In the Spotlight
About this section...
Back in the "early days" of foundation and nonprofit communications, to succeed at your job, all you needed to know to do was write a press release and publish an annual report.
Today, at foundations and nonprofits across the country, communicators are constantly striving for ways to be more effective at bringing attention to the work their organizations are doing, what they're achieving, and how these activities impact people throughout the nation and around the world.
In this section, we shine the spotlight on innovative, notable, and interesting approaches to the practice of communications in philanthropy. Our spotlight features illuminate new and more strategic approaches to telling stories, delivering messages, connecting with audiences, deploying new technologies...you name it.
If you have an idea that's worth spotlighting in this section--your foundation's work, a project involving one or more grantees, or something you've seen elsewhere--email us.
Only Way To Know What People Want In Your Website Is To Ask
Throughout the 14 months it spent on the redesign, the team responsible for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's new Web site stayed singly focused on making sure the end product would met the needs of people the foundation wants to reach.
These audiences include members of the general public who want to learn more about Gates' work, policy-makers, and people working in global health, global development and other areas Gates supports who may apply for grants.
And how did they know what current and potential users wanted? They asked...and repeatedly, according to Corrie Frasier, Gates' manager for content and distribution strategy, who lead the design project.
When It Comes to Health Care, Commonwealth Fund Website Asks:
Why Not the Best?
Web sites that provide easily accessible information about the best restaurants, stores or travel destinations also serve as an incentive to keep quality high in order to avoid bad ratings. Could such a Web site similarly help improve the quality of health care at U.S. hospitals?
That’s one of the questions the Commonwealth Fund hopes to answer from Why Not The Best? – a free online resource that tracks performance on various measures of health care quality at U.S. hospitals.
Thoughtful Approach to ‘Annual Reporting’
What do you call a regularly issued publication that reports on the programs a foundation supports, discusses challenges to its work, invites outsiders to offer their views and analyses, and talks about possible solutions to the major issues it is trying to solve?
For the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the answer to that question is not an annual report, but a Thoughtbook. Published four times since 2005 – the year it stopped producing its traditional annual report – the foundation’s Thoughtbook features a collection of staff-written essays along with contributions from grantees, partners and other leaders who are thinking differently about philanthropy.
Interactive Maps Help Drive Home Health Care Issues
When you want to explain a complex problem to someone, paint a picture.
That’s what the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation does through the use of interactive maps and other kinds of graphical presentation of data to help explain the obesity epidemic, geographic variation in health care, public health preparedness and other pressing health and health care issues.
Online Conversations Help Promote 'Information Marketplace' Idea
It's a concern every foundation faces: How do we ensure that our report or study gets the attention it deserves, generates useful conversation, and helps advance the featured issue or cause?
That was certainly the question for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as it prepared to release The Non-Profit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy, a report that advocates for a "marketplace of information" as a way to promote more effective charitable giving.
In an effort to spark an honest conversation about the issues and recommendations of the report, the foundation launched an online forum and began inviting people to post comments and reactions to the report
Everything That's Old Is New Again
Audio Annual Report Features Repackaged Recordings from Past Year
One of the knocks against print versions of foundation annual reports is that they cost a lot to produce and mail and ultimately end up unread – and in the recycling bin.
If that's the case, why not produce an annual report that's largely made up of recycled material – not paper – but previously produced content?
In a sense that's what the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) did when it created its first-ever audio annual report.
"Big Questions" Campaign Helps Templeton Advance Mission
What would you do if your foundation wanted to spark some thoughtful discussions on topics that range from the meaning of life to the existence of God, especially if the goal is show that these questions can be answered by “open-minded” scientific inquiry? For the John Templeton Foundation, the way to do is through a national print advertising campaign (and companion website) called Big Questions.
To Publish or Not Publish Its Annual Report, Lumina Foundation Doesn't Guess What Readers Want, It Asks What They Think
At the 2008 Fall Communications Network Annual conference, one of the most spirited discussions focused on the question about whether foundation annual reports are a thing of the past. While arguments were made on both sides for continuing or getting rid of them, another point of view was that foundations should ask people they’re trying to reach what they think about the annual report before making a decision.
