As I reviewed “Foundation Transparency: What Nonprofits Want,” the latest publication from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. So I dug deep into the archives to find reports on the subject produced by the organization I now lead, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

In May 1980, NCRP released Foundations & Public Information: Sunshine or Shadow? It was a scathing report that took foundations to task for their reticent approach to sharing information, and it launched a decades-long commitment by NCRP to promote increased transparency. The report explored why foundations should be accountable and transparent, and also the inadequate government requirements at that time. It ranked and scored 208 of the largest philanthropies using a rigorous methodology and found that 60 percent of foundations in the sample did not meet an acceptable standard of transparency. Just 4 percent were found to be “excellent.”

The methodology included a heavily weighted assessment of whether foundations provided the kinds of information that nonprofits most desired, including information about grantmaking interests and policies, and how grant applications were evaluated and decisions made about which organizations to fund.

I see many parallel findings between that report and CEP’s excellent new report. A full 33 years later, nonprofits are still clamoring for more information about how foundations make funding decisions and they want clear and open communication about priorities. They want to know whether it’s worth their time to cultivate a relationship and pursue funding. And despite an explosion of glossy annual reports and fancy websites, leaders of grant-seeking organizations are still highly frustrated by the lack of clear communication about a central element of foundation activity, namely how foundations decide which organizations to fund.

Foundation Transparency surveyed 138 nonprofit leaders, and I was unsurprised to see many of the respondents reference a desire to know how foundations assess their own performance and the impact they have. It only seems fair that since foundations are requiring this from grantees, that they be willing to be accountable for articulating impact, too.

Some of the findings suggest to me that nonprofits really want foundations to function as true partners. For example, the fact that an overwhelming majority of respondents wanted to know more about what foundations are learning indicates that grantees want learning to go both ways.

The CEP report doesn’t explore the regulatory framework for foundation transparency, nor does it explore in-depth the arguments for why greater transparency may be warranted. But another report released this year does revisit those questions. The Philanthropy Roundtable published in March 2013 Transparency in Philanthropy: An Analysis of Accountability, Fallacy, and Volunteerism.

As I reviewed Foundations & Public Information in light of the Roundtable’s current offering, I was struck by how little the arguments in favor of greater foundation transparency have changed since 1980. The original NCRP report looks at the partially-public nature of philanthropy, which is revisited by the Roundtable (though our organizations obviously come down on different sides). The partially-public dollars argument asserts that because of the preferential tax treatment afforded to foundations, a high level of transparency and accountability is owed to the public and grantees. NCRP repeated and expanded on this argument in our 2009 publication Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best: Benchmarks to Assess and Enhance Grantmaker Impact.

In 1980, NCRP devoted some attention to why greater transparency is in the self-interest of foundations and how it might improve their effectiveness. This topic is explored robustly in the Roundtable’s new report, Criteria, and is touched on in the CEP report. Because I see additional regulation as unlikely in the near future, the link between effectiveness and voluntary transparency merits further exploration.

Speaking of regulation, there has been some increase in activity around this in recent years, though nothing has actually changed for more than 20 years in terms of mandated disclosures. Most philanthropy insiders are familiar with efforts by the Greenlining Institute to pass AB624, which would have required new disclosures for the largest foundations in California. Fewer are aware of quieter efforts by the Philanthropy Roundtable to pass legislation in several states banning efforts similar to AB624.

The last substantive change that shaped the current required information disclosure in the IRS form 990-PF can be traced to when NCRP worked with Senator Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.) to influence the IRS to change what it required in the form. Those changes contributed to helping the Foundation Center produce the best data available about the sector. An abbreviated version of how NCRP’s efforts on transparency evolved, including the Durenberger intervention with the IRS, can be found on page 10 of this look back at NCRP’s history.

What I’m left with is a sense that, on the issue of transparency, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Coincidentally, around the same time as I was reviewing the new CEP publication and beginning to think about crafting this blog post, Bob Bothwell invited me to join him on a Friday evening for a baseball game at Nationals Park. Bothwell was NCRP’s executive director from its inception in 1976 until 1998. I am reminded again of how important it is for those of us from a new generation who are leading nonprofits and foundations to intentionally nurture connections to our history, even while we attempt to take our organizations in new directions.

