Author Archive

« Older Entries

Funder Uses YouthTruth Data to Spark Community Engagement

Friday, September 9th, 2011

When the California Endowment’s Laura Olson began working in the far northern region of Del Norte County, California, she faced a dilemma.

Del Norte County (and Adjacent Tribal Lands) is one of 14 communities that make up the California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities program. The Foundation’s hallmark program seeks to create places where children are healthy, safe and ready to learn. The heart of this work is engaging communities in strategies that will improve the health and well-being of their residents through systemic change.

But, as any funder knows, it isn’t easy to find ways to deeply involve community members in such efforts. For Olson, a beneficiary survey called YouthTruth helped catalyze community discussion.

Del Norte, a rural area located about seven hours north of San Francisco, faces an array of challenges including a declining fishing and timber industry, the highest poverty rate of any county in the state and very low rates  of youth going on to higher education. As part of the planning process for The Endowment’s initiative, community members said that in order for them to have a healthy community, they needed a successful economy, which they linked to a successful education system.

Why Are Schools Failing? 

The community’s need to strengthen schools to get to a healthier community is what led The California Endowment, a health funder, to look at how it could help push for educational change, said Olson, program manager at The California Endowment in a panel at the 2011 Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) conference.

She soon discovered a barrier.

“What we needed was a common understanding of current conditions [in the schools],” Olson said “You’d walk into a coffee shop and people would say the school system is failing. You would ask ‘What about the system is failing?’ But they didn’t know. Business leaders didn’t know why it was failing, just that they can’t hire their workforce from local graduates. Nobody could really talk about it.”

The Endowment set out to gather data on the strengths and challenges of area schools so community members could have an informed conversation.

For help, Olson turned to YouthTruth. The survey, created in 2008 by CEP with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, gathers data on high school students’ perceptions of their schools.  Through the survey, students report what is working in their schools and what could be improved. CEP then provides customized reports to schools that show each school’s results in comparison with peer schools in their district as well as to schools that make up the national YouthTruth sample. District leaders and local funders also receive a summary report. YouthTruth provides findings for school leadership, students, and district personnel and works with staff to use the results to make changes in their schools.

As part of its data gathering, The Endowment commissioned YouthTruth surveys of students in all four county high schools. The survey asked students questions about areas such as:

  • Their relationships with their teachers.
  • Their school’s overall culture.
  • Their preparedness for their future goals.
  • The rigor of classes and instruction.
  • Their life outside of high school.

At The Endowment’s request, CEP also added customized questions on students’ sense of well-being, lunch options and exercise habits.

Student Survey Reveals Surprises

The survey results were startling. And they helped spark a conversation in the community, Olson said.

“What did we learn from the data?” Olson said. “We learned that students don’t feel challenged in the classroom. Students were considering other options besides college after graduation, and a large proportion of students felt unclear about their future. Teachers and administrators were surprised. They said they didn’t know they weren’t talking about options after college.”

Because YouthTruth survey findings provide comparative data, teachers, school administrators and community members could see that students ranked the high schools in Del Norte comparatively lower than other schools on questions such as, “My school has helped me understand the steps I need to take in order to apply to college.”

The YouthTruth survey achieved an 80 percent response rate from students across the four schools, making the findings particularly compelling not only for schools but for the larger community, according to Olson.

“The data [from YouthTruth and other sources] was used to inform and engage people outside the school system,” she said. “For me, that was a key aspect. This was an opportunity to get the community involved in a conversation around schools. Having this perception data was important in that process. It brought diverse stakeholders to the table. A lot of people came who wouldn’t have come to engage in a conversation about education. We had an economic development summit and we engaged businesses, and teachers and parents.  We got the conversation started, including envisioning what we want to see. It’s not just the schools’ responsibility to educate their children but the community’s responsibility.”

“At the end, we created a common understanding of the problem and we raised the profile of important issues in the community.” Olson continued. “Now, when community members go into the coffee shop, they can tell you what’s going on in education and they can tell you what students are thinking.”

YouthTruth Provides Key Baseline Data

The data from the YouthTruth survey brought another important benefit to Olson, she said. The California Endowment is just two years into its 10-year Building Healthy Communities initiative. By surveying high school students early on, the Endowment can repeat the survey and see if student perceptions of teachers and school change over time as a result of planned interventions in Del Norte.

