Author Archive

Lessons in Grantee Interactions

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

November 2010 will mark my second year as a grantmaker. It’s been a whirlwind of new information, new people, and new ways of working in the nonprofit sector, for which I am extremely appreciative. In response to CEP’s recent study of best practices among highly rated program officers, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned in my first two years.

1. Power dynamics are real.

The stories I heard before taking this job are true. People are often happy to hear from me. My phone calls and emails are returned promptly. I’ve had conversations with grantees and said, “These are just ideas,” and received proposals with verbatim transcriptions of my thoughts. It happens. These power dynamics are inherent in the relationship between nonprofit organizations (grantees or not) and grantmakers. I do try to mitigate them as much as possible, first and foremost by acknowledging them openly. I know it’s touchy-feely of me to say, but I think it’s important to remember that we’re human.We have families and histories and interests outside of our jobs. Getting to know the staff members at grantee organizations as people has been really helpful in breaking down the power barrier and also quite rewarding, as the arts world is filled with fun and interesting folks. It also lays the groundwork for building trust and mutual respect, which are important antecedents to my next point.

2. Meet grantees where they are.

Candor, on the part of both the grantmaker and the grantee, is vital to strategic grantmaking. In order to create this relationship, I start by doing my homework and getting first-hand exposure to a grantee’s activities. I familiarize myself with their artistic work by going to see performances and sitting in on classes and rehearsals. I learn about the communities they serve and try to get to know the neighborhoods in which they operate. I want to be fluent in my grantees’ work and deepen my understanding as much as possible. That way, when we sit down to talk about strategic challenges, new opportunities, declining revenue streams, or the latest artistic success, I have a strong base of knowledge with which to enter that conversation. Also, I read whatever recent grants documents we have on hand – yes, all of them. To the extent possible, I want to speak my grantees’ language and meet them on their turf. I think it helps grantees trust that I too am invested in the work they do.

3. Listen more. Talk less.

In conversation with grantees, I like to exhibit a discerning openness. I’ve found that the ability to ask thought-provoking, open-ended questions is a useful skill. Open-ended questions often serve me better than pointed ones because they have a way of revealing where the leaders of organizations are in their thinking. There are, of course, exceptions to this approach, and there is always a time and place to probe deeply on critical issues or to offer ideas or suggestions. However, I’ve learned more and made more progress talking through tough problems with grantees when I’ve been able to follow their train of thought rather than try to steer it. There’s a lot of value in letting organizations find their own answers, even when I think I might have an idea for a solution. Once things are on the table, we can scrutinize together.

4. The 30,000-ft. view can be useful.

Many nonprofit leaders are very much in the weeds of running their organizations, supporting their communities, and dealing with the myriad demands on their time. I’ve found that sharing what I’ve learned from speaking with other grantmakers and organizations or directly connecting grantees can have real value for the organizations with which I work. I recognize that, as a grantmaker, I have access to people and conversations that my grantees do not. It’s nice to be able to be a resource.

In reference to my last post, I think the common thread running through all of these lessons is the fact that giving organizations multi-year, general operating support grants of significant size makes grantee interactions easier. General operating support is as much an affirmation of my trust in an organization and its leadership as it is a reflection of strategic alignment.

Before I bid my time as guest blogger “adieu,” I want to re-orient a bit. I sometimes worry that with all of this left-brained thinking and emphasis on effectiveness, I may forget about why I’m here on this planet and why I do this philanthropic work. I passionately believe in the transformative power of the arts in the lives of individuals, communities, and for our world.  I want to leave you with a quote by one of my favorite poets, Audre Lorde. She once said:

 For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

If I may be so bold as to expand this amazingly powerful statement, I believe that all creative expression functions in this positive way and for everyone – not as a luxury, but as a “vital necessity of our existence.” I encourage all of us to remember this truth and to realize it every day.

