Research and reports

Philanthropy Annual: 2008 Review

The Foundation Center 's Philanthropy Annual: 2008 Review is a yearly compendium that highlights the news, issues, people, organizations, and giving trends shaping the field of philanthropy.

The Annual provides a full overview of organized philanthropy, illustrating its important role in society and its national and global impact. Contents are drawn in part from Philanthropy News Digest, the Center's daily online news service, as well as selected research findings in the annual Foundations Today Series and other Center sources.

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Report Provides Snapshot of Foundation Communications

What is the state of foundation communications? How do communications staff members spend their time? What are their priorities? How much influence is Web 2.0 having on foundation communications? How effectively do communications staff work with their program colleauges? How does spending compare across foundations of different sizes?

These are some of the issues addressed in a report, Foundation Communications: the State of the Practice. The report includes a summary and analysis of the results of a survey conducted in the fall of 2008 of several hundred communications professionals at private and community foundations. The survey was conducted by DeSantis Breindel, a branding and interactive firm, for the Communications Network, with support from the California HealthCare Foundation.

>>Download the report


A Guide To Evaluating Foundation/Nonprofit Communications

In response to requests for hard copies, The Communications Network has made arrangements for the 40-page guide, Are We There Yet?, to be printed on demand at a per copy cost of $8.00, plus shipping. To order, or for more information, click here.

PDFs of the report can also be downloaded.

Do you know if your communications are working? Have you ever asked?  If the answer to both questions is "no," you're not alone.

Few foundation communicators claim they regularly – if at all – formally evaluate their work.

To help, the Communications Network has published Are We There Yet? A Communications Evaluation Guide.  Created by Asibey Consulting, and made possible by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the guide walks users through a nine-step process for creating plans for monitoring and measuring their communications.

In developing the guide, Asibey Consulting surveyed more than 80 foundation and nonprofit communicators, conducted 20 in-depth interviews and extensively reviewed existing resources and reports. In addition to step-by-step planning advice, the guide includes several case studies from the Lumina Foundation for Education, The Wallace Foundation and others where the data from evaluation efforts helps communicators achieve their goals and direct limited resources wisely.

"We found out that we can do better in terms of clarity in communicating what we do and what we fund [through evaluation]," said Marc Fest, director of communications for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. "We also found that there's an opportunity to be more customer-service oriented."

Among the reasons stressed for evaluating communications efforts are these:

  • Evaluation improves the effectiveness of communications.
  • Evaluation can help organizations more effectively engage with intended audiences.
  • Situations change - strategies and tactics may need to change as well.
  • Evaluation ensures wise allocation of resources.

Once evaluation is underway, the guide suggests you communicate your findings to people who may benefit from what you are learning, such as your team, your board or colleagues and peers.

The guide, complete with a worksheet to chart your strategy, encourages readers to follow nine steps in creating an evaluation plan:

Step 1:  Determine What You Will Evaluate                       
Step 2:  Define Your Goal                                               
Step 3:  State Your Objective                                               
Step 4:  Identify Your Audience                                               
Step 5:  Establish Your Baseline                                               
Step 6:  Pose Your Evaluation Questions                        
Step 7:  Draft Your Measurements                                    
Step 8:  Select Your Evaluation Techniques
Step 9:  Estimate Your Budget               

The guide also shows communicators how to step back and regroup when their evaluation indicates less progress towards objectives or milestones than they had anticipated.


"Often, the difference between failure and success might be as simple as recasting the message, utilizing new spokespersons or targeting a different segment of your audience," said David Brotherton of Brotherton Strategies. "But if you keep shoveling dirt when that hole is getting deeper, you'll eventually dig your own grave.

The report was written by Edith Asibey, Toni Parras and Justin van Fleet of Asibey Consulting with support from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

>>Download the guide.

To view an introductory webinar about the guide and how to use it, click here.

Also of interest...

Another helpful resource on evaluating communications is a report, published in early 2009, that summarizes a conference held at theRobert Wood Johnson Foundation to discuss successful strategies to evaluate communication campaigns.

Robert Hornik, Ph.D., discussed evaluation of public health communication programs, including an examination of special problems, major principles of communication evaluation and alternative evaluation designs. Lawrence R. Jacobs, Ph.D., provided an overview of policy communication evaluations, outlining effective strategies and lessons learned. Julia Coffman presented the differences between evaluating advocacy and evaluating programs or services. Coffman also shared a composite logic model to facilitate advocacy evaluation design.

The report provides a summary of the conference presentations.

>>Download the report.

New Report Urges Foundations to Make More Use of New Media

A report produced for the Communications Network urges foundations to make more use of Web 2.0 technologies in order to more effectively engage the public in their work and to have greater programmatic impact.

