By Rich Polt

The best communications campaigns are grounded with a single, clear idea. For truly iconic campaigns, the line between idea and slogan is blurred, such that all you need to hear is the message itself and you immediately know who it’s from: “Yes we can,” “Just do it,” “The other white meat.”

Achieving this kind of communications nirvana is not easy. It’s challenging for even the most focused, experienced and disciplined nonprofit (and for-profits for that matter) to develop a simple message and to deliver it to audiences in a compelling manner, again and again and again.

Unfortunately, by the very nature of the grantor-grantee relationship, clear messaging in this sector often falls prey to the compromises and hoop-jumping that is required to secure funding. The net result is not just weaker messaging and marketing campaigns, but ultimately diminished philanthropic and societal impact.

I recently saw this unintended and unfortunate dynamic with a nonprofit that had secured a sizable grant from a funder. While both funder and grantee undertook the collaboration because of clear mission synergies, the reality was that the funder brought tremendous leverage and its own marketing agenda to the mix. Despite both parties feeling that they were entering the relationship with eyes wide open, the nonprofit ultimately needed to have its external message take a back seat to that of the funder for the campaign. We’re not talking about a major conflict of messaging mind you. But it was enough of a nuanced shift that the growing nonprofit was no longer able to articulate its unique value proposition.

Communications is a discipline that by its very nature is squishy, subjective, and difficult to evaluate. In the same way that the Tactical Philanthropy community perpetually seeks better mechanisms for measuring philanthropic impact, thoughtful communications professionals lose sleep over how to best measure the return on their efforts. What does it mean to create buzz or to become a thought leader? So naturally, when we look at the interplay between two arguably nebulous disciplines – communications and philanthropic impact – it is difficult to quantify the problem.

This tension in funder-grantee communications mirrors the already documented tensions between funders and their grantees in other areas: program efficacy, mission drift, boardroom relations, etc. In a study by The Center for Effective Philanthropy on funder-grantee relationships, a key finding (detailed on the bottom of page 10) is that the “pressure grantees feel to modify their priorities in order to receive a grant” is an important contributor to the measure of the overall relationship. We know this is a very real issue. So it stands to reason that this also impacts the realm of communications.

While I am looking at this problem from the lens of the nonprofit, it is equally possible for the reverse situation to hold true. When smaller foundations, ambitiously working to create their own brand in the market, make grants to powerhouse nonprofits, they run the risk of having their messages eclipsed by that of their steamrolling grantees.

So what should be done?

A comprehensive analysis of this issue is outside the scope of this blog post and the sheer complexities involved indicate that no one-size-fits-all solution is practical. However, I do believe there are some basic preventative measures that both funder and grantee can take as they embark on a collaborative marketing effort.

1) Have a heart to heart. Both parties should acknowledge outwardly – from the very beginning – that they each have their own marketing agendas. Share these. Discuss key messages. Are there any messages that are so fundamental to identity that they cannot be compromised? Make communications part of the larger conversation about philanthropic impact and the intended outcomes of the relationship.

2) Know who is leading the charge. At the end of the day, one person needs to be responsible for the success of this campaign. Is it someone on the funder side or the grantee side? This fact alone says a lot about where ultimate messaging power should lie.

3) Sacrifice the rigidity of your message when it makes for stronger outcomes. If a nonprofit is participating in a campaign being spearheaded by the funder, than the nonprofit should be prepared to have the funder’s messaging and marketing agenda take center stage, even if it doesn’t completely mesh with its own messaging. At the end of the day, if the campaign is a success – and strong marketing helped bolster that success – than the nonprofit will be thrilled to have been a part of it. If this doesn’t sit well with the nonprofit, than hopefully they would have recognized the issue early by following suggestion #1 above.

On a macro level, I doubt anyone can say the degree to which differing grantor-grantee messages have degraded net social benefit. But having seen marketing campaigns fall flat as a result of this dynamic, I can say with complete certainty that it’s a problem (a.k.a. an opportunity) – one that merits our collective thought and consideration.

By William Schambra

This year marks the 15^th anniversary of federal welfare reform. Foundations were extremely active in that major policy initiative, and we can learn a great deal about what makes philanthropy effective from a look back at that time.

Reform meant dismantling a long-standing federal entitlement to support for dependent families, replacing it with a state-based, time-limited program. Wisconsin led the way in the state-level experimentation preceding national legislation, with considerable support from Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. That state’s new program, Wisconsin Works, emphasized job placement almost exclusively, backed by generous child care and state insurance programs.

As a Bradley program officer at the time, I was struck by the fact that metrics – in spite of the fact that every last detail of the program was measured, mapped, and monitored –didn’t tell us much about the program’s effectiveness. The one question metrics couldn’t answer was the one question for which we typically consider them essential: did the program work or not?

For conservatives, the numbers said yes, it works, because the welfare roles plummeted. For liberals, the numbers said no, it doesn’t, because the program didn’t lift many families out of poverty. The numbers simply became another weapon in a larger political struggle. The debate about effectiveness finally turned more on moral and political opinions about the meaning of “works” than on measureable outcomes.

That larger political struggle, which might seem to be an obstacle to reform, in fact was a major positive contribution to its effectiveness.

As a conservative foundation in a liberal city and state, we knew that every feature of our involvement would be scrutinized with a harshly critical eye. Bradley’s critics were numerous, vociferous, and uncowed by our endowment. There would be no easy praise, no adulatory newspaper editorials that foundations typically expect for their grants.

However soothing such automatic public applause can be it, it can also lull foundations into inadequately examined assumptions and mediocre performance. Vigorous criticism, on the other hand – as unfair and tendentious as some of it seemed — concentrated our attention wonderfully, leading us to think through every aspect of our involvement in reform with extreme care.

Our involvement was also served well by the fact that it was undertaken in our own backyard. The low-income communities affected by reform were fewer than five miles from the doorstep of our headquarters. We had come to know them well, because we had long befriended and funded an array of local, grassroots, faith-based groups embedded in those communities. We were confident that they would serve as a backstop for the state program, providing emergency food, housing and training for those who might not be ready to enter the workforce. We could also count on accurate information from them about the real-world, street-level impact of the program on their clients.

But working in our own backyard meant that, unlike so many social “experiments” launched by foundations in far-away inner cities, there would be no quiet folding of the tents and fading into the night if things turned out poorly. These were our neighbors, they knew where we lived, and they would hold us accountable. This, too, helped concentrate our attention and imbued us with a serious sense of responsibility for the outcomes.

