This posting’s headline, of course, was inspired by the title of Joel Fleishman’s celebrated book, The Foundation: A Great American Secret. Fleishman got it half right, at least according to a recent report by Harris Interactive for the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative (PAI), which suggests that foundations are—even among the best-informed Americans—a mystery beyond fathoming. This is a finding that should worry all of those who believe in the power, or at least the potential, of foundations to improve the lives of people.
The findings of the PAI survey are, if not shocking, at least depressing. Only two out of ten people surveyed could identify an example of how a foundation has affected their community, and fewer than four in ten could even name a foundation on the first try.
What goes beyond depressing to the realm of scary is that the respondents are not the fluffy-craniumed participants on Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” segments, but rather what PAI calls “engaged citizens.” Engaged citizens are the 12 percent of the adult population who hold leadership positions, either staff or volunteer, with organizations working on community or social issues.
If foundations are a secret to more than 60 percent of these people, imagine what an abiding mystery they must be to the “disengaged” 88 percent of our adult population!
It gets worse. While most of these engaged citizens can’t name a foundation or think of a way a foundation has affected their community, they do have high expectations of foundation performance. More than three out of four say their communities would suffer without the work of foundations, and nearly eight in ten want foundations to focus grants on finding new and better ways of solving problems. And nine out of ten believe that it is important for foundations to accept responsibility to serve the public.
So, to summarize, even the best-informed of our citizenry know very little about foundations or their work, but nonetheless have high expectations of what foundations should be doing to help their communities.
If one thinks that foundations are capable of doing much, but one also thinks that they are doing very little, there is a definite disconnect. The PAI survey does not suggest that such a disconnect has yet inspired the highly engaged respondents to grab their torches and pitchforks, but it does raise the question of whether an unaddressed gap between what is expected and what is delivered might turn “highly engaged” citizens into “highly enraged” citizens.
There are two possible explanations for the cognitive dissonance highly engaged citizens experience when considering foundations. Either foundation performance 1) has been lousy, or 2) has been effective, but not well communicated, either of which would explain the perceptions of trifling impact. Fortunately for foundations, the respondents seem to believe the latter: nearly 90 percent think foundations should be more open with the public about their activities, mistakes, and lessons learned.
If ever there was a wake-up call to foundations to do a better job of sharing their wins, losses, and learnings with their natural allies in the social sector, the PAI survey has rung it up. There is no guarantee, especially in these straitened economic times, that engaged citizens will continue to blame the gap between their perceptions of high foundation potential and low foundation performance upon ineffective communications.
In fact, it seems likely that, sooner or later, the conclusions will shift from “they’re doing a lot, but don’t tell us about it” to “they don’t tell us much because they aren’t doing much.”
True, communicating good news is not easy, but in this age of viral marketing, there is no excuse for the good work of foundations to be an abiding mystery among even the best-informed citizens.
If that omission is not corrected, and soon, foundations may pay a big price the next time they need public support, whether to buttress their funded programs or to defend themselves from misguided regulatory efforts.
The time to make friends is not after the bar fight has begun. For foundations, friend-making time is now.
Joel Orosz, PhD, is the Distinguished Professor of Philanthropic Studies at The Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University
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Disclaimers and Disclosures: The views expressed in the CEP blog by guest bloggers are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Never hurts to be reminded of this “knowledge deficit,”as PAI so fondly calls it. But I’m not ready to say it’s a failure of foundations to communicate.
There are far too many examples of thoughtful and well-implement communcations programs practiced by foundations large and small.
However, what the research suggests is that greater effort needs to be spent determining the effectiveness of communications and making adjustments from what’s learned. At the Communications Network, we’re trying to help the field do that work better through activities such as a communications evaluation “toolkit” we published in 2008 (http://comnetwork.org/node/247), as well as through training, webinars, and at our conferences.
We’re going through one of the most disruptive communications periods in history, which presents both challenges and opportunities. On one hand, there are so many ways of communicating thanks to the explosion in social media. Similarly, that explosion makes it harder to be heard over all the noise.
But that’s no reason to remain quiet. Just get smarter at it.
I would count myself as one “engaged citizens” but I think one problem that foundations cause for themselves is the practice of only funding programs for one to three year periods.
If I was surveyed, the two best examples I know of foundation success is the one from the 1940s where it was proven that painting a white line on the edge of pavement saves lives. This is also a great example of the fact that the program itself is not always scalable by the non-profit sector. Once proof of concept and saving lives were demonstrated, public road projects funded by taxpayers as part of road projects painted the lines as a normal part of road constuction efforts.
The second example I can recall without research are the efforts of the Gates Foundation to combat various diseases. Their funding hasn’t been just for a 3 year grant.
Sustained funding can make a huge differnce.
Regards,
Bill Huddleston
www cfcfundraising dot com
Author of “Successful CFC Fundraising,
Growing Donors that Give for Decades”
This PAI study underscores the need for foundations to strive to have “glass pockets”–a phrase coined by Russell Leffingwell, a Carnegie board chair over fifty years ago. Glasspockets (www.glasspockets.org), a new web site developed by the Foundation Center in partnership with CEP, the Communications Network, and a number of other philanthropy infrastructure groups, is working to inspire foundations to greater openness about their operations and grantmaking. In Glasspockets we will feature content illuminating philanthropy’s successes, failures, and ongoing experimentation so foundations can build on each other’s ideas to increase impact. The “Who Has Glass Pockets” area of the site provides grantmakers and the public an easy way to see what some of the largest foundations in the country are doing as far as online information disclosure. This is a very new effort and we welcome your suggestions and input for the site’s evolution.
Janet Camarena
Director, SF Office
The Foundation Center