Center for Effective Philanthropy Conference

As one would expect from an event organized by a relatively young and high-impact initiative to enhance foundation effectiveness, the Center for Effective Philanthropy's biennial conference in Chicago in early March was a case study in the inexorable, if tortured, disciplining of grantmaking foundations through empirical data.

The Center has been a considerable success, and is going from strength to strength, but it must win its way in a community of institutions that are notoriously difficult to influence from the outside. As Center director Phil Buchanan noted in his welcoming remarks, perceptual data do not answer all questions, but they do yield fundamental insights.

The conference featured a series of plenary and breakout sessions that allowed foundation delegates to share and analyse the impact on their foundations of using the Center’s growing list of ‘assessment tools’. Besides the Grantee Perception Report, these include an Applicant Perception Report, Staff Perception Report, Operational Benchmarking Report, Comparative Board Report, and an integrated assessment tool called the Multidimensional Assessment Process.

The conference also featured the Center's vigorous research agenda, particularly a skilfully stage-managed lead-off presentation of the findings from its new research on foundation strategy. That study (available, from June, with all other Center publications on its informative website at www.effectivephilanthropy.org) creates a typology of strategy personas from among the 21 foundations that they surveyed: charitable bankers, perpetual adjusters, partial strategists, and total strategists.

The research methodology is thoughtful and experimental; the findings were presented with subtlety, humility and humour – and judging from my conversations with participants over the two days, they very effectively captured the nuance of approach and style of the professionals in the room.

In sum, this event was another tour de force for one of the most refreshing and important organizations to emerge on the US philanthropy scene in the past decade. It is well past time for the rest of the philanthropy world to pay heed to the data it is gathering.