close as foundations come to Maoism (at least in the sense of “letting a thousand flowers bloom”). There are a number of effective ways to organize field notes, but perhaps it is best to start this discussion with a couple of methods to avoid.

The first method might be described as verbosity tempered by extraneous detail. This typically consists of a virtually verbatim transcript of every conversation ...