Recently, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) released on our behalf a confidential survey of Archstone Foundation grantees, as well as of unfunded applicants to our responsive grantmaking program. Grantees and applicants should have received an email with a link to the on-line survey, and we hope very much that you will complete the survey candidly and give us the benefit of your best thinking.
Effectiveness for a funder is a funny concept. In one framing, what we do is give out funds to meet our IRS-imposed obligations, so perhaps effectiveness is getting the money out the door on time and keeping the books balanced. Obviously, this is too low a bar. However, directly measuring change in the well-being and health of older people in California may be too unwieldy an outcome to use as a practical guide in our work (too slow to change, too expensive to collect, and too confounded with other trends).
Something in-between is the expert opinion of one of our key constituencies who share with us a sense of mission to improve the lives of older adults – our grantees and those who would be grantees. Are we on the right path? Is our grantmaking having its intended results? Is our process reasonable or unduly burdensome? We have many questions, and we need your answers. But two barriers stand in the way of this source of feedback: power dynamics and halo effects in judgment.
It can be terribly difficult to give our friends or employees honest feedback as to their good and bad behavior. We are constrained by social norms, politeness, and an unwillingness to cause conflict. We know that all those considerations and more come into play when grantees (and would-be grantees) are asked for honest feedback. Because a funder has the power of the purse, it is even harder to give candid views. It would be almost impossible for a nonprofit leader to give fully honest feedback on our strengths and weaknesses when she could not quite be sure that it might not affect chances of future funding. Therefore, by using CEP, which is committed to a strong process of confidentiality, as our intermediary, we make it possible for our stakeholders to tell us the truth. CEP won’t tell us who has completed the survey and who hasn’t. They disguise the words you use in open-ended comments. And they won’t give us information from items where there are so few respondents that you might be identifiable. They make the world safe for feedback.
The second barrier is more pleasant, but just as corrupting. Given norms of reciprocity and the scarcity of philanthropic resources, people who get funding from a foundation are predisposed to a very positive view of their funder. (Those who do not receive a grant can be understandably hurt, disappointed, and let down.) CEP helps us interpret your feedback by benchmarking scores against a massive database of similar funders being rated on the same questions. We may very well discover that we get a 6 on a 7-point scale on some important rating, but that the average funder gets a 6.5, and thus we are not doing as well as our peers. They give us the context we need to interpret our results.
Once we have our results, another key part of the process is the work we will need to do to understand and come to terms with what we learn so that we can make and implement plans to improve. CEP’s expert staff will (metaphorically) hold our hands as we struggle to interpret all of the data. Our expert guides from CEP will work with us on alternative analyses that that we might use to test our understanding of what the data are saying. Finally, they will encourage us to come up with practical and doable ways of changing our practices in ways that might plausibly increase our effectiveness.
We are committed to openness to feedback and to being effective funders. We want to be good partners to our grantees and to succeed in our mission of improving the lives of older people in California. We take this seriously. So seriously that last month, three of us traveled to Minneapolis for the biannual CEP “Stronger Philanthropy” Conference to learn from others in the field and the latest research findings of the CEP team. We also got copies of CEP’s CEO, Phil Buchanan’s newly released book – Giving Done Right: Effective Philanthropy and Making Every Dollar Count, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in how foundations and other funder organizations can do their best work.
Keep an eye on Point of View, our new blog. Come September, we should have some results and be ready to share them with you.