And in case you’re wondering, the Washington Nationals beat the Cincinnati Reds 1-0, and Jordan Zimmerman pitched a one-hitter.

--Aaron Dorfman

Data is everywhere these days, spilling out over the sides of its containers, and busting out at every seam. The world is literally teeming with it. At the BayNet Libraries Annual Meeting, we learned from Dr. Jonathan Reichental, why this is: “We are grappling with the volume of data in the world because we now collect the same amount of data every three days as we did throughout the entire year in 2003.” This was just one thing I learned from Dr. Reichental’s talk “How Data Can Help Create Better Communities.” Reichental is no stranger to data: He currently serves as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the city of Palo Alto. It sounds like they’re doing some pretty nifty tricks with big, open-data down there. If you’re interested, it’s happening up here too as San Francisco just hired its first CIO.

Dr. Reichental’s talk focused on how government data can be used to improve communities. Data mined from government sources is often mashed-up with data from other free sources, such as Google, to strengthen the quality of data. For example, Palo Alto mashed its data on street quality ratings with Google Street View to create Palo Alto StreetViewer; a tool used to visualize ratings to make decisions about infrastructure improvement.

Data is used in many different ways in the social sector. We know that nonprofits collect and analyze their data to measure the effectiveness of their services, and that strategic nonprofits use open data to better position their outreach and services. The same is true for foundations, but these applications are often conducted within the silos of the organizations. Data espouses positive effects when it is shared, or, to put it in more familiar terms, when we are transparent with it.

Reichental mentioned the following six things about government use of open data (outlined in a summary by Sarah Rich):

• It  is the liberation of peoples’ data
• To be useful, data needs to be consumable by machines
• Data has a derivative value
• Data eliminates the middleman
• Data creates deeper accountability
• Open data builds trust

Three of these things stood out to me in a major way as beneficial for foundations too: derivative value, accountability, and trust.

When data is made available to the public, other organizations can use the same data in interesting and powerful ways. Think about all those fantastic mashups they do on Glee, but with data sets! An example Dr. Reichental shared is the use of public health ratings in Yelp reviews to strengthen the overall value of reviews. I don’t need to repeat the fact that foundations sit on a “treasure trove” of information as they require nonprofits to report all sorts of useful data. Can you imagine the derivative benefits if they shared this information with the world?

When government shares data publicly it creates deeper accountability. Dr. Reichental used the example of how the government is sharing their data through USAspending.gov, which in turn creates greater accountability as the public can now see where and how their money is spent. The same is true for foundations. This is why we have form 990/990-PF. Some foundations are now going beyond the 990-PF and opening up their grants data via the new Glasspockets Reporting Commitment.

The last thing Dr. Reichental mentioned about data, the fact that it builds trust, is the most compelling thing for foundation transparency, and it goes hand-in-hand with accountability. Being transparent means you have nothing to hide, so conversely, when we aren’t transparent, the public assumes that we do have something to hide. The trust component is perhaps the biggest reason why the government decided to share data publicly. The government was collecting it all along, but it wasn’t until recently that they decided to free it. Now, five years into the Obama administration we have over 400,000 data sets available via data.gov.

Data isn’t going anywhere except up and out. We are heading in a direction where sharing data publicly will be expected and touted as part of the common good. In the case of foundations, sharing data may actually increase the value of the work.