The lessons of Bradley’s involvement in welfare reform were the reverse of what might have been expected. Metrics, the heart of social scientific calibration, have long been understood to be the key to successful policy reform. They are supposed to lift policy discussion out of the bitterly contested realm of political values and local, subjective viewpoints, and put it on the serene plateau of indisputable, objective, universal facts.

No such thing had happened in Wisconsin. Metrics were subsumed into the local political debate rather than the other way around. And a vigorous, face-to-face, fiercely partisan contest about the meaning of “what works” held Bradley accountable to its own community for concrete results, in a way that abstract measurement never could.

Unhappily, many foundations today believe that “effectiveness” requires detachment from immediate, hands-on engagement in the civic life of their own local communities, and tie their grantmaking instead to ever more elaborate, arcane, abstract theories and models. They’ll end up with numbers aplenty. But they still won’t be able to answer the question, “what works?”

“I am not taking any part in the search for my successor as president of the Hewlett Foundation, but if I were on the Foundation’s search committee I would welcome ideas from readers of Sean’s blog.”

Below is the list of people suggested by the Tactical Philanthropy community as potential successors to Paul Brest. Given the number of emails I got from readers (I’m intrigued that not a single person made a public suggestion via a comment, but instead most emails reiterated the importance of anonymity), I’ve listed those people who were suggested by at least two different readers. If your suggestion didn’t make the list or if you have yet to make your suggestion, leave your thoughts as a comment to this post.

So here we go…

Jeff Bradach: Jeff is co-founder and managing partner of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm well know for their work with foundations and philanthropists.

Phil Buchanan: Phil is the president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a leading research organization focused on providing information to help improve the effectiveness of foundations.

Jim Canales: Jim is the president of the James Irvine Foundation and is well known for pushing the philanthropic field to be more transparent.

Jed Emerson: Jed has played many roles in philanthropy and impact investing. He has worked in the past at the Hewlett Foundation and is well known to most readers of this blog.

Katherine Fulton: Katherine of president of the Monitor Institute, a consulting firm and think tank focused on working with organizations seeking to achieve social impact.

Paul Grogan: Paul is president of the Boston Foundation where he has a led a shift at the foundation to focus on making unrestricted, general operating support grants.

Michael Kaiser: Michael is the president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Before entering the social sector, Michael founded a strategic planning firm that worked with large corporations.

Grant Oliphant: Grant is the president of the Pittsburgh Foundation. Grant is outspoken, shows up regularly in blogs, video chats and other public venues and has a history of supporting philanthropic infrastructure.

Sonal Shah: Sonal was the first head of the Office of Social Innovation at the White House. Prior to working there, she was head of global development initiatives at Google. Sonal recently left her position at OSI.

Paul Shoemaker: Paul is the public face of the Social Venture Partners movement and has been deeply involved in many initiatives to advance the field of philanthropy.

Nancy Roob: Nancy is the president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a foundation known as a leading practitioner of evidence-based grantmaking and the recipient of the largest grant from the Social Innovation Fund.

Bob Ross: Bob is the president of the California Endowment… and he has a blog!

Albert Ruesga: Albert is the president of the Greater New Orleans Foundation and is well known to philanthropy blog readers as the author of the White Courtesy Telephone blog.

Fay Twersky: Fay recently joined the Hewlett Foundation as a senior fellow who “will work with President Paul Brest and the Foundation’s program teams to refine and consolidate the Foundation’s efforts to measure the progress and effectiveness of its grant portfolios… [and] will spend some of her time writing and offering reflections to the field on issues facing both nonprofit and philanthropic institutions.” Previous to joining Hewlett, she was at the Gates Foundation designing and developing their Impact Planning & Improvement division. According to Paul Brest, “Fay Twersky is simply one of the most knowledgeable and strategic thinkers in the field of philanthropy.”

Jane Wales: Jane is president of World Affairs Council of Northern California, president of the Global Philanthropy Forum and president of the philanthropy program at the Aspen Institute (yes, all three). She’s also host of the nationally syndicated NPR radio show “It’s Your World”.

Al Gore: This one only got one mention. But I add it in because it is oddly appropriate. Vice-president Gore has been out of politics for some time and focused on environmental issues (a core program for Hewlett). In the age of the Giving Pledge, might taking over the presidency of a multi-billion dollar foundation be a new role of choice for ex-global leaders?

I think this is a fascinating list. It is far from exhaustive, but certainly seems to line up well with the list of characteristics I said I was hoping to see in Hewlett’s next president.

However, I have a challenge to the Tactical Philanthropy community. Where are the leaders of nonprofit organizations on this list [update: I meant nonprofit direct service organizations]? Might not a major foundation and the field of philanthropy benefit from at least considering the leader of a top nonprofit organization?

I hope you will consider adding more suggestions to this list or adding your thoughts to those who have been named in the comments section.

The Hewlett Foundation is a private foundation whose board has sole and absolute authority to select their next president. But they are also an organization that seeks to exert influence on the public good and actively seeks to engage with the public. I see absolutely nothing wrong with having a public discussion about the decisions that Hewlett, or any large foundation, makes or contemplates making. These sorts of discussions happen all the time in regards to large for-profit companies. In both the for-profit and nonprofit case, the boards have authority to make the decisions they see fit and the public has the right to express any opinions they might have.

That being said, the emails I’ve gotten from very senior members of the philanthropic community – people whose opinions I respect very much – suggest that my hosting this discussion is far more controversial than I might have guessed. I intend no disrespect to the Hewlett board. I do not believe that anyone other than the board has or should have any vote on the matters of the Hewlett Foundation. I do not presume that my opinions or the opinions of my readers are any more valid than anyone else’s. I readily admit that my goal – advancing the field of philanthropy – overlaps with only a portion of the Hewlett Foundation’s mission.

But there is nothing wrong with the public, stakeholders in the common good over which the Hewlett Foundation and all large foundations seek to exert influence, holding discussions and expressing opinions on the actions of these foundations.

Why am I hosting this discussion? Because I, and every reader of this blog, have a vested interest in the development of the field of philanthropy. The Hewlett Foundation has been the most influential foundation exerting influence over the development of our field under the leadership of Paul Brest. With Paul announcing he is stepping down, I care a lot about who replaces him. Do I have any say in the matter or should I have one? No. But the public has every right to discuss those things which effect us. This is a bedrock principal of a vibrant public commons and the field of philanthropy does itself a disservice if it seeks in any way to limit public discourse about the development of the field.

