Archive for April, 2011

Boston Foundation’s David Trueblood to Join CEP as Vice President

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

In January, I blogged about some impending transitions at CEP. I am pleased to be able to share now this news about the newest member of CEP’s leadership team.  Press release is below.

April 28, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Boston Foundation’s David Trueblood to Join CEP as Vice President

Cambridge, MA… The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) has named David Trueblood Vice President – Communications & Programming.  Trueblood, currently Director of Public Relations for The Boston Foundation, will be responsible for promoting CEP’s messages related to foundation effectiveness and increasing the visibility of CEP’s research and assessment tools.

“We are absolutely delighted to be welcoming David to CEP,” said CEP President Phil Buchanan.  “He has earned an impressive track record in the community foundation world and brings tremendous talent and creative energy to this crucial leadership position.”

Trueblood has served since 2005 in his role at The Boston Foundation, where he raised visibility for that organization’s civic leadership role in the region.  Earlier, he served from 2001-2004 as Director of Communications at Trinity Church in the City of Boston where he designed and executed the communications strategy to support the largest capital campaign in the church’s long history.

Trueblood’s early career was as a journalist, working as a reporter and editor at a variety of newspapers and, most recently, serving as Managing Editor of the Community Newspaper Company from 1997-2001.  He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and has a master’s degree in Intellectual History from Harvard.

“CEP has a compelling mission and one that only grows more relevant over time,” said David Trueblood.  “I am excited to join the CEP team and I look forward to working to help raise the profile of that mission and that organization.”

Trueblood will assume his post at CEP in June.  He succeeds Alyse d’Amico, who is transitioning into a new, part-time role as Special Assistant to the President / Director of Development in order to spend more time with her young son.

“I am deeply grateful to Alyse for her tremendous achievements in her eight years at CEP and, most recently, in her role overseeing communications, programming, and development,” said Buchanan.  “She has helped build this place into what it is, and CEP’s strong identity and reputation exist in great part because of her.  I look forward to working with her in her new role.”

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M. Christine DeVita, President of The Wallace Foundation, Joins the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Board of Directors

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

CEP is pleased to announce that Chris DeVita, President of The Wallace Foundation, will be joining our Board of Directors this May. The press release is below.

April 19, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

M. Christine DeVita, President of The Wallace Foundation, Joins the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Board of Directors

Cambridge, MA— M. Christine DeVita, president of The Wallace Foundation, has been elected to a three-year term on CEP’s Board of Directors beginning May 2011.

An attorney who joined The Wallace Foundation in 1987 and became its president in 1989, DeVita has overseen the foundation’s transformation from a collection of small family funds into one of the country’s largest foundations with assets of more than $1 billion.

During her tenure, DeVita has pushed the foundation to maximize its impact. She led its transition from project-focused grantmaking to targeted strategies that combine program, communication, and evaluation expertise. DeVita has also emphasized building and broadly sharing the foundation’s knowledge. A well-respected foundation leader, DeVita is committed to using data to make better decisions in grantmaking.

Wallace’s  approach to philanthropy has been profiled in the book Creative Philanthropy by Helmut Anheier and Diana Leat (Routledge, 2006), and in two CEP research publications, Aiming for Excellence at The Wallace Foundation (2009), and More than Money: Making a Difference with Assistance Beyond the Grant (2008).

“We are thrilled that Chris DeVita is joining our board,” said CEP President Phil Buchanan. “Under Chris’ leadership, The Wallace Foundation has become a model for using data to assess and improve its performance.”

DeVita, who retires from The Wallace Foundation in June, joins a Board of Directors whose other members include Board Chair Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Michael Bailin, former president and CEO of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation; Crystal Hayling, former president and CEO of the Blue Shield of California Foundation; Christine James-Brown, president and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America; James Knickman, president and CEO of the New York State Health Foundation; Patricia Kozu, managing director of finance and administration at the National Employment Law Project; Kathryn Merchant, president and CEO of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation; and Nadya Shmavonian, president of Public/Private Ventures.

