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What words should we use to describe the clients served by nonprofits? Participants in nonprofit programs? Recipients of nonprofit services? End beneficiaries of philanthropy? Partners? Constituents? Citizens? The list of...
In a Telegraph interview several years ago, Lisa Marie Presley said, “Something happens to people around fame and power and money — it can bring out the worst and best in people; it’s a monster you have to tame.” In the world of philanthropy, this plays out in...
“When they hear my voice, it’s power,” declared Paula Jones, a participant at ECHOS, a Houston-based health, social, and educational resource organization. Paula was talking about the power of feedback during a plenary session at the 2018 Shared Insight Gathering in...
If you are ever looking for a way to produce groans and hisses from your board of directors, tell them that it’s time to update your strategic plan. There are only a few special souls in this world who stand at the front end of a strategic plan and are excited about...
Gluttons for punishment or navel gazers? Who would have thought that the fourth time our foundation, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, completed the Grantee Perception Report (GPR) would be every bit as valuable as the initial one. Each time we have worked...
The answers you’re given depend on the questions you ask. Though it may seem obvious, understanding this simple truth will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your philanthropy. The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) recently released a new...
Feedback is important for every funder — and so is closing the loop to share what you learn and how you plan to respond. Funders of every type and size work with CEP to listen to and learn from grantee feedback through the Grantee Perception Report (GPR)....
For the past decade-plus, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) has been an important colleague of CEP’s as we both work toward strengthening the philanthropic sector. The GEO community brings together more than 5,000 grantmakers around the world so they can...
I remember in elementary school counting 100 cheerios on the 100th day of school. Though I no longer use my breakfast as an opportunity to mark an occasion (or practice my arithmetic), this month at CEP I find myself again appreciating an important hundredth...
This post was originally written for the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy’s "Field Focus: Data and the Sector" campaign. The original post can be viewed here. A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a vice president of a foundation that my organization, the...