CEP often has a front row view of communications challenges faced by foundations. One issue foundations grapple with on an ongoing basis is getting all staff members to communicate the same messages about a foundation’s work, and specifically its goals, strategies, and grantmaking guidelines.
In light of this, I was not surprised by the following finding from the report The Communications Supercharge: How Foundations Use Communications to Advance Their Public Policy Work, recently released by USC’s Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy (bolded emphases are my own):
The interviews suggest widespread agreement that the thorniest challenge faced by these leaders is how to best integrate communications into program planning and execution. In the respondents’ views, communications is a horizontal function in a vertical world. Its place and points of intersection with other foundation activity are still somewhat ambiguous, in spite of growing levels of activity and support from top leadership levels. The challenge stems from the basic facts of foundation culture. ‘Program is king’ in foundations: grantmaking programs are vertically organized silos, presided over by program directors, initiative directors, and program officers. Communications is not seen as programs, at least not yet, in all but a very few foundations.
This is a great summary of a challenge we see frequently at CEP. The USC report is part of a heartening trend of foundations paying more attention to their communications challenges. Also worth reading is a new report from California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF) on communicating with grantees. Spitfire Strategies will be releasing a report on the same topic at the Communications Network conference this month.
This focus on communications by foundations will be welcome news to grantees. In CEP’s surveys of tens of thousands of grantees of more than 200 foundations over recent years, clarity of communication of goals and strategy is among the areas where grantees give foundations lower marks. Hopefully, thoughtful engagement with the new resources that exist for foundations, like this study, will start to change that.
In USC’s report, foundation leaders talk about their struggle to make communications more “integral to the program planning process”—something the authors suggest is highly connected to getting all program staff communicating on message. In a recent Communications Network blog post discussing The Communications Supercharge, Marcia Sharp writes “that when we look at the sum total of a foundation’s communications efforts, we should be looking at both the efforts of the communications department itself and the communications efforts supported through grantmaking programs.”
While it may be tempting for foundation leaders to lay all the responsibility for communications at the feet of communication professionals, both the USC report and CHCF piece make clear that this won’t lead to the desired results. Getting clear and consistent about communication is tough, painstaking work that involves everyone from program assistants to the CEO, as CEP’s case study on the Wallace Foundation makes clear. But, by looking across the foundation, and involving all the right players — as Wallace did — improvement is possible.
Improvement matters, because better communication leads to better understanding about important philanthropic goals and the strategies to achieve them. With this understanding comes alignment, as foundations and their stakeholders work together to accomplish their shared goals.
| Posted in | Funder/Grantee Relationships |
| Tags | communications, Grantee Perception Report, grantee perspectives |
Sally’s blog lays out a couple of different threads to the discussion of how foundations use communications to increase program impact. One is how foundations articulate and then communicate their own overall goals and strategies to external partners and stakeholders (and use good communications and listening skills to help shape those strategies). CEP’s interest and great work in the recent Foundation Strategy material has been on this thread.
The other thread is how foundations tap the power of communications to increase the reach and impact of individual grants or larger initiatives. The “Supercharge” report is really about this second thread –less about foundation strategy writ large, and more about program or initiative strategy (which should, of course, align…). It shows quite dramatically, as Sally suggests, how foundations (at least 18 large ones) are embracing communications as a critical driver of policy impact. It also raises a couple of really interesting issues about how to get the potential yield of communications. One is the structural “vertical/horizontal” challenge that Sally picks up on in the blog– if the horizontal communications function is situated in ambiguous relationship to the vertical program leadership, there will be instances where communications is well integrated into program strategy and execution, and instances where nothing happens. There’s an obvious potential for lost opportunities here. The second issue, which really intrigued me as I was doing the Supercharge interviews, is the very likely dispersal of strategic focus and management of communications initiatives, when you have communications execution in a given program or initiative by so many different actors — program and communication staff inside the foundation, grantees, and contactors and consultants who may be hired by the grantees or by the foundation. The full scale of the communications enterprise in foundations is ripe for mapping, and also for a sense of best practice around strategies for managing it all.
[...] Report Watch: Leveraging Communications | The Center for Effective Philanthropy Sally Smyth at Center for Effective Philanthropy profiles a new report which looks at how foundations can supercharge their communications strategy to achieve more impact. I believe that effective communications is a key catalyst for large foundations. (tags: philanthropy) SHARE THIS POST Tweet ← Previous post [...]
Similar to Marcia’s report that outlines strategies used by foundations to increase the impact of their policy work, Spitfire Strategies newest publication, Clearing the Path to Change: How to Use Communications to Advance Your Strategy, tries to shed some light on ways foundations can plan their communications to better support their strategy to create social change. As noted in Sally’s blog post, Marcia emphasizes the need to both address the internal foundation communications department and those communication efforts supported by grantmaking programs, and frankly, we couldn’t agree more. Foundation messages must be aligned and capacity-building resources must be made available to grantees.
Our guide offers some best practices from foundations who have figured out how to use communications to improve impact, and provides insights from lessons Spitfire has learned during our eight years of working with nonprofits and foundations. The suggestions inside the guide are food for thought for any foundation regardless of size, budget, whether dedicated communications staff is available or not. It is important to note that the suggestions are not small suggestions. Nearly all of them require foundation-wide changes if the foundation is not already doing them. Most will mean more work or a different way of working for foundation staff. As foundations consider which of these recommendations might be right, it is important to remember that they don’t have to do them all at once – foundations can add best practices over time. Per our own best practice experience and in order to help foundations navigate the steps, we have also created a tool that will help foundations capture their thinking as they go through the guide.
Good communications is integral to every foundation. We are excited to release our report next month and hope that our own expertise, coupled with the ongoing work at Center for Effective Philanthropy, will help every foundation have more impact and a louder voice.