Designing an effective grant program requires input from everyone who will interact with it—from the nonprofits and organizations seeking funding to the evaluators and program officers managing the process. This Grant Program Design Stakeholder Interview template helps foundations, government agencies, and philanthropic organizations gather structured feedback during the program design phase.

Whether you're launching a new funding initiative or redesigning an existing grants program, this template captures perspectives on funding priorities, application barriers, evaluation criteria, reporting burdens, and capacity building needs. It's designed for interviews with potential applicants, community partners, program officers, current grantees, and subject matter experts who can inform a more equitable, accessible, and impactful program.

Why Paperform is ideal for stakeholder research:

Paperform lets you build professional, on-brand interview forms that feel conversational rather than bureaucratic. With conditional logic, you can tailor questions based on the stakeholder's role, skip irrelevant sections, and gather nuanced feedback without overwhelming respondents. The doc-style editor makes it easy to add context, examples, and multimedia to ensure clarity.

Once responses come in, use AI Insights to identify common themes across dozens of interviews—surfacing patterns around application complexity, priority gaps, or reporting challenges without manual synthesis. Connect your form to Stepper (stepper.io) to automatically route interview summaries to program design teams, update research databases, or trigger follow-up outreach to key stakeholders.

For foundations and grant-making organizations committed to participatory design and community-centered funding, this template helps you move from assumptions to insights—building programs that truly serve the people and communities you aim to support.