A Glaisman Tool
What is your renewal
actually buying?
A grant is denominated in dollars. The work it pays for is denominated in meals, bed-nights, clinic visits, cases managed. When the organization’s costs move and your renewal does not, the gift shrinks without anyone deciding to shrink it. This shows you by how much.
A meal, a bed-night, a clinic visit, a case managed.
Why this number matters
Nobody in the transaction is measuring the thing that moved.
You track what you gave, and it is unchanged. The organization reports what it delivered, and it protects that figure, because the grant report asks for people served and not cost per person served. So the number in the report holds, and the erosion surfaces somewhere quieter: a route dropped, a distribution thinned, a vacancy left open, a reserve leaned on.
Headline inflation will not tell you the size of it either. A service organization buys a narrow and volatile basket, fuel and food and freight and insurance and wages, and that basket moves on its own schedule. In 2026 it moved a long way. Global goods trade rose 12.5% in the first half of the year, and UNCTAD reads much of that as prices rather than volume, with trade prices accelerating from 3.6% to 5.1% between the first and second quarters. The inputs behind a food program or a shelter repriced together.
The arithmetic here is simple, which is exactly why it goes unexamined. Two numbers from the organization and one from your own records give you the real size of your gift.
Getting the inputs
Three numbers, one short call
From your records
The grant
What you gave last year, and what a flat renewal would be this year. If the renewal is already set at a different figure, use that instead.
From the organization
The unit
Whatever the work is counted in. A meal served, a bed-night provided, a clinic visit, a case managed. Use the unit the organization already reports against.
From the organization
The two costs
What one unit cost last year, and what it costs now. A capable finance lead can answer within a minute. One who cannot has told you something too.
Take it further
Three questions to ask before the renewal goes out
The percentage is one signal. These three surface what the grant report does not show you about how the organization absorbed the difference.
Question one
“What does a flat renewal mean for this program, operationally?”
Not whether they are grateful, which they will be. What it means for service levels. The answer is a percentage, and it is the real size of your gift.
Question two
“Which line absorbed the increase this year?”
Costs that rise have to land somewhere. Staffing, service volume, maintenance, or reserves. Knowing which one tells you whether you are looking at an adjustment the organization can repeat or a bill it is deferring.
Question three
“Would unrestricted or multi-year support change what you can buy?”
The fix is not always more money. Often it is the same money held loosely, so it can move toward whichever input spiked, and committed across more than one year, so the organization can buy ahead of a price rather than behind it.
This worksheet came out of an issue of The Informed Funder, Your Flat Renewal Is a Cut, on what six months of a closed shipping chokepoint did to the organizations donors fund.