A podcast interview with CEP President Phil Buchanan provides a timely take on the state of foundation assessment. The interview is conducted by Larry Blumenthal and Bill Silberg for Talking Philanthropy, a Foundation Center service. The conversation, available directly here, is just over 15 minutes long and covers a wide range of questions.
It takes off from CEP research recently published in the report The State of Performance Assessment: A Survey of Foundation CEOs, which presented the following key findings:
- CEOs place great importance on assessing their foundations’ effectiveness;
- Foundations appear to be using a broader range of information to assess their financial, operations, and programmatic performance than a decade ago; and
- Board involvement in assessment remains a challenge.
The conversation examines the findings and charts the changes since CEP’s earlier research on the subject almost a decade ago, putting the efforts to find effective ways to assess performance both in the long-range history of modern philanthropy and in the more immediate context of a decade of significant change in culture and practice.
