(Jacob Harold is philanthropy program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This post appears courtesy of Alliance magazine.)

Gorillas – whether or not of the 800-pound variety – are powerful creatures. The presence of a gorilla on the cover of the [September 2011] issue of Alliance was a winking reference to the sheer size of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Indeed, foundations have a bit in common with gorillas: powerful, independent and rather unaccountable.

Just as a zoo designer must balance safety and freedom when creating a gorilla exhibit, so must society balance accountability and freedom when considering the role of foundations. The flexibility of the foundation structure offers space for the creativity, risk tolerance and long-term time horizons necessary to tackle society's toughest challenges. But foundations' lack of direct accountability – whether to voters, investors or customers – brings with it moral and strategic challenges that have often been discussed in these pages and in many a conference hall.

As fiscal crises cause governments to pull back funding to services and research, the demands on foundations are likely to increase. While the Gates Foundation's size presents unique challenges and opportunities, it is just one of tens of thousands of foundations – including about a hundred with more than a billion dollars in assets. As a class of organizations with masses of free capital in constrained times, foundations are certain to find themselves under the sceptical gaze of the media, policymakers, academics and the general public.

A shifting accountability context

Indeed, all organizations face a shifting accountability context. Businesses regularly encounter new expectations from consumers and investors about the social and environmental consequences of their operations. Government agencies face evolving demands for openness, citizen voice, and evidence of results. Non-profits are constantly asked for greater detail on programmes, financials and operations.

Technology has supercharged the voice of the many – enabling new forms of communication and collaborative action. The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street are not mere Twitter revolutions, but the fluent use of social media from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park more than hints at new possibilities in collective action.

Both the sources and targets of accountability are multiplying. There are simply a lot of institutions now: the US alone has 30 million businesses, 1.2 million non-profits and 80,000 government agencies. Such scale changes strategy: more actors means more variables; more variables means more factors to consider; more factors means less certainty.

Add in the upheavals brought by globalization, terrorism, demographic shifts and climate change and we must ask if the top-down regulatory structures that defined governance in the 20th century will prove sufficient. Centralized government action is surely as important as ever; regulation is here to stay. No organization should use this flux as an excuse to abdicate its fundamental responsibilities. But these changes have resulted in great confusion. How should organizations respond? How do we integrate formal, top-down regulation with distributed, bottom-up accountability?

Luckily our governance mechanisms are catching up with our changing world. We are still early in this transition, but I argue there are four behaviours that are proving necessary for any business, government agency or non-profit to maintain a social licence in this dynamic environment. Together, these behaviours form what University of California political scientist Lee Drutman and I have called the 'new governance bargain'. By fulfilling their part in this new, implicit arrangement, organizations can retain permission from society to operate without excessive regulatory constraints. What is more, these behaviours can fuel increased effectiveness by enabling organizations to learn better, react faster, and better understand their context. Each of the four behaviours is directly applicable to the unique context of foundations.

Transparency

The first behaviour is transparency. By sharing basic information with stakeholders, organizations can avoid accusations of opacity, head off false rumours, and prevent the suddenness of a Wikileaks-style exposure. More positively, transparency allows stakeholders to feel included in an organization's work, enables benchmarking, and supports collaboration and learning. For foundations, the practices outlined in the Foundation Center's Glasspockets.org site offer a start towards systematic transparency. Tools like Creative Commons licensing and standardized metadata promise new forms of open productivity. At times, of course, foundations must exercise discretion – especially if transparency compromises a strategy, as can be the case when your grantees face an active opponent. But in general foundations can and should move from a stance of opting into transparency when convenient towards a stance of opting out when necessary.

Measurement of multiple bottom lines

The next behaviour is the measurement of multiple bottom lines. We see the emergence of non-financial measures across society: corporations sharing carbon emissions data, countries dropping GDP in favour of 'Gross National Happiness', and non-profits proclaiming that the administrative cost ratio tells nothing of their impact. Foundations with rigorous strategies and evaluation systems can easily do the same. Their measurement systems can and should go beyond endowment size and payout ratio to systematic tracking of the quantity and nature of the work done by foundations and their grantees. As the work of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has shown, a good measurement system can help offer both grantmakers and grantees clarity, insight, and – ultimately – greater effectiveness.

