Posts Tagged ‘foundation effectiveness’

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Data Point: Influencing Donors Who Give to Community Foundations

Friday, September 16th, 2011

The use and management of data stands at the core of the work undertaken by the Center for Effective Philanthropy. The set of survey tools CEP has developed as well as field-wide research builds comparative data drawn from key constituent groups—grantees, donors, staff members and others—providing insights that enable funders to better define, assess and improve their effectiveness.  We are posting this series to share our data more broadly and to highlight specific data points.

In this case, the source is the Donor Perception Report (DPR), which helps community foundations to better understand donors’ awareness of their organizations’ strengths and future opportunities.

The data point shown above comes from responses to the following question:

Please think about your giving to or through the Foundation over the past 3 years. Rate the importance of each of the following factors in your decision(s) to establish a fund with the Foundation, or to make contributions to the Foundation or to your fund instead of giving to or through other charitable options.

Donors taking this survey were asked to rate on a scale of 1 (Not at all important) to 7 (Extremely important) several elements related to their community foundations, in categories such as leadership and knowledge, finance and administrative services, or reputation and referral network. While the highest rated factor among the over 2,500 donors surveyed was the Foundation’s integrity and trustworthiness, the quality of the Foundation’s staff was the next highest rated factor as shown in this chart. The Foundation’s efforts to connect the respondent to other donors, however, stood on the opposite end of the scale as factor with the lowest rating.

Readers of this blog post are invited to respond. Does this information fit with your expectations about how donors make decisions?

 

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CEP’s work is rooted in the conviction that feedback can play a role promoting change in foundation practice. For a broader look at the role of feedback in philanthropy, see the report, Can Feedback Fuel Change at Foundations? written by Phil Buchanan, Ellie Buteau, Ph.D., and Shahryar Minhas and published by the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

 

Kevin Bolduc is Vice President – Assessment Tools at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

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What Foundations are Doing to Understand their Effectiveness

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

One of the first research projects undertaken by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) after it was founded 10 years ago was an effort to understand what foundations were doing to assess how effective they are.

What we learned in 2001-2002 was that foundation leaders were frustrated by how limited their ability was to determine how well the foundations they lead were doing. The data they collected was most likely to speak to the financial performance of the foundation or to the success of individual grants. But it was hard to determine a meaningful answer to the bigger question: how a particular foundation is doing in work designed to make a difference in the world.

CEP’s 10th anniversary created an opportunity to take a fresh look at the current state of performance assessment at large foundations in the United States. What our new research determined is that, in brief, progress is real, but much remains to be done.

As my colleague Phil Buchanan said at our 2011 conference, “… even though we can point to many compelling examples of foundations making an impact, there is far too much ineffective philanthropy–foundations funding programs that don’t work or having the opposite of the intended effect. That’s why assessments are so important.”

Today, CEP is releasing new research about foundation CEOs’ attitudes toward assessment and what the foundations they lead are doing to measure performance. Our  new report, The State of Foundation Performance: A Survey of Foundation CEOs, draws on the responses of 173 CEOs who head foundations making $5 million or more in grants annually. Responses to the survey provide a snapshot of a movement in philanthropy that remains controversial and complex.

The majority of CEOs we surveyed believe that foundations have made great strides in being able to assess their effectiveness. A majority also believes that too few foundations understand their overall performance. Clearly, the issue carries weight. Fully 72 percent of CEOs say assessing their foundation’s performance is a high priority for them.

The search for useful metrics has expanded between our first and second reports. Our data indicate that foundations are using a broader range of information to understand their effectiveness than they were a decade ago.

  • With regard to foundation operations and finances, almost every foundation looks at investment performance and administrative costs. But the kind of information that foundations are least likely to look at is data about people working at the foundation: diversity of staff, staff retention rates and what staff say it is like to work at the foundation.
  • With regard to programmatic work, almost every foundation uses anecdotal feedback, grantee reports, site visits and evaluations. But the information that foundations are least likely to turn to for understanding their program work is feedback from their ultimate beneficiaries – those who are receiving the services or programs that foundations are funding.
  • More than 90 percent of foundation CEOs report they conduct formal evaluations of their work, and almost 50 percent of CEOs combine information across multiple functions to generate a foundation-wide assessment.

These findings seem to support CEOs’ perceptions that there is still a ways to go when it comes to understanding their foundations’ performance, and offer foundations potential paths to follow to get closer to that understanding.

Perhaps one of the most sobering findings from this survey is CEOs’ continued desire for more involvement by foundation boards of directors in the important work of performance assessment – a key aspect of any board’s oversight responsibilities. Over the years this finding has repeatedly arisen in CEP’s research. In this new report, we gleaned more insight into what is getting in the way. The most frequent reason CEOs cited is that the board does not have a deep enough understating of the issue areas in which the foundation funds – a reason that can certainly be addressed by any foundation.

As with all of CEP’s research, we hope this report will spur conversations in the staff meetings and board rooms of those who read it.

Ellie Buteau is Vice-President—Research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

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The State of Performance Assessment, 10 Years Later

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

A decade ago, I started my job at CEP and we launched a study on performance assessment at large foundations. It’s not as if we were the first to think the question of whether a foundation was achieving its desired results was important. The earliest major American philanthropists cared deeply about results and some foundations, like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, had been putting major resources into evaluation for decades.

But what was lacking, at that time, was a look across the large foundations to understand both practices and attitudes when it came to performance assessment.  So we undertook that study with limited resources — $345,000 in grants from the Atlantic Philanthropies, Packard, and Surdna –  and a small staff (three of us worked on the project, and that was CEP’s sole effort in its first year).  We conducted a broad-based survey of CEOs and a series of qualitative interviews.

What we found was clear – and sobering.  CEOs didn’t feel particularly satisfied with the information they could tap to understand how their foundations were doing. They weren’t utilizing a broad set of indicators, tending instead to rely on evaluations that told them more about a particular grant or set of grants than about the overall effectiveness of the foundation they led. And many of them told us they wanted more timely indicators to help guide and inform their work.

A lot has changed in the past decade. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other new foundations have burst onto the scene. A whole set of infrastructure organizations, from CEP to GEO to Bridgespan to Guidestar, have either been founded or grown substantially. And the media has paid more attention to philanthropy, raising questions about how it operates and what it has achieved.

So we thought it made sense to take stock, again, of the state of performance assessment at large foundations. This time, we surveyed CEOs of foundations with at least $5 million in annual grantmaking.  We’ll release results of that study tomorrow at noon, EST.  Check this blog and our Web site to find out how performance assessment has changed and what the attitudes and practices are of foundation CEOs today.

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Gates Annual Report Highlights CEP Role in Increasing Global Impact

Friday, August 5th, 2011

The power of CEP’s Grantee Perception Report (GPR) received a strong endorsement this week from Jeff Raikes, President of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A widely published AP news story sparked by the giant foundation’s newly released annual report focused on the challenge of getting honest and useful feedback from grantees—and how effective CEP’s tools have been to that end. You can see the article online or in a host of newspapers, or click here.

In an interview with AP reporter Donna Gordon Blankinship, Raikes made the connection between the survey and need for his organization to be more in sync with grantees around the world.

“If we can work more effectively with our grantees, that will increase the impact that we aspire to,” Raikes said, according to Blankinship. 

After talking with Jeff Raikes, Blankinship interviewed Phil Buchanan at CEP, who talked about the ongoing need for foundations to develop credible and objective information about the relationship between grantee and funder.

You can see an overview of the Grantee Perception Report here.

David Trueblood is vice president — communications and programming at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

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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.

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