The majority of the comments I’ve received about this discussion have been very positive. Of the negative ones that suggested I was breaching some kind of taboo, most were framed as not so much a complaint from the author but a warning that the discussion would be frowned upon by others.

Maybe I am breaking some unwritten rule that the decisions of foundations boards should not be discussed in public. But if that is in fact an unwritten rule, it is one I feel completely at ease breaking. I see no ethical prohibition on members of the public debating the decisions of foundations boards. I also will defend completely the right of private foundations to make whatever decisions their boards’ see fit.

Paul recognized that foundations should pay just as much attention to the practice of their philanthropy as to the execution of their programs. Paul didn’t just pay lip service to the need for constant refinement of your approach to philanthropy. He funded and personally oversaw the largest, most important philanthropy program at a major foundation. In recent years, the Gates Foundation has ramped up their own philanthropy program. But most all large foundations do not seem to believe that funding the investigation and development of the philanthropic field is their responsibility.

Paul, a former dean of the Stanford Law School, had strongly held convictions about the best approaches to philanthropy. But he relished a good debate and was willing to change or modify his beliefs when he was presented with compelling arguments. The philanthropy blogosphere is full of what superficially passes for debate. But too often it is actually just two different points of view being presented over and over without any give and take or any modification of positions that might suggest the “debaters” are looking to build their understanding of philanthropy rather than simply seeking to win the argument.

Paul celebrated the idea that learning comes from failure. He oversaw the release of Hard Lessons, a major report on a Hewlett Foundation program that went off course. He also created an annual prize at the foundation for the program that made the worst grant each year. Far from trying to embarrass anyone, the worst grant prize is meant to encourage program staff to embrace and learn from their mistakes.

Paul, preparing to retire at age 72, recognized the value of social media to the field of philanthropy. Writing in the 2006 Hewlett annual report, Paul discussed the need and process for creating an online information marketplace for giving. At a time when few foundation professionals even read blogs or tracked social media, Paul took to heart my argument that if he was serious he should launch a blog as a platform for debate. A year later he launched his own blog on the Huffington Post platform and engaged in a level of constructive critique that is rarely heard in public within our field.

On his blog, Paul didn’t just make statements from a soapbox in the way that so many foundation hosted blogs treat the medium as a digital platform for their press releases. Instead, Paul fully understood the conversational aspect of blogging that sets it apart. For instance, Paul took on my arguments that strategic philanthropy is flawed in a multipart back and forth between the two of us. He added his thoughts to debates started by other bloggers. He reviewed important books being released in our field. He highlighted critiques of his book by other bloggers. He criticized as “virtually meaningless” the nonprofit rating system used by Charity Navigator (but in a move highlighting his willingness to update his believes as the evidence changes, he oversaw a grant to Charity Navigator when it sought to improve its rating approach). And he wrote a scathing indictment of the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy’s position on how to assess foundations even while noting that Hewlett funds NCRP as part of their program to support the infrastructure of the philanthropic sector.

Paul doesn’t just accept the role of debate in building knowledge, he tolerates and encourages debate within his foundation’s own ranks. While I found his public sparing with me online and at conferences remarkable, I just about fell out of my chair when I read Letting Go, an article in the Stanford Social Innovation in which a current Hewlett employee made a case essentially at odds with the tenets of strategic philanthropy that Paul laid out in his book. Paul easily could have stopped the employee from publishing the piece, but instead allowed it and continues to engage in the debate publicly.

Paul was such a great large foundation president because he sees himself as a student of philanthropy, not just a teacher. It is easy for an executive who is put in charge of billions of dollars of philanthropic assets to assume that getting the gig must indicate that they are the one who knows what to do. But as I wrote recently, knowledge is a process not a destination.

What the field of philanthropy needs right now are senior leaders who see themselves not as the people who own the knowledge, but instead as student-leaders striving to help our field grapple with the many, many difficult challenges we face.

I wish Paul the best. As I said above, I frequently disagreed with his positions. While sometimes an opponent on means, Paul was a fierce believer in the value of the ends I seek: Building a better philanthropy.

Building on this theme, Bill Schambra of the Hudson Institute recently emailed me a link to a 2005 article about the the interaction between four major education funders and Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute who had written an article critical of their grantmaking strategies. In the article, Hess argued – as Tony did – that there is not enough criticism in philanthropy and made a case for foundations to encourage and welcome critical input. Hess even did a study similar to Tony’s showing how rare criticism in the sector is.

I’ve reprinted Hess’s argument below with some text removed due to its length:

“Good intentions shouldn’t insulate education scholars, reformers, or philanthropists from criticism. Even when we regard critiques as wrong-headed or inadequate, we should recognize that such scrutiny keeps us honest, helps others assess our arguments, and helps protect us from hubris. In a democracy, the hurly-burly of rough public discourse is essential.

One may honor the noble intentions of philanthropists… and still discuss the limitations of their efforts.

This does not mean that a critic’s view is the “right” one; only that such a perspective is crucial to the democratic process and the spirit of public accountability. Unfortunately, respect for the nobility of philanthropy and fear of offending philanthropists make such hard looks rare.

Just how rare such critiques are has rarely been documented. In light of the controversy stirred by my article, I thought it appropriate to explore the media coverage bestowed upon the foundations discussed in the article. They appear to routinely receive kid-glove treatment from the press and the education community; even obliquely critical accounts are hard to find.

My research assistants and I examined how the educational activities of the Annenberg Challenge, Broad Foundation, Gates Foundation, Milken Family Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation were depicted in major national media from 1995 to 2005. Using Lexis-Nexis, we searched the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and Associated Press. We examined all 46 articles available on the Annenberg Challenge and the first 25 on the educational activities of the other four foundations (in the case of the Walton Family Foundation, where just nine articles were located, we also examined articles on the Children’s Scholarship Fund that mentioned the Walton Foundation). We coded each article as primarily positive, primarily negative, balanced, or primarily factual.

Of 146 national media articles, editorials, and op-eds examined, just five were largely critical of the activities discussed. The remaining pieces were positive, neutral, or factual, with 65 positive, 67 simply relaying facts, and the remainder balanced. In other words, there were 13 positive articles for every critical account. The stories and editorials were often accompanied by glowing headlines like “Grant Helps Principals Get Plugged In,” “The Gift Sends a Powerful Message,” or “Two Teachers Go to Head of the Class with Awards for Excellence.”