Proactive engagement with stakeholders

The third behaviour is proactive engagement with stakeholders. Decisions made without reference to stakeholders often elicit fury– and, if one isn't careful, a boycott, recall election, protest or lawsuit. But stakeholder engagement offers far more than a mechanism for avoiding angry response. Consider the extensive use of focus groups in consumer product development, the role of polling in politics, or the ways that non-profits use social media to engage their communities. Foundations can and must engage with their stakeholders; as the title of a recent Grantmakers for Effective Organizations report put it, 'Do Nothing About Me Without Me'.

Given foundations' independent structures, such constituent engagement requires proactive efforts. The Center for Effective Philanthropy's Grantee Perception Report offers a simple, powerful tool to elicit stakeholder feedback. Innovations like the Peery Foundation's live Twitter broadcast of a board meeting or the Packard Foundation's use of a public wiki for strategy development around agricultural pollution promise new ways to learn from our communities.

Collaboration

The final behaviour is collaboration. In a complex, interconnected world, it is a rare organization that can hope to solve a problem in isolation. Complex problems often require the specialization made possible by division of labour and the reach made possible by cross-organizational economies of scale. Collaboratives like the Climate Works Foundation, STRIVE and the True North Fund offer new models of aligned strategy powered by common goals, pooled capital and shared measurement systems. Foundations' unique perspective on a field and ability to convene key players enable them not just to participate in collaborations but to catalyse them. And their privileged position is much more likely to yield results if grantmakers apply it humbly, fully aware of the power dynamics inherent in any funding relationship.

Together, these four behaviours offer a framework for foundations to be more effective while avoiding unproductive government intervention. They are not simple boxes to be checked: each is an attitude that must be embedded across foundation activities and constantly refreshed. You cannot dial in to a new social contract.

Over the next few years, we will start to learn whether these behaviours are enough. We may well discover they are not and we will have to reconsider the top-down regulation of foundations. But for now, instead of caging our gorillas, let's set them free – under the watchful eye of us all.

-- Jacob Harold

Transparency can be painful. Trust us, we know.

The Foundation Center is the primary data collection, analysis and reporting agency for the field of U.S. institutional philanthropy. Each year we analyze more than 150,000 grants awarded by about 1,500 of the country's largest and most influential foundations, and load them into our master database that now comprises more than 3 million grants awarded over the past 20 years.

Every year, our database is accessed by thousands of grant seekers, looking for funding to do their work. It also underlies all of the research reports written by the Foundation Center, tracking trends in the field over time.

But here's the thing - our data aren't perfect. And we want you to know that.

Moreover, despite the limitations of our data, we fully intend to keep publishing reports documenting and explaining the work of U.S. foundations. Even if what we produce sometimes comes back to bite us.

Case in point - we have published a number of reports in recent years on issues related to diversity in philanthropy. Not everyone is satisfied with the findings we report, regardless of the caveats we issue about the limitations of available information on the populations that benefit from grantmaking. But we issue the reports anyway, because there is burgeoning demand for this type of information.

Why would we issue reports based on imperfect data? Because it is the only way the data will get better.

To build our grants database, we have relied for most of our 55-year existence on publicly-filed IRS Forms 990 and 990-PF filed by foundations. We transcribe verbatim the information provided by foundations on these forms that describes the purpose of each grant awarded during a given year. Sometimes this information is richly descriptive, sometimes it's sketchy, often it's nonexistent.

In recent years, we have developed a platform that allows foundations to send their grants information directly to the Center through an electronic reporting system. With more than 700 foundations participating, this has significantly improved both the range and depth of information available for analysis. But the quality of information we receive still varies a great deal from foundation to foundation.

As we confront the limitations of the information available to us, we have to make a choice about how best to spend our resources to build a database that describes the work of U.S. foundations. We can accept the limitations of the existing information and try to collect data on the work of as many foundations as possible each year.  Or we could drastically limit the total number of foundations and grants we analyze and focus instead on trying to obtain as much additional information as we can about each grant awarded by those foundations (e.g., about beneficiary populations, geographic area served, etc.). The former strategy, the one we've chosen, allows us to add more than 150,000 grants to our database each year. The latter would allow us to add only about one-tenth of that amount. We believe we owe it to the hundreds of thousands of individuals who use our grants database to make it as comprehensive as possible, so they can maximize their ability to find support for their good work.

