October 20, 2013
Foundations Should Use ‘Giving Tuesday’ to Show How to Choose Charities
By: Phil Buchanan
Giving Tuesday, a new effort to promote end-of-year giving by Americans, offers an opportunity for foundations to make a statement about how to support effective nonprofits and help the public learn more about what foundations do. It’s an opportunity I hope they seize…> read more
October 17, 2013
Foundations Should Work to Fix a Broken Washington
By: Phil Buchanan
The stunning display of our government’s dysfunction hardly ended when lawmakers last night approved a deal to open the government and allow the nation to pay its debts. And that leaves the question: What can be done to persuade lawmakers that it’s their duty to govern responsibly? Robert Gallucci, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, suggests in an eloquent op-ed for this newspaper that foundations must step up to help make the case….> read more
September 23, 2013
Getting the Facts Straight About the Nonprofit Sector
By: Phil Buchanan
Dan Pallotta’s TEDTalk has received a lot of attention. Too bad, then, that it is built on so much ignorance about both the history and present-day realities of the nonprofit sector.
There are at least four crucial fallacies in Pallotta’s argument…> read more
August 5, 2013
Peter Buffett Is Right to Call for Philanthropic Change
By: Phil Buchanan
When Peter Buffett took to the pages of The New York Times to lament what he calls a “crisis of imagination” in philanthropy—a failure to envisage a way for our society to function that puts an end to what he calls a “perpetual poverty machine,” he ignited a quite a debate. Mr. Buffett, chairman of the NoVo Foundation and son of Warren Buffett, critiqued our capitalist system, while being careful to emphasize that he is not calling for an end to it…> read more
July 30, 2013
Active Listening
By: Mark McLean
On the heels of the second Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) Perception Survey, CEP’s Mark McLean, shares the value of and challenges in collecting candid feedback from grantees and applicants…>read more
June 16, 2013
‘Strategy’ Is Not a Bad Word: It Is Essential Even to Grass-Roots Movements
By: Phil Buchanan and Aaron Dorfman
In philanthropy, the word “strategy” gets tossed around a lot.
To some, it’s become a bad word, conjuring up images of consultants dressed in business casual who don’t understand nonprofits or the issues they face, brewing up strategies depicted in PowerPoint that get approved by a foundation board and then forced down the throats of grantees…> read more
April 7, 2013
The Hard Work of Achieving Results
By: Phil Buchanan
The hype related to “social entrepreneurship” and “social entrepreneurs” is as overheated as it is ubiquitous.
Entire journal articles have been devoted simply to trying to define the terms, and skeptics—sometimes including me—have wondered what all the fuss was about.
My doubts have been several.
I have wondered whether we’re just putting a snappy new label on something that’s been around for centuries—individuals building organizations that act as catalysts for significant social change.
I have wondered whether…> read more
March 10, 2013
As Nonprofit ‘Research’ Proliferates, It Must Be Viewed With Healthy Skepticism
By: Phil Buchanan
In the last decade or so, the number of organizations and academic institutions doing what is billed as “research” on philanthropy has proliferated.
That is, by and large, a good thing, and I have been heartened at the Center for Effective Philanthropy by how hungry foundation leaders are for pragmatic information about what it takes to do a better job. But the rise of so many research groups increases the importance of understanding what—in the slew of reports and articles being e-mailed, tweeted, and otherwise distributed—is based on…> read more
February 21, 2013
Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries
To become more effective, nonprofits and foundations are turning to various sources for advice. Some look to experts who can share knowledge, research, and experience about what works—and what does not. Others turn to crowdsourcing to generate ideas and even guide decisions about future directions or funding.
Experts and crowds can produce valuable insights. But too often nonprofits and funders ignore the constituents who matter most, the intended beneficiaries of our work: students in low-performing schools, trainees in workforce development programs, or small farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. In bypassing the beneficiary as a source of information and experience, we deprive ourselves of insights into how we might do better…> read more
January 23, 2013
What Capitalism Can’t Fix
By: Phil Buchanan
Increasingly, I see people looking starry-eyed to business and markets to solve social problems. In so doing, they run the risk of dismissing the impact of nonprofits — and diminishing the value of organizations that seek to make a difference without creating the potential conflicts that come with the profit motive. My view is that pretending companies and markets hold all the answers actually puts at risk our ability to deal with our most pressing societal problems — and to help our most vulnerable citizens…> read more