--Natasha Isajlovic-Terry

Explore now»

A press release on May 7, 2013, announced that nine additional participants have joined the Giving Pledge, the effort launched by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in 2010 to encourage the world's wealthiest to commit the majority of their assets to philanthropic causes. The new list includes American as well as international pledgers and the first female individual billionaire, bringing the total number of signatories to 114 individuals, spouses, and their families. Profiles for the new signatories are now available:

• Michael Ashcroft
  - United Kingdom
• Sara Blakely
  - Atlanta, GA
• Monica and David Gelbaum
  - Newport Beach, CA
• Craig and Susan McCaw
  - Hunts Point, WA
• Stephen Ross
  - New York, NY
• Paul E. Singer
  - New York, NY
• Mark and Mary Stevens
  - Atherton, CA
• Tad Taube
  - San Francisco, CA
• Samuel Yin
  - Taiwan

Since August 2012, Glasspockets has been keeping an Eye on the Giving Pledge, providing an in-depth picture of the participants and their publicly known charitable activities.

Explore the Eye on the Giving Pledge»

-- Daniel Matz

Foundation leaders who want to increase the accountability of their work should consider supporting efforts to solicit feedback from beneficiaries, say three experts in the field of conducting recipient assessments.

To succeed, the feedback must be representative, actionable, systematic, and comparable, said Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan, and Valerie Threlfall in a webinar presented last month by the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR). The webinar was based on the article, "Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries," written by the webinar speakers and published in the spring 2013 issue of SSIR.

Twersky, who is the lead author of the article and the director of the Effective Philanthropy Group at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, said gaining knowledge from beneficiaries, in addition to experts and crowdsourcing, is a moral issue and a smart thing to do to achieve effective program results. "I think if this is important to practitioners to listen systematically and to do it well, it will be important to funders who are responsive to their grantees...I don't think we have done a good job as funders of listening to those voices. I think we can do a lot better," she said.

A 2011 survey of CEOs by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) showed that just 19 percent of responding foundations use beneficiary focus groups or convenings to assess the effectiveness of their foundation's programmatic work, and 16 percent use beneficiary surveys to do so. Those who collect this information reported having "a better understanding of the progress their foundation is making against its strategies" and "a more accurate understanding of the impact the foundation is having on the communities and fields in which it works."

So why aren't more foundations supporting programs to solicit beneficiary feedback? The webinar speakers examined the issue by discussing benefits and success stories, challenges and criticisms, and best practices for establishing a feedback system.

Benefits and Success Stories
Twersky, Buchanan, and Threlfall drew on their experiences as co-founders of YouthTruth, a nonprofit organization that administers online surveys to high school students across the country, to exhibit an effective system for gathering beneficiary feedback. YouthTruth was created in 2008 by CEP, in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to leverage student opinions into schools' decision-making processes. The questions focus on student engagement, school culture, student-teacher relationships, rigor of classes and instruction, and preparedness for the future. Two hundred thousand students from 275 schools have answered the survey, and 85 percent of participating administrators say they have used the data to make policy or programmatic decisions.

"In the case of YouthTruth, we have seen real benefits — courageous students and schools that have participated in the process — in that it has really opened up new areas for discourse and I think changed both adults' and students' expectations about their involvement in decision-making," said Threlfall, a senior advisor at YouthTruth.

In the healthcare sector, the push for using beneficiary feedback to improve outcomes has focused around patient-centered and accountable care, as measured through initiatives such as the Hospital Care Quality Information from the Consumer Perspective (HCAHPS) survey. The publication of "Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century" by the Institute of Medicine in 2001 spurred an increase in the collection and use of recipient feedback for this purpose, the authors explained. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act continues in this direction with goals for measuring patient experiences during hospital stays and incorporating consumer assessments in determining insurance reimbursements. "When patients have better communication with providers, and when they understand treatment options and feel that they have some say in their own care, they are more likely to follow a treatment regimen and improve their health," the authors wrote in the SSIR article.

They pointed to work by the Cleveland Clinic to increase nurse check-ins as a result of patient feedback, as part of a successful quest for a 90 percent satisfaction rate using HCAHPS; and an initiative by the California HealthCare Foundation to gather feedback from patients outside the commercially insured population that has been the traditional focus of data collection.

The education and healthcare sectors provide unique opportunities for collecting feedback, as the service structure enables providers to track recipient populations and compare information across institutions, the speakers said.