Adopting that strategy means we have to live with some data limitations when doing research based on the information we have. But what is not generally understood or appreciated is that this is simply a fact of life regarding all research, at all times and in all places. Any research study that does not come with caveats, or explicitly stated limitations, is not an honest piece of research.

In our reports, we use colors, italics, boldface letters, boxes, sidebars, methodology sections, and other strategies to make people aware of both the findings and the limitations of our research. Of course, it's never enough. Findings still have a way of disconnecting themselves from the methodologies used to generate them.

But that's fine - as long as it leads to good faith conversations about what we think we know, what we don't know, and what we need to know. As the primary data collection agency for the field, the Foundation Center is committed to doing the best it can to answer the questions that people are asking about institutional philanthropy. The need to know will not go away, and we - all of us who care about philanthropy - must do whatever we can to ensure that we have the kinds of data that will allow us to meet this need.

Do you have thoughts about how we can collectively improve the quality of data available to the field? Let us know. Like all fields of endeavor in the 21st century, to be effective, philanthropy must operate from a solid base of knowledge that can only be built from reliable data on the issues it is addressing and the approaches it is taking to make a difference.

-- Larry McGill

Infographics serve as yet another transparency device, one that can present a complex set of data in a visual format that can be quickly and easily processed.   Have you used infographics to tell your story?

-- Mark Foley

Gates devotes a significant portion of this year's annual letter to innovation in agriculture. This is clearly an area that he believes holds great promise to improve the lives of billions of people in a relatively short period of time with rather modest commitments of resources. He cites many reasons for optimism, including exciting new understanding of plant genes that should greatly accelerate the pace of agricultural innovation.

Most of the foundation's resources go to global health issues. He shares many positive developments in this area, including a milestone in the fight to eradicate polio: on January 13, 2012, India marked its first anniversary of being polio-free. This was a huge accomplishment, calling for the coordination of many players. The effort reveals many lessons that will hopefully lead to successful campaigns in the three countries where the virus remains endemic-Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

The foundation's domestic work focuses on U.S. education. Here, Gates is impressed by the technique of peer evaluation among teachers that has been tested in the Tampa, Florida, school district and hopes it may serve as a model that can be replicated. Interestingly, the concept of learning from one's peers arises again when Gates later discusses the first of what will be an annual meeting of those who have taken the Giving Pledge. He would like to focus attention on how the web can be used to allow "givers of all sizes to connect to causes and see the results of their giving."

One of the perennial challenges that Gates admits facing is the common belief that development money is wasteful or doesn't produce lasting results. But he is "convinced that when people hear stories of the lives they've helped improve, they want to do more, not less." Given this, Gates attempts to put into perspective the news that some of the money provided to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was diverted for corrupt purposes. The Gates foundation is the largest non-governmental donor to the Global Fund.

Gates concludes by making a plea for continued funding from the world's wealthiest nations, even in challenging economic times, for development that benefits the world's poorest. A "relatively small amount of money invested in development," in his words, "has changed the future prospects of billions of people-and it can do the same for billions more if we make the choice to continue investing in innovation."

To read or download the letter (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, and Spanish), click here.

Those interested may send feedback about the annual letter to annualletter@gatesfoundation.org.

Tweet using #billsletter to join the conversation. Follow Bill Gates on Twitter: @BillGates.

-- Mark Foley

So far we have identified nearly 100 foundations in California who Tweet. Our staff is hard at work uncovering which other online tools California foundations are using to increase their visibility. Check out the online communications platforms used by over 1,300 foundations across the United States at Transparency 2.0.

Do you know of a foundation Twitter feed, or other social media activity, we should include? Send an email to glasspockets@foundationcenter.org.

-- Janet Camarena

(Marie Deatherage has directed communications at Meyer Memorial Trust since 1996. She has also worked as a program officer, college professor, researcher, disability rights advocate, journalist, editor and publisher. She has degrees from the University of Chicago and University of Oregon and has never met a disruptive technology she didn't like.)