Now, I recognize that those who steer leading foundations often make concerted efforts at disciplined self-appraisal. They evaluate the effectiveness of grants, engage in self-criticism, and convene working groups to assess their giving. This is sensible and desirable. It is not, however, what I mean when I talk about the benefits of public criticism. These conversations take place privately and away from public scrutiny, allowing foundation officials to reassure themselves that they’ve heard the array of arguments, sorted through options, and made the best decision they can. I’m happy to concede that they probably have.

These sessions, however, have a limited impact. It is hard-hitting public exchanges that can most effectively change the way options are weighed, alter the attractiveness of certain courses of action, or even reframe the context in which decisions are made. The groups convened by foundations tend to include, naturally enough, their friends, allies, and grantees. Such groups are less likely than outsiders to offer a radically different take on strategy or thinking—especially given the sensible disinclination of grantees to offend their benefactor or reformers to offend the engine funding their cause.

Because negative publicity can rile boards of trustees or disrupt relationships, one readily understands why foundation leaders are sensitive to suggestions that their efforts may be ineffective or wasteful. Foundation staff feel subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) pressure from their boards and benefactors to support projects that will demonstrate results and earn acclaim in a window that matches their grant-giving cycle.

If, as we have seen, the disinterested media go easy on foundations, leaders in the education and policy worlds are even more hesitant to turn their piercing gaze on foundations for at least three reasons. First, philanthropists are, almost by definition, worthy of praise. After all, they are giving money away in an effort to help others. Second, academics, activists, and the policy community live in a world where philanthropists are royalty—where philanthropic support is often the ticket to tackling big projects, making a difference, and maintaining one’s livelihood. Even individuals and organizations who also receive financial support from government grants, tuition, endowment, or interest groups are eager to be on good terms with the philanthropic community.

Third, even if scholars themselves are insulated enough to risk being impolitic, they routinely collaborate with school districts, policymakers, and colleagues who desire philanthropic support. Incurring the wrath of a major giver may make it harder for otherwise blunt scholars to collaborate with skittish colleagues, public officials, or educators. The irony is that leading experts on high schools, school choice, or urban school reform, for instance, tend to avoid commenting starkly on funders like Gates, Walton, or Annenberg.

All of this results in an amiable conspiracy of silence. The usual scolds remain in the good graces of the foundations by training their fire on other, less sympathetic targets. Even if foundation personnel choose to turn a blind eye towards this phenomenon, they should be aware of how the chill of a heavy-handed response to criticism can make an already skittish education community even more reticent.

I suggest, then, that foundations need to make it conscious policy to welcome—and even encourage—criticism. I’m not talking about hired evaluations or strategic assessments conducted by friendly critics but about rigorous debate over objectives, strategies, and performance. Given that even tart-tongued observers will be unusually reluctant to share their thoughts, foundations need to make it extravagantly clear that they will not blacklist critics—or look kindly upon those who do. Of course, such debate inevitably entails critiques that may seem incomplete, wrong-headed, or unfair—especially compared to the warm bubble in which foundations have long resided.

Only this kind of scrutiny, however, will flag blind spots, wishful thinking, or ineffective spending. The point is not that skeptics are always right, but that most efforts to change policy or organizations enjoy mixed results. The value of skeptics is that they raise unpleasant issues. Whether or not the foundation personnel agree with such assessments, engaging with them is essential to forestalling the plagues of hubris and groupthink that are so much a part of human nature.

The harsh cultural change I’m suggesting will not be easy. It will require foundation boards to become more accepting of negative publicity and foundation staff to acknowledge themselves as fair game for public criticism, rather than unsoiled stewards of noblesse oblige. This may seem like a lousy deal. But I think one of the lessons of the education philanthropy I discussed is that universal approbation is incompatible with fundamentally changing troubled social institutions.

What the new breed of muscular philanthropists have spent recent years learning is that mixed reviews just may be the painful price of relevance.”

Foundations have the gift of being essentially free from external accountability. Just as I think that each individual should have personal control over their own health, I think that each foundation should have control over their own actions. But that still leads open the possibility that foundations might choose to voluntarily subject themselves to external accountability as a tactic to achieve better results.

Deciding to post Grantee Perception Reports from the Center for Effective Philanthropy is one way that foundations are already doing this. It seems to me that another way they could utilize external accountability would be to announce at the beginning of a new program what their metrics for success are and then commit to a schedule of progress reports.

Some major foundations have already begun to share the results of their programs with the public. But generally these reports are released as a retrospective. It would be far more useful to helping the foundation achieve results if they released information at the beginning of a new program. In our workout analogy, simply telling people after you’ve been working out for awhile how you’re doing wouldn’t be very effective. The key is making a commitment to an external party in order to voluntarily put pressure on yourself to follow though.

In a recent post on the GiveWell Blog, Holden Karnofsky highlighted a nonprofit called GiveDirectly that intends to make cash transfer payments to very poor people in Kenya instead of providing social services. Holden highlighted the fact that GiveDirectly is subjecting their work to a randomized controlled study at the very beginning of their program and noted that they’ve “pre-announced” the design of the study.

Holden wrote:

“Our #1 suggestion for making social science research more credible is to “pre-register it,” i.e., announce in advance what data will be collected and how it is intended to be analyzed, so that the final result can be compared with the initial plan and a reader can form their view of whether the results are an artifact of publication bias. We made this case to GiveDirectly and it sent us (see below) a template for the full survey it will be using and a plan for analyzing the data. Now that we have seen these and posted them publicly, GiveDirectly won’t be able to cherry-pick results in the same way that we suspect many studies do. (Of course it will still be possible for the researchers to perform different analysis than they had originally planned; but they won’t be able to sweep any unfavorable conclusions of their analysis under the rug.)”

I think foundations should be free to run their programs in any way they like within the bounds of the law. But for foundations that strive to be effective in their giving, some sort of “pre-registration” of new programs could be very helpful in keeping them focused and motivated.

Self-discipline is critical for success in every domain of human endeavors. But self-discipline is hard. One savvy way to stay on track towards the results you seek is to voluntarily create systems that maintain pressure on you to perform. We all face moments when we’re tired and can’t keep up. Or moments of judgment when we need to grade ourselves but go too easy and choose not to face hard facts. Creating a system of external accountability can help us accomplish our goals, whether those goals are getting in shape or running effective philanthropic programs.