According to the authors of Come on in. The water's fine. An exploration of Web 2.0 technology and its emerging impact on foundation communications, foundations that have adopted new and still emerging forms of digital communications—interactive Web sites, blogs, wikis, and social networking applications—are finding that they offer "opportunities for focused convenings and conversations, lend themselves to interactions with and among grantees, and are an effective story-telling medium.” The report's authors, David Brotherton and Cynthia Scheiderer, of Brotherton Strategies, who spent nearly a year exploring how foundations are using new media, add that "electronic communications create an opportunity to connect people who are interested in an issue with each other and the grantees working on the issue."

The report also acknowledges that the new technologies raise skepticism and concern among foundations. They include the "worry of losing control over the foundation's message, allowing more staff members to represent the foundation in a more public way, opening the flood gates of grant requests or the headache of a forum gone bad with unwanted or inappropriate posts."

Still, the report urges foundations to put aside their worries and make even more forceful use of new media applications and tools. The report argues that whatever is "lost in message control will be more than made up for by the opportunity to engage audiences in new ways, with greater programmatic impact."

Acknowledging that adoption of new media tools will require some cultural and operational shifts in foundations, the report offers suggestions from Ernest James Wilson III, dean and Walter Annenberg chair in communication at the University of Southern California, for how to deal with these challenges. He says that for foundations to make the best use of what the technology offers, they should concentrate on three things:

  • Build up the individual “human capital” of their staffs and provide them the competencies they need to operate in the new digital world.
  • Make internal institutional reforms to reward creativity and innovation in using these new media internally and among grantees.
  • Build social networks that span sectors and institutions, to engage in ongoing dialogue among private, public, nonprofits and research stakeholders.

As Wilson also says, “All of these steps first require leadership, arguably a new type of leadership, not only at the top but also from the ‘bottom’ up, since many of the people with the requisite skills, attitudes, substantive knowledge and experience are younger, newer employees, and occupy the low-status end of the organizational pyramid, and hence need strong allies at the top.

The report was made possible by support from The California Endowment, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

>> Download the report

Research Explores Perceptions of Foundation Role and Impact; Suggests Ways to Improve Understanding

How well are the role and impact of foundations understood in America today? If policymakers and opinion leaders better understood the work of foundations would that enhance the sector's overall effectiveness? To help answer those questions and identify potential communications strategies to support those goals, the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative has produced a series of thought-provoking research reports.

Philanthropy's Awareness Deficit. Engaged Americans show limited knowledge of foundations and struggle to identify their impact on communities or issues they care about, according to a recent survey by Harris Interactive. But there is a silver lining: they still express positive feelings towards foundations and their social value. Read about these and other survey findings in this PAI Digest.

Five Questions about Demonstrating Impact. .American foundations must do a better job of demonstrating the impact of their work, according to a dozen philanthropy leaders. In this PAI Digest, they weigh in on how foundations can demonstrate impact and why they should. The stakes are high, the state of practice low. Consider it a wake-up call for the field.

Making American Foundations Relevant:
Conversations with 21st Century Leaders in Philanthropy looks at how the foundation sector sees itself as well as how it believes it is perceived by external audiences critical to its ability to deliver on the promise of philanthropy. In interviews with 43 individuals (foundation and related professional association executives, and opinion leaders from national policy centers and universities), researchers found almost universal agreement that the role and importance of the sector does not register with critical audiences to the extent that these individuals believe it should. Making American Foundations Relevant presents essential and practical strategies for overcoming many of the barriers that sector leaders and observers believe hamper the ability of  foundations to be more effective at addressing society's needs.

A Research Synthesis on Aspects of Foundations and Philanthropy suggests that foundations spend more time examining their operations and grant-making effectiveness rather than trying to understand external perceptions and attitudes, and how those might affect their ability to fulfill their missions.

Philanthropy in the News offers an in-depth look at how the news media has covered foundations over 15 years, beginning in 1990. While the study finds that the number of news stories is steadily increasing, the primary focus has been on the amount of money foundations have awarded individually and collectively. Conversely, the report found that "only 1 percent of 38,000 stories analyzed discuss the benefit or impact of philanthropic activity. (>> Click here for a related op-ed from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

If You Advertise, They Will Respond

Does public service advertising work?  Can advertisements move people to action? Findings from studies conducted by the Ad Council on two of its campaigns show that properly researched and strategically implemented, public service efforts that are designed to raise awareness of critical issues and call people to action can produce powerful results.  The two Ad Council campaigns that the organization studied both focused on helping children in need.  In one, the goal was to encourage more parents to adopt children currently living in foster care.  The other was intended to help Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBSA) recruit more adults to serve as volunteer mentors to young people in communities nationwide.  Among the results of these two campaigns:
   
 --By the end of 2005, the campaign on behalf of foster kids inspired more than 9,000 prospective families to either contact an agency to start the adoption process or request that the process they'd initiated earlier move to the next step.    
 