Meyer Memorial Trust's (MMT) path to transparency began slowly and modestly, first by openly examining the effects of clusters of grants we had made as feature stories in our annual report. Then in the 20th anniversary edition, Charles Rooks – our first and only CEO to that point – gave very candid answers to a series of questions about what had gone on at MMT over the first 20 years, which took us a considerable distance in revealing what went on inside our doors. But our annual report essentially only reached people who already knew us, so its effect was severely limited.

Enter Web 2.0

The first real progress on our road to transparency and accountability, however, was made possible by the Internet, especially through the interactivity of Web 2.0.

We were relatively early to realize that technology had enormous potential to make foundations better known and understood. In 1996, we were the first foundation in Oregon to launch a website, albeit very simple and crude by today's standards. (No wonder, I created it by reading a book and making mistakes until it worked.) Since then, our site has been through three major iterations, each attempting to raise the bar of our own expectations, but we largely made up what foundation transparency and accountability looked like as we went along.

The first breakthrough in our journey came as we planned remaking our website in 2003, when I came across The Cluetrain Manifesto, which grew out of a conversation posted on the web in 1999 and published as a book in 2000. First big insight: You can't be transparent if you can't admit you're human.

The manifesto begins:

• "People of the earth...
  
  
• "A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter–and getting smarter than most companies.
  
  
• "These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.
  
  
• "Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal..."

You could effortlessly substitute the word foundation for companies or corporations in this text in 2000.

In my last post, I explained that MMT's biggest communication challenge in the 1980s and early 90s – as the largest foundation in the Pacific Northwest until technology fortunes created philanthropists with much bigger pockets – was to be perceived as approachable and accessible and trustworthy. 

On our website we addressed that in a number of ways, including:

• For example, rather than list the academic degrees, awards and other resume builders to show how impressive and distinguished our staff members are and how qualified they are to judge nonprofits, we asked our staff to answer personal questions that revealed something about them as people. Currently we are taking everybody back to high school! Yes, some staff were extremely reluctant to participate, for reasons ranging from fear of stalkers and identity theft (neither happened!) to just feeling exposed and vulnerable. Since "exposed" and "vulnerable" are words I've heard nonprofits use to describe how due diligence and site visits can make them feel, I figured we were getting somewhere!
  
  
• From the beginning in 1996, we included email addresses of individual staff members on our website. (Yes, it meant we all got more spam in our inboxes, which had an associated cost), but it also meant we really and truly were easily reached. Especially when compared with other foundations, whose websites in those days sometimes didn't even list staff members' names. (Later we hired a system administrator who, among many awesome things, reduces our spam to a trickle.)
  
  
• We added to our website "What We Look For" documents that program officers use to evaluate grant proposals for each of our grant programs. Yes, some staff members objected, arguing that "if we do that, nonprofits will just write what we want to see." Well, that might be true, but of course many were already trying to do that, only they were guessing what we were looking for. If we told them, might it be likely that they would actually begin to do those things?

Basically, we got in the habit of expecting to post anything and everything unless someone could provide very compelling reasons not to. Compelling reasons did not include "We've never done that before" or "No other foundation in our area is doing that."

But even more important than what we did was how we did it. Our communications became conversations. We began talking in a human voice. And we found that being authentic (human) goes a long way in creating trust and transparency. How do we know if we are succeeding? Partly from an anonymous survey we did of our news alert email list. Although we certainly have detractors, we generally got very high marks from our community. Some of the comments in the question about voice and tone of communications let us know we were hitting the mark. Note in the sample quotes below how readers positively link an authentic voice with trust and transparency. 

• "Refreshingly personable, informative & non-bureaucratic - MMT's email is peerless - always written from the heart rather than as if by advertising agency staff writer"
  
  
• "The tone of the MMT e-messages is colorful, sunny, full of character, and positive energy. If I'm feeling down, it's lovely to receive a cheery e-mail from the representative of a major funding entity such as MMT. Such friendly communications counter the energy of the typical 'gods on olympus' voice woven into foundation/trust website/e-correspondence dialogue"
  
  
• Relaxed at times, which is okay since you have tried to become more 'transparent' to the nonprofit community.

The Glasspockets Era

Fortunately, our current website was developed at the same time Glasspockets  launched, which finally gave us a yardstick of 23 practices by which to measure ourselves and identify places in our pockets that still needed cleaning.