According to Dave Powell, Lumina's Director of Publications, the results from the foundation's survey of annual report readers were "instructive, even a little surprising. We certainly feel they can inform our decisions about what to do in coming years."
Commonwealth ChartCart Service Provides Facts and Statistics To Go
The Commonwealth Fund is learning that sometimes a little goes a long way.
While the foundation is known for publishing more than 100 thoughtful, in-depth reports each year about complex health policy issues, many of the researchers and policymakers the Fund is trying to reach are eager for quick access to some of the salient facts and figures from these publications. So to help, Commonwealth has set up an online library that contains more than 1,600 downloadable charts and tables from the foundation’s vast catalog of publications.
Funders Not Only Ask Their Grantees "How Are We Doing?"
But They're Sharing What They Learn With the Public
When the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) began conducting surveys of grantees in 2003, foundations primarily used the findings to learn what their grant recipients liked about doing business with them and what needed improvement.
Now, as a nod to greater transparency, a growing number of foundations are sharing grantee feedback from these surveys on their Web sites for the public to see. Often times these postings include discussions about improvements foundations are making spurred by comments from their grantees.
One Foundation's Remedy for Ailing Health Policy Journalism
One of the hallmarks of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s (KFF) communications strategy is its reliance on the news media to inform opinion leaders and decision-makers about issues relating to health policy concerns in the United States.
Missouri Foundation For Health Invites Viewers On A Virtual Journey
A lot of foundations talk about “driving” change. At the Missouri Foundation for Health, they’ve gone one step farther.
Communicating With Public is Key to Peterson Foundation
What do a foundation launch and Hollywood-style movie premiere have in common?
For the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, quite a bit.
To Tell Its Story, Robert Wood Johnson Tells (Lots of) Stories About Its Grantees
Most foundations believe that the best way to showcase their work and the causes they support is to highlight their grantees, and often by telling stories about who they are and what they do. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) believes so firmly in that idea that it has made grantee stories a centerpiece of its website.
Want Your Ideas to Get Noticed? Be Audacious!
If you were to look up “audacious” on Dictionary.com, you’ll find: “extremely original . .highly inventive: an audacious vision of the city's bright future. That definition perfectly describes the Open Society Institute-Baltimore blog: Audacious Ideas.
Online Service Helps Keep Key Audiences Current on Nonprofit Research
Have you ever struggled to find up-to-date information on topics relating to the work your foundation is supporting? Have you done countless Internet searches hoping you can locate what you need? Or has your organization gone to great lengths to distribute and disseminate reports and other publications but without certainty it was reaching key audiences?
Knight Foundation Annual Report Undergoes Major Transformation
Foundation annual reports are a lot like the weather. You hear a lot of complaints, but everyone seems powerless to change them.
Give Dollars, Get Change…and Then Talk About It
Spurred on by research from the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative that shows the public isn’t getting the full story about foundations because what’s reported by the media is mostly “transactional”—the number and size of grants awarded—the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is piloting a new way to bring attention to its work and more importantly, its accomplishments.
Nothing to Hide: Irvine Shows How to Candidly Report Bad News
In 1999, the James Irvine Foundation launched Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL), a major initiative to improve education achievement in low-performing schools in five California cities. Midway through the initiative, the foundation discovered that its $60 million reform effort was in danger of failing. Drawing on in-house expertise and outside experts, the Foundation studied the problem and made a series of mid-course corrections.
Communicating in the Blink of an Eye
If you need more proof that the ways we communicate and share messages are changing by the minute, and that the lower cost of technology (plus ease of use) puts the power of "real-time" communications in everyone's hands, here's another example.
To Support Knowledge-Based Grantmaking Teagle Embraces High-Tech Communications
W. Robert Connor may be a classics professor at heart--he taught ancient Greek literature and history at Princeton University--but today he spends most of his time thinking about the future, not the past.