Your foundation’s name is invaluable. Protecting it from reputational damage is crucial.
Funding the wrong organisation or individual puts that reputation at risk.
While you can protect and uphold your own standards, what about the organisations you support? You can’t risk funding criminal activities, individuals with controversial political ties or industries that conflict with your mission and values. These decisions can damage credibility and impact individual projects, jeopardising your foundation's future.
Truly know potential grantees before you invest in building a relationship.
Foundations need a comprehensive view of potential grantees early in the process to identify any red flags before committing their time, funds, and reputation. This involves understanding not only the organisational governance and beneficial ownership structure but also its reputation and that of the individuals behind it. Identifying reputational threats at the outset helps avoid wasting valuable time and resources on extensive due diligence or relationship-building with organisations that may ultimately harm their cause.
Protect your charitable name with Xapien
Xapien is a grantmaking due diligence tool that surfaces red flags on potential grantees in less than 15 minutes. It combs the entire indexed internet to deliver concise reports on individuals or companies worldwide. The platform casts a wide lens on risks, from sanctions to allegations, corporate structures to key associates, and their wider online reputation. By identifying reputational risks early, you can focus on building relationships with organisations that will drive your good work forward.
Ethical and reputational due diligence is a critical component of WaterAid’s organisational strategy. Before, WaterAid’s ethical check process consisted of either in-house manual checks (which could be time-consuming) or externally commissioned checks by consultants (which can be costly), and ultimately have a knock-on effect on capacity and productivity.
With Xapien, WaterAid has been able to transform its ethical due diligence process. Xapien is primarily used to conduct ethical checks relevant to WaterAid’s line of work, focusing on understanding potential risks associated with engaging new donors, partners, or suppliers, and identifying opportunities from these relationships. Xapien enables WaterAid to conduct a full, in-depth ethical assessment.
Customer stories
WaterAid
Foundations are a key area for the Mercy For Animals research team. They spent days manually searching, analyzing, and summarizing information about past philanthropic initiatives and foundation directors to build prospect profiles for outreach. Going down rabbit holes was a challenge, as was knowing when they had conducted enough research to make a decision and move forward. This would delay the start of the outreach process.
Mercy For Animals now Xapien foundations and directors, letting the reports run in the background. Xapien manages the end-to-end research process, they no longer have to worry about missing important information. With Xapien as the team's on-demand researcher, they have more time to build a valuable pipeline and focus on strategic tasks where human judgment and creativity matter most.
Customer stories
Mercy for Animals
ClientEarth is a global charity which litigates against organisations doing harm to the environment. The philanthropy team had received approval to launch a new corporate fundraising strategy. However, partnering with the wrong corporation is ClientEarth’s most significant reputational risk, so they needed to conduct stringent due diligence.
ClientEarth didn’t have a single dedicated prospect researcher in the team whose job it was to conduct this due diligence and provide reports to fundraisers. They needed a tool that could be put straight into the hands of fundraisers. This tool needed to conduct in-depth research, particularly around a corporation’s links to environmental concerns, whether directly or indirectly through third parties such as the company owners and directors, as well as their supply chain. If done manually, this would have taken hours for each due diligence report, significantly slowing down the fundraising process.
Customer stories
ClientEarth
The Prospect Research Manager, being the sole researcher at Sightsavers, is responsible for all research and due diligence checks. This research, whether it’s a quick review or in-depth investigation, would often take a couple of hours to an entire day or even longer. In turn this this would cause delays to fundraisers being able to commence stewardship and delays in the delivery of bespoke research projects.
Integrating Xapien into the workflow has proven to be a game changer for the Prospect Research Manager, enabling them to handle multiple research and due diligence requests with remarkable efficiency and speed.
Xapien has become an indispensable research tool eliminating the need to dedicate entire days to due diligence research. This has resulted in quicker approval and grant processes and fostered better relationships with potential donors.
Customer stories
Sightsavers
The development team’s due diligence process involved a template with specific information requirements. Each team member would manually search for this information online, which meant carefully researching and reviewing news articles, Wikipedia, and company websites one by one, before analysing and summarising the findings.
This was time-consuming, taking half or day—or sometimes an entire day—to compile a report to the expected standard. There was also the risk of human error. Individuals might overlook critical details, leading to variations in quality depending on who was doing the research. This lack of uniformity made sharing the information with senior leadership a challenging task.
Customer stories
Royal Air Force Museum
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution conducts background research on all corporate partners, trusts and major suppliers to protect the organisation from risks. Conducting manual research using search engines and databases can lead to bias in the results due to a user’s preferences and past searches. By using Xapien to conduct background research, the RNLI obtain unbiased results and uncover all the reputational risks, not just the first few pages of a search engine.
For example, the RNLI was looking to partner with an extreme sports safety equipment company. Manual searches didn’t find anything of concern. But then a Xapien search revealed several class action lawsuits in USA and Canada relating to faulty equipment. The RNLI didn’t want to partner with any company that didn’t uphold the highest standards of user safety.
Customer Stories
Royal National Lifeboat Institution
The Museum of London has a small team of three who manage the entire advancement practice and only one person who is responsible for their entire research function. The Museum does not have a large existing pool of donors that they can leverage. They needed to scale the fundraising efforts rapidly, with limited resources.
Ciara FitzGerald-Graham, the Museum's Fundraising Intelligence Manager, adopted Xapien for her research and due diligence. With Xapien's AI-generated reports, she gets comprehensive due diligence results in minutes, not days. This saves her time and lets her focus on prospecting and scaling their fundraising efforts.
Bonus: Running a Xapien report provides the team with an extra layer of security that all risks have been checked, protecting the organisation from reputational risk.
Customer stories
Museum of London
Xapien streamlines due diligence
Xapien's AI-powered research and due diligence tool goes faster than manual research and beyond traditional database checks. Fill in the form to the right to book in a 30 minute live demonstration.