Author Archive

Taking the Next Step(s)

Monday, May 17th, 2010

My posts last week were about how best to engage those on the front lines in philanthropy’s work. Of course, your strategy for engagement must be informed by what you’re trying to accomplish and how your organization perceives its role. However, there are some universal actions that philanthropy can undertake that would benefit grantees regardless of individual foundation goals and strategies.

I’ll leave you with this short list of actions that may help you more clearly see the world—and your own decisions—through the eyes of those you intend to serve.

  1. Solicit anonymous grantee feedback. For any funder that hasn’t yet solicited feedback from grantees, this is the place to start and you won’t be disappointed. The feedback will be illuminating and will spur important clarifying conversations. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Grantee Perception Report has enabled hundreds of foundations to get a better view of themselves through comparative feedback. Armed with this view, grantmakers are in a better position to make smarter decisions.
  2. Start with what your community needs rather than what you are equipped to provide. Try to work backwards by developing a stronger sense of what people want and need.  For instance, the next time your foundation is considering something new, start from an initial framing of the problem you hope to address, but leave your actions and the format of your response open to shaping by input from those closest to the issue. This can be applied to a new online grants application process as well as to the structuring of a new grants portfolio.
  3. Hire your grantees. GEO’s 2008 national study of foundation effectiveness, Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter?, found that grantmakers with staff members who have nonprofit experience are far more likely to engage in a host of “grantee – friendly” practices. Intentionally hiring folks with nonprofit experience will help you create an organization where employees at all levels have a deep connection to people outside your walls – especially those who receive your funding and ultimately benefit from your efforts. That connection will help you make hundreds of better decisions every day.
  4. Go into the community. Bill Somerville in his book Grassroots Philanthropy: Notes of a Maverick Grantmaker extols the importance of understanding what’s happening on the ground and in the community in order to be an effective grantmaker. He talks about hanging out at a community center or soup kitchen and talking to some of those receiving the service as an irreplaceable part of intelligence gathering when considering who and what to fund.
  5. Update your nonprofit experience set. Many in philanthropy got their start in the nonprofit sector, but it may have been years, even decades, since they’ve worked on the front lines. Grantmakers might consider creating periodic opportunities for staff members to work a three- to six-month stint inside a nonprofit of the size and scope typical of their grantees. Experiences like these provide grantmakers with a front row seat to understand the realities of grantees’ work and give them a variety of insights and firsthand experiences they need to do a better job as grantmakers.
  6. Go all the way. The highest level of stakeholder engagement involves creating a sense of shared ownership with grantees and communities. By including stakeholders in shaping foundation strategy and grant decisions, you’re giving up some of the power while at the same time exhibiting incredible trust in those most closely connected to the work. In the end, none of the problems we hope to address in philanthropy will be solved by independent actors. Attentiveness to philanthropy’s role as one actor in a collaborative problem-solving process will likely lead to shifts in some practices that serve as barriers to doing work in partnership with others.

My question for you is, what’s holding philanthropy back from more regularly putting what we hope to accomplish at the center of our decision making rather than the particulars of our individual organizations?

GEO and CEP are both shining the spotlight on ways to meaningfully engage important stakeholders in philanthropy’s decision making.  Please stay tuned for a soon-to-be-published GEO report on strategies for engaging stakeholders in order to get results that really matter for the people and communities we serve.

I’d like to extend my thanks to Phil Buchanan and the top-notch team at CEP for inviting me to participate in this dialogue.  Feel free to respond to this post or to contact me directly at enright@geofunders.org.

Kathleen P. Enright is President and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations

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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.

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Posted in Assessing Performance, Developing Strategy, Funder/Grantee Relationships | 2 Comments »

Rules of Engagement

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Some question whether the push for foundations to have well-developed theories of change, goals, and strategies may have the unintended consequence of distancing philanthropy even more from those on the front lines.  But instead I would suggest that the way you engage with and relate to grantees and others must be thoughtfully constructed based on how you think about your role as a grantmaker. 

These thoughts were prompted by a session at the GEO conference entitled “Strategic Philanthropy and Effective Grantmaker-Grantee Relationships.”  The session revolved around a series of framing questions regarding the roles of foundations in their dealings with grantees.  The questions (A sample: “Should funders be problem solvers or social investors?”) spurred a lively discussion among the audience and presenters Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Sean Stannard-Stockton, author of the influential blog Tactical Philanthropy.

The back-and-forth was friendly (i.e., no fisticuffs ensued), but Brest and Stannard-Stockton at times offered up a fascinating duality of views.  Where Brest is a strong believer in foundations having clear strategies and well-wrought theories of change, Stannard-Stockton advocates an approach where the grantee, not the grantmaker, has a theory of change.  In his view, the role of funders isn’t to design or frame solutions but to invest in high-performing organizations engaged in problem-solving work. 