“Now we have this great baseline data,” Olson said. “It’s not a 2 percent sample size. It’s an 80 percent response rate. We can do it again and we can generate engagement of those whose lives and thinking we are trying to change. The students are talking about what they want and what they think for the first time because we asked them. [YouthTruth] allowed us to engage the students in a way that we just didn’t have the tools to do in the past.”

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in YouthTruth | Comments Off

How Community Foundations Use Donor Perspectives to Improve Their Work

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

While donors are the lifeblood of community foundations, at times it can be tough to know exactly what they want from their foundations.

For two leading community foundations, learning about their donors’ views from a comparative survey served as a catalyst to get both their donors and their board members more excited and involved in foundations’ work. What’s more, survey results led both foundations to take new steps that they believe will bring in donors who will be actively engaged with their foundations, according to the community foundation leaders who spoke at CEP’s 2011 conference in May.

CEP’s Donor Perception Report (DPR) is a confidential survey that asks donors’ perceptions of the strengths and areas for improvement of the community foundations they fund. The DPR provides foundations with findings not just on their donors’ perceptions but on how they compare with other community foundations.

The Greater Cincinnati Foundation commissioned the DPR in 2010 after trying four other donor surveys that did not yield the information that leaders needed, said Kathryn E. Merchant, president and CEO of the foundation. In the previous attempts, the foundation struggled to get good, objective information from a source that understood community foundations, Merchant said.

“The first [donor] survey we did ourselves,” she said. “People didn’t think the credibility was strong. Then we went to the other extreme and hired a market research firm, and they didn’t get our business.”

For the DPR, CEP surveyed the community foundation’s donor advised funds (755 via email and traditional mail) and received a 34 percent return rate. The foundation found that it rated highly on donor satisfaction and willingness to refer others to the foundation compared to 13 other community foundations.

“When [CEP] presented the report it was our best board meeting ever,” Merchant said. “The board was so excited to have this information…The board was excited to learn: (a) about our good report card; and (b) about the areas where we could possibly improve because they were so clear and excited about the journey we were going to take…The whole organization is getting a buzz from this one survey. Had I known, I would have begged CEP harder to do this sooner.”

The foundation also learned that fully 72 percent of its donors would like to be self-sufficient for their giving decisions, relying on the foundation primarily for management and facilitation of their funds.

“That tells you a little bit about what you have to do in upping your game in your self-service tools,” Merchant said. “We had been working on that in a slow paced way. We decided that 2011 is the year that we really need to bring that home.”

The DPR also told the foundation that some donors wanted much more involvement. For the past several years, The Greater Cincinnati Foundation has categorized its donors into one of three tiers with tier one donors as the most highly engaged, tier two has somewhat less involved and some wanting to get more involved, and tier three as the donors satisfied with the self-service aspect. The DPR revealed that some of the tier two donors wanted more engagement with the foundation, more site visits to nonprofits, and other ways of connecting. As a result of the survey, the foundation formed a task force that included donors and began looking for ways to engage those donors and address other DPR findings, Merchant said.

“We’re thinking about making it easier for donors to go from tier two to tier one,” Merchant said. “I do wine tastings for my donors now.”

(Merchant is also a certified wine professional.)

“This is the hit of the universe,” Merchant said. “This is just a fun informal setting where we get to talk about the community of donors because we didn’t really get that before. The biggest gift in the DPR is to see what the donors think in a clear-eyed way and understand the nuances of how you might approach coming a little closer to getting people what they need.”

The DPR also revealed that The Greater Cincinnati Foundation had twice as many donor advised funds for each staff person assigned to donor relations as did the comparative foundations. Merchant used that information successfully to make the case to her board that the foundation needs to hire another staff member in donor relations.

The Rhode Island Foundation used the DPR in conjunction with other CEP tools, including the Grantee Perception Report®, the Stakeholder Perception Report, and the Applicant Perception Report, to get feedback from a variety of key people and organizations, said Neil D. Steinberg, the foundation’s CEO.

“The single most significant finding [from the DPR] was that our donors of today are not our donors of tomorrow,” Steinberg said. “If we wanted to grow the foundation, if we wanted to have an impact, if we wanted to raise our visibility and leadership, we had to reorient how we would [cultivate] donors.”

