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The CEP blog aims to offer a range of perspectives, experiences, and opinions related to effective philanthropic practice. We welcome submissions that address crucial issues facing individual and institutional donors and are not self-promotional in nature. The views expressed in these posts are not necessarily CEP’s own.
This post originally appeared on the Social Velocity blog. When it comes to the debate about the social impact of endowment investments, college and university campuses — not foundations — seem to be where the action is. Foundations have hundreds of billions of...
This post originally appeared on the blog of Giving Evidence, which encourages and enables charitable giving based on sound evidence. Most charities hate the reporting which funders make them do. Notionally a learning process, it’s often just compliance,...
One of the recent trends in philanthropy we’ve been most excited about is the growing conversation about the importance of looking to history to inform decisions of the present and future. HistPhil has emerged as an engaging space providing thoughtful commentary and...
“We assume that they feed everything to a giant fiery furnace.” This was the best guess of a frustrated nonprofit executive in the first round of Project Streamline research when I asked what foundations did with the reports he wrote for them. Over the years, I’ve...
On June 2, Don Matteson, chief program officer at The Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation, joined CEP’s Naomi Orensten for an informative and lively webinar about the Grantee Perception Report® (GPR). In the conversation, Don discussed what The Foundation has...
The Ford Foundation’s recent decision to shift funding focus entirely to inequality has sparked further conversations about foundations’ responsibility to fund programs and initiatives combating socioeconomic and racial inequality. Recent events from Ferguson to South...
Impact investing at independent foundations is a mile wide and an inch deep. I think that’s a fair summary of CEP’s latest research report released in May, Investing and Social Impact: Practices of Private Foundations, based on a benchmarking survey of private...
Last week my organization, the Social Innovation Research Center, released a report on the progress of the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), the Obama administration initiative that funds community-based programs in low-income areas and provides the necessary evaluation...
A young donor behind a large, new foundation said something recently that really struck me — and in a good way. It happened in May in a session at CEP’s conference that I moderated on “new models in philanthropy” (some of which of course are not so new at all), and...
We’re excited to share that videos of several talks from May’s CEP Conference are now posted on our YouTube channel! During the conference and over the past month, we’ve heard from several attendees asking if we had recordings of their favorite talks so they...
The funder-grantee relationship is one of the major thematic areas covered by CEP’s grantee survey, which asks about interactions — staff responsiveness, the foundation’s approachability, and grantee perceptions of being treated fairly — as well as the clarity and...
There’s been a great deal of turnover at the biggest foundations, prompting us to revisit our 2012 analyses of the backgrounds of CEOs of the largest 100 foundations by asset size. We reported last month on the professional backgrounds of foundation CEOs — noting a...
Nonprofit, mission-driven organizations overwhelmingly want to assess their impact — and, generally, they put effort into doing so. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s recent report, Assessing to Achieve High Performance, underscores the importance nonprofits...
Gathering feedback and data and helping foundations act on that information is at the heart of what we do here at CEP. But we need feedback to improve, as well. To that end, in 2015 CEP commissioned Harder+Company Community Research to conduct an independent...
We need to rethink our understanding of power. And by “we,” I mean all of us engaged in promoting social change and supporting efforts to move our communities forward, especially those of us inclined to believe we still have a greater hold on the reins to power than...
This post originally appeared on the President’s Blog on the Philanthropic Foundations Canada website. At a recent conference of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Phil Buchanan, the president of CEP, posed a pointed question to the assembled foundation...
As I read CEP’s Assessing to Achieve High Performance report, several thoughts came to mind. First, “Ooh, these graphics are so pretty!” Second, “Yeah, funders need to provide more money to nonprofits so we can do more and better evaluation.” Third, “Data needs to be...
In a toughly-worded op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times headlined “Who Will Watch the Charities?”, Inside Philanthropy founder and editor David Callahan argues that philanthropy “is a world with too much secrecy and too little oversight” and...
And just like that, the 2015 CEP Conference has come and gone! As we did with Wednesday, here’s a recap via Twitter of highlights from all of Thursday’s talks and sessions. The morning started early, but it didn’t take long for the room to perk...