This Giving Season, improve your effectiveness as a donor with CEP’s resources for individual givers.
Contact Us
Search
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.
How can we better listen to, learn from, and act on feedback from those we seek to help? The topic of listening to beneficiaries has received increasing attention in recent years. CEP research conducted in 2014 showed that most grantees of major foundations were...
This op-ed by Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation President and CEO Rachel Garbow Monroe first appeared in The Baltimore Sun. Words have power. Too often today, they are being used to tear us down and apart, making us feel helpless and defenseless. Alternatively,...
At UTEC, we work to help disconnected young people in the communities of Lawrence and Lowell, MA trade violence and poverty for social and economic success. In our work, we believe that the young people we serve are experts in their own experience. This belief is...
What do people want that can make their lives better? Are we helping them get it? If not, what should we do differently? Those three questions increasingly drive the work of the most effective organizations, and CEP’s new report, Staying Connected: How Five...
‘Tis the season for end-of-year lists. Best albums of 2017? Pitchfork has you covered. Best books? The New York Times Book Review is the place to go. Best movies? NPR has a list to binge your way through on New Year’s Day. Here on...
“We have too many people trying to problem-solve from a distance,” says Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). “And when you try to problem-solve from a distance you miss the details and the nuances of the problems and your solutions don’t work very...
Funder effectiveness matters. It matters because funders have a unique ability to contribute to change. It matters because more effective funders can have a profoundly positive impact on the organizations they support — and thus on the people, issues, and communities...
It’s no secret that working in the nonprofit sector is a challenge. Many organizations are strapped for resources, and staff are often overworked and working for less money than they could get at a for-profit company. So why do people do it? Many who choose the...
Funders care about American education. Foundations of all sizes, locations, and ideological beliefs aim to improve education and support young people, and, in 2012, foundations spent $5 billion on education. With all of this investment, don’t we want to know whether...
As a foundation that sees relationships as a key component of philanthropy and social change, The Whitman Institute (TWI) applauds CEP’s recent report, Relationships Matter: Program Officers, Grantees, and the Keys to Success. It may seem like common sense that...
In our “post-truth” world, we are all overwhelmed by information. In-person interactions struggle to compete with the ceaseless barrage of push notifications popping up on our mobile devices. Attention, trust, and full presence are now among our scarcest resources....
At CEP we are always thinking about the ways that strong funder-grantee relationships affect the success of foundations’ efforts. This topic has been a major emphasis in our research agenda for more than a decade, as we have continually investigated the questions,...
Over the past 20 years, the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) community has championed the idea that strong relationships with nonprofit partners matter. As we say in Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter?, “When we build trust with and tap the knowledge of...
Strong relationships between program officers and their grantees are always important. But they’re especially important when disaster strikes. Hurricane Harvey brought Houston nearly 51 inches of rain and some of the worst flooding we’ve ever experienced. The...
In my position at CEP, I have experienced what it is like to navigate funders’ individual guidelines and requirements. I know sometimes selection processes can feel like jumping through a series of irrelevant hoops rather than useful experiences. And I’ve been through...
This post originally appeared on the United Philanthropy Forum website. The nonprofit sector has a board diversity problem. A recent BoardSource report showed that nonprofit boards are no more racially and ethnically diverse than they were two decades ago...
On the 10th anniversary of his involvement with the Gates Foundation, Warren Buffet wrote a letter to Bill and Melinda Gates asking them to reflect on their progress achieving their goals at the head of world’s largest foundation. In his letter Buffett mentions that...
This post appears as part of our Q&A series on the blog, in which readers can submit questions to be answered by CEP’s experts. We’d love to hear from you with questions related to relationship-building with grantees, grantmaking patterns, assistance beyond the...
This article by Anand Sinha, country advisor for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in India, was originally published on India Development Review. You can read the original here. “Failure is not an option” read the bumper sticker on the rear window of...
Funders often request compelling data to make the case that investing in grantee staff advances nonprofit programs and impact. Understandably, before making a significant investment you want to see proof that the investment will enjoy solid returns. Fortunately, there...