State of the Philanthropic Union:
Meeting Effectiveness Challenges
Charity Effectiveness Symposium III
Presented by the
Education and Research Foundation of the
Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York
At Baruch College
February 26, 2009
About 250 executives from nonprofits and foundations, as well as consultants, academics, and other practitioners from the philanthropy field, registered to attend the BBB Education and Research Foundation’s third Charity Effectiveness Symposium. The program was held at Baruch College on February 26, 2009. “State of the Philanthropic Union” was presented by the BBB Foundation with generous financial support and program committee participation from American Express, The New York Community Trust, and United Way of New York City, with generous breakfast and break sponsorship provided by Mutual of America. The program was hosted by The Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management at the Baruch College School of Public Affairs, and prepared with the support of Philanthropy New York (formerly New York Regional Association of Grantmakers); these organizations also participated in the BBB Foundation’s program committee for the event. Additional event collaborators included: The Foundation Center; NYCharities.org; the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee; the New York Council of Nonprofits (formerly known as The Council of Community Services for New York State); the Association of Fundraising Professionals-Greater New York Chapter; and Women in Development, New York.
Program Agenda:
Welcoming Remarks: Claire Rosenzweig, President of the Education and Research Foundation of the Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York, Inc. and David S. Birdsell, Dean of the Baruch College School of Public Affairs, welcomed attendees.
Keynote: Lorie A. Slutsky, President of The New York Community Trust, opened the conference with a keynote address, “State of the Philanthropic Union.” Her remarks were followed by three panel discussions and several workshops.
Panel I: The first panel, “Advocacy and Leadership: Why, How, Evaluating Impact”, was moderated by Timothy J. McClimon, President of the American Express Foundation. Panelists included: Kevin Ryan, Program Officer, New York Foundation; Michael Stoller, Executive Director, Human Services Council; and Vincent Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights.
Panel II: The second panel was entitled “Measuring the Moving Target – New Challenges” It was moderated by Dr. William D. Weisberg, Chief Operating Officer, Children’s Aid Society. The panelists were: Chung-Wha Hong, Executive Director, The New York Immigration Coalition; Edward Pauly, Director of Research and Evaluation, The Wallace Foundation; Dr. Robert C. Smith, Associate Professor, Sociology, Immigration Studies and Public Affairs, Baruch College School of Public Affairs, author of Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants.
Attendees then broke into three groups. A third panel took place in the main hall. In addition, there were two workshop programs.
Panel III: The third panel topic was “Making Tough Choices – Planning, Budgeting, Mergers & More.” Jennifer Jones Austin, Senior Vice President, Community Investment, United Way of New York City, moderated the discussion. Her panelists were: Barbara Krasne, Co-Founder, KrasnePlows; Russell Pomeranz, MBA, Manager of Financial Advisory Services, Fiscal Management Associates; and Doug Sauer, Chief Executive Officer, New York Council of Nonprofits.
Workshops: Two workshop session were also offered.
- H. Art Taylor, President and CEO and Bennett Weiner, COO, BBB Wise Giving Alliance led a special BBB Project Input Session: “How Smaller Charities Deal with Impact Assessment Challenges.”
- Joelle-Jude Fontaine, Program Officer, A.L. Mailman Family Foundation, Inc. and Ronna Brown, President of Philanthropy New York (formerly New York Regional Association of Grantmakers), presented “Foundation Perspectives on Evaluation.”
Claire Rosenzweig and Dean David Birdsell welcomed attendees to the event and thanked them for their participation.
Summary of each Panel and Workshop:
8:40-9:30 am: Keynote Speaker
Lorie A. Slutsky, President, The New York Community Trust
State of the Philanthropic Union
Claire Rosenzweig introduced Lorie Slutsky, who presented her keynote remarks. During the Q&A period that followed, audience questions were moderated by Jack Krauskopf, Distinguished Lecturer, Baruch College School of Public Affairs.
Ms. Slutsky began by saying that the “state of the philanthropic union” is not great, and will probably be worse next year in 2010. At that point foundations will have seen two years of bad investment performance. Since funds available for granting are based on a percentage of average assets calculated over several years, this means that 2010 will be a difficult time for many nonprofits. There will be less money for everything, at a time when demands for nonprofit and foundation services are growing astronomically.
Even so, there’s room for hope. The new President is a former community organizer. Perhaps more Americans understand the value and necessity of what nonprofits and grant-makers do.
Nonprofits and foundations alike are taking the same steps: trimming budgets, looking hard at programs, trying to get more efficient and figure out what services we can live without. In the midst of all this belt-tightening, we still need to demonstrate results – not just heart-warming stories.
“New” philanthropists talk about the need for metrics to demonstrate results, and recently, some inaccurate perceptions have grown up around the concepts of “old” and “new” philanthropy, when it comes to effectiveness measurement. For example:
“Old” philanthropists are sometimes described as being seriously wanting in their practices, hidebound, willing to throw money at the same problems year after year without measuring their own work or that of their grantees, and eager to put too many strings on grants.
“New” philanthropists have been characterized as far more ambitious, willing to tackle huge global issues, strategic, and hands-on in their approach to problems. These new philanthropists supposedly bring skills from the for-profit sector to the nonprofit world, are more able to set benchmarks and hold grantees accountable, and more likely to talk about “social capital markets” that turn donors into investors, who are looking to get a social return on an investment.
But the clash of new vs. old philanthropy isn’t really new any more. One of earliest practitioners of “new” style philanthropy, the Robin Hood Foundation, was started about 20 years ago. And “old” line grant-makers do seek accountability.
The debate over old versus new is not academic: it affects who gets funded for how much. Some talk about funding only nonprofits that can show concrete results. Others pursue the path of “venture philanthropy”, seeking direct involvement in management and governance, and a measure of control over what the nonprofit does.
Bearing this in mind, we might well ask: what will happen to the many small nonprofits that provide essential services in poor neighborhoods, but find it hard to provide iron-clad results? What about advocacy groups that give voices to marginalized groups, but have hard-to-measure effects? How do we put a value on the efforts of adventurous, small arts groups? What about nonprofits that tackle difficult-to-evaluate issues such as domestic violence – issues that people don’t want to talk about? What about issues that take years of work before success can be shown?
Ms. Slutsky related several stories about “right thing to do” grants made by The New York Community Trust to projects and organizations that they deemed very important, but that took years to show results.
For example, the Trust made a series of grants to study New York State’s Byzantine formula for financing education. They supported litigation and collaborative activities bringing together upstate and downstate efforts to advocate for education resources. The Trust provided about 2.5 million dollars in funding for about 20 years. Ultimately, the end result was that the state awarded $5 billion for city schools. But the job isn’t finished: the state funds are not completely allocated, yet. The Trust remains involved to help their grantee realize all the fruits of its policy victory – a better education for kids. By all accounts this grant work would have been judged a failure at the 1, 3, 5 and 15 year benchmarks common to Wall Street. But the Trust thought it was necessary and it would have been an important thing to do, even if the campaign had not scored such a big victory. The moral of the story: correcting injustices is hard work, and the paths to success are long and unpredictable.
Another example: the Trust received a proposal for a program targeted to minorities and young women who avoid science. The formatting of the proposal was a little odd, and it would have been easy to reject on those grounds. But they considered the problem very important. A Trust program officer made a site visit, and discovered an “extraordinary jewel of program” with an inexperienced leader. They made a grant and saw it pay benefits over time. The program started with 17 kids in 2 institutions, and has grown to serve 200 students in 27 institutions. It has helped 200 kids go on to college with careers in science. Would a venture philanthropist have stuck with this? Probably not – someone focused only short-term results most likely would have cut his or her losses long ago. A “new” philanthropist might not have funded someone with little so experience who did not even have a board, at the outset. The moral of the story: Scalability and success don’t happen instantly. They take time – and they involve risk. Often, in order to deal with difficult problems, funders need to be willing to take risks on untried grantees and new program ideas that cannot show results right away.
Here’s the reality: “old” philanthropy has always been ambitious, has always expected results and operating efficiency. The important thing is to try to get to the heart of the problem, rather than only treating the symptoms. Funders need to be ready to make grants that respond to emerging issues and should seek out new ways to respond to old problems. Both grant-makers and nonprofit leaders should expect their fair share of failures. That’s the price of taking calculated risks.
Some venture philanthropists are starting to realize this and are beginning to make decisions that look a lot more like traditional grant-making. Getting results on huge, complex projects takes time. This is true even when the funder is able to invest a lot of money in a program, and has a healthy tolerance for failure. Results are hard to measure, not because we don’t want to measure, but because effects have multiple causes.
Ms. Slutsky cited the recent Michael Edwards book, Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, which challenged elements of the “new” philanthropy as being flawed in both proposed means and promised ends. Some proponents of this new approach see business methods as the answer to social problems. But there is little evidence or analysis to support such claims. Ms. Slutsky noted some of the dangers of a “venture” approach to nonprofit programs. When scaling up, the project can suffer “mission drift”. For example, the hard to serve clients may be cut out to make it easier for a project to show great results; hard-to-measure advocacy efforts might be trimmed; and there can be too great a focus on revenue producing activities that move away from initial mission purposes.
We can credit the “new” philanthropists with many valuable achievements. They have pushed older philanthropists to be bolder, and to do more to document results. They have brought fresh ideas, new approaches and a new vocabulary to neglected questions.
However, Ms. Slutsky would challenge the argument put forward by some that “tomorrow’s donors will take care of tomorrow’s problems.” Few truly important problems can be addressed in the short-term. Where would we be this year, during the recession, if we had to rely only on the generosity of living donors and could not turn to foundations endowed by previous generations? Funds at The New York Community Trust were derived almost entirely from legacies bestowed in wills made by non-living donors, for the benefit of future generations. It is important to spend today – but also critical to save for tomorrow. Both are valuable.
This current debate over “old” and “new” and “business methods” is likely to fade in time. For the moment – nonprofits need to pay careful attention to which kinds of philanthropists are offering funding, and appeal to them in the language they understand. Nonprofit leaders should recognize that all grant-makers are looking for better measures of impact. We all need to know more about what happened to end users as a result of our efforts.