Criticism and Challenges
Despite positive outcomes, experts say that beneficiary feedback is under-utilized by philanthropic organizations for many reasons. According to the CEP study, 73 percent of the responding foundations provided some funding to assist grantees in understanding the effectiveness of their programs, but only 9 percent did so for all of their grantees.

The speakers identified a range of challenges that may explain why beneficiary data is not more commonly used. According to Buchanan, who is president of CEP, soliciting feedback can be expensive and difficult to gather, particularly for populations that are hard to reach, and power dynamics between recipients and service providers can create a barrier to candid information sharing with a high response rate. Twersky cited low literacy rates, trust issues among vulnerable populations, and access to technology as other potential barriers. Allocating funding for surveys may be viewed negatively as an administrative cost that takes resources away from the direct provision of services. Another criticism is that placing an increased focus on outcome metrics can impede innovation and risk-taking. And although recipients may be viewed as customers of a business, they are not the ones paying for the services they receive, the speakers explained, which makes it easier for service providers to overlook their opinions.

Best Practices for Gathering and Incorporating Beneficiary Feedback
Twersky, Buchanan, and Threlfall offered a series of recommendations for collecting and utilizing beneficiary feedback effectively, including the following:

• Seek Feedback When it Matters

The speakers recommended initiating the survey process before or during a program rather than only after it ends, enabling the data to have the most impact. Twersky compared this to leading indicators used in business.

• Design Surveys for Impact

The speakers recommended developing a process to integrate feedback early on and to consider the use of focus groups before or after administering surveys, as well as establishing requirements for a high response rate. Buchanan stressed the importance of detailed survey design and methodology and suggested working with consultants or providers if necessary.

• Strive for Candid, Representative Responses

Threlfall made the recommendation: "Check for non-responder bias to make sure certain populations aren't left out." This requires cultural awareness of the population being surveyed. For example, with smallholder farmers, "Men tend to have disproportionately more access to mobile phones than women, so whose voices are we hearing?" Twersky noted.

• Prepare for Negative Results

In a YouthTruth video shown in the webinar, Dr. Brennon Sapp, principal of Scott High School in Taylor Mill, KY, described receiving difficult feedback. "One question that will haunt me to my grave is the question that was ‘do your teachers care about you?' We rated bottom 1% in the nation on that one specific question and it really hit hard. It's hard to swallow, hard to take, hard for my teachers to take," he said in the video. Following the survey, Sapp said he worked with staff to change policies and shift the culture of the school, which led to a decline in the failure rate and increased teacher intervention.

• Collaborate with Other Organizations

Working with other groups enables providers to generate comparative data. In the CEP survey, 26 percent of respondents said they were currently using coordinated measurement systems with other funders in the same issue area, and 23 percent were considering doing so. According to Twersky, developing benchmarks through collaboration will help organizations to interpret the data.

Beneficiary Assessments in the "Big Data" Movement
Despite its inherent difficulties, beneficiary feedback is poised for growth as a method for measuring performance and accountability within the social sector movement toward "big data." The push for evidence-based social programs utilizing impact evaluations was echoed in the Obama Administration's launch of the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) in 2009 to provide million-dollar matching funds to nonprofit organizations chosen by grantmakers that are working in the areas of economic opportunity, healthy futures, and youth development. The SIF's "key characteristics" include: "Emphasis on rigorous evaluations of program results not only to improve accountability but also to build a stronger marketplace of organizations with evidence of impact."

While some challenges will remain insurmountable — as Twersky pointed out during the webinar, "When the intended beneficiary is the earth, how do we listen to the earth?" — there are more than enough resources available to start speaking to more of its inhabitants today.

What are the biggest challenges your organization has faced in collecting and incorporating beneficiary feedback into decision-making? What role should recipient assessments play in the "big data" movement? How can foundations and nonprofits use beneficiary feedback to enable greater accountability and effectiveness? Please provide your comments below.

-- Emily Keller

On April 25, 2013, Knight participated in roundtable discussion on Advancing Social Media Measurement hosted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whose staff has blogged about social media here at Transparency Talk.