The "Who Has Glass Pockets?" criteria helped us identify items we were lacking entirely (e.g., a formal whistleblower policy) so we could develop them, and post those we had but hadn't thought to include (e.g., bylaws). Probably the most helpful service Glasspockets provided was to advise us about how a general purpose responsive foundation like ours can begin to confront the challenge of evaluating its effectiveness. We've conducted user surveys and outside evaluations and added them to our web site and through the Glasspockets web site we have been able to identify other private foundations with a similar all-encompassing approach within a defined region. We continue to challenge ourselves to find more and better ways to judge and report on our effectiveness and share them with Glasspockets so our profile is up-to-date.

Glasspockets also helped us figure out how to report on our past programs and share not only what we learn from our work, but reveal where we fail as well as succeed.

It took several months for us to accomplish every item on the "Who Has Glass Pockets?" list, it was a lot of work and wasn't always a top priority in the day-to-day pressure of deadlines. But can you imagine how happy and proud we were when Janet Camarena, director of the San Francisco office of the Foundation Center and head of the Glasspockets initiative wrote in a July 2010 email, "Congratulations, your pockets are the clearest we've uncovered thus far…"?!

Honestly, I don't understand why any foundation wouldn't want to achieve some of the most basic Glasspockets measures. Can anyone seriously give me reasons for any foundation not to have a web site in 2012? Even small family foundations without staff ought to be able to take the Foundation Center up on its offer to design and host free websites.

Because I think this trip to transparency is just beginning. 

Next month I'll share why I think we are in the earliest stages of opening up and how I look forward to a future where Glasspockets will have a longer list to itemize, giving us all much more shared knowledge we can use to move our field forward and create a better world.

-- Marie Deatherage

As we continue to showcase examples of foundations' transparency, Paul Brest, retiring president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, provides a nice window into the thinking behind the foundation's work. Grants aren't the only way the foundation seeks to solve social and environmental problems. In Beyond the Grant Dollars, his opening essay of the recently released 2010 Annual Report, Brest pulls back the curtain to explain the added value of the program staff in magnifying and maximizing impact.

He writes, "The Beyond the Grant Dollars project has two primary objectives:

• To improve the Foundation staff's and Board's decisions about the mix of strategies and the allocation of financial and human resources that can best achieve our goals.
• To determine the skills, experience, and other qualities we should look for in new staff members and ways to improve the development of Foundation program staff."

Brest does a fine job detailing a number of ways that funders like the Hewlett Foundation employ staff to get the biggest bang for the buck, all the while trying to keep their eyes on the prize. With solid examples from the foundation's own experience as a highly engaged philanthropist, he thoughtfully presents the rationale for the various tactics mobilized for mission achievement. And, as in the best instances of lessons learned, he does not only discuss successes. In his own words, "potentially high returns also involves a significant risk of failure."

Finally, Brest mentions the desire to capture the substantive knowledge that program staff acquire in their fields and in their various activities and disseminate it for internal use as well as externally "when it has the potential to inform nonprofit organizations, foundations, and others."

View the President's Statement and the full Annual Report, or see past Annual Reports dating back to 1966.

-- Mark Foley

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), like many philanthropies today, has embraced social media. We have a Facebook page, YouTube channels, blogs and multiple official Twitter feeds. Our staff also participate directly: more than 40 of my colleagues are regular Twitter users and many have contributed blog posts to popular sites within their fields. Our CEO, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey (@risalavizzo), sets the tone with her regular activity on Twitter.

Like many philanthropies, we're still finding our way and doing our best to learn from our collective experiences and from the experiences of others. For RWJF, engagement in social media is rooted in a context – a context about who we are as an organization and what we seek to become.

The first part of that context comes from our history with transparency. Since RWJF's beginnings, we have emphasized independent evaluation of our programs. As David Colby (@DavidCColby) and his colleagues have detailed, RWJF chose to make public the results of those evaluations so others could learn whether the interventions had (or had not) been effective. In addition, since 2007, we have made public an annual assessment that examines a number of dimensions of our organizational performance. (You can download these reports on our website.)