There’s a more pressing question to answer now: do we change grant-making to respond to today’s pain, or stay focused on long term goals? This debate has been going on at grant-making organizations everywhere. The Trust decided that it can’t ignore the pain. They recently approved $10 million in grants - $7 million for safety net grants to nonprofits that provide services such as food and shelter, as well as funding for legal service groups providing help with issues such as predatory debt collectors. To put this in perspective, the Trust made $3 million in comparable grants last year. The Trust felt it was important to respond quickly and at scale, to the current crisis. This means: there will be less money available for grant-making for the rest of 2009. Like everyone else in tight times, the Trust must focus on making best use of its limited resources.
For this year, the Trust is not funding new organizations; they will not fund advocacy projects that pit one essential sector against another; they cannot support non-essential services at this time; and cannot invest in “Cadillac programs” – meaning great programs that can add one more component to get better. These are hard choices, but necessary ones for this year.
Areas of focus for the Trust in this year: they aim to address the key needs of New Yorkers who have been hit hardest by the recession. New Yorkers need to have enough to eat and need help to assure that they can stay in their homes. They remain interested in bettering health care for New Yorkers and ensuring adequate funding for schools. They would like to help nonprofits weather the storm by sharing resources and taking collaborative approaches.
Foundation and individual donor funding is limited; this is a reality of our society. The Trust cannot make grants to replace lost money from government programs that may be cut. This is where a major threat to many in the nonprofit sector may lie. Both the state and city are suffering deep budget cuts. Nonprofits can and should join together to advocate for government resources, whenever possible and appropriate. But even so, we will all have to face the reality that the government pie is going to shrink, at least for a while.
The good news for our “philanthropic union”: strong nonprofits have built important infrastructure in our city that serves the community very well. This has helped us through prior crises, such as the 9-11 tragedy. Although the current economic crisis seems to be especially difficult, change will come, it will get better, and together we will find creative ways to deal with challenges ahead.
Summary of Q&A Discussion with Lorie Slutsky and Jack Krauskopf:
The rate of creation for new nonprofits is remarkable. There are now 1.3 million nonprofits across the country. It’s likely we won’t emerge from this economic crisis with every group intact. And that means we will have to make difficult choices about allocating resources in the future.
Ms. Slutsky said she doesn’t worry about whether new capital will come in to spur philanthropic efforts – it will come. But she does worry about how the capital will be spent. It’s important that we don’t cut off funding for important or experimental issues, in the name of impact measurement.
Regarding the Trust decision not to fund new applicants this year: it was a tough decision, but a necessary one. Anyone can apply; they won’t stop people from applying. But it’s quite unlikely that funding would be possible. The project would have to be of urgent importance. The applicant would have to justify starting up something new, show that there is no other way to achieve same end, and demonstrate that the program could be sustained over time. “Duplicative services” are not funded as a general rule.
The Trust usually does not publish information about why individual applications were or were not funded. This is because their decisions are not evaluative comments about the applicant organization; instead, they are decisions about how resources can be allocated. It might be necessary to turn down one type of appeal from an organization and possible to fund a different kind of appeal.
9:40-10:30 am: Advocacy and Leadership: Why, How, Evaluating Impact
Moderator: Timothy J. McClimon, President of the American Express Foundation
Panelists:
Kevin Ryan, Program Officer, New York Foundation
Michael Stoller, Executive Director, Human Services Council
Vincent Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights
Claire Rosenzweig introduced the panel moderator, Timothy J. McClimon, President of the American Express Foundation. Mr. McClimon in turn introduced his panelists.
Mr. McClimon began by citing a definition of the term “advocate” from Black’s Law Dictionary: “to speak in favor of, defend by argument, to support, vindicate, or recommend publicly.” He then asked panelists: how do you define advocacy?
Michael Stoller remarked that he is proud to be a registered lobbyist. His organization, the Human Services Council, is an umbrella advocacy group that lobbies for nonprofit human services providers and their clients. Lobbyists are often maligned and harassed; but lobbying is a perfectly good and a legal thing to do, within the required restrictions. Mr. Stoller advocates the old-fashioned way by going to Albany and City Hall, and telling law-makers what they think should be done. They use methods such as letter-writing, email campaigns, and so on. It’s traditional “nagging”. His group also has litigation options in its “back pocket” - but these tactics are used far less often.
Kevin Ryan said that the New York Foundation defines advocacy very broadly in order to be as inclusive as possible. It could involve litigation, lobbying, or getting grassroots community members engaged in pressing for policy change. Grassroots organizing is an important component of the advocacy process. Advocacy can bring new voices and new ideas to the table. Often people in communities feel that they aren’t well represented by their elected officials or their community boards, and as a result, they take action. Local, state, and regional groups can all help greatly to bring important issues forward. Local efforts that begin with activities such as legal and policy advocacy by individuals can morph into effective collaborations between groups for larger purposes, especially around issues such as educational reform or health care.
Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights defined advocacy as external communication or action that is designed to change a policy or a practice, or reallocate resources, in furtherance of a nonprofit’s mission. Money is a very important element in advocacy. Usually, when major policy decisions need to be made, somebody is going to end up as the monetary winner and someone will be a loser. Advocates often seek to have money allocated to benefit their own group’s constituency. Mr. Warren’s organization does education and legal work; their primary tool is litigation. It is not a membership organization, and unlike many other advocacy groups, it does not have a set constituency. They work to change “hard, cutting-edge issues that nobody else wants to touch.” CCR builds coalitions to accomplish its goals, and also focuses very heavily on mobilizing public action “in the street.” Since the national administration has recently changed, their advocacy style must change now to adapt to the new climate for policy action.
Mr. McClimon asked the panelists to discuss advocacy in the context of the non-profit community. How is nonprofit advocacy different from being an advocate in the commercial sector?
Michael Stoller responded that his Human Services Council represents the gamut of human needs: if you are advocating to people with a heart, you can appeal to them on the basis of common human experiences and feelings. By contrast, major corporations have money that nonprofits cannot bring to the table. Political power is bought through votes. Politicians need to be elected through voting campaigns, which cost a lot of money. Human services clients may come from groups that are often not liked, and they don’t vote often - except for the elderly. His organization cannot bring a lot of money or large blocs of voters to the table. So they need to have very skilled lobbyists and advocates that go to targeted meetings with people who have the power to do what they need to have done - and they try to convince them to do it.
Kevin Ryan said that his foundation funds advocacy mechanisms. The groups they support vary widely in terms of budget size, from very small ($50,000 per year) to $10 million or more. For this reason, the groups use a wide range of advocacy tools: some that are more sophisticated can afford to hire a lobbyist, or join coalitions. Groups that don’t have resources and are not connected in networks often need help understanding how the advocacy process works and may need training. His foundation encourages groups to “try to figure out what the rules are” and to join forces with larger efforts whenever possible. This builds capacity in a way that their grant-making alone cannot achieve.
Vincent Warren observed that for-profit companies have a goal of maximizing profit; but some nonprofits have a goal of “putting ourselves out of business.” If human rights organizations win all their battles, they won’t be needed any more – which would be a good thing. His group tackles “the hardest, most public, most controversial issues that no policymaker or judge wants to be out in front of.” They try to persuade lawmakers that their constituents’ interests are aligned with what the law requires. This can often be “a very tough sell.”
Mr. Stoller remarked that he assumes that everyone in the nonprofit world is an advocate in some way. Advocacy includes a broad array of activities: for example, if you go to government to try to get food stamps for a client who needs them and is entitled to have them, that is a kind of advocacy. Another kind of advocacy might be going to court to try to compel the government to do “the right thing”. Yet another kind is community organizing. If you are a small non-profit, it’s often helpful to hook up with other organizations in a coalition, joining forces to hire lobbying professionals. There is strength in numbers. Also, it’s problematic if your organization is spending too much time lobbying and not enough time giving services to end users. Finally, hired lobbyists can say things to powerful decision-makers that small nonprofits might find it hard or risky to say.
Mr. Ryan noted that small organizations within coalitions can bring important issues and strategies to the table that would not otherwise be identified. His foundation encourages coalitions and partnerships for advocacy purposes. At the same time, he said that it is very possible for small agencies to advocate effectively and provide services at the same time: he’s seen it done.
Mr. McClimon asked: Why should nonprofits pursue lobbying or advocacy as a strategy?
Mr. Stoller responded: “How could we not?” Some people have expertise to work one-on-one with human services clients; and others are better equipped to work with the people who make rules and decisions that affect our clients. For example, many of HSC’s members get a large amount of their funding through government contracts. HSC approaches this situation “systemically” – aiming to fix the system. Previously human services organizations did not get interest on payments if they were paid late, although other vendors did get it; they advocated to government about this, the policy changed, and now their nonprofits do get interest.
Mr. Ryan gave an example to show how a smaller organization could take action leading to major policy change. He described how a group called Queers for Economic Justice brought together different poverty and LGBT groups to address problems in homeless shelters in New York City. The grassroots organizers went into shelters and found out that same gender couples weren’t allowed to share a space together. They advocated with the Department of Homeless Services and got them to change their policy. This led to a broader change than expected: not only were same-sex partners allowed to remain together under the changed policy, but also family members outside of the nuclear family such as grandparents and grandchildren were allowed to share living space. There were other beneficial effects. Once they got to the table with DHS to advocate about the mistreatment of LGBT youth in the homeless shelter system, they were also able to create a training program for DHS staff to address and resolve this problem.
Mr. Warren suggested that you first need to think clearly about what the problem is, and then determine who has the capacity or the power to fix that problem. Then you can strategize approaches in a targeted way. For example: CCR was approached by families who were upset about how much they were charged for collect calls by jailed family members. You can only call out from jails. The family members were being charged 500 times more for collect calls than other people. To address the problem through advocacy, CCR needed to understand who was responsible for making decisions about the prison telecom services contract. The policy decision makers were in Albany, so that was one target group for advocacy efforts. CCR also filed a challenge with the FCC, and mounted a litigation effort. Then the strategy began to branch out. There were demonstrations targeting the corporations that were overcharging for prison calls, and requests for meetings with decision makers at those companies. The Latino, African-American, and mainstream press all got involved. At first, they encountered strong resistance from Albany decision makers. But after several years of effort, their work paid off: the old phone contract was ended; the Family Connections Bill was passed in New York State, and it opened up new prison calling contracts for new vendors. The families then had an opportunity to meet with telecom contractors, during settlement negotiations, to talk about whether prison calling services met their needs. They were at last regarded as customers, rather than “poor cash cows.” This is why advocacy is important: you can’t not advocate.