Writing on the Knight Foundation's blog, Mayur Patel, Knight's vice president for strategy and assessment, emphasized social media's ability to enhance:

• Transparency: Improving the transparency and responsiveness of our work and the openness of our strategy and grantmaking.
• Information Dissemination: Sharing lessons learned and helping shape best practices.
• Network Strength: Diversifying and growing our network to find new talent and sources of innovative ideas.

Read the Knight Foundation blog»

A number of the sessions touched on issues relating to philanthropic transparency in a digital age, such as:

The Future We Make: Development in a Digital Age
 

Philanthropic Decision-Making: Open or Closed, An Art or a Science?

While attendance at the conference is by invitation, GPF provided a live-stream of all sessions during the conference while also recording each session in order to provide archival access later. As a GPF partner, Glasspockets is proud to host the conference recordings on our web site. You can find them all on Glasspockets.

Watch the videos»

Last year, after Steve Downs shared an overview of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) social media strategy, we hosted a series of interviews with RWJF staff members about how social media, and more broadly, the transparency and participation they offer, are adding new and critical dimensions to their work. The first case study on social networking as a learning tool is available here. The second on experimenting with different social mediums to serve as a catalyst for collaboration is available here. The third on leveraging social media to expand networks is available here.

The latest post offers perspective on how the use of these tools—which have become essential to our communication efforts—can be measured to reflect the impact of our work and rooted in a context of achieving social change goals.

Since 2009, RWJF has been incorporating Web 2.0 technology in our everyday work. That is what people who visit our website  can see since our September redesign, as we have more social sharing facilitation tools across the site. We also invite conversation about how to advance health and health care on Twitter, Facebook, and produce content that can serve the needs of various online communities.

We can clearly see and have made projections about the future value of social media. Social media can help us create social change and build movements around the causes that we care deeply about. We have learned many key lessons from initiating this work guided by our principles of openness, participation, and decentralization. Specific lessons include:

• Personal outreach matters;
• Responsiveness to requests for engagement is important;
• Criticism can lead to healthy dialogue;
• Make engagement easy and simple; and
• Engagement takes work and dedicated resources.

These take homes suggest that each of these principles requires concerted efforts and conversations about policies and processes for achieving the intended goals. With each social media campaign, we must be explicit about expectations. Social media metrics is an essential part of our efforts at RWJF. We need measurement to help us achieve those expectations. Measurement also helps us continually improve our use of social media to achieve our broader social change goals.

Q: What does an effective and efficient social media campaign look like?
A: So where do you start: well, you might start first with acknowledging what you are already doing in social media and celebrating that. Do you have a Facebook page, an organizational presence on Twitter, operations on Tumblr? Conduct an inventory of what you are doing as an organization, as well as the engagement by individuals. Do staff leverage social media for their job, how have they been able to extend their reach, do we regularly appear on relevant blogs?

As you do this, you might start to recognize how much you don’t know. BUT don’t let the “not-knowing” stop you.

• Have an explicit dialogue about your goals, what are you trying to accomplish with your social media efforts, e.g. what is the purpose of tweeting something, what is the action you want an individual to take? Although click-through is not itself an outcome, in my view, it is a process measure. 
• Identify your networks. You probably already have more of a network than you recognize (see The Networked Nonprofit  by Kanter).
• Schedule a formal discussion about value proposition in-house. Talk to who does it now and who doesn’t. Don’t expect everyone to Tweet. Some are better long-form writers and therefore might be better suited for blogging.
• Establish data points for measuring impact of what you do.
• Provide unique URLs for product releases and then test URL placements against each other (AB testing) to see which one is more effective.

Ultimately, discuss to what end are you using social media. Social media is another tool to achieve larger goals. While it can be a very powerful tool, it should not be mistaken for an end in itself.

Q: What is the expected ROI for social media?
A: We believe social media can have a profound effect on expanding our reach, as more people are building trusted networks of individuals and organizations and engaging online. Appropriate use of social media channels help us provide the right information and the right tools into the hands of our health and health care advocates (also known as message evangelists). You then start to see how making data accessible in new ways, such as interactives, data visualizations, and infographics, enables us to illustrate key points for case-making and building awareness.  