As part of that work, the foundation looked outside the usual applicants when it had an opening in its development team. Instead of hiring a fundraiser as is typical for community foundations, the foundation hired a senior private banker who had worked in wealth management. She had ties to some of the wealthiest individuals in the state who may not have known about the foundation, Steinberg noted. The foundation also started connecting potential donors with its program officers more.

“Our best fundraisers are our program officers,” he said. “If someone says they are interested in the arts, we put them with our program officers and we wow them with what we are doing in arts organizations.”

Through the DPR and other CEP surveys, Steinberg said that the foundation began to address a potentially serious problem. When donors die and leave their estate to their children, those offspring, who are often living in another state, may want to use the money to support causes where they live rather than Rhode Island.

“We are now having a dialogue with donors when they open funds, which is usually when their kids are young,” Steinberg said. “We will describe the situation of money going outside of Rhode Island and ask them where they want their money to go. They will often write in the document that 50 percent of the money goes to Rhode Island. We didn’t know to do that before,” he said.

“The real crux of what we are doing is changing the dialogue,” he said. “We are getting to know our customers better.”

Susan Parker is owner of Clear Thinking Communications.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Assessing Performance, Developing Strategy, Funder/Grantee Relationships | Comments Off

Michael J. Fox: Getting Results By Going the Unconventional Way

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Almost from the start, Michael J. Fox and Debi Brooks began upending the way foundations typically do business.

The co-founders of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research did so because they felt an urgency about finding a cure for Parkinson’s—and because in the beginning, they didn’t know any better.

When Fox decided to start a new foundation dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease, he said he knew he wanted to keep its efforts tightly focused on research. 

“One of the reasons we focused on research was because it was a huge task, it was an essential task,” said Fox, who spoke at the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) 2011 conference. “If we started going in all sorts of other directions, no one would be served.” 

The decision to center the foundation’s mission around Parkinson’s research, rather than patient services, was just one of the first ways that Fox and his colleagues forged their own way.

Fox, an acclaimed television and film actor as well as bestselling author, established the foundation in 2000, following the public disclosure of his diagnosis in 1991 at age 30 of young-onset Parkinson’s disease. Since its inception, the foundation has funded more than $240 million in research to speed development of breakthrough treatments and a cure for Parkinson’s disease. Today it is the world’s largest private funder of Parkinson’s research and has been held up as an exemplar of a new breed of nimble, strategic, and fast-moving disease research funders.

At the CEP conference, which marked its 10th anniversary, Fox said that the hallmark of the foundation is “informed urgency.”

“It’s been like a joke in our board meetings—POM—purity of motive,” he said. “Whenever we get bogged down in anything, we [remind ourselves] we are here for one thing. We are in business to get out of business.”

Co-founder Debi Brooks, a former Goldman, Sachs & Co. executive, said that the foundation began taking unconventional approaches like asking its researchers to meet and share what they learned simply because it made sense. Brooks and her colleagues did not realize that wasn’t the way that competitive scientists typically approach their work.

Brooks pointed out that many academics are accustomed to receiving grants of up to five years’ duration from funders who do not routinely require detailed updates on their progress. Brooks and her colleagues, by contrast, began making smaller  grants over shorter timeframes. And, they wanted researchers to provide in-person updates on their work. It was a request that the foundation’s own scientific advisory board challenged. Board members said it would result in scientists simply sending their postdoctoral students because they were too busy to attend, Brooks recounted.

“I said, ‘We’re kind of busy too,’” she said. “We did some pushback.”

The requirement to meet was meant to help focus the work, Brooks said. Initially, the scientists simply tolerated the obligation of making an in-person presentation of their work in front of their competitors. But their reluctance soon changed to a different attitude, she said.

“What we found was that there was so much cross fertilization and problem solving in the moment that the assessment meetings ended up as some of the best work that we could spawn. [There were] partnerships, collaborations, [people saying] ‘I’m sending you my antibodies, you help me with this.’ Then it became that you wouldn’t miss the assessment meetings. We would say ‘Given what we heard, what are the challenges we should be thinking about?’ If you weren’t at the assessment meeting, you’d miss the chance to influence us.”