Mr. McClimon invited the panelists to give additional examples of effective advocacy programs and strategies.
Mr. Stoller said that his organization looks for counterintuitive allies. If they walk into an advocacy situation with someone like Mother Teresa – as an example of someone that people would expect to be on the side of human services groups - they might not be as successful. On the other hand, someone like a Donald Trump might be an unexpected partner for advocacy and the element of surprise would enhance the impact of their joint efforts. For example, in the past, they have reached out to prominent “board members of board members”, tapping the networks of their member organizations, as well as funders, to identify counterintuitive allies for advocacy efforts. For the “One New York” campaign, they have recruited wealthy New Yorkers to write the governor and say that they would be happy to be taxed a bit more, so that the state could be in a better position to cope with the economic situation.
Mr. Ryan discussed an example that illustrates how advocacy efforts don’t always work the way you expect. You have to consider advocacy in a very broad sense: it can’t just be about passing legislation, or even just about achieving concrete end results; it’s about the process of addressing problems. He cited The Human Rights Project of the Urban Justice Center. It has been advocating for several years, to encourage adoption of human rights initiatives in New York City that would reshape the way city agencies measure conditions in communities and meet community needs. This organization is fighting an uphill battle to get the city to engage in discussions, and there’s a bill slowly moving through the City Council about this. Over 100 organizations are participating in this process. A number of them have adopted a human rights framework to show how communities are affected by different policies. This has changed the way some funders look at the types of projects they fund. The bill has not yet been passed, but the coalition’s efforts have had an impact, and this has changed the thinking about ways in which advocacy efforts can be effective. Sometimes we try to measure success in advocacy in the same way that we evaluate services. This may not be the right way to look at it. There have been many valuable reports issued recently about better ways to assess advocacy programs. For example the Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has issued reports about it, and GrantCraft has a good report on measuring advocacy.
Mr. McClimon asked: How do you assess the impact of advocacy?
Mr. Ryan replied that his foundation’s board really understands how these processes work. They try to look at what is happening on the grassroots level and assess how people are affected by the work these organizations are doing. Issues can range widely from day labor issues to senior advocacy. Whatever the issue is, changes happening “on the ground” can really make a big difference. They talk to a lot of people and dig deep to understand the impact. “On the ground” assessment can be difficult to do but is necessary. Sometimes very simple steps can make a big difference. For example: advocates for the “Picture the Homeless” group took pictures of vacant buildings all around the City where they learned that residential apartments were being warehoused. They got money, did a study, and found there were 20,000 potential housing units being warehoused that might be available to low-income people, if this issue could be addressed through policy change. All this resulted from “on the ground” research by a small group. The results: now this issue is a big deal, and it’s on the agenda of citywide campaigns.
Mr. Warren said he would like to discuss the example of CCR’s Guantanamo campaign. On January 11, 2002, it was announced that the first 20 prisoners from different parts of the world were going to be incarcerated in Guantanamo as accused terrorists. There were to be no courts, no judges, no lawyers, and no American Red Cross services for these prisoners. The CCR saw the prisoners’ lack of recourse to legal redress as a fundamental affront to the rule of law in American jurisprudence. They filed a habeas corpus case. So the campaign began as a single “rule of law” strategy, where they went to the courts, seeking a judicial finding that the situation in Guantanamo was illegal.
In time, this single lawsuit morphed into about 787 prisoner lawsuits. They lost their cases in court for several years, until in 2004, the Supreme Court finally agreed to review a case and issued a decision favoring their position. Then in 2005, Congress passed a bill that literally undid the Supreme Court decision. At this point, their strategy changed to include Congressional advocacy. When they learned about the allegations of a “rampant program of torture” at Guantanamo and other places, their strategy had to be broadened again. To respond to this issue, they partnered with other groups and coalitions that had been doing work around the torture issue for years, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In the end, while they were very successful in courts, they still did not have access to policy makers in the administration who were willing to abide by the court decisions.
Now, of course, the administration has changed and the situation is different. Suddenly their group is having a lot of meetings with the Department of Justice. They have gone from being an “outside” advocacy group to being a “partner” group that can help to form policy and solve problems in a more collaborative way. While things are not totally rosy, this represents a distinct advance and a fundamental shift. The greatest factor in helping to bring this change about was a major public opinion shift about habeas corpus and torture. Media exposure, influenced by advocacy, helped to bring this about.
In terms of measuring success: as of February 2009, there were about 245 prisoners left in Guantanamo. CCR still cannot declare “success” while prisoners who may be innocent remain incarcerated at Guantanamo. However, their motto is “success without victory.” The cases they litigate are often hard and it’s very common for them to lose them. The key question they ask themselves is: have we made a lasting and positive policy change through advocacy? Usually, they believe they do achieve this.
Mr. Stoller also presented an example. He described the “Workforce Campaign”. This has to do with advocacy for direct services workers, such as helpers for the elderly, who often get paid “Peace Corps” level wages. HSC ran a campaign to get them cost of living adjustments. This has been very successful. The positive aspect: this has morphed into a kind of public-private partnership. The city now recognizes HSC as the “go-to” group, and they are discussing how to make contracting with social services easier for both sides, so that less time and money can be spent on bureaucracy, and more will be spent on serving clients. Money saved through these process enhancements can be then returned to service providers. This represents a major breakthrough.
But the difficulty is: how do you evaluate it? They can’t solve these process problems in just a few years. They only get money from process savings if they go and ask for it all the time. It’s an ongoing, incremental process that doesn’t have a simple endpoint, involving a continuing relationship with city and state government. While they are trying to achieve systemic change, they also need evaluation tools that take the long-term nature of the advocacy effort into account.
HSC also does some anti-racism work, and they are considering the idea of incorporating this into their core mission. They understand that their efforts alone won’t end racism, so they cannot evaluate themselves on that goal. But they might be able to evaluate specific steps such as training workshops, investigations of institutional racism, advocacy efforts to determine whether certain laws might have racist effects, and so on. They want to understand and evaluate what they are doing in this area; this poses an evaluation challenge.
Mr. McClimon quoted Rahm Emanuel, who said that “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” He then asked the panelists to discuss advocacy opportunities that may have come about as a result of the current economic crisis.
Mr. Stoller observed that his group’s COLA taskforce with the Deputy Mayor’s office is now working in a more intense way. The process is now “on steroids” and they are hoping they will be able to move faster as a result of the economic situation.
Mr. Ryan said the opportunities weren’t “brand new” but the crisis did make it possible to make strides with programs they have been working on for a while. Foundation advocacy includes promoting the work of grantees, and they do that. It’s also important for funders to have the flexibility to offer general support and fill gaps when that type of funding is needed by organizations they work with. Collaboration and coalitions are important as advocacy tools. Often, coalitions can offer training and support so that advocates can do the best possible job in the difficult economic environment.
Mr. Warren cited several potential advantages to the current economic crisis. The economic crisis has hit people who are deeply invested in the market the hardest – especially foundation funders. A lot of foundations are taking a good hard look at their priorities. Either they will broaden their focus and fund nonprofits at shallower level; or they will narrow the focus, and fund more deeply. This could open doors and present opportunities for certain nonprofits that are aligned with changing foundation priorities. Deep financial concerns will also force nonprofits to make better use of coalitions; it will be harder to do work alone. With respect to policy advocacy, the crisis could also create opportunities. For example: look at prisons. They cost money to run, so staffing cuts might need to be considered; but prisons also bring money to the communities where they are sited, so budget cuts could affect the economy of those communities. Difficult budgeting questions affecting prisons might make it possible for advocates to enter the mix, recruit unusual allies, and press for solutions to related problems – such as jail overcrowding, for example.
Summary of Q&A Discussion with Timothy McClimon and Panelists:
Mr. McClimon asked: Can you discuss advocacy issues that seem to pit one worthwhile group against another? How do groups avoid this?
Mr. Stoller responded that to avoid “herding cats”, his group tries to work on issues that cut across sectors, such as the workforce campaign, disaster preparedness, and racism. They ask for information about the member’s top 2 or 3 priorities, and then they go to decision makers with a list of about 40 top priorities and say “this is what we want.” Their members can always advocate on their own as well. They hash out the highest priorities out at long meetings. Sometimes a group might not get to have their priority as a focus in one year, but might get it put forward in the next year.
Mr. McClimon asked: How do we mobilize our constituents to change the culture in Albany?
Mr. Ryan said that progress happens when more groups and more people advocate, and more people are engaged. Grassroots organizations can have clout through voting power even when they don’t have money. The more groups you can get together to go to Albany to talk to lawmakers, the more effective these efforts will be.
Mr. McClimon asked: How do you decide between funding direct services vs. advocacy?
Mr. Ryan replied: Again it’s about using multiple mechanisms to achieve impact. Everyone is doing some kind of advocacy, whether it’s a formal process or not. People are doing all of these different direct service and advocacy things together. There’s a way of articulating that to funders.
Mr. McClimon asked: Understanding that advocacy is measured differently than direct service, what are ways organizations can reshape the conversation to describe the activities they have undertaken?
Mr. Warren said this is an important “dialogue that has to happen” between front line program people at nonprofits, and their funders and board members. For advocates to effectively to do their work, they need to understand what they are trying to change, how they expect to change it, how long it will take, and what resources will be needed to achieve an impact. Activities often happen in coalition, gradually over time, which makes it hard to do traditional grant reports that isolate a group’s distinct impact in a short time frame. Funders and nonprofits need to be sophisticated about crafting interim benchmarks so that we can determine how things are moving forward. It’s important to be realistic. If it’s a public opinion benchmark, funders are often willing to put a lot of money into polling research; but that doesn’t always capture information about how public opinion is evolving and changing around the issue. Nonprofits need to be very specific about small, cumulative steps that they are taking along a path to change. Also, roadblocks happen all the time. For example, a leadership change in a coalition partner can alter the situation dramatically. It’s the journey that counts, not just the end result. His organization talks with funders to try to get buy-in on “the journey”, as well as measurement points.