Because social media is a vehicle through which ideas can be generated, tested, built upon, and spread, we believe that this is worth measuring. However, while there is a plethora of ready to use analytical tools crowding the market, the challenge will be to avoid the “low-hanging fruit” trap of measuring activity over action. If we do our job correctly, we will be able to say what works and what doesn’t using social media metrics, as well as distinguishing online from offline impact.

Q: What is the current state of the field for measuring social media? Where do we go from here?
A: The potential power of social is undeniable and we are looking for ways to continue to test our assumptions about what we are producing. For example, by watching others comment on Twitter about our work we not only have a better sense of how we are being understood, it also serves as a kind of content analysis of the impact we are having. By monitoring a recurring Twitter chat, we can hear whether our meaning and intention is influencing the discussion in the way we desire it to.

As the unit responsible for measuring the impact of our work, we regularly ask ourselves: What are we using social media for? Who are our target audiences (segmented, as well as aggregated)? (The ability to diversify our networks is a huge value to RWJF; developing metrics that includes demographics of our audiences is an important part of the measurement effort.) What is the expected action/behavior we wish to see? How do we measure behavior change? How can we best go beyond measuring online activity (page views, unique visitors, tweets, and re-tweets) to measuring offline action and policy change? This is the key challenge for philanthropy today: assessing an effective and efficient social media campaign. As a foundation, accountable to our Board and the public, we must have standards for our investments in social media just as we do for our programmatic investments. We ought to be able to answer the so-what question for investing staff time and talent in social media campaigning. As a sector, we are becoming much more sophisticated in our use of communications to advance our work. Looking at ways to measure social media should fit within the framework of measuring communications broadly. Even as the task of identifying communications indicators is challenging, social media lends itself well to being more precise and thus measurable.

In order to engage the field in a dialogue on social media measurement, RWJF is hosting a national convening of experts in three domains: evaluation, communications, and social media. The April convening will produce a set of indicators on five Foundation-focused outcomes:

1. Our foundation is viewed as a valuable information source.

2. Our foundation is viewed as transparent.

3. Lessons are disseminated, multiplying impact beyond our foundation’s reach.

4. Public knowledge, advocacy, influence, and action is increased in strategic areas

5. Our networks strengthen and diversify.

We invite you to help us advance the field of social media measurement. Please follow hashtag #SM_RE on Twitter for conversations stemming from the social media measurement meeting this month, including a live Twitter chat on April 18, 3 p.m. EDT, as we continue to move the field forward in using data to evaluate and assess impact of our work.

-- Debra Joy Perez

This year’s conference kicks off today and features a program agenda that includes topics that put transparency, technology, and open data center stage, such as “The Future We Make: Development in the Digital Age,” “Decision-Making in Philanthropy: A Science or an Art?,” and “Building an Information Infrastructure: Unlocking Data for Philanthropy.” Although attendance at the conference is by invitation only, GPF provides access, via live stream, to conference sessions as they happen, and via recorded video, once the programs have concluded. Access this year’s conference here.

For those who know Bill Gates and the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation well, there aren’t too many surprises about the second wealthiest man in the World -- except that he tours power plants, garbage dumps, the Large Hadron Collider, Antarctica, and missile Silos (!) with his family during his free time. There are definitely more than a few nuggets of information that would be of interest to potential Gates grantees. Eradicating polio remains a primary concern for the foundation. Other causes discussed throughout the thread include climate change, education, global health, and terrorism.

The Gates Foundation has been using technology to increase transparency in some very innovative and proactive ways. We have featured many of these efforts here on Transparency Talk: The 2011 Grantee Community Call, the Gates Annual Letter, and the Inside the Gates podcast series. This latest experiment is another window to the world’s largest private foundation, one that uses technology as a means to humanize the man behind the institution. The formal conversation is over, but the thread will live forever on the front page of the Internet.

-- Natasha Isajlovic-Terry