Ron Ragin is an associate program officer in the Performing Arts Program at Hewlett Foundation.  The views expressed are his own.

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Thoughts on General Operating Support in Uncertain Times

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

The Hewlett Foundation has long been an advocate of making general operating support grants when appropriate alignment between an organization’s goals and strategies and those of the Foundation programs exists. Our President’s statement in the Foundation’s 2008 Annual Report covers this topic in detail. The large majority of the Performing Arts Program’s grants are multi-year general operating support grants of significant size (relative to grantees’ annual operating budgets) because such an alignment does exist. 

As Paul Brest mentions in the above-linked statement, nonprofit organizations place a high value on this type of support for a number of reasons. It gives organizations the financial stability, autonomy, and flexibility necessary to direct their spending where it is needed. It enables innovation and risk-taking, providing nonprofits with resources to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. It eases the fundraising burden and mitigates the potential for mission creep.

In challenging economic times such as these, the benefits that general operating support can provide to nonprofit organizations are placed in high relief. In addition to financial challenges, there are many other environmental factors creating great pressure on nonprofit arts organizations — changing demographics, technological innovations, and shifts in consumer preferences, to name a few. (Note: If you’ve got a moment, check out this fabulous speech by Diane Ragsdale, formerly of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Actually, you should just carve out some time to watch it. She provides a clear analysis of the challenges that arts organizations face and offers some potential paths forward).

All of this environmental uncertainty is challenging some basic assumptions about best practices. Here’s an example. I recently asked the leader of a local nonprofit arts organization what he was learning through the strategic planning process that his organization is undertaking. He said something to the effect of, “You know, Ron, we’re creating a strategic plan that doesn’t look like anything we’ve used before. There’s too much uncertainty to plan three years out, so we’re working on a new vision for the organization. Then we’re going to develop an operational plan for the year and start piloting new ideas, monitoring the whole way.”

His answer was refreshing and realistic, and I appreciated his candor. Organizations need to set visionary and achievable goals and require the flexibility to pursue them in ways that make sense given the rapidly changing environmental context in which we find ourselves. General operating support is one way in which we provide our highly aligned grantees with that opportunity.

Ron Ragin is an associate program officer in the Performing Arts Program at Hewlett Foundation.  The views expressed are his own. 

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Investing in Data

Friday, September 10th, 2010

The Hewlett Foundation’s approach to philanthropy is grounded in a belief that we should strive to maximize the expected return of our grant investments relative to our goals. However, as many nonprofit folks have written ad nauseum, measuring social and environmental impact is challenging and decidedly imperfect. At a very basic level, we often don’t have the data we need to know how the world is changing. For grantmakers, who are one or more degrees removed from the ultimate beneficiaries of our grants, the difficulty of measurement and evaluation can be exponentially compounded.

At the Hewlett Foundation, most of our programs have invested in large-scale data systems to improve decision making, monitoring, and assessment of field-wide changes and impact. Over the past few years, the Performing Arts Program has invested in large-scale data and analysis tools that we hope will have benefit for the field and our grantee organizations, and will help the Performing Arts Program achieve its goal to measure impact and assess progress toward outcomes. Here are a few:

California Cultural Data Project has helped the field standardize and aggregate financial information about arts and cultural organizations throughout the State. This resource enables organizations to track trends and benchmark their financial performance against peer organizations, as well as streamline the reporting of financial information to funders. In addition, the tool helps us track the financial performance of our grantee organizations and research the overall financial health of the nonprofit arts ecosystem in the Bay Area (and beyond!). We share this information with our Board of Directors each year.

The Bay Area Cultural Asset Map is a one-year pilot project that is currently under development. The output will be a suite of web-based mapping tools that aggregates and analyzes information to help us better understand who is making art, where it’s happening, who is benefitting from or participating in art making, and how the ecosystem is being supported. Although this primarily will be an internal tool for the Performing Arts Program during the pilot phase, the ultimate vision is to create a publicly available resource that allows other funders, policy makers, arts organizations (nonprofit and commercial), artists, and the general public to understand and access the diverse cultural landscape of the Bay Area in new and exciting ways. Stay tuned!