Mr. McClimon asked: What steps should funders take when considering funding advocacy?
Mr. Stoller recommended that the foundation look at the group’s prior success record. Coalitions generally work better in terms of advocacy than individual organizations. The group should have a clear agenda - they should know what they want to achieve through advocacy. It’s important to be flexible and ready to deal with changing circumstances, which are bound to occur. Who is on the coalition? Are they the real players?
Mr. Ryan said that this is a research issue. There are many funders who support advocacy, they are colleagues, and they can consult each other. There are funder affinity groups that can help you navigate your way through the process. Ask yourself: what fits in best with the mission of your foundation?
Mr. Warren recommended that foundations and donors engage in “the 100 years test”: looking back at this moment, 100 years from now, do you think people would say that your proposed action was the right thing to do? For example, was it “ridiculous” for people even to be questioning whether advocacy about torture was important in your time period? The issue of slavery is a good example of how the “100 years test” might work for you. He also said that funders should not worry about whether they think an advocacy battle might be “winnable” as a threshold test for funding. If we worried about that, we would never try to change anything.
10:40 – 11:30 am: Measuring the Moving Target – New Challenges
Moderator: Dr. William D. Weisberg, Chief Operating Officer, Children’s Aid Society
Panelists:
Chung-Wha Hong, Executive Director, The New York Immigration Coalition;
Edward Pauly, Director of Research and Evaluation, The Wallace Foundation;
Dr. Robert C. Smith, Associate Professor, Sociology, Immigration Studies and Public Affairs, Baruch College School of Public Affairs, author of Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants
Claire Rosenzweig introduced the second panel’s moderator, Dr. William D. Weisberg, Chief Operating Officer of the Children’s Aid Society.
Dr. Weisberg introduced the panel discussion by observing that while many aspects of New York City life remain stable over the years – like families taking day trips to Coney Island - there are also a lot of changes going on in our neighborhoods. For example, Children’s Aid has built full service schools in Washington Heights over the past 18 years. When they began doing this, they couldn’t build schools quickly enough: the schools filled as soon as they were built. Five years later, the same schools were overcrowded and had to have split shifts. Then, the school populations started to decline. Some schools went from overcrowding to under-population in the schools. Our New York communities change quite often, in terms of population density, ages of residents, and household incomes. In Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant, two other neighborhoods where CAS operates, household income has increased tremendously in the last 10 years, by over 20%. Our communities also change significantly in terms of shifting nationalities and ethnicities of residents as a result of immigration and other forces. In Queens, where his group is starting to work with schools, there are now over 138 different languages spoken in homes and at school. Each of these changes forces us as charities to re-examine our work and ponder how to keep our work relevant and effective. We must measure effectiveness because we want to make sure we are having a real impact; also, funders demand it.
Dr. Weisberg then introduced his panelists, each in turn, and invited them to present opening remarks.
Edward Pauly explained his evaluation work at the Wallace Foundation, and discussed their market research resources for nonprofits. His foundation aims at building new knowledge, to support improvements in after-school programs, arts learning for young people, expanded participation in the arts, and improving the leadership of public schools. The consistent theme they have learned from Wallace Foundation grantees is that nonprofits can serve their clients most effectively when they have good information on what their target groups want and need. This is an old and honorable nonprofit tradition: for example, settlement houses were often founded to respond to the unmet needs of low-income populations. Nonprofits serving immigrants are effective because they speak the language of immigrants and know their families. Community-based health clinics need to be culturally competent, to adapt to the expectations of their patients. And employment training centers need to understand the life experiences of people who need job training. The contemporary approach of “figuring out what your clients want” is called “market research”: in a nonprofit context, this refers to systematically gathering information about the preferences and needs of the people your organization wants to serve, so you can serve them better. It’s information for your decision-making.
Sometimes nonprofits are founded by people who have an excellent understanding of the needs of their clients. As a result, they may not need to do market research – at first. But as time goes by, these groups may serve more people and different people, and their services may become more complicated. Funders will probably ask for more information about the effectiveness of those services. At this point, it can be very useful for nonprofits to refresh their knowledge about the needs and preferences of the clients they serve.
For example, three years ago, as part of the Wallace Foundation work supporting after-school programs, they asked an organization called “Market Street Research” to prepare a how to do it guide about market research. This guide is called Getting Started with Market Research for Out-of-School Time Planning: A Resource Guide for Communities. It is targeted to youth-serving programs, but the tools in the guide could be useful to any kind of nonprofit. The guide covers all the basics of market research: when and why to do it, what kind of research is useful, how to do research inexpensively, and how the results can be used when it’s done. It is available for free download from the Wallace Foundation website [go to www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledgecenter - then click on “Out-of-School Time Learning”].
Some of the youth services organizations that Wallace supports with grants have used market research and discovered a number of important things that have changed the nature of their services.
They learned what proportion of the target client group are children (or parents) who speak a language other than English at home. This changed the way these organizations needed to communicate with clients.
They found out that many parents have concerns about safety issues in the programs or relating to children traveling to and from the programs.
They learned that many parents – and even the kids themselves - want more homework help to be a part of the programs.
Through research, they discovered how many of the parents can afford to pay for some of the services provided and how many cannot pay at all for services.
The market research results varied considerably, depending on which groups and neighborhoods were providing research information. Service changes resulting from this research work: the nonprofits worked to improve safety; they tried to send parents notifications in languages spoken at home; they provided more homework help; and they adjusted their fee structures to respond to client needs. The result: enrollments and attendance went up.
Methods described in the Wallace Foundation guide include focus groups, interviews, informal surveys, and sophisticated surveys. It’s a highly adaptable set of techniques; there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Mr. Pauly pointed out that nonprofits can also use general market research that has been done by others to inform their work. For example, Wallace Foundation commissioned a national survey, which resulted in a report called “All Work and No Play? Listening to What Parents Really Want from Out-of-School Time.” This is available as a free download from www.wallacefoundation.org, and it’s a great source of ideas about the needs of children and parents if you are serving these types of clients. It’s also a source of ideas about market research that you might like to conduct for your own organization.
Consider these questions: do you need market research? What kinds of market research questions would be meaningful for your organization? Ask yourself: what does my organization most need to learn about our clients and our target groups? What is it that we don’t know about the people we serve – that would enable us to make breakthroughs in the services we provide, if we could get the information? You know more about your organization than any consultant could, so you as nonprofit leaders are in the best position to ask and answer these questions.
“Heeding the voices of consumers” is one of the biggest challenges nonprofits face today – just as it was true for the founders of settlement houses, long ago.
Dr. Robert C. Smith welcomed attendees to Baruch, where he is an Associate Professor of Sociology. He proposed to give a brief overview of the Mexican community, and then talk about some of the issues in the Mexican-American community that might affect nonprofit programs.
Dr. Smith sketched out the demographic picture: there are over 750,000 Mexicans in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area. There are about 500,000 Mexicans in NYC, or one out of every 16 people. The influx of immigrants from Mexico is not going to slow down. There are 600-700,000 Dominicans versus 8 million Dominicans in the Dominican Republic. By contrast, in Mexico, there are 110 million people, and increasing numbers of them are arriving in newer destinations in the U.S. – away from the Southwest to other parts of the country, such as North Carolina and Georgia, which have experienced major increases in Mexican populations.
There has been a de facto moratorium in the U.S. for the last 20 years on allowing recent immigrants to get legal status. Since the amnesty program of the late 1980s, if you have emigrated to the U.S. in the last 20 years, unless you have pre-existing family connections, it is hard to legalize. Among recent Mexican immigrants over the last decade, up to 90% are undocumented.
There are also increasing numbers of people who speak Spanish as a second language, whose first language is an indigenous language, although so far this is a small percentage of the whole.
Immigrants who have undocumented status are often fearful and they often fall victim to misinformation. For example, his research has revealed that many of these immigrants believe that undocumented people can’t go to college, which is not true in many circumstances. Most guidance counselors also do not understand the facts about this, and may have given out incorrect information. Undocumented children who have graduated from a NY public high school or gotten a GED have the right to attend college at in-state tuition rates, subject to other considerations.
Many immigrants are also afraid that their children will be taken away if they seek help from nonprofits or other service agencies. In fact, there are cases where that has actually happened. Nonprofits need to develop trusted relationships with community organizations and people in the Mexican-American community, to try to find out what stories and bits of misinformation are circulating that could be impeding access to services for this group. You can hire Baruch grad students to help. It might also be possible to sponsor an intern, so that the help might be free.
The Mexican population in America is varied: it includes undocumented adults; kids who were born in Mexico, raised in the U.S. from a very young age, but still not citizens, whose educational and career progress comes to a “screeching halt” at the end of high school; U.S. born Mexicans; and legal residents. Those groups have different needs.
The Mexican-American community is very densely organized. Many are affiliated with some kind of community-of-origin group, or they might belong to a local prayer group. However, very few of these Mexican-American organizations are linked up to American institutions. So the organizational capacity that exists in the community is not yet being used to connect these target client groups to services and information that they need. Funders and nonprofits don’t have to reinvent the wheel to address and solve problems affecting Mexican-Americans. For example, look at the problem of undocumented immigrants thinking they can’t go to school: we can fix that problem by disseminating information through existing community groups, and developing relationships in the community. There are some excellent after-school programs that are doing a lot of good work in this area, linking schools and community groups. The good news is: a lot of the things nonprofits are already doing can be replicated to help Mexican-Americans who need help, but it’s going to take bridge building to get it done.
Chung-Wha Hong noted that the nonprofit community needs more shared spaces like this where helpful information can be shared. She began her remarks by taking a broader look at issues affecting immigrants in America today. We are all familiar with racial disparities, but something very troubling that she calls the “immigration divide” is emerging in America, which involves the convergence of racial and immigration status.
A few statistics tell the story. Looking at health care, non-citizens are over three times more likely to be uninsured. Non-citizens are also three times more likely to live in overcrowded housing; and 62% are more likely to live in dangerous housing conditions.
For children who don’t speak English, who are called “English language learners,” their four-year graduation rate is only 23% - compared to the general graduation rate, also not ideal, of 62%. That’s a huge gap. More than half of public school children come from immigrant families. In New York City, 60% of low-income kids are children of immigrants. Another astounding fact: 60% of those who don’t speak English are under 200% of the federal poverty line.