Alyse d’Amico is vice president—programming, communications, and development at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

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We Get By with a Little Help from Our Friends

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

At the heart of CEP’s work is the provision of comparative data that allows one funder to understand how aspects of its own performance compare to the other funders. In much of our work, the manifestation of that activity is charts in our reports that display the comparative data. I’d like to ask your advice in making the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP’s) data display stronger.

Here are two examples of the way our charts look now (click on the images to enlarge them).

We’ve tweaked these charts here and there over the past few years, but we still hear from some funders, and in our 3rd party feedback, that these charts can be tough to understand. On the other hand, some of the funders we work with love these for the amount of information they pack into a small space.

We think we can improve these charts. Although any change may not be immediate, we want to brainstorm now some other possibilities.

Fundamentally, any data display we use has to meet just a few basic parameters. It must:

  • be flexible enough to display a potential segmentation of the overall data, display trend data, and (probably) also a sub-group comparison – a cohort from among the full dataset
  • simultaneously display both an absolute scale and relative results (because both are necessary pieces of information in interpreting results)
  • display comparative context so that one funder can consider its relative results compared to our database of others’ results

Keeping with the core CEP values of transparency and feedback, we’d like to enlist your help. The readers of this blog and the users of our tools know CEP’s work well, and I think you probably have some opinions and ideas just waiting to be set free. We’d welcome the advice. (Or a recommendation for a great data visualization expert you might have worked with. This is too small a project for the couple we’ve reached out to.)

So please leave a comment with your idea. Scribble a chart idea, scan it, and upload it to our comments. Point us in the direction of something you think is analogous. Help us generate some ideas about this absolutely critical piece of our work.

What’s in it for you? The knowledge that you aided CEP in its efforts to help foundations become more effective. And, if we choose an idea you suggested, a very public and grateful acknowledgement for your efforts and ideas.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Don’t Believe the Hype, Believe the Data

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

When is a trend really a trend?

Too often, in philanthropy (and maybe just in life), we fall prey to believing something is a trend based on rhetoric and talk, rather than actual data about what is happening.

Here’s an example:  Many have suggested that there is an increasing emphasis on earned revenue in the nonprofit sector – and that there has been an increase in earned revenue as a funding source for nonprofits.  A year or two ago, I sat in on a presentation in which the speaker said, with authority, that “the rise of earned revenue” in recent years was evidence of the “blurring of the boundaries between the sectors.”

He said it as if it was an undisputable fact we all knew.

I have no doubt that the speaker very much wanted what he said to be true, and maybe he even thought it was.  But, the problem is, it isn’t.

The facts are, there is nothing new about earned revenue in the nonprofit sector (think Goodwill or hospitals or universities), and there is no data I have seen to support the contention that it is on the rise as a proportion of total revenue.

William Foster and Jeff Bradach of Bridgespan pointed this out in a very thoughtful Harvard Business Review article in 2005, noting that the data didn’t support the assertion that earned revenue was increasing as a proportion of total nonprofit revenue.  I wondered whether that was still the case, so I checked with the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics. The folks there ran the numbers for me on what the IRS calls Program Service Revenue – the best proxy for earned revenue on the form 990.

What the most recent available data shows is that Program Service Revenue has remained steady, as a proportion of total revenue, between 1991 and 2008. It represented around 70 percent of total nonprofit revenue in 2008, just as it did in 1991. (Yes, of course, it has increased in absolute dollars, but then so has contributed revenue.)

Breaking it down further reveals that Medicare and Medicaid payments make up a much larger share than was the case a decade ago, while “other” revenue – which would include the kind of earned revenue that the speaker who was touting an increase was referring to – has declined as a proportion of total Program Share Revenue.

On the organization level, fewer of the nonprofits filing 990s are reporting any Program Service Revenue. That number has actually dropped slightly – from 57 percent of organizations in 1991 to 51 percent in 2008.

So, no matter how you slice it, it’s pretty hard to support the case that earned revenue has taken on a more important role in the nonprofit revenue story. This is just one example of the phenomenon (is it a trend?) in which a trend is proclaimed on the basis of talk on the conference circuit or articles and blog posts – rather than on the basis of actual data about actual practice.

