In her blog post of last week, Linda Wood described the benefits to philanthropy when funders participate in “more truth-telling and candor.” Her comments are right in line with the findings we report in Working with Grantees: The Keys to Success and Five Program Officers Who Exemplify Them. But it can be difficult for program officers to create the conditions in which grantees can be totally honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
In his video interview, Chris Kabel, one of the high-performing program officers highlighted in the report, talks about the art and science of building strong relationships with grantees. According to Kabel, the ‘art’ portion of the equation is the ability to create trust with one’s grantees. That trust, he says, helps grantees feel safe enough to share their challenges – rather than sweeping them under the rug. The result is a partnership focused on solutions that can lead to more effective philanthropy.
To learn more about the elements of positive funder-grantee relationships, we encourage you to view interviews with three of the program officers featured in the report.
Alyse d’Amico is Vice President – Programming, Communications, and Development at CEP.
“Talk about sharing sensitive material! Wow.” This was just one of a number of similar comments the Haas, Jr. Fund received from nonprofit and foundation colleagues reacting to the level of truth-telling and candor shown in short video clips we recently posted of executive directors talking about coaching.
In these videos, successful, highly regarded nonprofit executive directors describe the issues that they are working on with their Haas Jr.-funded coach. We hear from a long-time executive director and public official pushing through fear to take on work that would be new and risky. From another about the difficulty of taking a different leadership stance when she moved from the #2 position to the #1 executive director role for the first time. From still another about how to assess whether she would continue to be the right leader for the organization’s next phase.
Hardly unique challenges for nonprofit leaders. But what seems to have struck a chord is their willingness to “tell it like it is”: to acknowledge strengths and weaknesses and to describe the value and impact of reaching out for support.
What would it take for truth telling and candor to catch on in philanthropy, so that comments like these don’t feel like such a breath of fresh air? Much has been written in recent years about the need for greater honesty, transparency and even partnership between funders and grantees.
A year ago, the Skoll Foundation introduced the notion of “radical transparency,” based on the experience of Forge, an international organization (led by executive director, Kjerstin Erickson) that used the Skoll community as a sounding board for deep organizational issues. Most folks in philanthropy understand well the steep risks of investing in start-up nonprofits. Yet the philanthropy blogosphere – and even the Wall Street Journal – was rightly abuzz when this social entrepreneur went “open kimono,” to quote the blogs, and took a candid and humble approach to reaching out for advice and financial help. And, it worked; they raised money.
We can also thank the Center for Effective Philanthropy who got the ball rolling in the direction of truth-telling when it started the anonymous Grantee Perception Report that gives foundations, often for the first time, the unvarnished truth about how helpful – or not – they are to their grantees’ efforts. And, it worked; foundations have begun to change their practices as a result.
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations has also called for funders to look at how they get in the way of their own grantees’ effectiveness. GEO’s leader, Kathleen Enright, has urged us to build the trusting grantee relationships that allow for candor, and to experiment with ways to see the world through the eyes of those we intend to serve.
At the Haas, Jr. Fund, our leadership investments have been a rich source of learning about what leaders need to be successful. With dedicated resources, our grantees are able to tap what’s tried-and-true about strategy, boards, fundraising, executive leadership, and teams; but they are also given resources to experiment with out-of-the-box ways of working and leading. We have been struck by the importance of making sure that what matters to us as funders does not crowd out dialogue about what matters most to our grantees. How can we create the conditions to simply ask, what do you need? Not your staff. Not your board. And, for the moment, not even your end beneficiaries. What do you as a leader need to do your best work?
As the anonymous foundation that stepped forward to provide funding for Forge put it, “When a funder balances power and becomes a partner, the truth comes out. When a funder expresses their support for someone’s work and the desire to fund what is needed most, the truth comes out.”
Linda Wood is Senior Director, Leadership and Grantmaking at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund.
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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.
