Monthly Archive
April 2012
The Winding Path to Being a Foundation CEO
April 25th, 2012
The annual Council on Foundations (COF) conference, which will kick off this weekend in Los Angeles, features an interesting new track for “aspiring” foundation CEOs. The sessions are designed, according to the COF website, for “those with more than five years of senior management experience who expect to be foundation CEOs in the next three to five years. ...
Transitions at CEP and YouthTruth: Appreciating a Leader
April 19th, 2012
About four and a half years ago, I got off a plane and checked voicemail on my cell phone to find a message from Fay Twersky, then Director of Impact Planning and Improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now Senior Fellow at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation). Fay had been talking with me about the potential for CEP to help bring the voices of intended beneficiaries – those whose lives a foundation and its grantees seek to touch – more to the fore. ...
Why Staff Feedback Should Matter for Everyone
April 12th, 2012
Prior to joining CEP, I spent several years working with Global 1000 companies to implement employee engagement surveys, and I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that almost every crucial organizational outcome (profit, customer satisfaction, etc.) is tied to the engagement and commitment of individual workers. ...
Are Funders and Their Grantees Discussing Racial Diversity?
April 10th, 2012
As my colleague Kevin Bolduc and I discussed in a previous post, CEP sought to understand the degree to which funders and their grantees are communicating about racial diversity. Between spring 2010 and fall 2011, we collected data about this topic from more than 10,000 grantees of 70 US funders. ...
CEP’s Work to Date on the Topic of Racial Diversity in Philanthropy
April 5th, 2012
In the past several years, discussions about foundations and diversity – in particular diversity as it relates to race – have surfaced more frequently in philanthropy. Perhaps one of the most widely known – if highly controversial – efforts came from The Greenlining Institute’s work on The Foundation Diversity and Transparency Act. ...
Is Anybody There? Does Anybody Care?
April 3rd, 2012
The title of this post is borrowed from a song in the musical 1776, in which George Washington repeatedly writes the Continental Congress, requesting badly needed assistance, only to be met with evasive responses. The lines were called to mind by the experience one of my colleagues had with approximately thirty foundations when he sought support for a project to explore the basic question: “What is Philanthropy? ...
assessing performance
beneficiary feedback
beneficiary perceptions
communications
community foundations
comparative data
conferences
developing strategy
Donor Perception Report
economy
effective philanthropy
Essentials of Foundation Strategy
foundation effectiveness
foundation governance
foundation performance
foundation staff/program officers
foundation strategy
foundation transparency
Funder/Grantee Relationships
funder/grantee relationships
funder effectiveness
giving strategy
goals
Grantee Perception Report
grantee perspectives
Grantee Voice
indicators
leadership
nonprofit sector
overall foundation performance assessment
performance assessment
performance measurement
philanthropy
role of philanthropy
social media
Staff Perception Report
stakeholder engagement
strategy implementation
youth
YouthTruth
Lessons from a Risk Taken
I really appreciate your willingness to share this and your assessment of what didn't work out as planned or anticipated. Thanks.
I really appreciate your willingness to share this and your assessment of what didn't work out as planned or anticipated. Thanks.
Lessons from a Risk Taken
Jon, thanks for the comment. If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that the cost in time and effort and dollars were all higher than...
Jon, thanks for the comment. If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that the cost in time and effort and dollars were all higher than...
Lessons from a Risk Taken
Thanks for sharing the lessons learned, and what I sense are second thoughts about the cost/benefit of the whole enterprise. I appreciate the thirst for...
Thanks for sharing the lessons learned, and what I sense are second thoughts about the cost/benefit of the whole enterprise. I appreciate the thirst for...
Foundations and Impact Investing: What Is Really Going On?
Great insight. Sometimes it's great to invest in multiple countries as security as the economy in one country might decrease and increase in another.
Great insight. Sometimes it's great to invest in multiple countries as security as the economy in one country might decrease and increase in another.
Foundations and Impact Investing: What Is Really Going On?
Great questions. It is likely still too early to get a handle on whether the (potential) results reflect the hype meaningfully. However, I will be...
Great questions. It is likely still too early to get a handle on whether the (potential) results reflect the hype meaningfully. However, I will be...