The second part starts in 2008, when RWJF underwent a strategic planning exercise where we began by looking at the world around us. We saw innovations in philanthropy coming from newer, smaller foundations -- like the Steve and Jean Case Foundation and the Omidyar Network -- that were leveraging new technologies to cast a wider net as an effort to stimulate conversation and engage people more widely. We saw new models for the sector like Kiva and DonorsChoose -- platforms that enabled more direct connections between donors and their impact. And we also saw the amazing, disruptive accomplishments of services like Wikipedia and Craigslist that were run by organizations employing only a few dozen staff by but drawing their power from vast networks of engaged users. We came away from this effort with a sense -- still very impressionistic -- that we should explore what it would mean for us to become a "Web 2.0 Philanthropy."

"Web 2.0" is becoming an increasingly archaic term as it is regularly supplanted by the term "social media," but for us, the distinction has meaning. Where "social media" is often associated with services like Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr, we see "Web 2.0" as running deeper. It is the collection of tools that harness the collective creativity and knowledge of and promote interaction among the Web's many users. It is based on an "architecture of participation," which enables the users of a service to add value to that service. Beyond social media, it can be expressed in many other ways, ranging from the user who improves on a cooking magazine's recipe by adding an unexpected spice to the protester during the Arab Spring posting a cell phone video of a beating on YouTube for the world to see. It is the seller rating system of eBay, in which the experiences of hundreds of other buyers give a potential buyer confidence in the seller. It is about the blurring of the lines between producer and consumer, the blurring of the lines between expert and non-expert and the aggregation of many small contributions into something of great value.

We knew that as a relatively large and relatively middle-aged foundation (we celebrate our 40th anniversary this year) with our traditions, habits and engrained practices – we would have to consciously push ourselves to evolve in this direction. We needed first to flesh out the vision, which we did through a combination of research (i.e. small "r" research like reading case studies and talking with folks at other organizations) and experiential learning. Those of us tasked with working on the vision felt we couldn't do so unless we were actively engaging in Web 2.0 experiences, so we started experimenting with Twitter and Facebook -- and experiencing their cultures and experiencing their value to our day-to-day work. It wasn't long before we concluded that becoming a Web 2.0 philanthropy was not so much about adopting new social media than it was about embracing the underlying values of Web 2.0 and weaving them in to our work. We honed in on three principal values:

• Openness, at one level, implies transparency–letting others see into the organization and how it works. But in Web 2.0, openness goes beyond organizational transparency and represents humility and a willingness to learn, to be surprised, and to hear and accept criticism.
  
  
• Participation refers to a style of engagement in the professional communities of which we are a part. It requires asking questions, listening, responding and contributing where we can add value–whether expertise, research and other materials, or connections.
  
  
• Decentralization is a natural consequence of distributed participation and inherently requires a ceding of some control. So much information is now created and shared collaboratively, and the path and shape that such information takes cannot be controlled by any one entity or group. However, a tremendous upside of the emergence of Web 2.0 is the potential for countless unseen contributors to augment and amplify one's own contributions.

Building on these values, the research and our early experiences, we sketched out a vision of how RWJF could embrace Web 2.0. The vision included a number of elements, ranging from using social media to be better informed about our fields and the work of our grantees, to cultivating our networks of people and organizations who care about our issues, to crowdsourcing expertise, to seeking feedback and criticism and ultimately, to using using Web 2.0 principles to design programs that work at very large scales. The vision, along with a strategy to evolve toward it, gave the organization a context and a rationale for our embrace of social media, which was beginning to play out.

One might be tempted to think that with all of this Web 2.0 strategy development going on, we approached social media with a deliberate, carefully planned strategy, but in fact, we took a much more organic approach. Previous to the Web 2.0 work, we had done some limited blogging and had gotten over the usual jitters about all the things that could go wrong. Later, as a few intrepid staff began testing the waters at Twitter and Facebook, we consciously took a supportive stance. We came up with social media guidelines that, while putting up some guardrails to limit the likelihood of unfortunate events, actually encouraged staff to experiment and to develop their own, individual personalities online. We wanted them to explore how it could provide value and we wanted to learn from their experiences. The context of our overall push to become a Web 2.0 philanthropy informed the development of our social media guidelines, provided a strong incentive for staff to participate and, by connecting it to a set of values, also influences how staff participate in social media.