Meanwhile, as scientists compared notes at the assessment meetings, Fox’s presence provided an unexpected motivation, he said.

“I would go by the foundation [with these] large groups of scientists in the conference room who were busy swapping stories,” Fox said. “I would come in to say thank you. Their response [to me] was not as Michael Fox or as the founder of the foundation, but as a Parkinson’s patient. I would be very symptomatic in front of them. I could see them make the connection between what they were doing and this shaky person at the front of the table. It was about ‘fix the shaky person.’”

The full video interview of Michael J. Fox and Debi Brook’s talk at the CEP conference is available here. The conversation was moderated by Rockefeller Brothers Fund President and CEP Board Chair Stephen B. Heintz.

Susan Parker is owner of Clear Thinking Communications.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Developing Strategy, Programming and Communications | Comments Off

Esther Duflo Explains Why She Believes Randomized Controlled Trials Are So Vital

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

Even before Esther Duflo rose to speak at the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) 2011 conference, she had already stirred controversy. Her well-known belief in the ability of randomized controlled trails to understand the effectiveness of policy interventions in developing countries brings up strong feelings among some in the philanthropy world.

As Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas said in his introduction of Duflo, “Feelings runs so deep about Esther that Phil [Buchanan] actually received some tough emails about her coming to speak here to us.”

But Duflo seemed to quickly win the crowd over.

“I’m sure I’m not very dangerous,” said Duflo, professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. “I speak with a funny French accent. I don’t bite.”

In explaining her approach, Duflo said that discussions about foreign aid often devolve into a debate about whether the aid works or not. It is impossible to resolve that debate by staying on that level, said Duflo who is founder and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.  For one, the question of whether aid works is not particularly well defined, she said. Second, aid is a small part of developing countries’ overall budgets. For example, aid comprises about 5.7% of the budgets of African countries that receive it.

“A big part of my work is to try and shift the conversation from whether aid is good or bad to think about policy or programs instead,” Duflo said. “Another objective of my work is to think about not just the five percent [of aid], but the 100 percent.  [That is], what role this five percent can play in improving the quality of programs. I want to think about the efforts of most private donors…as not being an end in itself, but as being venture capitalism and finding the good ideas in development. In that case, think of each dollar you are spending as being multiplied many, many fold. If these programs help us identify what really works then that can be taken up as a policy on a very large scale. That is the reason for my work and the reason for placing so much emphasis on the evaluation of specific programs.”

Duflo cited several examples from the book she co-authored Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.

“I thought I would identify surprising facts that I didn’t know and maybe you didn’t know either and that would have been difficult to know without employing the kinds of methods we work with, particularly randomized controlled trials,” she said.  “The first one is that sometimes you save money by paying people.”

Childhood vaccines are generally available for free and yet each year millions of children go without basic immunization, Duflo said. She described a randomized controlled trial of three immunization camps in rural India.  She found that by giving parents an incentive to go to the camps to immunize their children—in the form of one kilo of lentils for each child immunized—the rate of immunization increased from 6% to 38%. (For more on this topic, see Duflo’s TED Talk.)

She said it the trial showed that it actually saves money to give the lentils. The cost for a child to be fully immunized in a camp without the incentives was $50 while it was $27 in a camp with incentives. That’s because the camps must pay for a nurses’ time regardless of the number of children they immunize. At the camps with incentives, nurses immunized more children and the costs per immunization decreased.

“Because of the randomization, seeing the effect is very transparent and easy,” she said.

Duflo said that findings like these challenge what she calls the three “I”s of development policy: ideology, ignorance and inertia.

“Programs are often borne in ideology,” she said, “[An ideology that] the poor are entrepreneurs, or they are starving or they are slothful. [Programs] are conceived in ignorance of the reality of the field, and then they persist because once they exist there is a consistency for them to just continue. I think we need to fight against that.”

As an example of the three “I”s Duflo cited a government policy in India to have village education committees on which villagers serve. That policy has not worked as planned.During the question and answer period, audience members asked Duflo to expand on her ideas.

At the end of the session in response to one question, Duflo showed how she can be both soft-spoken and laser sharp in her point of view.

“From our position of being reasonably well off and comfortable, [perhaps] university professors, we tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, ‘Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?’ And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care for you. And the poorer you are the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life….My lesson is to stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track.”