So when we look at assessing immigration issues, we have to go beyond factors such as income and socio-economic issues to consider factors such as: languages spoken; how recently the immigrants arrived in the U.S.; whether or not they have legal status, undocumented status, or a mixed status; and the conditions prevailing in home countries. These all are indicators of immigrant progress. Outcome indicators might include housing, health, income and so on.
What are the “lenses” through which we’re going to look at how immigrants are faring? What must we do to change their situations? She proposed four “lenses”. To what extent do immigrants have:
Equal or full access
Rights
Opportunities
Resources
The City of New York has done a fabulous job on the access issue. Two executive orders directly addressed language issues and the fear of deportation. However, there’s much more that should be done in the other areas, such as resources, rights and opportunities; so the status of immigrants in New York City is a mixed bag. When evaluating how a certain government agency or community is doing on immigrant issues, it’s really important to look at the situation through all four lenses.
Considering the critical issue of access, Chung-Wha Hong pointed out two major barriers to immigrants who need services.
The first barrier is legal exclusions. If you are undocumented, you will not be eligible to use certain programs.
The second barrier is lack of access. Often access barriers are related to language issues, and fear of deportation. For example: you may be eligible to get food stamps but not receiving them, due to fear of deportation.
Her organization, the New York Immigration Coalition, works to overcome barriers and increase access to services, in order to help immigrant clients in New York. Advocacy is an important tool for this, and so is market research.
Recently, the NYIC looked at language access in hospitals. They took surveys in hospitals both before and after they succeeded in getting a state-wide language access regulation passed. They used surveys in 10 hospitals with 617 patients, and just as Ed Pauly recommends, they asked for the exact market research information they needed to know about. The survey asked questions such as: does this hospital have translated signs? Does this hospital provide translation services? And so on.
After the regulations were passed, and they interacted with hospital administrators to point out language barriers, there was a dramatic improvement in language access for patients:
Translated signs went from 0% in 2004 to 78% in 2008 (Elmhurst Hospital)
The number of people who could not set appointments due to language barriers decreased from 50% to 6% (Woodhull Hospital and Mental Health Center)
There were several surveys: one, in the “before” stage, was an advocacy tool that gathered data, showing what was wrong, which they used to urge adoption of language access improvements. The second survey in the “after” stage was used to show progress. Hospital administrators who had cooperated in implementing the language access changes wanted to participate in press events when it was time to announce the improvements.
In the end this language work developed into a city-wide executive order, and language access has been integrated into the city’s matrix of customer-service initiatives and evaluations, along with factors such as wait times and response rates. So the work that started with very simple surveys wound up having broad effects.
Dr. Weisberg remarked that people come to him with million dollar research ideas. He asked Chung-Wha Hong: Did you spend a million dollars on this hospital evaluation?
She responded “no.” Her organization gave several community groups $5,000 mini-grants, to go to waiting rooms and conduct the surveys with small groups of patients. It added up to a good-sized sample: it may not have been a scientific type of sample, but it did give a good picture of the real life experience in hospital waiting rooms. They had a foundation grant of under $100,000, which was distributed through mini-grants to the groups that conducted the surveys.
Summary of Q&A Discussion with Dr. William Weisberg and Panelists:
Dr. Weisberg asked Edward Pauly: How do you incorporate an outcomes focus when conducting market research? And do you recommend market research for funders?
Mr. Pauly replied that the Wallace Foundation often commissions major research studies to inform their funding work. They feel that having a really good understanding of what the problems are, as they are understood “on the street”, improves their ability to have an impact. He stressed once again that organizations should figure out for themselves what is most important for them to learn. Sometimes you need to focus on outcomes, or service shortfalls. At other times, you may need to study issues of access or learn more about the clients who need your services. You may need to ask and answer different types of research questions at different times. Research answers may be unexpected and reveal important things that you did not know. With Wallace, one of the surprises that emerged from market research was information about how many kids and parents had safety issues that were affecting their ability to receive services. Don’t ask research questions about what you know – try to find out about what you don’t know.
Dr. Weisberg asked: What are some suggestions for affordable resources to design surveys. Have you found ways to access free or low-cost help with designing research tools?
Chung-Wha Hong responded that it often helps to partner with research groups that are experts in the issue areas to be researched. One partner that her group had was the CUNY Graduate Center. They did a get out the vote campaign; they mailed information, and knocked on doors. The CUNY professor did a study, comparing voting rates for people who were contacted by her group versus those who were not contacted by them. There was a 14% higher voting participation rate for those who were contacted by her organization.
Dr. Robert Smith remarked that Baruch has a survey unit which partners with community organizations on pro bono projects. If there is funding, it makes everything easier. You can hire a graduate student who is eager to do work that makes the world better; it’s not like private sector work. There are a lot of possibilities.
Edward Pauly also recommended working with graduate students from schools of social work.
Dr. Weisberg asked: How can stakeholders come together and form coalitions to work for change?
Chung-Wha Hong noted that her organization has about 200 member groups; one of the best ways to get them to participate in advocacy work is through activities in a taskforce. There are many things that small groups cannot do alone. But Chung-Wha Hong has seen coalitions of groups have huge victories because they worked together – for example, this happened in the education area, where they won large funding sums to address issues faced by English language learners.
Dr. Weisberg asked: How can funders share what they know about outcomes and evaluation?
Mr. Pauly responded that this is a challenge that the foundation sector needs to address more fully. The Wallace Foundation started to make all their commissioned research reports and evaluations public about 12 years ago. Last year, they had over 200,000 downloads of that information. There’s a huge appetite for this data. He urged nonprofits and foundations to make these kinds of reports publicly available on their websites.
Dr. Weisberg noted that there is great ambivalence about the emphasis on outcomes in evaluation. For example, is a dance class for low-income children worthwhile even if it doesn’t help them to go to college? He asked: If low-income children deserve to participate in art classes, why should we feel compelled to prove that the art class has to have a profound impact on the child’s life?
Mr. Pauly said there may not be a need to do an outcomes study if somebody has already done it. You can take the results of somebody else’s research (e.g. on the positive impact of high quality after-school programs), apply them, and put your dollars into services. The point of doing research is to learn something that will significantly improve your services. There should be a high standard, and a clear understanding about the expected payoff, before charities are asked by funders to put scarce resources into outcome studies.
Chung Wha-Hong said that some things are just obvious, even without a study. For example, when the Federal stimulus package arrives, it will be worth billions of dollars. They already know it’s going to have money for things like unemployment insurance, job training and placement, and so on. But undocumented workers will not have access to any of these things. They know who is going to fall through the cracks, so they already see a really urgent need. Her group doesn’t need a study to tell them that 500,000 undocumented immigrants will fall off the lowest rungs of the economy, because they have no access to Federal stimulus income supports. Her clients need to be part of the economic recovery solution, too. It’s very important for her group – and for other charities – to take steps to cope with the predictable infrastructure problems. The goal is to ensure that all of the city’s workers are included in the recovery solutions to our economic crisis.
Dr. Weisberg concluded by saying that one of his favorite Lily Tomlin characters said “I always knew I wanted to be somebody, and now I realize I should have been more specific.” Similarly, nonprofit evaluation work will be enhanced and effectiveness will be improved if we focus our questions and our efforts more specifically.
12:00 – 1:00: Workshop Sessions
Workshop I:
Making Tough Choices – Planning, Budgeting, Mergers & More
Moderator: Jennifer Jones Austin, Senior Vice President, Community Investment, United Way of New York City
Panelists:
Barbara Krasne, Co-Founder, KrasnePlows
Russell Pomeranz, MBA, Manager of Financial Advisory Services, Fiscal Management Associates
Doug Sauer, Chief Executive Officer, New York Council of Nonprofits
Claire Rosenzweig introduced Jennifer Jones Austin, who moderated the discussion. Ms. Jones Austin in turn introduced the panelists: Barbara Krasne, Doug Sauer, and Russell Pomeranz.
Ms. Jones Austin divided up the planned discussion as follows:
- Discussion of strategic decision making in “tough times”
- Discussion of real-time, tactical decisions that must be made immediately to weather the recession
- Q & A
Ms. Jones Austin began by asking the whole panel what strategic decisions should be considered at this time, with all signs pointing to a deep and long recession and many saying the bottom has yet to fall out.
Barbara Krasne responded that it is clear we are now in a recession, and one that is likely to be long and difficult. The recession will have ramifications for the nonprofit sector across the board. First, planning horizons need to change; it’s not ‘business as usual’; you have to pace yourself, because it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Nonprofit leaders need to be thoughtful and strategic. There is no ‘magic bullet’ or single solution.
Ms. Krasne observed that organizations will probably not be able to fulfill the demand for services during the recession. In the best of times, with far more resources, organizations have difficulty meeting the demand for services, so there’s even less chance of doing that when resources are stretched so thin. Instead, leaders should think about what is core, and focus on mission – what the organization, whether it is a charity or a funder, is really all about.
What is your ‘signature program’ or essence? Try to be sure that you can continue to deliver your core work to your clients. This is a critical first step. Everything else can be considered extraneous, if you don’t have enough resources. Consider which programs have the most impact in your target communities, where you can provide the highest quality programs, and how these factors fit with your mission. Then you can begin to look at what your options are and begin to make choices. It’s all about trade-offs, because no organization can do everything.
Ms. Krasne repeated the idea that “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” It is possible to find opportunities in times of crisis. The process of thinking about how to sustain core programs can open up new ways of thinking about and accomplishing your mission.
Doug Sauer agreed and went on to say that organizations should expect dramatic change. As we work through the crisis we should not expect to emerge in three or four years with the situation slightly rearranged, but basically unchanged. The crisis presents a challenge to change organizations, change the community, and change the nonprofit sector for the better.
Mr. Sauer identified resistance to change in the nonprofit sector as a major stumbling block in this process. When it comes to changing way the sector does business, the charity community tends to be conservative. Nonprofit executives should take a leadership role in shaping the future coming out of the recession, rather than asking foundations or government agencies to define it for them.
Nonprofits need to be assessing their strategic positions relative to mission in a realistic way all the time. The worst time to begin thinking strategically is when you’re forced to do it in the midst of a crisis.