By Tony Wang

Every sector, including the nonprofit sector, needs transparency AND a healthy marketplace of ideas to combat corruption and inefficiency; transparency so that we can identify problems sooner and a marketplace of ideas to brainstorm solutions.  But as a myriad of corporate scandals demonstrate, the information marketplace, like any other market, is vulnerable to market failure.  What philanthropy and the nonprofit sector need are better policies to support critical discourse.

What is causing the information market failure?

Take for example the recent Three Cups of Tea scandal. I imagine staff members at Central Asia Institute (CAI) didn’t speak up because they worried how raising a fuss might damage their organization and their individual careers. Additionally, anecdotal evidence suggests several people were aware of the problems at CAI before the 60 Minutes exposé was released. The issue isn’t that we’re unaware of the problems, but rather, people aren’t speaking up.

Although our sector does have its fair share of discussion, I worry about who’s participating. Here on Tactical Philanthropy, for example, the majority of guest posts are authored by consultants and senior executives at foundations.

However, what I find most alarming is the trend of topics discussed here and elsewhere. Consultants and program officers tend to discuss topics like measuring impact, field building, and impact investing because these topics are less likely to offend and are important channels for business development for consultants and help program officers gain visibility for themselves and their foundation. Conversely, more critical and controversial topics like wasteful grants, abuses of power, dysfunctional feedback loops, and poor grantee communication are rarely touched on and do not receive the same level of attention.

In writing this post, I reviewed all 136 guest posts published here on Tactical Philanthropy since 2007. Only five were unequivocally critical of foundations.

(See the spreadsheet I built on Tactical Philanthropy guest posts here. I used my personal judgment to categorize the posts by their degree of criticism.)

In addition to a dearth of financial incentives, there are significant, personal disincentives for critical discourse. If a program officer raises her voice about poor practices in philanthropy, her colleagues will suspect, perhaps correctly, that her opinions draw from her experience at the foundation.

I’m familiar with this issue personally. As a consultant, I became deeply concerned whether current and potential clients frowned upon my blogging and how it affected the reputation of my firm, to the point I abandoned blogging altogether after strong encouragement to do so.

Despite First Amendment protections and the availability of Internet anonymity, feelings of institutional allegiance and desires to avoid conflict, especially with colleagues that we respect and work with every day, cause many of us not to speak up on controversial topics. And because of the unique structure of our sector, where foundations enjoy the power of the purse, criticism of our sector is even harder to come by.

How do we fix our sector’s information marketplace?

A number of actors do play a key role in covering philanthropy’s blind spots. My favorites include academics like Rob Reich and journalists like Stephanie Strom who often play the critic’s role. Philanthropy, in recognition of this issue, even funds watchdog groups like the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy. But all of these actors are external to the organizations that desperately need radical transparency and discourse.

In addition to the critical outsiders, we need the perspectives of critical insiders. We need to support and heed the voice of individuals with critical perspectives, lest philanthropy fall victim to mediocrity.

First, all organizations need to create predefined guidelines on permissible discussion. Instead of a presumption of secrecy that requires an individual to awkwardly ask for permission to express her view, we need a presumption of transparency that shifts the burden to the organization to request individuals not to disclose information and allows an individual to exercise her discretion. Foundations should also provide employees, grantees, and consultants with safeguards to ensure funding is not dependent on an individual’s views.

We also need to openly solicit feedback. Some of the most critical guest posts were in response to the Social Innovation Fund, which actively sought public comment. Sometimes, we also need to solicit feedback in a way that’s anonymous, untraceable, but verified to cover our blind spots. For example, we need forums like TheFunded where grantees are free to criticize foundations in their funding practices and forums that allow program officers to criticize nonprofits and their grant applications, to prevent repeats of Three Cups of Tea. And we need all members of our field, not just senior executives and consultants, to participate in discussion forums like Tactical Philanthropy.

But most importantly, we all need to embrace humility as a virtue, stop thinking we deserve immunity from criticism, and actively listen to those who have the courage to speak out on tough issues.

By Jacob Harold

These days, if a nonprofit manager says that their organization can solve a social problem alone, they’re likely to get quizzical—if not dirty—looks. After years of isolated activity, most nonprofit leaders have come to understand that the great challenges of our time are too big and too complicated for any single organization to solve. The broader philanthropic community seems to have internalized the fact that collaboration is often a prerequisite to impact.

But it is one thing to say that cross-organizational alignment is important; actually organizing such activity is another challenge altogether. And that challenge is multiplied when—as is so often true—the key players are not all nonprofits, but also include government or corporate organizations.

Given the constrained budgets and overburdened schedules of today’s leaders (regardless of sector) we cannot rely on them to magically align their efforts. Much to their credit, organizational leaders sometimes leap the difficult structural barriers and self-organize. But it often takes an outsider or a new party to help a whole be greater than the sum of its parts.

I believe that foundation program staff are sometimes well-positioned to play this facilitative role. Let’s be clear: they are well-positioned not a result of any particular skill or intelligence but only because of the unique character of the foundation perch. A program officer at a major foundation can come to understand the contours of a field simply by returning their phone calls and emails (not that we always live up to that obligation). Even a passive PO can quickly learn who is doing what, at what scale, and why. No other player has such privileged access to information. But what should we do with that privilege?

Some funders have tried to make good use of it. The Packard Foundation worked closely with consultant FSG to help their marine fisheries grantees align their strategies. Liquidnet for Good’s Markets for Good work has been essential in articulating a shared vision within the community of online giving platforms (I—and many others—have been involved in that work, as well). Many funder affinity groups support efforts to align strategies among nonprofits in a given issue area.

So foundation staff can sometimes take up a share of the financial, logistical and intellectual burdens of collaboration. But there are at least two major barriers to useful funder participation.

First, just because you have a bird’s eye view of a field to see the key dynamics doesn’t mean you know what to do next. In fact, no one may immediately know how to improve the functioning of the system as a whole. It may take research, discussion, and deliberation to determine a strategy—activities which themselves require collaboration.

Second, nonprofits are made up of human beings who generally don’t like being told what to do by an unelected or unappointed party. Collaboration requires a sense of shared ownership; if people believe there’s a puppet master, they will not bring the same spirit of collaboration, purpose, and engagement that is needed. They might fake it for a while, but it won’t last.