 --In the first nine months after its campaign was launched, applications to become a Big Brothers Big Sisters mentor increased by 75%.  In addition, over 12 months, inquiries to BBSA offices climbed nearly six-fold to more than 600,000 from people who wanted to learn more about becoming a mentor.  
 
 "These campaigns generated an immediate and extraordinary response from the public that is benefiting children throughout the country," said George Perlov, the Ad Council's Senior Vice President/Research Evaluation. "The results of the PSAs testify to the power of public service advertising to make a difference.

>> Download the adoption campaign case study (PDF)

>> Download the Big Brothers Big Sisters case study (PDF)

Making Your Organization Stand Out

How do you make your organization stand out so that people know of it for its sterling reputation, its quality work, and its outstanding commitment to serving key publics or constituencies?  To help answer that question, CommunicationWorks, LLC, a Washington, DC-based communications consulting firm interviewed leaders of nine exemplary institutions representing a range of geographic locations and fields, including culture, politics, journalism, scientific research, among others.  Among their findings about what makes an organization a "cultural gem" is recognizing that the organization has "something very precious to share" with its community, and then "integrating it, making it meaningful and relevant to the life of that community." 

>> Download Raising Institutional Visibility (PDF)

Resources

Message Development and Media Relations 101
Jeff Martin, Director of Media Relations, Council on Foundations
>> Download presentation (new window)


Harnessing the Power of Strategic Communication
Kyle Peterson, Senior Consultant, Foundation Strategies Group
>> Download presentation (new window)


McKnight Foundation
Creating Common Ground
The McKnight Foundation chronicles the early years of an ongoing public information campaign to galvanize support for protecting and preserving undeveloped land in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding communities for public use. The Foundation is making the report available for nonprofits and community groups interested in learning how to use communications to effectively collaborate around a broad range of issues.
>> Download the report (new window)

>> Request printed copies by email


Kaiser Family Foundation
Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers
Recent years have seen an explosion in electronic media marketed directly at the very youngest children in our society, yet very little is known about how these changes have played out in young people's lives. In order to help understand the implications, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a national study of more than 1,000 parents of children ages six months through six years. The findings are published in the report Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers.
>> Washington Post article (new window)
>> Kaiser Family Foundation Report (new window)


Benton Foundation and The Communications Network
Values and Voice - Advancing Philanthropy Through Strategic Communications
>> www.benton.org (PDF)

Benton Foundation
Benchmarks for Building Extranets and Online Communities
In this report, Jillaine Smith provides lessons learned from the work of the Benton Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts recent experience in building an online community. These benchmark guidelines are intended to help foundations and nonprofits plan, build and sustain online communities.
>> Read Report (PDF)


The Packard Foundation and Williams Group
Marketing Your Knowledge: A Report to Philanthropy’s R&D Organizations
The Packard Foundation and the Williams Group prepared this report to to help the foundation community better understand how to share and spread knowledge of effective practice within philanthropy.
>> Read the report (PDF)


FoundationWorks and the Packard Foundation
Bridging the Gap - Connecting Strategic Communication and Program Goals
With generous support from the Packard Foundation, the FoundationWorks team presents their findings from interviews conducted with foundation leaders and program staff.
>> Read the report (PDF)


The Ad Council
Relevance of the PSA to the reader and locality are the two most important factors for PSA directors, according to the Ad Council's first survey of print PSA directors. Conducted in partnership with Strategic Surveys International, the study identifies the various criteria affecting PSA placement. 
>> Read the survey (PDF)

FSG Social Impact Advisors
The Evaluation of Capacity-Building Grants
This brief paper, which reviews the basic components of an evaluation model that was developed by FSG Social Impact Advisors (formerly Foundation Strategy Group) for the Maine Community Foundation, highlights the importance of grantee communications, and suggests that foundations deciding to undertake a capacity-building initiative should make communication a top priority. FSG suggested that these foundations should take the time to define roles and communicate responsibilities, hold firm on insisting that grantees meet agreed-upon objectives, and foster connection and regular communication among grantees.
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The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation
Making Evaluation Work
In this 21-page report, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation communicates the pivotal role that evaluation now plays in its work. The foundation shares how its new evaluation tools, structures, and strategies have allowed it to monitor and strengthen grantee performance, and demonstrate outcomes more effectively. The paper also lends insight on how the foundation has helped its grantees measure their performance and monitor their outcomes by adopting new evaluation structures. The new evaluative measures that EMCF has implemented can provide the foundation with information that helps it to effectively articulate the value and impact of its grantmaking.
>> Read the report (PDF)