When it comes to soliciting feedback from grantees, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund in San Francisco walks the talk. Thoughtfulness, candor, feedback from grantees, and constant improvement are an integral part of how I’ve seen the Fund do its work.
Recently, we were interviewing staff from Haas, Jr. for a new CEP case study on understanding the field – the Fund is an exemplar in gathering and sharing expertise in its fields of work. One staff member we spoke with was Linda Wood, senior director, leadership and grantmaking.
Knowing how important good leadership is for its own success, the Fund has established a program area that provides access to leadership development for nonprofits. In the course of our conversation about her work in that area, Linda mentioned videos of grantees describing their leadership coaching experience that the Haas, Jr. Fund has posted on its website. People reacted with surprise, Linda said, at how openly the folks in these videos share what that coaching has been like for them.
Because honesty and transparency are also CEP’s watchwords, we were delighted when Linda offered to share her thoughts about these videos in a blog post. We hope you will join the conversation as she ponders, “What would it take for truth telling and candor to catch on in philanthropy?”
Kevin Bolduc is Vice President, Assessment Tools at CEP.
Are funders listening to those who should matter most? Are funders listening to those whose lives they seek to improve?
In my last post, I discussed the new report from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), Do Nothing About Me Without Me. The report calls for funders to engage stakeholders more frequently and substantively in their decision making.
But who are the right stakeholders? Over the past decade, CEP and GEO have both emphasized the importance of hearing from grantees and, given that they are the ones on the front lines doing the work to help funders achieve their goals, that makes a lot of sense. To think you could devise and implement a sound strategy without hearing at regular intervals – in a rigorous and candid way – from grantees is the height of hubris. I am proud of the role CEP has played in bringing the grantee perspective to funders.
But funders have tended to pay less attention to rigorously collecting the perspectives of those stakeholders for whom the stakes are highest: those whose lives a funder seeks to improve.
Admittedly, for some grantmakers, this is difficult, at best. If your goal is to protect an endangered species of wolves, your options are limited.
But if you are, say, trying to improve the quality of human services available to recent veterans, shouldn’t you ask them what they need?
Or, if you are trying to improve outcomes for students in America’s high schools, shouldn’t you understand how students are experiencing those efforts? In fact, if you understood that there was a link between changing student perceptions and changing student outcomes, might you have a crucial leading indicator by which you could manage and gauge progress?
That’s what CEP is exploring in an effort called YouthTruth, developed in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and now also funded by the Stuart Foundation. So I was pleased to see the GEO report’s emphasis not just on grantees, thought leaders, and internal constituencies such as staff and board, but also on local community members.
“Engaging the people you intend to help or the representatives of the communities you serve is essential to learning how you’re doing as a grantmaker,” the report argues. Our YouthTruth initiative involves surveys of high school students and the delivery of Beneficiary Perception Reports to school leaders, districts and education networks, and funders. We have designed the process to be one in which students understand their views will be taken seriously; this isn’t another “fill in the scantron sheet” with your No. 2 pencil experience.
Lucy Bernholz, Ed Skloot, and Barry Varela describe YouthTruth in the following way in their report, Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector:
“[YouthTruth] inherently recognizes the value of the ‘end user’ experience. It … equips students with the data if they want to use it, while also pointing them to other resources that might help them improve their schools. This type of evaluation turns ‘subjects’ into ‘actors.’ It changes the dynamics at every level—from when data are collected, from whom, how they are used, and who can analyze it—at a cost that is negligible when compared to traditional approaches.”
The early results of YouthTruth are encouraging (a formal evaluation is underway), with school leaders making many different types of changes on the basis of what they learn. For a flavor of what schools learn, watch this video, produced by MTV, that is played at kick-off assemblies at schools before students take the online YouthTruth survey.
We are hearing that this data is seen as extremely powerful by school leaders. But we have yet to see if the data will be used to inform funder decisions about strategy and strategy development. More on that in my next post.
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.
