In the Spotlight
A look at innovative communications
practices
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This section of the website
contains links to "spotlight" features about different ways foundations are
innovating their communications activities. Click on any of the links to
read the full story.
If you have ideas for a
future Spotlight, email:
brucet@comnetwork.org
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.
Click to read
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. Started in September
2007, the weekly blog features a mix of voices drawn from all walks of Baltimore
life. Each week’s topic aims to stimulate a discussion about “what can be done
to promote opportunity, achievement, health, and prosperity in our city.”
Click to read
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.
Each month, the foundation,
whose
work is focused on the nation's health and health care issues, prominently
displays a compelling photograph of a featured grantee on
its website.
Click to read
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.
At the same time, Irvine decided it would not keep quiet
about about the problems it encountered during the
course of the initiative, but instead would issue a
detailed report describing to the public what went
wrong, steps taken to correct the problem, and lessons
it learned.
Click to read
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?
Help is now available from
IssueLab,
an online service that collects, archives and helps
disseminate a range of nonprofit research.
Click to read
Knight
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.
That's not the case, however, at the John S. and James L.
Knight Foundation. Its 2006 annual report shows what happens
when the decision is made to undertake a major shift in
design and presentation.
This year, in addition to its traditional print version
(although smaller than in the past), the foundation produced
a digital -- and available only online
-- version
that tells the story of the past year using video, sound and
some text.
Click to read
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.
Connor is president of the Teagle Foundation, a small
grantmaking organization based in New York that is
working to revitalize the liberal arts. As part of this
effort, Connor has
made communications a key element of the foundation’s
change strategy, but in ways that you might not expect
from a former professor with a love for ancient texts.
Over the past several years, Teagle has adopted a nearly
paperless approach to communications as well as
employing a range of online technologies – from
chatrooms to podcasts -- to disseminate knowledge
designed to further the foundation’s mission.
Click to read
The ABC's of Successfully
Disseminating Research Findings
The Irvine Foundation recently
completed a major dissemination effort to share results from a two-year
evaluation of CORAL, an eight-year, $58 million initiative intended to boost the
educational performance of low-achieving students in five California cities. The
evaluation was conducted by Public/Private Ventures (P/PV).
According to Daniel Silverman, communications director, the way Irvine
disseminated the evaluation stands as a good example of how to use research
findings to advance a foundation's mission.
Click to read
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