Resource Library
Browse helpful resources for funders, including evidence-based reports, profiles of funders making change, case studies, and blog series.

Understanding & Sharing What Works: The State of Foundation Practice
How well do foundation leaders believe they understand what is and isn’t working in their foundation’s programmatic efforts? How are they building that understanding? What information are they choosing to share with others? To answer these questions, CEP surveyed and...

Understanding & Sharing What Works: Profiles of Four Funders Propelling Philanthropic Practice
This piece is a companion to Understanding & Sharing What Works: The State of Foundation Practice. Authored by Lowell Weiss of Cascade Philanthropy Advisors, these four profiles seek to bring the data from that report to life through stories of foundations whose...

Strengthening Grantees: Foundation and Nonprofit Perspectives
Strong organizations, leaders, and networks are crucial to foundations’ and nonprofits’ ability to achieve shared goals. What support are foundations seeking to provide to help grantees strengthen their organizations? Is that support in line with what grantees really...

Benchmarking Foundation Evaluation Practices
For foundations, there are lots of questions to reflect on when thinking about which evaluation practices best align with their strategy, culture, and mission. How much should a foundation invest in evaluation? What can they do to ensure that the information they receive from evaluation is useful to them? With whom should they share what they have learned?

Assessing to Achieve High Performance: What Nonprofits Are Doing and How Foundations Can Help
For foundation leaders to most effectively support grantees, more needs to be understood about the extent to which nonprofits are assessing performance, how they are approaching this work, and what they are looking for from their funders to support it.

Hearing from Those We Seek to Help: Nonprofit Practices and Perspectives in Beneficiary Feedback
For nonprofit organizations, hearing from the beneficiaries they seek to serve is an important practice for planning, implementing, and evaluating their programs and services. But does this feedback and an understanding of intended beneficiaries’ needs reach foundation funders and influence their funding and strategic decision-making?

How Far Have We Come? Foundation CEOs on Progress and Impact
Few foundation CEOs believe that a lot of progress has been made overall toward the goal receiving the greatest proportion of their organization’s resources.

Foundation Transparency: What Nonprofits Want
Well-intentioned talk about foundation transparency is a good start, but according to new CEP research, nonprofit leaders want more.

The State of Foundation Performance Assessment: A Survey of Foundation CEOs
Over the past decade foundations have worked to assess their performance in the fields and communities they seek to address. Data-driven forms of measurement have become more widely used to judge the results of programs, as part of a broader range of information used, as CEOs place great importance on assessing their foundations’ effectiveness.

Can Feedback Fuel Change at Foundations?
When foundations make a commitment to getting consistent feedback from their grantees that is candid and comparative, they can make substantive changes that result in different—and better—grantee experiences.