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January 23, 2008, 09:24 AM ET
How Foundations Can Help Individual Donors
Why do foundations do so little to distribute the knowledge they gain from their grant making so that individual donors can benefit, asks Sean Stannard-Stockton on the blog Tactical Philanthropy.
“The point I’m making is not that foundations have some sort of obligation to fund nonprofit information for public use, but that doing so is in their best interest,” Mr. Stannard-Stockton writes. If foundations support efforts to provide individual donors with the information to make strategic decisions then “it seems to me that foundations can achieve huge returns on their grant dollars by enabling the public to gain access to the same kinds of information that they themselves use.”
In a podcast interview, Mr. Stannard-Stockton struck up a conversation with Phil Buchanan, executive director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, about this topic.
Mr. Buchanan cited an article featured by The Chronicle of Philanthropy on the organization Great Nonprofits as a good example of “a place where people can go and offer their perspective on nonprofits that they’ve either been served by or volunteered with.”
However, he notes that the challenges in measuring performance are myriad because the nonprofit world does not “lend [itself] to easy assessment and, of course, there’s no universal measure” of success.“ Still, Mr. Buchanan said that certain foundations “deserve some credit for having provided support to some of the organizations that are working on this issue” while others could do much more.
Perla Ni, founder of Great Nonprofits, chimed in to the comments section following the podcast to give her take on why only a few foundations, such as Kellogg and Hewlett, that “support initiatives to create better information about nonprofits.”
She writes that, quite simply, “foundations don’t feel the pain of insufficient information” as individual donors often do. Foundations must realize that helping individuals gain access to both “hard” and “soft” information “can have a huge payoff when they attract greater individual giving.”
What do you think? Should foundations do more to help individuals decide where to give? Would such efforts help or harm small or risky nonprofit causes? Click on the comments link below this post to share your thoughts.
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