Some organizations will need to face the possibility of closing. This must be dealt with very honestly at the board level. Organizations at the margins are the most vulnerable. The reality is: some groups will fail, especially those that have “dinosaur structures” or that are less effective at meeting their missions. As the advocacy panel mentioned, there are going to be both winners and losers.
Ask yourself: do our institutional structures really help us carry out our mission? Nonprofit executives, board leaders, and funders need to look at the situation as an opportunity to change and redesign systems and structures within organizations as well as externally. The goal should be preserving mission, not preserving organizations.
Transparency within the organization is essential – not just external transparency. Executives and board members need to communicate with each other very openly about the organization’s situation. Honesty, clear judgment, and “open unity” within nonprofits are critical elements that make it possible for organizations to respond effectively to the crisis. Leaders should always keep in mind the best interests of the constituency or community served.
Nonprofit leaders should be bold agents for change within organizations and in the wider community, and have the courage to do what’s best for mission in this environment. That may not necessarily be the same thing as simply keeping an institution surviving or maintaining what may be outdated, irrelevant ways of operating.
Russell Pomeranz said that, as a CFO, he is interested in the context or business framework in which strategic decisions are being considered. His goal is to increase the probability of appropriate and positive outcomes, not only financial outcomes, in order to manufacture a wide range of options that might result in the right strategic decisions. To do this: every nonprofit must understand its unique financial realities and clarify core mission, goals, and aspirations. This will enable the CFO and the organization to formulate an appropriate business model or plan in which decisions will fit - for both the short-term and the long-term.
For example, decision making for an organization with a short-term business model, focused on survival, is different than decision making for an organization that wants to seek out new opportunities aggressively and to expand programming, regardless of the economic climate. There’s also a difference between organizations without reserves and those which have reserves and decide to use them to build and maintain programmatic and administrative infrastructure. This, in turn, contrasts with organizations with reserves which cling to them in case things get worse in years to come (despite the fact that the “rainy day” is here now). Some organizations may decide to “hold their breath” and wait for all the bad news to pass. Others might decide that strategic risk-taking steps such as collaborations, spin-offs, mergers, new directions, and innovations are the business models to follow.
All decisions should be made with reference to the plan. Combining financial reality and organizational ambition into a viable business model will best inform the strategic decisions that organizations have to make.
Ms. Jones Austin next asked the panelists to identify key elements of strategic thinking that can get organizations started on the decision-making process. What are the basics? Is it having the board around the table and having staff engaged in process? Do you need to do some surveying of what’s out there or figure out who potential partners are? How do you get started?
Barbara Krasne felt that it’s very important to have the board, management, and staff involved in the decision-making process. She suggested scenario planning as a place to start. Consider a three year time horizon: for example, you can think about what will happen if income drops 25% next year, an additional 25% the following year, and remains flat the third year. Look at what the expenses are, and what the gap is. That will provide a broad picture of ways in which you have to realign your expenses. This can provide a sense of where you might be able to go, and what you might want to do. We’ve probably all done the easy cuts, and the across the board cuts. What else is possible?
There was significant growth in many agencies in the years leading up to the downturn. Many organizations were functioning at a smaller size several years ago. Without replicating the past: you can examine what the critical programs were when you operated on a smaller scale, recall what the staffing pattern was like that supported those programs, and review related costs in conjunction with mission. This helps you to get a sense of the bigger picture.
You can also think in terms of contingency planning, or planning for the worst-case scenarios. In times of great uncertainty, it’s very important to feel like you have some control over your destiny. By proactively thinking about what you would do if key funders drop out, or if a contract is not renewed, you can generate a plan. You will know what steps to take because you will already have thought it through. You will also see what ‘triggers’ will activate those steps. About cutting too much: it’s much easier to plan for deeper cuts and – if you have the resources - not act on them, than it would be to scramble to make additional cuts in an emergency situation.
Doug Sauer saw the solution as being very situational: “it depends” – there’s not one model out there. Consider whether your nonprofit’s board and leadership have the will and the resources to keep things going and do what needs to be done. Take a realistic look at where you are and “plug the holes in your ship.” If you have contracts that are “sucking dollars out”, you may have to make tough decisions about that. You have to be careful about cutting back infrastructure if that might make you less competitive – or less accountable – down the road.
A lot of nonprofits are not unified around mission at the board and staff levels. Saying “it’s about mission” is easy, but when staff and board members have ten different ideas of what the mission is and where the organization’s priorities lie, it adds confusion. Staff may prioritize secondary programs. What might have been ‘core’ ten years ago may no longer be core now. There may be an entrepreneurial spirit which, while positive in many situations, can lead staff to focus on chasing dollars instead of focusing on mission. Organizations must clarify and agree on a core mission and program. This starts with the board of directors, which needs to assume ownership. There must be good discussion, openness, and literacy at the board level. Dialogues with board members and also with funders can create new opportunities around transitions.
Mr. Sauer expressed a fear that “we’re losing infrastructure in our community.” For example, if a neighborhood center closes, the process of trying to start it again three years later will take much more money and the center will take years to be effective. Talking about these things now at a board or funder level might help to prevent such a loss of infrastructure. Mr. Sauer also suggested involving community stakeholders in the conversation, using community organizing techniques, which will better facilitate nonprofits doing what is best for the community they serve. The focus has to be what’s best for the community, not just “we need money to keep our doors open.”
Mr. Pomeranz suggested three possible triggers for the planning process:
- Budget Process. This can occur as a part of regular operations. Examine what is happening. If, for example, you find that revenues are way down, ask what that means for your organization, and what needs to be done to maintain programs and stability. Making decisions about your budget will necessarily include decisions about what your strategic focus and goals will be.
- Leadership. Nonprofit executives should be setting aside time to meet and plan. They should be organizing forums and groups to discuss specific issues.
- The Board. Board members have fiduciary responsibilities, and they need to be working closely with the nonprofit’s Executive Director to brainstorm and problem-solve solutions.
Ms. Jones Austin emphasized the point about setting aside time to think and plan. When operating in the midst of crisis, nonprofit leaders might often be led to respond to urgent problems without setting aside critical time to think beyond the day-to-day.
Mr. Sauer suggested that organizations also need to manage the crisis. You will find out who is really committed to your organization when you have financial troubles. In difficult times, organizations have to be aware of the risks: board members might leave; the staff could get anxious; clients and other constituents could also get nervous. It’s important that communications be handled well. Try to draw attention to small successes. Negativity feeds on itself, and it’s important that your staff, board, and clients do not feel that the situation is out of control. Make sure that meetings are productive, not wasteful, and that the players in your organization feel that change is being made incrementally, even if not on a large scale.
Ms. Jones Austin asked how funders should be thinking with respect to strategic direction. How can grantmakers be most helpful to the provider community in their strategic thinking and planning about the crisis?
Mr. Pomeranz observed that maintaining capacity in administrative and leadership structures is critical. If you’re cutting core staff, if you do not hire senior-level people with capacity and experience who are capable of leading and making strategic decisions, or if the Executive Director is forced, due to cuts or inadequate staffing, to spend all his or her time micromanaging operations, there will not be enough time to focus on strategic issues.
Ms. Krasne noted that funders have a unique role in the crisis. They can be more responsive, even if their funding resources are more limited. Depending on the philosophy and the culture of the funder, the response will be different. She suggested that funders could help by increasing general operating grants, since this need is one of the biggest problems that charities are facing. Grantmakers can also structure their grants to foster activity, for example by making matching grants; or by reshaping awards that have already been committed to release the grantee from restrictions, and move grant dollars into the unrestricted category.
Ms. Krasne observed that funders are interested in making sure their awards are being used in the ways that they anticipate and that can be accounted for. Now more than ever, they will want to look at organizations that can deliver. The crisis has forced funders to grapple with whether or not they should continue to fund as they have done in the past.
Mr. Sauer remarked that for the first time that in his experience, nonprofit grantees are sharing the same issues and problems with their funders. Historically, funders have been reticent about sharing their internal issues and problems. The crisis presents an opportunity to have real dialogue about common issues and partnerships.
Funders should be setting a model for collaboration by working with each other, particularly in grants and planning. A problem, Mr. Sauer noted, is that government funders, foundations, nonprofits, and others in the voluntary sector do not necessarily communicate well with each other. Nonprofits often have to devote infrastructure to managing the non-communication in their funding environment. The crisis presents a good time for funders to coordinate with each other to integrate funding plans, with nonprofit providers being part of the picture.
Mr. Sauer suggested that this is also a good time for grantmakers to loosen grant restrictions. Funders should move away from line item restrictions or micromanagement of programs. It’s important to give general operating money to priority organizations that the funder believes have strong infrastructure and can be successful.
This is also a great time to be thinking about ‘big bang’ solutions. New initiatives can provide incentives; for example, restructuring can be a change agent. Funders should be examining the possibility of the positive impacts of changing policies, changing the configuration of nonprofits, and new kinds of social investment. They should be open to the possibility of risk-taking.
Ms. Jones Austin then drew on questions from the audience to direct the discussion towards specific tactical decisions organizations should be making. Organizations have already made staff decisions, including lay-offs, staff reductions, having people work part-time, things of that nature. She asked: Any thinking about furloughs, how they can affect an organization, and how decisions around them can be made?
Barbara Krasne described a client of KrasnePlows that had already used furloughs. She found it interesting because the entire agency accepted the furloughs in a positive way. Staff and leadership alike felt that the furloughs were a shared burden, that it was fair, and that the furloughs allowed people to keep their jobs and minimized damage in terms of program delivery.
Mr. Pomeranz, too, had worked with organizations which had decided to institute furloughs rather than implementing 10% salary cuts. This helped to maintain staff morale. Cutting salaries increases anxiety and reduces staff willingness or desire to be at an organization. Salary cuts can also make staff nervous about whether salaries will ever be raised back to original levels. If the organization is not in crisis, furloughs send the wrong message. On the other hand, if ‘the world is falling apart,’ staff members fully understand why furloughs are being instituted. On occasion, furloughed staff were glad to accept them to get the time off – especially overworked, senior level staff. It’s sometimes a good idea to take a progressive, graduated approach, based on income level: for example, lower-income staff might have only one unpaid week off, while those making more could have two, thereby reducing the impact on lower income staff.
