From 2018

November 8, 2018

Julian Wyllie
The Chronicle of Philanthropy 

Thirty-seven percent of private and community foundation CEOs hesitate to share information about program mistakes or failures, according to a new report. And a similar percentage, 34 percent, said they feel pressure from their board of directors to withhold information about failures.

Those are among the findings in a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy titled “Understanding & Sharing What Works.” The survey analyzed responses from 119 CEOs of private and community foundations that give at least $5 million annually.

In recent years, it’s become fashionable for nonprofits and foundations to speak openly about their failures. However, the new report indicates that resistance to do so remains strong among many grant makers…> read more

November 4, 2018

Jara Dean-Coffey
Linkedin Pulse

October 31, 2018

Larry Kramer
The Chronicle of Philanthropy 

My annual performance goals this year include a commitment to increasing the collection and use of feedback from the people we seek to serve across all of the Hewlett Foundation’s grant-making programs — my way of telling the foundation’s board that I (and the staff) will make this a priority.

Our reason for doing so can be simply stated: If you want to help people, asking what they find helpful makes obvious sense. We all do that in our personal lives with our family, friends, and neighbors. We do it in our workplaces, asking for and giving feedback to team members.

And in a charitable organization, whose whole mission is helping people, it is essential that we make it a norm to ask for feedback from the people we’re seeking to help. It can only improve our ability to make a meaningful difference in their lives.

Our foundation, like some others, already uses the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Grantee Perception Report to gather and react to feedback from our grantees. These surveys have helped us improve how we work with nonprofits, prompting us to sharpen our proposal requirements, improve our approach to helping these nonprofits connect with each other, and more…> read more

October 11, 2018

Rusty Stahl
Philanthropy News Digest

When it comes to strengthening the operational capacity of nonprofits, there is a gap between the support foundations tend to provide and the support nonprofits say they need, a report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy finds.

Based on a survey of a hundred and seventy nonprofit CEOs and a hundred and eighty-seven foundation leaders who oversee their organization’s programmatic work, the report, Strengthening Grantees: Foundation and Nonprofit Perspectives (40 pages, PDF), found that although 87 percent of foundation officials said their organization was aware of their grantees’ needs, 58 percent of nonprofit CEOs said none or few of their funders ask about their needs beyond funding. According to the survey, nonprofit CEOs said they most needed help with fundraising (42 percent), staffing (37 percent), and communications (26 percent), while foundation leaders viewed fundraising (51 percent), governance (39 percent), and financial management (33 percent) as most important…> read more

October 4, 2018

Julian Wyllie
The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Foundations are not as in touch as they think they are with the needs and concerns of the nonprofits they support, according to a new study that draws on the perspectives of both foundation and nonprofit leaders.

Most foundation leaders — 73 percent — say their organization follows up with grantees often or always to understand the effects of the support they have provided. However, only about one-third of nonprofit CEOs said foundations often or always follow up.

“You expected to see some discrepancies” based on previous research, said Ellie Buteau, vice president for research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which conducted the survey. “But I don’t think we expected to see the degree of the discrepancies in the study. That was surprising to us.”

The survey also found that 87 percent of foundation leaders believe their organization is aware of grantees’ needs, while 58 percent of nonprofit CEOs say none or few of their grant makers ask about their group’s overall needs beyond funding…> read more

September 7, 2018

Forbes Nonprofit Council
Forbes

Having an organization that is diverse and inclusive is key to equal performance within. But according to a study by The Center for Effective Philanthropy, sexual orientation and gender diversity are lacking at many nonprofit organizations.

While these organizations claim to have a handle on the situation, reality proves they do not. Nonprofits need to show their clients, as well as their employees, that they are willing and able to accept all, regardless of their gender, race, religion or background.

Below, eight members of Forbes Nonprofit Council discuss how the nonprofit sector can better approach diversity and inclusiveness…> read more

August 16, 2018

Katie Smith Milway
Stanford Social Innovation Review

Fay Twersky and Lindsay Louie of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation were stumped. Less than a year into forging a coalition of funders that was briskly moving grants out the door, they realized that they might have a flaw in their approach to fostering change. The collaborative they helped to create, Fund for Shared Insight, aimed to help funders and nonprofits become more effective by listening intently to the people they strove to help—their end users. Although gathering user feedback is common in the corporate world, where consumer preference informs strategy and makes or breaks sales, in the charitable sector, consumers too rarely get asked if the hours are convenient or the services are advancing their life goals.

The potential for user feedback to improve funder and nonprofit decisions and offerings, as it does commercial entities’, seemed obvious. But it became clear to Twersky and Louie, after a January 2015 visit to nonprofits piloting ways to listen, that it was going to be hard to capture that potential. “There was no existing platform that could scale,” says Twersky, “and the approaches that nonprofits were using seemed artisanal and very complex.”

Twersky, Louie, and Fund for Shared Insight’s story of finding simplicity on the other side of this complexity—of collaborating with other funders not to scale a proven approach, but to design a solution with nonprofits and their end users that could be adopted far and wide—is fairly unique in the world of philanthropy…> read more

July 19, 2018

Andy Segedin
The Nonprofit Times

About four out of five nonprofit CEOS say that racial diversity is relevant to their organizations and slightly fewer report that their organizations are least somewhat racially diverse.