The arts and culture field lacks large-scale, regularly collected and refreshed data sets that are made broadly available. Some of this may have to do with a lack of capacity for arts organizations to systematically track their own data and report on trends over time, but I think there’s also a cultural reason (no pun intended) for this lack of information. In the arts, we work in the realm of the ephemeral, the beautiful, the abstract, and the intangible. Our impact is difficult to measure – though there is exciting work afoot on that frontier – and this circumstance has, I think, led to a bit of resistance for us to put ourselves under the evaluation microscope. However, we’re starting to fill in some of the gaps.

If you want to learn more about how the Hewlett Foundation thinks about the value of data, check out this.

Ron Ragin is an associate program officer in the Performing Arts Program at Hewlett Foundation.  The views expressed are his own. 

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Keepin’ It Real with GPR Results

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Before I get started, I’d like to thank the folks at CEP for asking me to contribute to their blog. I’m looking forward to the conversation that will unfold here.

I’m a person who appreciates candor in my relationships. I think it runs in my family. I don’t know too many Ragins who will hesitate to tell you what they think about anything — always with tact and respect, of course. As such, I was excited (and admittedly a bit nervous) when the Hewlett Foundation commissioned CEP to conduct its third Grantee Perception Report (GPR) in 2009. Having previously worked at CEP, it was odd to be on the receiving end of grantee feedback for the first time, but I was anxious to learn what Hewlett’s grantees thought of the performance of the Performing Arts Program, where I serve as associate program officer.

So what did we learn? First, the good news. Compared to other foundations, grantees rated our program quite positively for its impact on and understanding of the field, local community, and organizations that we support. Given that the Performing Arts Program is field-specific as well as regionally focused, we were pleased with this result and felt affirmed in the grantmaking approaches we’d chosen to take. Though we don’t have direct measures of impact (we’re still working on it), grantee perceptions therefore are important performance indicators, as these organizations have on-the-ground knowledge upon which to draw.

However, we received less positive ratings on other important measures, including the clarity of communications of our goals and strategy and the helpfulness of our selection process in strengthening grantee organizations. In response to open-ended questions, grantees expressed a desire to better understand the Program’s strategy and to have it communicated more consistently. They also wanted to know how their work fits into our strategies. With regard to the selection process, grantees told us something we certainly know — relative to other arts funders, our application is long and difficult. We intend the rigorous thinking that is required to complete our application to be of benefit to the organizations, and while many responded that they found the “extra” application elements to be useful, we recognize that improvements could be made.

As a program officer, it’s easy to get trapped in a bubble, deprived of the critical feedback necessary to improve practice over time. This is why GPR results are so helpful. They give us a necessary reality check that we may not otherwise receive.

So what did we do? After a number of internal conversations, as well as some Program-specific follow-up sessions with CEP staff, we made a few changes that we think will help the Performing Arts Program move in the right direction. We now reinforce and communicate to grantees the Program’s goals and strategies as frequently as possible, particularly when having in-person meetings. We placed our Program’s logic model on the Hewlett Foundation website and refer grantees to it, as well as other funders and interested parties. Three times a year, we host a series of grant seeker workshops, during which the Program staff review goals and strategies with grantees, walk through the more challenging application elements, and field questions. We also revised our application, identifying and removing some redundant elements.

I’d be curious to know what other folks have done to improve communications about goals and strategy and to make their selection processes more helpful in strengthening grantees. Any good stories or suggestions? CEP has published a number of reports about ways in which foundations have made improvements in response to grantee feedback. Check them out, if you haven’t already.

Ron Ragin is an associate program officer in the Performing Arts Program at Hewlett Foundation.  The views expressed are his own. 

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