Ms. Jones Austin next drew on audience questions about mergers. She asked: Where might organizations find information on funders that support mergers; legal resources; and how to handle publicity related to mergers?
Mr. Sauer identified mergers as an area where funders might “step up” more, both from the private side and the government side. In New York, he noted that there are very good models of private funders putting money together into a pot and organizing phase processes for mergers. Mergers cannot just be about “smushing” organizations together: they have to be planned for success. It is critical that funders do not approach mergers as way to save money now and pay less money down the road. The process should be about helping agencies to achieve efficiencies – not necessarily saving dollars, but having more money to reinvest back into services and mission, thereby helping the merged organization to be stronger and more competitive.
Simply considering a merger is a risk for organizations, their boards, and for funders. The process can be expensive. Funders can help by creating an environment that is supportive and conducive to the merger process. It’s important to ensure that the paired organizations are willing and able to merge appropriately. There may be alternatives other than mergers that might be better.
For resources, he suggested talking to your current funders, and also identified New York State agencies and the New York Council of Nonprofits as possible sources of assistance.
Ms. Krasne agreed, and suggested that funding for mergers can best be sought from those funders with whom your organization has strong relationships. If the funder has invested in your organization for years, feels that your programs are of high quality, and is supportive of your mission, they will want to ensure that your services are sustained. She recommended that organizations have a good merger plan to present. This strategy can be an effective way of getting funding for the one-time initial costs associated with merger.
Lawyers Alliance for New York offers legal resources for some charities in the state. Other legal service agencies that support other nonprofit sectors might also be a source. Board members also may be able to provide excellent commercial legal expertise in M&A services; but it may cost you more time and energy to retrain for-profit attorneys in the needed nonprofit approach. This takes extra work.
Ms. Krasne reminded the audience to think about financial implications, and compensation analyses so that the merging organizations can find parity, and also process management. Bear in mind that managing the merger process is a specialized skill. You can choose to employ consultants who have significant experience with merger work. The integration of different cultures and factors can be complicated and it’s important to recognize that. Mergers draw everything out during the due diligence process; it’s rarely neat, tidy, or clean.
Mr. Sauer agreed, reminding the audience that going into the process, organizations need internal transparency. You do not want to find yourself surprised by any aspect of your own organization in front of another. It’s also an opportunity that mergers should be explored when you have assets and strength, not when you are desperate. He advised ‘thinking ahead of the game.’
Ms. Jones Austin asked a question from the audience: What are the core financial systems organizations need to get through this crisis?”
Mr. Pomeranz listed accounting systems, accounting infrastructure, HR systems, reporting systems that can ensure that information reaches senior management so that they can analyze and understand it, and analytical capacity. Organizations should maintain systems that allow them to analyze where revenue gaps lie and what the actual impact of a proposed expense reduction could be. Any system that enables an organization to better understand its situation should be viewed as core.
Ms. Jones Austin next asked: What are the strategic questions that every nonprofit should ask at their next board meeting?
Mr. Sauer suggested that organizations ask “Are we confident that we know who we are, why we exist, and where we’re going?” Within that, he proposed that organizations ask if they can develop strategies to go where they want to go.
Ms. Jones Austin wondered whether it would be appropriate to ask about the board’s level of commitment to the organization.
Mr. Sauer responded that organizations generally know whether or not board members have performed at a high level. Sometimes organizations “carry” uninvolved board members. A crisis may present an opportunity to “clean house” on a board.
Ms. Jones Austin asked: Are there frameworks, tools, or consultants that can help an organization understand program effectiveness versus costs, so leaders can make decisions effectively?
Ms. Krasne suggested thinking about program profitability, an approach she saw as being under-utilized. Organizations can look at the true costs of programs, including administrative and indirect costs, and see how programs may line up against one another. This can help decision-makers to understand which programs have the potential to generate funds that might help offset deficits. Sometimes core programs may always run at a deficit and agencies may accept that as a necessity for the mission. Recognizing that and being willing to make your core program an ongoing investment is one thing; not knowing how the financial picture relates to the program is a different situation.
Finally, Ms. Jones Austin asked all three panelists to provide examples of organizations that were making effective choices.
Mr. Sauer provided the example of three literacy volunteer organizations that approached the New York Council of Nonprofits, which already had integrated services. They felt that to promote literacy voluntarism effectively, they needed to merge. They made good choices without a facilitator, working together, with Executive Directors and Boards leading the process, and were simply looking for help to make the merger happen.
Ms. Krasne described a funder which recognized that they could no longer give out as much money or fund organizations at the same level. This led them to think very carefully about the due diligence process as they made grant decisions. For example, they review “key indicators” for an organization’s sustainability, not just the program. They consider whether the nonprofit is an entity that can financially support and deliver the program. And they also look at organizational indicators, such as leadership and governance.
Mr. Pomeranz described organizations which have identified budget cuts on a graduated scale: minimal, moderate, significant, or devastating. Wise leaders at some organizations decided to accept a larger deficit, since making ‘devastating’ cuts would have had a negative impact on their programs and on their ability to raise money in the future. Other organizations have used reserve funds to plan in strategic ways that might increase the deficit temporarily, but that can lead to revenue-generation over the long term. Finally, as a last word, Mr. Pomeranz stated, it’s important to “know yourself, know what your resources are, understand your situation, and that’s the best way to make decisions that will take you forward.”
Workshop II:
BBB Project Input Session: How Smaller Charities Deal with Impact Assessment Challenges
Leaders: H. Art Taylor, President and CEO, BBB Wise Giving Alliance
Bennett Weiner, Chief Operating Officer, BBB Wise Giving Alliance
Mr. Taylor provided an introduction to the workshop: There’s been a lot of talk lately about measuring charity effectiveness. This has come from a variety or sources. Foundations want to know if nonprofit grantees are effective. Individual donors want to understand whether charities are effective too - but their knowledge about charity effectiveness is often limited. Nonprofit leaders need to determine whether they are effective in meeting their mission goals.
The challenge is - how do we evaluate? Is there a practical approach that could result in helpful reports, for the benefit of charities and donors? The BBB’s Wise Giving Alliance is conducting a research project to explore this concept, with generous support from the Hewlett Foundation. Workshop attendees were invited to provide input about how smaller charities might view this, to help shape thinking and project development.
Effectiveness information has to be meaningful to the people who are using it. It also has to be practical. Any process or template for charity effectiveness reporting would need to be useful to the most likely audiences for the information, and it should not overburden the nonprofit.
Mr. Weiner gave a brief history of the BBB’s Standards for Charity Accountability, as background.
The BBB Wise Giving Allliance last revised its 20 Standards for Charity Accountability in 2003, as a result of a long-term project. The WGA commissioned a professional survey that solicited information from the public about effectiveness. Meetings were held in New York and elsewhere with leading figures in philanthropy, to seek input about the Standards. At the time, there was no consensus on how nonprofit effectiveness might best be assessed. The BBB adopted two new Standards at this time, which require that charities conduct an effectiveness evaluation of their own organization in meeting its mission at least once every two years, and report the results in a written report to the board, as a matter of board policy.
What have we seen as far as compliance? Many national nonprofits evaluated by the WGA meet BBB Standards: 60 to 65% meet all standards, based on the 1,200 charities that BBB-WGA reviews. When charities do not meet some standards, it is not uncommon for them to miss the standards that require having a board policy about charity effectiveness evaluation and conducting the assessment at least once every two years.
Charities are often already doing self-assessments, but they just may call it something else. The BBB is interested in understanding more about the challenges that smaller organizations face when evaluating their impact and progress against mission.
What should we assess? Results? Outcomes? What is meant by “effective”? If I am a small theatre group and I’m good at filling the seats each year – is that being effective? The average nonprofit has under a million dollars in its budget. It can be costly to do very intensive evaluations, and funders are not always willing to help pay for such expenses. But it might be possible to look at key performance indicators, if these could be defined well enough to be valuable.
Mr. Taylor clarified that the BBB’s project seeks to identify key factors that might help charities communicate a sense of whether they are actually effective in meeting their mission. All nonprofits should be able to say something concrete about the progress they are making against their mission goals. How have we “moved the needle” - ?
Participant Comments
Participant comment A: Our program has logic models; we’ve done an evaluation. The issue is the overall agency evaluation. When you look at program evaluation we’re either there or close to being there, we know the inputs, activities, outcomes, and outputs. We know if we have been successful in a particular program. My pre-schoolers are ready for kindergarten. BBB seems to focus on the overall. The first step is to deal with language issues. Perhaps BBB could develop some sort of tool based on the way we do things. For example, I’ll know a child is ready for kindergarten based on 5 of 8 cognitive skills. If BBB creates a tool where you have governance, program outcomes and finance… We do our two-year assessment, to comply with BBB but I was hoping to find out what a good agency-level evaluation looks like. For example, we can submit a report saying we’re at “B” point, but we think we can do better, and here are the areas we want to focus on. We have a very extensive evaluation of after-school programs: we know from parents, teachers, and kids where we are effective and where we are not. As an agency how do we do that overall? Whatever is developed has to be simple – it’s going to fall on the executive director. We need simple but meaningful evaluations.
Participant comment B: There is a difference between evaluating short term results and longer term outcomes. For example, you could evaluate a program that delivers food to seniors. If you only look at whether the food is safely delivered, you don’t know whether the seniors ate the food – and whether they benefited from it. You might commission very expensive research to find out if the food is being eaten and if it is, whether it is contributing to quality of life for the seniors over the decades. Instead, one organization did something very simple: they developed a little picture of a plate, and they got senior recipients of the food to mark the quadrants on the plate to represent what parts of the meal they ate. This at least gave a sense about what their clients liked and what kind of nutrition they were really getting.
Participant comment C: I’m on the board of a small nonprofit. In order to get a big grant from a foundation, we’re being asked to do an evaluation – but we don’t have a lot of resources to do this job. We’re helping young people grow and mature into engaged members of their communities. Grades aren’t one of the program outcomes that we measure, although foundations might like us to do that. We have outcomes but we can’t tell you if our programs affected student grades or college entrance. Our program raised 60% more money than the year before. We’ve expanded to Chicago and San Francisco. We always get, “Where’s your evaluation?” We say young people are the evaluators; they come back and bring their kids.