More highlights from Duflo’s talk at CEP’s conference will be available on CEP’s YouTube channel soon.

Susan Parker is owner of Clear Thinking Communications

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Assessing Performance, Developing Strategy, Guest Author | 3 Comments »

How Jeff Raikes Approaches the Challenges of Foundation Strategy

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

Growing up on a Nebraska farm, Jeff Raikes learned something about the fun and not-so-fun aspects of work.

“Every farm kid wants to drive the tractor – that’s the cool thing,” said Raikes, chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) 2011 conference. “But some days you drive the tractor, and some days you scoop hog manure. That’s a real job, and I have a real job [now].”

When Raikes took over the reins of the Gates Foundation, he had worked in the hyper-competitive world of computer technology at Microsoft for more than 20 years. In the business world, part of developing strategy came from learning from one’s competitors, he said.

“In the private sector, you see where competitors provide better value – how to do better,” he said. “I thought [here in the foundation world] there are no competitors, but there are opponents who have a legitimate different point of view about achieving the same goal or [believe] that it’s not the right goal. As in business where you have to pay attention to competitors, in philanthropy it’s important to listen closely to your opponents and their point of view.”

Moderator Nadya K. Shmavonian, president of Public/Private Ventures, pointed out that as the largest private foundation, many people are intimidated by the power, passion, and assets of the Gates Foundation. She wondered how Raikes welcomes and accesses honest feedback from others.

“It’s extremely important to be clear that you want a dialogue and then act consistently with that principle,” Raikes said. “I always find it important to say, ‘What is it that we could have done differently or better?’ because people are very highly tuned to say what they think I want to hear. If I say, ‘How’d I do?’ well, then they are going to tell me the nice stuff. If I say, ‘What it is that we have to do differently?’ it represents the spirit that we want to engage in a dialogue of how to make our work even better.”

“I know that’s going to seem overly trite and simple, but I just think of this as a general principle to drive down through the organization: that desire to always learn,” Raikes continued. “I think it’s extremely important that we pay attention to those people who criticize our strategy and really reflect on what they are saying.  If you are a business listening to what competitors say, it really helps you to improve your products and services. Take our education work.  I read Diane Ravitch’s book [The Death and Life of the Great American School System] cover to cover. I don’t agree with everything she says, but I think she’s got some insights that are worth reflecting on.”

Raikes also talked about other lessons related to strategy that he learned from his years in Microsoft.

“Growing up in the IT industry, you can easily fall in love with information and just want more and more information,” he said. “If you are going to be successful, it’s not the volume of information, but the quality of information – gathering the right information at the right time. Shortly after joining the foundation, I sat in a meeting with Bill and Melinda [and other senior leaders]. I could see in [Bill’s] comments a concern that we were going to go data crazy. In that meeting, the term ‘actionable measurement’ was coined. We need to measure those things that will cause us to make some decision or action.”

Raikes said that he also encourages his program officers to talk about not just the five best grants but the five grants that are not performing well.

“That’s where we are going to learn,” he said. “That is fundamental to countering the challenge that we don’t have the same feedback as the market.”

He also said that he doesn’t believe that an organization should wait to enter “the market” until it has a perfect plan. Raikes said he has learned that the way to develop successful solutions over time is to strike the balance of “where you have a good sense that something will work, and then you get out there and you test it and you learn and you iterate. I’m much more of a believer in iteration.”

He said that the Gates Foundation develops strategies that it intends to last three to five years. Then, on an annual basis, each strategy team reviews with him and the foundation’s co-chairs the execution of that strategy to see what’s working and what’s not in order to make adjustments.

“If our grants don’t fully succeed, we only fail if we don’t learn,” Raikes said. “That’s the essence of what we are trying to do in philanthropy. The key thing that I’m trying to emphasize is that success is learning.”

“If you’re not willing to continuously learn and make adjustments, you won’t get the greatest impact,” he continued. “…when we get into a new area like agriculture, which we did five years ago, we have this tendency to start out pretty broad. But then when we figure out where the points of leverage are, we focus. Those investments we make that are outside the points of leverage have to be transitioned, and that will be disappointing to some people…Maybe that’s the hog manure part of the job.”

The full video of Raikes’ talk is available here.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Assessing Performance | Comments Off

« Older Entries