Center for Effective Philanthropy conference

Event CEP Conference: Aligning for Impact – Connecting the dots
Date 31 March-1 April
Venue Los Angeles, USA
Organizer Center for Effective Philanthropy

It would be almost impossible for anyone who attended the recent conference of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to argue convincingly that CEP is not having an impact on how philanthropy is practised in the United States. The CEP mantra is that foundations need to have clear goals, employ strategies designed to achieve those goals and analyse performance indicators to know if they are making progress. This approach is clearly being adopted by an increasing number of foundations, and the effect is – for the most part – positive. But some at the conference raised questions about whether the CEP approach to effectiveness is at odds with important foundation efforts to pursue social change. This critique is worth exploring.

But first, let me say clearly that the conference was extremely well run and well attended. It was enriching to engage in conversations with the thoughtful and influential people in attendance. The size – about 275 people – was large enough to be interesting and not so large that you could not find the people you wanted to talk to. One of the highlights of the conference for me was to hear clear examples, in plenary sessions and in breakouts, about how individual foundations have improved their practices as a result of their engagement with CEP or followed the goals/strategies/indicators framework that CEP promotes. The rigorous analysis of data, and the emphasis on having clear goals and strategies, is undoubtedly helping many grantmakers do their work better. This is, overall, a tremendous step forward for foundations, non-profits and the communities they serve.

To the extent that people voted with their feet, however, it appears that the leading social justice grantmakers in the US did not generally find a lot of value in CEP’s conference and chose not to attend. By my count, using CEP’s attendance list and comparing it to NCRP data, only seven of the top 35 social justice grantmakers (ranked by percentage of grant dollars for social justice) were represented at this year’s event. Two of those seven were foundations based in Los Angeles. When expanded to include the top 100 social justice funders, only 20 were at the conference.

Why did so few social justice grantmakers choose to spend their time and their travel dollars attending CEP’s conference? Where do effectiveness and social justice overlap? How do we prevent the analytic nature of the CEP approach from making philanthropy sterile and transactional?

The crux of the issue, which came up in the very first question during the opening plenary, seems to be that an over-reliance on data and indicators leads foundations to focus on issues that are measurable and to ignore issues that may be more important but hard to quantify. Here is the observation that Demos senior fellow Michael Edwards made during the question and answer session:

‘You said, I think, that changing community ethics was not a sufficiently clear goal to be legitimate in this new context, which is an odd observation when you consider how social change actually happens. I mean if one takes the example of tobacco control or attitudes to smoking, it was precisely those long-term changes in norms and ethics that led to action – that made action possible – over a 20- or 30-year period. What worries me, and I’m sure this wasn’t your intent, is that the use of that example and delegitimizing it pushes foundations towards only dealing with the easy subjects, and not the difficult ones.’

I know that CEP does not want to push foundations towards focusing only on issues that are easy to measure. In fact, its work helps foundations become more effective at pursuing those ‘hard’ issues by advocating for goals that are specific enough for foundations to determine whether or not they really are making progress. But so far the tools CEP has developed have not resonated very well with social justice funders.

My hope is that, over the next few years, we will see a coming together of sorts of the ‘effectiveness camp’ and the ‘social justice camp’ in US philanthropy. Both sides have something to learn from each other. My challenge to Phil Buchanan and others at CEP is to figure out how their work can be more relevant to social justice funders. My challenge to social justice grantmakers is to figure out how they can improve their work by being clearer about their goals and strategies, and how they can measure progress towards achieving those goals without abandoning the ambitious social change objectives they are pursuing. In bridging the seeming divide, our world, its people and their societies are the clear beneficiaries.

Aaron Dorfman is Executive Director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Email adorfman@ncrp.org

For more information
www.effectivephilanthropy.org