INSP - The ‘how to’ and the ‘who to’ of dissemination

Last year’s INSP plenary meeting in Heidelberg[1] failed to arrive at a clear definition of strategic philanthropy. Inevitably, this year’s plenary meeting at Long Island, New York, on 12-14 March was still grappling with the issue.

As Craig Kennedy (German Marshall Fund) admitted at the beginning of an illuminating ‘conversation’ with John Healy of The Atlantic Philanthropies (see Alliance Bulletin, May 2003), ‘some of us are still a bit fuzzy about the concept’. Kennedy had spent the morning looking at 25 foundation websites and discovered that all of them claimed to be ‘strategic’.

Barry Knight (CENTRIS) spent the first day running four consecutive workshops on the concept involving all plenary participants. The aim of the workshops was twofold: to map the concept of strategic philanthropy and, in line with INSP’s way of doing things, to create a working group. The eventual aim is to produce a joint ‘conceptual product’ for INSP.

In search of a definition

The idea was to come up with a definition by drawing on the insights and experiences of practitioners. Knight asked people to suggest what they saw as essential features of strategic philanthropy – necessary, not sufficient. Although some participants resisted even the idea of essential features, emphasizing the importance of context, the end result was agreement on a wide range of features and a few major disagreements.  People agreed, among other things, that:

• Strategic philanthropy must have a clear vision and a clear mission.
• There must be ‘value added, ie outputs and outcomes must add up to more than inputs and resources.
• There must be a theory of change underpinning the relationship between the two, and methods of monitoring and evaluation put in place early on to see that the two are properly ‘aligned’.

In a way the agreements were mostly pretty much what one would expect. ‘What’s the difference between strategic philanthropy and good philanthropy?’ asked one plenary participant. Does the emphasis on the ‘strategic’ mean we have lost tactics and operations, asked another, falling back on the military origins of the terms.

Perhaps more interesting were the disagreements. One of these was about ends and means. Which is strategic philanthropy about? According to Dirk Eilinghoff (Bertelsmann Foundation), it was one of the ‘basic assumptions’ of 2002 that ‘strategic philanthropy is effective philanthropy’, ie it is about means. Not all INSP members agreed with this view, though there was no agreement about how clear the normative ends need to be.

Another set of differences related to the appropriate relationship between funder and grantee. Does strategic philanthropy imply having terms negotiated between the two? What is the right balance between trust (of funder in grantee) and accountability? It was suggested that foundations have to have trust but they also need to verify.

Universal dissemination?

Much of the meeting was devoted to sharing the results of the working groups over the past year and drawing up work plans for the year ahead. Instead of four working groups there are now 14 small subgroups, each focusing on one aspect of strategic philanthropy and aiming to generate one paper.

With INSP now entering its third year, dissemination is a hot topic. What will the final INSP products look like? Basically, there will be publications, training (the Summer Academies and strategic philanthropy workshops) and a ‘conference of decision-makers’, to be held in 2004. The key publication will be the International Guide to Strategic Philanthropy, consisting of shortened versions of each of the 14 papers. This might be accompanied by a CD with the full papers, depending on the publisher. There will also probably be other ‘spin-off’ publications.

The real challenge for INSP will be marketing. There is an unfortunate tendency in the non-profit world to see publication itself as the goal, with the result that good publications are often not disseminated adequately.

But the question for INSP is not just ‘how to’ disseminate but ‘who to’ disseminate to. The audience sometimes seems to be seen mainly as medium to large foundations, but why limit it? ‘If anything can justify all this, it must be universal dissemination,’ was one member’s comment. It seems a weakness of INSP that so few members come from developing or transitional countries. Nevertheless, said one speaker, many INSP materials may in fact prove most useful to emerging foundations in developing countries. A ‘decision tree’ developed by one subgroup to help foundations formulate their theory of change was a case in point.

1 See Alliance, Vol 7, No 2, June 2002.

For more information
See www.insp.efc.be

If you have  interesting and challenging texts on strategic approaches to philanthropy that you’d like to include on the INSP website, please contact the INSP management at dirk.eilinghoff@bertelsmann.de

Upcoming events
The second International Summer Academy on Philanthropy will take place in Bologna, Italy on 27-29 August. It will focus on strategic philanthropy and foundation management.

An INSP joke
Two programme officers are walking in a park. One works on preventing nuclear war, the other on preventing homelessness. They pass a homeless man sitting on a bench. ‘How come my programme is so successful and yours isn’t?’ asks the first.