Alliance Online - June 2007

Herding cats with empirical data?

David Bonbright

EVENT Assessment to Action: Creating Change
Date 8-9 March
Venue Chicago, USA
Organizer Center for Effective Philanthropy

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.

Few would deny that the Center has been a considerable success, and that it is going from strength to strength, but it is also true that it must win its way through a community of institutions that are notoriously difficult to influence from the outside, particularly on a comparative basis. It may be that whoever coined the phrase ‘herding cats’ was referring to grantmaking foundations.

The power of perceptual data

Since its founding in June 2001, the Center first innovated and then persuasively demonstrated the power of comparable perceptual data as a means of improving foundation performance. The report from its five-year anniversary event in September 2006 summarized the history of its innovation process: 

1. research into the way foundations scrutinized performance data (they didn’t!);
2. analysis of performance measurement (no one data set possible to calculate); and finally
3. the path-breaking creation of one new data set – the views of foundation grantees solicited anonymously and developed comparatively.

As Center director Phil Buchanan noted in his welcoming remarks at the March 2007 conference, perceptual data does not answer all questions, but it does yield fundamental insights. It confirms suspicions and punctures complacency bubbles. To date, the Center has surveyed more than 40,000 grantees of 189 foundations. Grantee Perception Reports provide grantee feedback on 58 questions covering performance-related issues ranging from the responsiveness and knowledgeability of the foundation to the quality of non-financial support provided and the extent to which the foundation contributed to knowledge and policy in the grantees’ fields.

The foundations commissioning these reports have testified overwhelmingly to their usefulness – particularly to their boards, who had previously been fed on a diet of anecdote, staff opinion and, as a rare delicacy, independent evaluation of an individual programme.

The conference featured a series of plenary and breakout sessions that allowed foundation CEOs, evaluation directors and other senior officers to share and analyse the impact on their foundations of using the Center’s growing list of ‘assessment tools’. These have multiplied from the flagship Grantee Perception Report to include an Applicant Perception Report, Staff Perception Report, Operational Benchmarking Report and Comparative Board Report, as well as an integrated assessment tool called the Multidimensional Assessment Process.

Research on foundation strategy

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 detailed typology of four strategy personas to be found 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. It became a running joke throughout the meeting for participants to preface their comments with ‘I am a partial strategist’, or ‘I am an aspiring total strategist with uncontrollable charitable banker impulses’. Further chapters of this research on strategy are bound both to generate controversy and to continue to advance a field more known for its prerogatives than its performance.

In sum, this event was another tour de force for one of the most refreshing and important organizations to emerge onto the US philanthropy scene in the past decade. It is well past time for the rest of the philanthropy world to begin to heed the data issuing from the Center’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

David Bonbright is Chief Executive of Keystone. Email davidbon@keystonereporting.org

For more information
www.effectivephilanthopy.org

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