Participant comment D: Our organization relies on government contracts and private sources of funding. Government contracts focus on performance management but it’s not fully funded. Maybe what BBB should be looking for organizations to assess their major programs in some manner instead of doing an overall organizational assessment.
Participant comment E: My interpretation of the BBB Standards is that you are looking at the organization as a whole, not just the success of the programs. If your programs are great, but you have a board that never shows up, that’s a problem.
Mr. Taylor: Two BBB Standards for Charity Accountability deal with evaluation. The rest relate to transparency, governance, and accountability.
Mr. Weiner: What are the right audiences for charity outcomes information? Donors? Your Board? Your Staff? Major funders? Clients? Do you think charity effectiveness information should be used primarily for internal purposes, such as decision-making by the board and staff, or should the public have access to this information?
Participant comment F: I run a financial services group for nonprofits. Everyone is calling me and saying that they can’t make payroll. They are evaluating their organization in a way, but don’t realize that they are doing that. Whether it’s a government contract or foundation support, nonprofit leaders need to ask: is that activity sustainable? What’s profitable? What’s not? Before the current crisis, nonprofits didn’t have to think about this as much. A lot of organizations could take information they are getting from the assessments they are doing to make the tough budgeting decisions. This could help them conduct evaluations about the organization and its programs.
Participant comment G: Everything a nonprofit does can be measured, poorly or well. Funders tend to impose performance-based funding that is focused on the program part of it. It’s reasonable to start with that, but any nonprofit manager knows that’s not all they have to do. They also have to balance the books. The balanced scorecard approach to evaluation management is good for a small nonprofit, and it’s not something you need a consultant or a million dollar evaluation team to do. You can begin with this: what does the organization care the most about?
It’s kind of like you’re running into a brick wall with compliance. People don’t buy the evaluation process if they see it as something imposed upon them, as opposed to something they need. Everyone wants to make a difference. Sometimes that difference is not what we think it is. The organization needs to figure that out - what difference it makes. All nonprofits are different in some way, but chances are good you’re not doing anything totally unique – so you can learn from others in the field. But in terms of motivating people to actually do evaluation: you get compliance only after you get buy-in from the people who have to carry out the evaluation.
Mr. Taylor: We are thinking of evaluations that contain more than anecdotes. We want to see nonprofits making a consistent effort to show that they are making progress.
Participant comment H: Outcomes can be imposed. We applied for funding to support an internship program. We consulted with the grant officer and the outcome they want to see is an improvement in grades. Our program is prepping young people for work. We provide guidance on what careers might be a good fit, but I am also being asked to make sure the students go from a B to a B+. So as a result we had to add some extra elements to the program to achieve the desired outcome.
Participant Comment I: What some have and what others don’t have are ways to measure their own progress. If BBB is developing an effectiveness evaluation framework, it needs to get very widespread acceptance of measured or assessed elements.
Participant Comment J: I was in a subgroup for an evaluation. We had all kinds of measures and recommendations and the evaluators basically just threw it in the fireplace and the City did its own thing.
Mr. Taylor asked whether consumer input should ever be included in charity effectiveness reports. He noted that people who tend to hate something comment the most; there’s a worry about the comments being skewed.
Participant Comment K: The balanced scorecard tracks customer engagement. Does Zagat include nutrition? No. They grade why people go to the restaurant. Consumer Reports grades across a wide range of measures. Customer and management point of view are two different things. You can’t rely only on the customer view, but it’s silly not to pay attention to it. Client feedback is important but can’t be the only thing you listen to.
Mr. Taylor noted that the BBB is contemplating an approach that would look at shorter-term measures about the things nonprofits do on a day-to-day basis, rather than very long-term outcome studies. He voiced concern about how effectiveness reports might be standardized in a way that will help organizations demonstrate impact to funders.
Participant Comment L: We need to be educating funding agencies about what success looks like and what outcomes are. Sometimes government funders want to impose extra moving parts that have nothing to do with results, or they demand that nonprofits use horribly expensive evaluation tools.
Participant Comment M: There can be disagreements between experts in a given field about what appropriate benchmarks might be. How are nonprofits supposed to come up with consistent evaluations when the experts don’t agree about what success looks like or how to measure it?
Participant Comment N: What about reporting on failure? How can nonprofits go public with information about the things we didn’t do so well? It takes a lot of courage.
Participant Comment O: Sometimes evaluations of failures can really help managers understand how to improve operations.
Participant Comment P: Failures can sometimes lead to greater successes.
Participant Comment Q: Some foundations have done case study reports about failures as a way of better understanding and addressing the problems that are out there.
Workshop III:
Foundation Perspectives on Evaluation
Leaders: Joelle-Jude Fontaine, Program Officer, A.L. Mailman Family Foundation, Inc. (now a consultant and Vice Chair of Philanthropy New York), introduced by Ronna Brown, President, Philanthropy New York (formerly known as New York Regional Association of Grantmakers)
Ms. Brown introduced the program and Ms. Fontaine. Ms. Fontaine was the primary presenter for this workshop, which focused on foundation perspectives about evaluation in the context of grant reports by charities.
Ms. Fontaine explained that this reporting process should begin with relationship building between the grantee and the foundation funder. The nonprofit should be sure to communicate clearly about its mission and must make sure that there is a good fit with the foundation’s mission.
Evaluation is no longer a way of just seeing how money is used, but also a way of learning more about a field or organization. Nonprofit leaders are all advocates in a sense. It is important for charity leaders to think about how to advocate for our fields of endeavor. In order to advance our fields of work, we need to build relationships and open up communication. The reporting process is not just based on outcomes, but also on process and challenges. It’s important to describe what barriers and challenges were encountered while doing the grant work, and the grantee should be able to say “here’s what we learned.” Grantees must be honest when assessing their successes and challenges.
Do your homework about a foundation and try your best to understand its guidelines, before submitting an application. This is another aspect of relationship-building.
In Ms. Fontaine’s work with after-school organizations, she learned to appreciate the need for advocacy to create systemic change, along with the need for direct services. Her foundation has funded advocacy, communications, research, and policy development on a national scale. At one point, one of their grants supported an advocacy campaign. The grantee was putting messages out, but for some reason, the campaign wasn’t working. So Ms. Fontaine’s foundation made an adventurous grant to understand more about effective communications and messaging. As a result, they learned how to improve this type of messaging in general. The learning was disseminated to other advocacy organizations, so it helped to advance the advocacy field. This couldn’t have happened if her foundation didn’t have a strong relationship with its grantee, which enabled the grantee to say “this campaign isn’t working” and seek funding for message development. Relationship-building is important for learning about obstacles and potential solutions.
In addition to assessing how well an organization got the word out, her foundation evaluated how the grantee was doing its constituency building. They asked: what key constituents was the grantee able to bring to the discussion? How was the grantee engaging multiple groups to develop public will? The grant project involved grassroots efforts - getting communities talking, getting them to want and seek out the provided services. What was the process for doing that? And so on.
Ms. Fontaine distributed a case study about the “My Child First Early Literacy Program.” This case illustrated how an evaluation report can allow stakeholders to learn about the program and increase its effectiveness. Outcomes-focused evaluation is what we tend to think of as grant reporting; but reporting about lessons learned provides more helpful information about process. A discussion of process is important to learning about obstacles and improving services.
Sometimes it is hard to think broadly about the field you’re in, but nonprofit leaders should remember that you are part of a field. Your nonprofit is one of many organizations that are having an impact. It’s important to help foundations to understand the state of the field and the challenges you face. Don’t look at reporting as a report card, but look at it as a way to increase communication through relationship-building.
In the case study, the nonprofit’s program served Spanish-speaking immigrant families. The foundation’s mission also targeted Spanish-speaking families. The foundation was thinking not only about how to fund this organization, but also how they could apply what is learned throughout the field.
A final grant report should not be a mere checklist of things that were done. The funder in the case study requested answers to questions such as: what did parents think? How did it work out, how many organizations got involved with you? What was the feedback from the field about how your services were used? Did you encounter any stumbling blocks? This kind of information was needed so that the foundation could assess what its grant results might mean to the field and its larger mission of aiding Spanish-speaking families.
Foundation program officers want to know more about the developmental process; this can be done in a report that includes information about lessons learned in addition to details about outcomes. You also need to give information about the collaborative process, whenever that is relevant. Foundations need to understand the challenges involved when nonprofits work together.
Both Ms. Brown and Ms. Fontaine answered questions from workshop participants.
Q: When you talk about outcomes, like a report card, the hardest thing is connecting that to the larger goals of the grant. How do you do that?
A: It is important to break broad missions or goals into actionable pieces. What are its components? How do they relate to the work you do? In this way you can link components of your goals or mission to measures of success.
Q: One of the things we are asked is: how are you going to sustain the program when the grant is gone? And the answer is get another grant. How do we deal with foundations that seem to think that programs can pay for themselves?
A: Try the honest approach; it doesn’t help to pretend that a program can be sustained without more grant dollars, if it really cannot.
Q: Our organization partners with others. It’s difficult. In our reporting, projects are usually successful, and we don’t necessarily want to say what was horrible or make the other organization look bad.
A: If you have a good relationship with the program officer, you can talk about stumbling blocks. There’s also a code. You can talk about the relationship and say the outcome was positive, but you can also say “here are the challenges we faced.” That works. You can also reflect back and try to figure out what would have made it easier. Try to provide some action items that could improve the process in the future.
Q: About reporting on outcomes: we know we are not the only factor in success of the students who attend our after-school programs. There are parents, schools, teachers, a whole slew of factors that are involved. We are worried about how to assess our role in the outcome piece so that we can accurately report our responsibility for success, when we’re not the only factor.
A: It’s important to be honest about that. It’s a good idea to present an understanding of the field and your organization’s place in it. That illustrates an awareness of the situation that reaches beyond your organization. Understanding the research in your field is also important. What are the known elements that help children get ahead? You can talk about how your organization adds to that.
Q: Do you think reports to foundation are an appropriate place to figure out if you’ve had a direct impact on a child’s academic achievement when there are so many factors? We are not research specialists.
A: Try to follow best practices for your field of endeavor. Take credit for what you do, but within the context of understanding what others are doing, bearing in mind what is well-known in your field about the impact of elements such as mentoring, etc.
