Effectiveness

 

You can’t ‘retrofit’ scale
Chris West

You can’t ‘retrofit’ scale

Chris West
1 September 2010
Alliance magazine

When Shell Foundation was established in 2000, we had ambitious objectives to catalyse scalable and sustainable solutions to key global development challenges. We set about doing this by pioneering an ‘enterprise-based approach’ and focusing on a range of social and environmental issues in which the energy industry has a particular responsibility. Scale has always been critical to our mission so we were particularly encouraged by the recent issue of Alliance dedicated to the subject.

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Want to be big? Go small
Benjamin Bradlow

Want to be big? Go small

Benjamin Bradlow
1 June 2010
Alliance magazine

South Africa’s Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP), founded shortly after the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, consists of groups of mainly poor women who save small amounts of money daily. These groups have built over 15,000 houses. But in a country where the more than 2 million houses built by the government have barely put a dent in the housing backlog, going to scale as a social and developmental movement is still a monumental challenge.

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Can we do better in Haiti?
Nicolas Borsinger

Can we do better in Haiti?

Nicolas Borsinger
1 June 2010
Alliance magazine

If you look at some of the key figures for the Asian tsunami and the Haiti earthquake, orders of magnitude are surprisingly similar: around 300,000 dead or missing; 1.8 million and 1 million (respectively) displaced or homeless; $11 billion and $9 billion pledged. But what is the single most significant predictable difference in the response to these disasters? I suggest it is ‘density of aid agencies’ and (worse) its ripple effects. This means that lack of coordination, low absorptive capacity and turf wars among aid agencies will all be even more problematic in Haiti.

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Better together? A user’s guide to funding advocacy coalitions
David Devlin-Foltz

Better together? A user’s guide to funding advocacy coalitions

David Devlin-Foltz
1 March 2010
www.alliancemagazine.org

Caroline Hartnell, editor of Alliance, asked me to suggest some guidelines for funding advocacy coalitions, drawing on our work as planning and evaluation advisers to foundations and their advocacy grantees – who often work through coalitions of groups that join forces to promote policy changes. How can funders help such advocacy coalitions reach their potential? How can they help their advocacy grantees be ‘better together’? And how can they avoid doing harm? Click here to read ...


Do people value what they receive for free?
Kerry Brennan

Do people value what they receive for free?

Kerry Brennan and Daniel Tello
1 March 2010
Alliance magazine

If you’ve ever sat through to the end of a bad movie simply because you didn’t want to ‘waste’ the money you spent on the ticket, you’re not alone. Many people assume that paying for something will make you more likely to use it, while items given away for free are undervalued and less likely to be used. These seemingly harmless assumptions have a big impact on current debates over how health products should be delivered to the poor.

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Center for Effective Philanthropy extends reach into UK

1 December 2009
Alliance magazine

The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) is expanding its work into the UK and beyond. In spring 2009, CEP surveyed the grantees of the Pears Foundation and Friends Provident Foundation to produce a Grantee Perception Report® (GPR). The GPR provides comparative data on grantee perceptions of foundation performance in a variety of dimensions; all information from grantees is kept anonymous.
 

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CEP responds to Aaron Dorfman

Phil Buchanan
1 September 2009
Alliance magazine

I appreciate Aaron Dorfman's kind words about the impact of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) and the quality of our conference in his review in the June issue of Alliance. I welcome both his encouragement of social justice funders to see the relevance of our work and his challenge to CEP to reach out more effectively to those funders.

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Taking philanthropy to where communities are
Susan Maposa

Taking philanthropy to where communities are

Susan Wilkinson-Maposa and Alan Fowler
1 September 2009
Alliance magazine

The priority of ‘community’ in community philanthropy is seldom realized. A social action research programme in southern Africa, the Community Grantmaking and Social Investment Programme (CGSI),[1] explored ways in which this might be addressed. Based on this research, we argue that vertical philanthropy (aided change) and horizontal philanthropy (self-help and mutual assistance) should blend, and that the onus rests with grantmakers to adapt and accommodate how they work, integrating what poor communities know and do about getting resources to where they are needed.

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A perfect match: Clarence Foundation merges with Foundation for Sustainable Development

7 July 2009
www.alliancemagazine.org

The California-based Clarence Foundation has just announced that it is about to merge with another Californian organization, the Foundation for Sustainable Development (FSD). There is a lot of talk of mergers these days – especially from foundations encouraging non-profits to think about merging in response to the economic crisis. In this case the merger will be between a grantmaking foundation and a non-profit that focuses on helping community-based organizations throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. Click here to read ...


Communicating for Impact: Strategies for grantmakers

1 July 2009
www.alliancemagazine.org

Foundation communications is no longer just a matter of producing an annual report or the occasional press release about grantees, argues one of GrantCraft’s latest guides. Integrating communications is critical to advancing programmatic goals. The guide sets out to show how grantmakers use a communications to develop strategy, evaluate impact and take advantage of new media technologies.

Communicating for Impact: Strategies for grantmakers
GrantCraft

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