Another example is the provision of general operating support, as my colleague Andy Brock has noted on this blog.  While there has been much written and said about the importance of the provision of general operating support to nonprofits, both CEP’s data and Foundation Center’s suggest that, if anything, the trend is in the opposite direction.  Another “trend” that is often over-stated is the focus by funders on building the capacity of nonprofits, as we discussed in our 2008 report, More Than Money: Making a Difference with Assistance Beyond the Grant.

The fact that we can point to a few, high-profile examples of something happening doesn’t mean there is a broad or widespread trend.

Our desire for something to be true, or to position ourselves as the chroniclers of a trend, does not make it true. It’s a disservice to everyone in the sector when the media, consultants, or academics ignore the data to overstate a case – or to create one out of whole cloth.

As John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.”  And, as Chuck D. said, “Don’t believe the hype.”

I remain hopeful that the debates and discussions in the sector and in philanthropy can be more informed by facts and data in the future than they are today.

That’s a trend that is in our collective power to create.

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Sharpening the Streamlining Mindset

Friday, April 1st, 2011

“You hate to compare funders, but some just make the process insurmountable. Others make the process so easy that you wonder if they are throwing money at you without any thought. With [our funder] you feel they are thoughtful, thorough and diligent throughout the process.”

-Anonymous grantee

Inefficient, needless, or outdated application and reporting/evaluation processes undermine funder effectiveness by taking scarce time and money away from mission-related activities. They also throw a monkey wrench into funder-grantee relationships—and CEP research has shown that the strength of funder-grantee relationships is instrumental to funders’ capacity to have positive impact on grantee organizations.

Project Streamline is a collaborative initiative of grantmakers and grantseekers that has identified some of the pitfalls of selection and reporting processes, and how to avoid them. The report, Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose identifies four principles for streamlining grantmaking processes:

  1. Assess what information is truly needed to make grantmaking decisions.
  2. Ensure that the effort grantseekers expend is proportionate to the size of the grant, appropriate to the type of grant, and takes into consideration any existing relationship with the grantee.
  3. Minimize the amount of time, effort, and money that grantseekers spend getting and administering grants, thereby freeing up more time for mission.
  4. Make communications and grantmaking processes clear and straightforward.

In partnership with Project Streamline and Grants Managers Network, CEP recently announced the launch of the Grantmaker Assessment Tool, a free online self-assessment that enables funders to compare their grantmaking processes to those of other funders, assess how closely their processes align with Project Streamline principles, and determine the costs associated with their grantmaking processes for their organization as well as their grantseekers.

After completing a confidential online survey, grantmakers are immediately able to download a 27-page report that depicts their organization’s results as compared to those of other funders. In addition to estimates of the costs of their processes, participants will receive a “streamlining score” for each of the four streamlining principles. The tool is designed to help funders identify opportunities to streamline, and to spark discussions within their organizations. Participants can also return to re-take the assessment to track their organization’s progress over time.

Already more than 50 funders have completed the survey—so far, the data is striking.

For example, when asked, “How much could your organization decrease the amount of information collected from grantseekers without compromising its ability to make funding decisions?” most funders indicate little opportunity to streamline. However, the report also shows that most funders indicate, for example, that they require repeat grantees to resubmit all application materials, whether or not those materials need to be updated. And the vast majority of funders require grantseekers to submit materials—such as 990s—that are publically available.

The report lays bare contradictions like these, pointing funders towards opportunities to reconsider—and possibly reduce—redundancies and unnecessary burdens in their processes. It gives funders detailed, comparative information about their processes in order to spotlight areas for action and advocate for change within their organizations.

There is, of course, no one right way to streamline. Funders each need to consider their organization’s strategy, the level of risk they are comfortable with, and the value they aim to get out of their processes. But all funders do have the opportunity to approach their selection and evaluation processes from the streamlining mindset: a mindset that seeks to limit unnecessary burdens and reduce unnecessary costs.

When aggregated across the many thousands of grants, nonprofits, and funders, imagine the staggering potential of reduced costs and time saved. Imagine all that time, energy, and money redirected to pursuing mission and impact. Then ask: what could your organization streamline?

You can access the Grantmaker Assessment Tool here.

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