So foundation staff find themselves in a profoundly tricky position. They are often better-positioned than anyone to help align disparate efforts. But they can only succeed with authentic buy-in from participants, first to come up with the solution and then to execute it. That buy-in is difficult to build given the inherent power dynamics of foundation funding. This is not only a strategic challenge, it is an emotional one.

At the risk of being trite, there’s a simple way to get over these barriers. Like any facilitator, foundation staff need to be honest, humble, and focused on shared purpose: honest about the challenges facing a field, humble about their role, and constantly reinforcing the group’s common goals. (It doesn’t hurt if they—where appropriate—provide general operating support!)

Grantmaking is often presented as a fundamentally analytical enterprise. It can be. But in our increasingly complicated world, it just may be interpersonal skills that are most important to help us capitalize on our lucky bird’s-eye views.

By Susan Wolf Ditkoff

Decisions in philanthropy are sometimes painted in terms of false dichotomies – either you’re thoughtful and strategic, or you’re whimsical and opportunistic. But in today’s rapidly-changing world, it’s hard to justify planning that is overly linear and time-consuming – spending years analyzing reams of data and writing lengthy planning reports, and then executing that plan for 3-5 years before asking whether it’s working.

For instance, last Monday the Chronicle of Philanthropy featured the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation’s approval of a critically-important, time-sensitive, grant that will track radioactive material in the oceans around Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor. While unsurprising that an environmentally-focused foundation funded an environmentally-focused nonprofit to the tune of $3.7 million, the foundation’s speed and agility in this instance was remarkable.

Within a few short weeks, the benefactor (Gordon Moore), the CEO (Steve McCormick), and Chief Program Officer for Science (Vicki Chandler) all agreed to “pounce on an opportunity” identified by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution – before it was literally too late to take the necessary measurements. And they did so while in no way lowering their standards – the Chronicle reports that Moore “grilled the grantee” with questions, identified and mitigated risks along the way, and engaged in an internal debate before deciding to approve the funds. The grant stands out as an excellent example of philanthropy that will make an extraordinary and unique contribution – by being both highly strategic and highly adaptive at the same time.

The world we live in now demands a more adaptive approach to strategy. More rapid prototyping of ideas and their execution. More mistakes when they’re still quick and cheap. More calculated risks and contingencies. Less cumbersome cycle-times for decision-making. Less argument about “who holds the pen” when writing the strategy (the philanthropist or the nonprofit) and more real-time adaptation and collaboration by all parties. Less emphasis on correctly predicting the future, and more emphasis on clear assumptions and the agility to adapt in light of new information and opportunities.

The level of uncertainty is now such that strategies can feel stale as soon as the (virtual) ink is dry. Which means that tools like scenario analysis, collaborative models, and decision-trees become far more useful strategically than a thorough but static approach. At Bridgespan, we’re often asked to help philanthropists and nonprofits think strategically, and we’re finding such tools are more critical than ever.

In other words: if not much is knowable, don’t over plan.

I’m intrigued by the questions that adaptive philanthropists are asking. For example, an adaptive strategy requires clear but flexible definitions of what success looks like, for whom, and what is known or assumed about the problem – but not a rigid roadmap of how to solve it. An adaptive strategy articulates clear criteria and a screening process for what will and won’t get funded (guardrails if you will) that help philanthropists quickly assess and decide among emerging opportunities – without succumbing to random opportunism or mission drift.

In other words, philanthropists with adaptive strategies have clear goals and criteria, but don’t pretend to know all the answers. They are nimble decision-makers, and don’t treat others (co-funders, grantees, beneficiaries) like vendors whose role is to simply execute in a desired fashion. They are open to new ideas wherever they may come from. They save some gas in the tank (if one is still allowed that metaphor) for opportunities that arise outside their walls – and perhaps the more unknowable the context, the more gas you need to keep in reserve. They communicate clear desires for all stakeholders to bring new ideas into the conversation. And above all, they demonstrate a clear and passionate commitment to continuous improvement, and impose on themselves the discipline of adapting and getting better over time.

While some of these ideas aren’t new, it’s still striking how few philanthropists (especially institutions) are actually set up to respond with adaptive strategies. Perhaps the increased pressure for performance is leading to the misguided belief that everything can be knowable and known in advance – a sure recipe for disaster.

So I’m curious – what adaptive strategies have you seen? Or has fear of acting trumped taking a risk? It seems that one thing is definitely changing: the key question is not just whether your strategy is “right,” but is it also adaptive?

By Eugene Eric Kim

Recently I spoke at the GEO Learning Conference on collective intelligence. My focus is on collaboration, but thanks to the influence of my mentor, my frame has always been around maximizing collective intelligence for the greater good. While I’ve worked with foundations in the past, it was the first time that anyone in philanthropy had asked me to talk specifically about collective intelligence. In preparation for the talk I started thinking about great examples of philanthropy catalyzing collectively intelligent systems.

I couldn’t think of any. So I started doing some research. I still came up empty.

The basic premise underlying collective intelligence is simple. Sometimes, somehow, groups exhibit intelligence that far exceeds the sum of its parts. Ants are a great example of this. Individually, ants are – quite frankly – dumb. They do three things well:

• They carry heavy objects
• They leave trails
• They follow trails

In isolation, this list is not impressive. But in collaboration with others, ants do amazing things. They build ant hills. They form ant rafts. There are no heroic leaders in ant colonies. Leadership is distributed. All ants are both leaders and followers. And because of these properties, ants, collectively, are highly adaptive, and their intelligence scales. When you add more ants, the system gets even smarter.

What would happen if humans behaved more like ants? Fortunately, there are great examples of humans behaving collectively intelligent. The real challenge is finding examples of humans behaving really, really, really collectively intelligent. This is not simply an intellectual exercise. It’s a matter of survival. Our society is literally on a path of self-destruction, and the only way to avert disaster is to start behaving collectively more intelligent.

A little bit of collective intelligence is not enough. We need a whole lot of it.

The problem is that it’s hard for humans to act like ants, because unlike ants humans are smart individually. Perhaps smarter than is good for us. The way we like to attack problems is exactly the opposite of how ants attack problems. We like to centralize control. We like to understand problems to completion – or at least pretend we do – before attempting to address them. This is exactly the opposite of what we need to do to be successful.

By definition, a collectively intelligent system should be too complex for a single person or even a subset of the group to fully comprehend. Otherwise, the system would only be as smarter as that single person, which is to say, not smart enough. If we truly want to harness collective intelligence, we need to get over this idea that we need to fully understand the problem before we can act. That’s neither possible nor desirable.