Interestingly, many members of the audience pushed back against the session’s focus on either/or questions.  It seemed many of the grantmakers in the room preferred to see their organizations as both social investors and problemsolvers.  Foundation strategy is important, people seemed to be saying, but it should be based on a healthy respect for the views, perspectives, and expertise of grantees. 

But the way you engage with grantees depends on what you’re doing and how you view your role.  For example, in the Paul Brest model, you would (hopefully) develop and continually upgrade your foundation’s strategy and theory of change based on active outreach to and engagement with grantees and others.  You would want a sense from these audiences of how they believe your foundation can make a difference in solving problems. 

In the Stannard-Stockton model, on the other hand, engagement might be driven by another set of questions.  As a social investor, you might engage with nonprofit leaders, residents, and other on-the-ground experts about what organizations or networks are doing the best work in a given area or community, and how you can help them get even better results.

The takeaway for grantmakers: Think about how your organization views its role in the world, and then consider what that suggests about how you should be reaching out to grantees and others to engage them as more active partners in your work. 

There’s no debating the importance of relying on the insights and involvement of the people closest to the problem you hope to address.  The question is how to do it best given your goals and mission and how you view the role of your organization in the process of public problem solving.

Kathleen P. Enright is President and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations

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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.

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Through Others’ Eyes

Monday, May 10th, 2010

At the opening session of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations’ recent conference, Dev Patnaik, author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, made the compelling case for philanthropy to develop a “gut-level connection” to grantees and the communities they serve. Patnaik posits that the extent to which we base our strategy choices on a deep understanding of what’s happening on the ground is directly related to grantmakers’ chances of making decisions that deliver meaningful results.

 I couldn’t agree more. Called by a variety of different names – Dev Patnaik prefers “cultivating wide-spread empathy,” others use the terms “human-centered” or “user-centered” design – these concepts increasingly turn up in conversations about how philanthropy can have more impact. The idea is that grantmakers need to understand in an intuitive way what grantees and communities (the ultimate “users” of philanthropic products) truly need. Only then can philanthropy be certain that it is making investments and providing services that will deliver real results.

Many grantmakers are experimenting with ways to develop a gut-level connection to those they serve. Take the experience of the Stupski Foundation. Two years ago, they came to the disheartening conclusion that despite millions of dollars in support to try to reform public education in targeted districts around the nation, it was not getting a lot of traction.  Rather than walking away and perhaps investing their energies in another field or a different set of goals, however, founders Larry and Joyce Stupski agreed it was time to think differently.  They began experimenting with radical reforms that put the 21st-century learner at the center of educational change. 

But creating a learner-centered system requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of the learner’s needs and interests.  And so the Stupski Foundation invested in intensive ethnographic research in six school districts.  They are now in the midst of an even more ambitious customer research study focused on understanding the explicit and tacit needs of school, district, and state leaders to help in the construction of solutions. In a presentation at the GEO conference, Stupski’s chief strategy officer, Nelson Gonzalez, said the research included focus groups and “deep interviews” with young people, plus countless visits to schools. 

The goal of the research, according to consultant Erika Gregory of Collective Invention, Inc., was to “understand things people don’t tell you in a normal conversation.”  She explained further: “Much of our knowledge about systems and what people need is tacit.  It is knowledge you can’t draw out through direct inquiry, and so you have to engage in observational research.” 

In other words, you have to go out and see things for yourself, unlock what’s really happening in the schools and communities where you want to make a difference, and try to get people to open up about their real wants and needs.

This is empathy in action.  Whether you are working with third-party researchers and anthropologists or doing this on your own, the idea is to look at the world through the eyes of the people that your organization is seeking to serve. Grantmakers for Education recently adopted a novel approach to this challenge at a meeting where every participant adopted the persona of a young learner in the year 2025, complete with a fictional name and back story.  The idea was to have the group envision some of the key characteristics of a learning system that could respond to every learner’s needs.

“One thing I found astounding about the experience was how quickly we got to a deep, shared and aligned view of what needs to happen,” said Gonzalez, who participated in the GFE session.

It’s a work in progress, but one that holds enormous potential to demonstrate the power of empathy to transform how philanthropy works – and what results we get in return for our investments. 

There are a lot of grantmakers like the Stupski Foundation that are experimenting with new ways to engage with key stakeholders, new ways to figure out if their work is truly having a positive impact on the people they care about most, new ways of involving others in the design of better solutions and better programs.  The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s YouthTruth project with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is another such example.

My question for you is this: How can philanthropy more effectively put those we hope to serve at the center of our work? 

Kathleen P. Enright is President and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations

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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.

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Posted in Assessing Performance | 4 Comments »