Supplemental Materials

If your organization is invited to the full proposal stage, you will be asked, via email, to submit additional materials in support of your request. Your organization will receive a link to the Supplemental Materials Submission (SMS) Form, which will transmit those materials directly into the Boston Foundation’s grants database. It begins by collecting data on the diversity of your board, staff and constituency. At the end of the form, you will be able to attach documents, including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and PDFs. You may click on “Save & Finish Later” at any point.

Diversity Data

The SMS form begins by asking you about the demographics of your organization’s board, staff and constituency or population served. You may be familiar with one-page diversity data charts that the Foundation and others use to collect this kind of information. The 96 questions or fields included collect the same data in a linear form. When we import this information into our database, it is formatted as a chart that would be familiar to many of you.
 
We will use this information as part of our review of your organization’s request. It will also be aggregated with the demographic information of other organizations to tell us more about our grant making and the people and agencies it impacts. In addition, this data will help us measure and report on the explicit diversity goals of some of our strategies.
 
Filling out this form is straightforward. Each field is a simple number that should be entered without commas, dashes or other punctuation. The first set of fields asks about Asian board members and staff. If you have no Asian male board members, enter 0; if you have five Asian male board members, enter 5. The form proceeds alphabetically through race/ethnicity—Asian, Black/African American, Caucasian, and Latino(a), and then moves on to “Diversity Data for Board Members and Staff with Disabilities.”
 
After the data on race/ethnicity and disability, there is a section that asks for diversity data for board and staff that fall within an “Other Populations” category that you define. This set of fields is optional, but will allow you to express your organization’s diversity with additional nuance. For example, if your organization serves and is led and/or staffed by members of the LGBTQ community, then enter that description in the first box and enter specific numbers as you did before. Only one “Other Population” may be specified.
 
Finally, there is a section on the diversity of the population your organization serves. Again, the form will take only numbers entered without commas, dashes or other punctuation. We understand that in many cases, these numbers will be estimates that are reflective of the neighborhood, city or even state demographics rather than a specific count. As before, if no members of a particular group are served, please enter 0.

Attachments

After the Diversity Data form, there is a section for attachments. The email that gave you the link to this form asked for submission of specific documents, for example, an annual budget, most recent audit and project narrative. To attach your documents to the Supplemental Materials Submission Form, click on “Title” on the Attachments page. Using the drop-down menu, select the title of the first item the Foundation has requested. Then click on the “Browse” button, which will open up your own computer’s directory, and select the appropriate Word, Excel or PDF document from your directory. To attach this document, click on the “Upload” button. The document is now attached to your online form. Repeat this process for each of the supplemental items the Foundation requested in the email we sent you. We can accept Excel spreadsheets, Word documents or PDFs. If you have a document in an unusual file format, please save it as a PDF before attaching it. If we have requested a document that is not available in electronic form, please let your program officer at the Foundation know that you will be mailing it.
 
When you have completed the Diversity Data and attached all of the requested forms, click on “Submit” to complete the process.