We're a couple of years into our journey and we reap the benefits of being more open and engaged every day.  Many staff feel as if they're better engaged in their fields, they're learning more and they're expanding their networks.  This being a journey, though, it hasn't always been easy and we've hit our share of potholes.  Staff do wrestle with where to find the time to engage meaningfully in social media and being open and engaged often means having to expose what you don't know -- which can be uncomfortable.  We're also finding that there's a long way between having a vision of how to leverage Web 2.0 to change the world and having the world reliably work like a Wikipedia or a Craigslist.  Just because you ask people's opinions doesn't mean you'll get them -- sometimes the crowd keeps its wisdom to itself.  My colleague Erin Kelly will speak to some of these challenges in a future post on our social media experience.  As we continue this journey, we have lots to learn -- and I'd love to hear how others are finding success or overcoming obstacles to becoming more open, more participatory and more decentralized.

Have you ventured down a similar path? Tell us if/how your organization has embraced these tools to work in a different fashion. Did you to so to become better informed? Build networks? Service a traditional organizational or "consumer" need in a new manner? Let others hear what you have struggled with (or celebrated) to help shape the trajectory of a project you are working on with the contributions of others.

-- Steve Downs

A colleague recently shared the 2010 report to the community of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. We both agreed that it did a nice job of providing, in a brief paragraph, some transparency for many of the foundations' DAFs. Here's a sample narrative for the Lady Bird Charitable Advised Fund, established in 2005:

"Lady Bird has been an involved civic leader in this community for decades. Most recently, "President Lady" led the Nashville Rotary Club through a campaign to double its endowment, while serving the Bredesen Administration as President of the Governor's Books from Birth Foundation, which has built on the Imagination Library Program created by Dolly Parton and currently provides free books to more than 170,000 children under age five in Tennessee."

Are there examples of donor-advised funds' transparency to which you would like to draw attention?

-- Mark Foley]]> Cynthia Bailie Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:00:00 -0500 http://blog.glasspockets.org/2011/12/foley_20111220.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/transparencytalk/~3/aQ1oF5BL9rY/somerville_20111215.html http://blog.glasspockets.org/2011/12/somerville_20111215.html (Bill Somerville is Executive Director of the Philanthropic Ventures Foundation. This post is a response to a session on Foundation Transparency and Effectiveness, held in San Francisco, December 6, 2011, by the Center for Effective Philanthropy and the Foundation Center.) Foundation critics say it isn't enough to have passion and... (Bill Somerville is Executive Director of the Philanthropic Ventures Foundation. This post is a response to a session on Foundation Transparency and Effectiveness, held in San Francisco, December 6, 2011, by the Center for Effective Philanthropy and the Foundation Center.)

Foundation critics say it isn't enough to have passion and caring about your work. You need to be effective. Maybe the retort is you can't be effective unless you have passion and caring in your work. Nonetheless, what does effectiveness mean?

At PVF effective means getting out of the office and finding people doing outstanding work -- and funding them. It means trusting these people and giving them money to spend at their discretion without requiring them to spend 25+ hours applying for funds, regardless if there is a common application form, as was advocated. It means not holding foundation processes sacred and getting money to people when they need it and not having them wait months for a decision.

Does transparency and glass pockets help effectiveness? I don't know. What difference does it make for people to know foundation salaries? If it does make a difference, then we are talking about accountability not effectiveness. Is the foundation accountable in being efficient, frugal, responsible, responsive and productive?

Foundations have a special place in the community in that they are answerable to themselves. They are independent and have maximum latitude to do their work. They have a unique asset in that their money is not political, not in competition with anything or anyone, and they have no ax to grind. So, what are the factors of excellence in the exercise of philanthropy? A question foundation personnel should ask themselves every day.

One is leadership. Foundations should exercise leadership in their willingness to venture where others haven't gone, to take risks, to think into the future rather than indulge themselves in endless paper. A leader is one who brings out the best in others. Isn't this what foundations should be doing?

Another factor of excellence is modesty. Money is the tool of philanthropy and money is power. Foundation personnel must understand that it is not their money nor is it their power. Foundations are investing funds in people and programs worthy of the investment. They are not "giving money away."

This commentary is meant to create a dialogue and stimulate other people to add their thoughts on what makes for effectiveness.

-- Bill Somerville