I don’t need to rant about how slowly foundations move, or how they’re afraid to fail, or how they seem fixated on control and understanding at the expense of action. Foundations are experts at saying these things about themselves. The question is how can foundations start shifting their culture so that they can become better at both catalyzing collectively intelligent systems and behaving more collectively intelligent themselves? I think there are three ways to start.

First, most foundations need to stop thinking of themselves as funders. Giving money away is a valuable tool, but it’s not a high-leverage tool for solving the world’s most complex social challenge. Foundations don’t have enough of it, and there aren’t market mechanisms for leveraging it effectively. Foundations are fantastic at doing research and getting in the middle of systems, but they don’t leverage this expertise effectively. I think part of it is because they self-identify too strongly as funders. They need to think of themselves as movers of knowledge instead of movers of money.

This leads into the second thing foundations can do: Give knowledge away aggressively. The great thing about giving away knowledge is that, unlike money, it’s an abundant, accumulating resource. The more you give away, the more the world has, and you can give it away as often as you like.

Third, be courageous. I love what Sean wrote on this topic:

"The lack of external pressures, which gives philanthropy great freedoms, also requires us to draw on inner determination and discipline to achieve results."

In the face of structural resistance, change requires courage. "Courage" is a word that’s not used enough in philanthropy. I think that’s a shame, because we need much more of it in philanthropy and in the world. People need to acknowledge this, and they need to draw on it. The world is depending on it.

“Is one reason for them to avoid these government programs the fact that doing so would open them up to new levels of public accountability for achieving outcomes?”

I think this is very likely the case. If you look at the issue from the self-interest of the foundations (rather than their interest in achieving their mission), then getting involved in these programs offers a number of risks (such as being turned down, needing to be more transparent, etc) without much upside (they don’t need the money). But foundations are suppose to be in this game to achieve impact, not for their own self-interest. Does it really matter if a big foundation gets turned down or otherwise looks bad? They’re the ones with the money and freedom to do what they want. They should be confident enough to put up with some negative jeers if things go wrong.

“I’ve heard from a current participant in the Social Innovation Fund that the process is a ton of work and sometimes they wish they hadn’t gotten involved.”

I can’t say that it surprises me that a brand new government program might be a real pain from a paperwork stand point. Changing how the government allocates resources from a system based on activity to a system based on results is going to require a lot of hard work and paper pushing. Private foundations, which do no external fundraising, are best positioned to handle this increased workload compared to the public charities that are currently carrying the burden for the sector.

“The Social Innovation Fund is only $50 million. Why would large grantmakers care about getting a couple million dollar grant from the government?”

As I’ve written about consistently on this topic, the Social Innovation Fund is a pilot program. The point for large foundations to be involved is not because the program in its current state matters very much, but because demonstrating that there are ways for the government to effectively base funding on results is a huge opportunity. Whether you like the process or not, the SIF and the proposed Pay For Success programs are the US government coming to the social sector and asking for help on figuring out how to base funding on results. Deciding not to participate in the programs because there’s too much bureaucracy or because the money is too small is missing the forest for the trees.

“Sean, large private foundations are participating. Many are co-funders and/or participating in various conversations about what can be learned from the process.”

This is true. Large private foundations are participating, but not acting as intermediaries. Large private foundations believe that their expertise is in program design and grantee selection. A co-funder provides money, rather than due diligence expertise. If a foundation believes that they do not have the expertise to select grantees that can deliver results, than acting as a co-funder makes sense. However, the success of these government programs hinges on whether the SIF grantees or the Pay for Success intermediaries can successful make funding decisions that produce results. Their success hinges on the entities with the most expertise in this area filling this role. While I think that the current slate of SIF grantees has this expertise, it baffles me why expert grantmakers such as the nation’s largest private foundations would decide that it wasn’t worth their time to participate directly and settle for co-funding in which they essentially are outsourcing grantee selection to the public charities that are doing the heavy lifting of working with the government.

The new book Give Smart, by Tom Tierney of Bridgespan and Joel Fleishman of Duke University and formally of the large, private foundation the Atlantic Philanthropies, makes the point that funders are not forced to achieve results. The lack of external pressures, which gives philanthropy great freedoms, also requires them to draw on inner determination and discipline to achieve results. The easy choice with these new programs is for foundations to decide they’re not worth their time. Why bother with all the complications when you’re fully endowed and don’t need the funding? Because if you’re a mission driven organization you make choices based on maximizing impact, not what’s most convenient.

In both of these cases, the government is making the implicit assumption that grantmakers or other professional intermediaries are better positioned to make specific funding decisions. It is a similar assumption that investors make when they put their money into a mutual fund rather than making each investment decision on their own.

This framework is supported by people across the political spectrum and has garnered significant support from large foundations. For instance, both Council on Foundations and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations have successful organized large foundations to help support the Social Innovation Fund.

However, the first two rounds of the Social Innovation Fund application process has seen only one large private foundation step up to take on the critical role of intermediary (the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation).

To be sure, the SIF has seen applications from a number of savvy public grantmakers, such as New Profit, Social Venture Partners, Venture Philanthropy Partners, REDF, the Cleveland Foundation and numerous United Way chapters. But large private foundations pride themselves on their highly developed program expertise, rigorous due diligence of grantees and sophisticated impact tracking efforts. These skills are exactly what the Social Innovation Fund and Pay For Success program require to achieve the best results.

Why then have we seen such an absence of participation from the country’s leading practitioners of sophisticated philanthropy?

One often stated reason is that large private foundations don’t need government funding. But this argument completely misses the point.

The reason to participate as an intermediary in one of the new government programs has nothing to do with receiving funding. It has everything to do with playing a role in redirecting government resources to the most effective programs. Since government funding dwarfs even the Gates Foundation’s annual grantmaking, the opportunity to optimize this flow of resources should be of prime interest to large grantmakers.

Just to put in perspective the degree to which these government funds make private foundation resources look like chump change, if every penny of the Gates Foundation 2010 grant budget had gone to K-12 education, it could have paid for less than one full day of nationwide schooling. In other words, the US government spends more each day on education than the Gates Foundation spends across all their programs each year.