Other forms of diversity — such as gender identity and sexual orientation — are viewed as less relevant.

Some 82 percent of nonprofit CEOs believe that racial diversity is relevant to organizational goals and 79 percent said their organizations are at least somewhat racially diverse, but barely half (52 percent) find diversity in sexual orientation relevant to organizational goals, according to “Nonprofit Diversity Efforts.” The new study by The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) in Cambridge, Mass., surveyed 205 nonprofit CEOs. Just over half (55 percent) of respondents identified diversity in gender identity as organizationally relevant with 68 percent finding diversity among individuals with disabilities to be important.

These priorities bear out in actual diversity. Just one out of five CEOs (21 percent) reported that their organizations were not at all or not very racially diverse. That figure increased for sexual orientation (26 percent), gender identity (42 percent), and disabilities (59 percent).

Representation for those with disabilities also was identified by CEOs as far and away the area in which nonprofits least reflect the populations they serve (40 percent). Sexual orientation (18 percent), gender identity (15 percent), and race (15 percent) ranked far behind in terms of not reflecting populations served…> read more

July 19, 2018

Alex Daniels
The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Most nonprofit chief executives say diversity is an important goal, but their organizations are falling short of the mark, according to a study released today.

A survey conducted by the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that more than two-thirds of nonprofit leaders thought that having a diverse staff was very or extremely important. But only about one-third said their own staff met that goal. There was a similar disconnect between nonprofit leaders’ aspirations for diversity and the actual make-up of their boards and executive leaders, the survey found.

“They have a long way to go in terms of how diverse they want their staff and boards to be in order to meet their goals,” said Ellie Buteau, the center’s vice president of research.

A majority of nonprofit leaders reported that their organization was diverse based on race and ethnicity, gender identity, and the sexual orientation of members of their work force. But nearly 60 percent said their organization was “not very” or “not at all” diverse when accounting for employees with disabilities…> read more

July 17, 2018

Julia Travers
Inside Philanthropy

In the fall of 2017, the Barr Foundation commissioned the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to conduct a Grantee Perception Report, or GPR. More than 200 respondents participated in the GPR, which is a confidential survey of grantees and declined applicants about working with a funder. This is an important tool for foundations to gauge how they’re managing relationships that come with built-in tensions.

As CEP’s president Phil Buchanan told Inside Philanthropy: “Getting candid, comparative feedback from nonprofits they support is crucial for funders, given the power dynamics between those seeking resources and those who possess them.”

Barr received mixed results in the survey, finding that its partners were more satisfied in some areas than others. It was also sometimes rated as “typical.”

Barr’s last GPR was in 2012, and ratings for the overall quality of Barr-grantee relationships improved from being in the lowest quartile in 2012 to a more “typical” level in 2017—in the 37th percentile.

Last month, Barr President James Canales and Vice President Roger Nozaki co-wrote a blog post about the results of the GPR outlining how the foundation is responding to the feedback…> read more

July 13, 2018

Alexa Cortes Culwell
Stanford Social Innovation Review

Those of us in the social sector are painfully aware that toxic individuals and cultures are not just a function of the private sector—unfortunately, our sector has had its own share of recent scandals. Which raises the question: What if all social impact organizations held their leaders and staff accountable not only for what they accomplish, but also for how they accomplish it?

In recent years, the social sector has largely focused on what it is achieving, emphasizing theories of change, performance metrics, and impact—or the end result. But it’s also important to look at how we do the work, focusing on our cultures, internal behaviors, and the means to the ends. At the center of organizational culture must be a fundamental commitment to value and respect all people, inside and outside our organizations.

So how can we counteract workplace toxicity and develop stronger performance in the process? Based on decades of experience leading and advising social impact organizations, I believe there are four questions leaders should ask:

1. Are your organization’s values and cultural norms explicitly stated? Whether or not they are written down, every organization has implicit values and a culture defined by its leaders. If you have not yet created an explicit values statement, it’s time to do so—and it doesn’t have to be complicated. We’ve worked with a number of clients to create statements that can serve as an internal North Star and help anchor organizational culture.

Last year, the growing team at the Sobrato Family Foundation, a place-based grantmaker whose mission is to make Silicon Valley a place of opportunity for all residents, used its staff retreat to make the organization’s cultural norms and practices more explicit. The result was an internal co-created document that outlined, in very clear terms, the values and behaviors that aligned with the foundation’s mission and were expected of all employees…> read more

June 14, 2018

Suzanne Garment and Leslie Lenkowsky
The Chronicle of Philanthropy

The just-released 2018 edition of “Giving USA” brings glad tidings to the nonprofit world. In 2017, charitable gifts by Americans totaled $410 billion. That’s 3 percent more than in 2016, even after adjusting for inflation — a sign that the strong economy continues to power philanthropic giving.

But don’t expect fundraisers and other nonprofit executives to break out in smiles when they read the report, published annually by the Giving USA Foundation and based on research by Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. (We are both affiliated with Indiana University but are not involved in the production or publication of “Giving USA.”)

To the contrary, more than half of the 357 foundation and nonprofit leaders surveyed earlier this year by the Center for Effective Philanthropy worried that giving would decrease in 2018, largely because of the new tax law. Just 19 percent of the high-level foundation officials surveyed, and 14 percent of the nonprofit executives, disagreed with this gloomy prediction…> read more