Over the course of CEP’s work, we often hear reasons why foundations cannot, or should not, be compared to one another. According to the conventional wisdom, “If you’ve seen one foundation, you’ve seen one foundation.” And it is often assumed that community foundations are too different from private foundations to enable us to draw lessons from one that apply to the other.
While there is some truth in these statements, we also see that differences across foundations aren’t necessarily best explained by type, or asset size, or the other commonly hypothesized reasons. Our past research indicates that important variation exists across foundations, as well as in the practice of foundation staff members, on more mutable characteristics such as how grantees experience working with the foundation, internal attitudes and practices related to data and assessment, or the presence of a strategy.
Our latest research report, “Rhetoric versus Reality: A Strategic Disconnect at Community Foundations,” presents us with yet another instance in which we see more similarities than differences across foundations of different types.
In 2006, CEP released a report about the use of strategy, or lack thereof, among CEOs and program staff at large private foundations. It was a qualitative study, based on interviews with a total of 42 staff members from 21 private foundations. Based on our data from that research, CEP developed a definition of strategy:
A framework for decision-making that is 1) focused on the external context in which the foundation works, and 2) includes a hypothesized causal connection between use of foundation resources and goal achievement.
After receiving requests from community foundation leaders, we set out to conduct a similar, but separate study, about the meaning and use of strategy at community foundations. Given the particular challenges and competitive dynamics that community foundations face, we hypothesized that strategy may carry a somewhat different meaning or be viewed differently by community foundation CEOs. Or that, perhaps community foundations, by virtue of the pressures they’re under, would be more strategic than their private foundation counterparts.
But findings from this new research do not support that hypothesis. Our findings for community foundations are strikingly similar to the findings from our research with private foundations.
After in-depth interviews with 30 randomly selected community foundation CEOs, we found that CEOs of community foundations believe that strategy is important, and say that they are using strategy in their work at their foundation. However, when we compare their descriptions of their strategies with CEP’s definition of strategy, we find that few community foundation CEOs are actually using strategy.
It is worth pointing out that while analyzing our data from this study, we noticed that CEOs’ descriptions of their decision making processes did not indicate that CEP’s strategy definition needed amending in order to be applied to the work of community foundations.
The missing ingredient for most who participated in our study is the second part of CEP’s strategy definition: the logic that explicitly links the use of foundation resources to intended results in the community it serves. When we drill down to examine the decision-making process, we tend to see the biggest gaps between a CEO’s choices and how those choices will help the foundation move closer to achieving the foundation’s goals.
But we know that gaps of this nature are also key opportunities for progress in the development of strategy – for community and private foundations alike. It is clear that community foundations, too, have a long way to go to marry their rhetoric and the stark reality when it comes to strategy.
Ellie Buteau, Ph.D., is Vice President – Research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