Now I get that private foundations are “private” and have every right to opt out of participating in these sorts of programs. I believe strongly that philanthropy has a very different role to play than government. However, the Pay For Success program and Social Innovation Fund are examples of the government turning to philanthropy for help selecting the most effective programs. I don’t think it cuts it for the large, sophisticated foundations to stick to the sidelines cheering along the process.

Large foundations don’t need to participate in these new programs. But they should. It is the right thing to do and represents one of the most attractive ways for savvy foundations to leverage their program expertise to influence more funds than they ever dreamed possible.

In the wake of the Japanese disaster, charity rating organization GiveWell is demonstrating how impact focused transparency can be effective for foundations.

Ever since the Japanese earthquake, GiveWell has be posting information for donors interested in making a donation in reaction to the disaster. See links here, here, here, here, here and here. The posts are in depth, highly informed analysis with actionable takeaways. The posts explore the complex nature of the disaster and look at the unique characteristics of the specific event rather than offering general disaster response advice.

GiveWell’s advice moves money. The money given to the charities they suggest through their website represents only a minority of the money they actually influence.

So here’s my question. Why is GiveWell, on an annual operating budget of $350,000 leading the way with this advice? According to GiveWell, they’ve assigned one staff person who has spent about 40 hours on this project. Yet their work has been highlighted in the New York Times.

It isn’t as if large foundations have not also analyzed the Japanese situation. The Gates Foundation, for instance, made a $1 million grant to Mercy Corps in response to the disaster. Why doesn’t Gates invest 40 hours from one staff member in explaining their rationale? GiveWell is baffled as well:

“The situation in Japan is confusing to donors, and the Gates Foundation is better positioned than individuals (and better positioned than we are) to sort through the confusions. If it posted a substantive explanation of its grant – and answers to the natural questions this grant raises – it could be a great help to individual donors, who have given over $161 million (U.S. donors only) to the relief effort.”

If the Gates Foundation produced the sort of public analysis that GiveWell has, I would guess that they would influence other donations that would total more than the $1 million that they gave. Certainly the New York Times article would have included their thinking on the topic.

My point is not to pick on the Gates Foundation. No major foundation to my knowledge consistently produces public information explaining the rationale behind their donations as a way to influence other donors and enhance the impact of the foundation. I’m not even aware of one instance in which a foundation has followed this strategy (please email me details if you know of an example). [Update: I meant any large, staffed foundation. I work with and am aware of a number of smaller foundations that utilize this strategy. But by virtue of their public presence, larger foundations have more opportunity for their ideas to reach other donors.]

The opportunity here is huge. Foundation giving makes up just 13% if US charitable giving. If you believe, as I would assume most foundations do, that their philanthropic knowledge is their key value rather than their raw capital, than the best way to leverage that value is by sharing it as a way of influencing more capital.

Having a lot of money doesn’t make you a great philanthropist nor a great investor. Knowing what to do with your money is the key to being a great philanthropist or great investor. Figuring out how to leverage your knowledge against the largest pool of capital possible is the key to being the best possible philanthropist or investor. Leveraging knowledge against the largest pool of capital possibly is exactly the approach Warren Buffett used to become the best possible investor he come become. Who is going to figure out how to apply this approach in philanthropy?

Before I hand things over to Jason, I want to point out the Energy Foundation does $110 million in annual grants, making it one of the largest 50 grantmakers in the US. The fact that they are able to make grants seven times faster than the average grantmaker is evidence that a much faster approach to philanthropy is available to large foundations.

In addition it should be noted that the Energy Foundation is in fact a public nonprofit that is a partnership of other major foundations. This indicates that the Energy Foundation’s process might be fast, but it is not reckless since large foundations conducting slow due diligence find the Energy Foundation to be an excellent grantee. But it should also be noted that as a public nonprofit dependent on receiving grants, the Energy Foundation is subject to external pressures to perform from which private foundations are immune. This fact highlights the idea that a slow grantmaking cycle is a choice made by many large foundations and that when pressured to perform, a large grantmaker is able to greatly increase the speed at which they operate.

Just in case you don’t read his full comment, don’t miss the reference he makes to Fluxx, the open source grant management system designed by The Energy Foundation to power their speed-freak philanthropy.

Here’s the comment left by The Energy Foundation’s Jason Ricci:

“At The Energy Foundation, we’ve spent the last two years tackling the speed problem. When I joined EF as Chief Information Officer in 2009, the average time it took to get a grant out the door was about 90 days. And, while that’s half the average that Sean quoted, it was still in my mind too slow. Fast forward to today, and our average grant takes 27 days – from initial request to final approval and checks out the door. Here’s some background and insight into how we made this happen.

1. We no longer bring individual grants to the board for approval. Our board agreed that we needed to make grants faster, and had confidence in our ability to choose grant recipients wisely based on our program team’s knowledge of the sector. Our board no longer approves each grant. Instead, our board meetings are focused on allocating funds for future grantmaking strategies. I’d like to see more boards move in this direction.

2. We analyzed our grantmaking processes with a fine tooth comb. We make an average of 800 grants totaling over $110mm each year. We have a lot of requests moving through our organization, and with a staff of 80 we were overwhelmed. By spending a few months understanding our processes, we were able to identify the bottlenecks and where things were falling through the cracks.

3. Armed with an assessment of our processes and workflows, we spent the next few months standardizing those processes across programs. This took a lot of negotiating, but in the end we wound up with a solid and documented way of doing business at the foundation.

4. We built a grants management system that allowed us to manage and track all of our requests and grants. The workflows we mapped out are now built directly into our grants management system – everything flows smoothly from one approver to the next and nothing gets lost. Ever.

5. The fact that we had to build our own grants management system was not ideal, but it was clear that none of the existing vendors had a solution that solved our pain points. So, we decided early on to open source the code to the rest of the grantmaking community so others could benefit from the work we put into our system. There are now several other foundations who have adopted Fluxx to streamline their own business processes. You can check out the project at http://projectfluxx.org if you’re interested.

One other note – I’ve been on both sides of the game, and I can tell you from the nonprofit’s perspective the current state of foundation grantmaking is extremely frustrating. I’ve also been in the startup/VC world for a long time, and it’s a whole different world over there. I’ve been involved with startups who have raised $5mm in 2 weeks, all based on a crazy idea and a prototype. VC’s are willing to take enormous risks in search of enormous returns. They understand that 9 of their investments will fail, but that 1 will hit it big and make those other 9 failures worthwhile. The startup community doesn’t hide their failures in a closet – in fact, they celebrate them. Why can’t we do the same?”