Over the past several years I have increasingly reflected on the difference between “giving away money” and “solving social problems.”  Like many donors, I assumed the two were very much aligned – at least, if the money was donated in a thoughtful and strategic manner. As FSG has probed deeper into the nature of social impact, however, I have found less overlap than I expected between these two endeavors.

FSG began its journey with a focus on strategic philanthropy, but our mission has always been to help our clients achieve social impact. It is that focus that has drawn us beyond conventional philanthropy to pursue corporate social responsibility, mission investing, community foundation leadership, and new approaches in evaluation.  That same desire to understand how social impact can be achieved also led us to research and write “Catalytic Philanthropy,” this month’s lead article in Stanford Social Innovation Review.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and comments about Catalytic Philanthropy. Please share your thoughts with our team at insights@fsg-impact.org.

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“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

We have an agrarian school calendar and school day, yet less than 1% of the US population claims farming as their primary occupation. We still take a factory production line approach to educating students and moving them through our classrooms and school systems, despite overwhelming evidence that this approach, while good for efficiency, is failing to deliver results.  In the digital age where information is delivered through multiple media and continually updated and refreshed, our schools still rely heavily on printed, largely static text books. And despite advances in understanding how children learn, too many of our teachers still spend their day holding a piece of chalk and talking at their students.  Clearly, changes are needed to bring our educational system into the 21st century.

Lately, “innovation” has become the big buzzword for how to transform education. We have the White House Social Innovation Fund, multiple “Innovations in Education” conferences and gatherings, and even “Innovation in Education” awards. But are our innovations taking us far enough, or are we still boats being “borne back ceaselessly into the past”?

Take the SEED Foundation, which runs the nation’s only public college prep boarding schools for urban youth. Despite having students on campus 24-hours a day, SEED still follows a typical school day schedule—classes from 8 to 3, then after-school activities, and then evening homework time. But are there better ways to arrange the day? Perhaps high school students learn better in evening classes. Perhaps homework should be done throughout the day.  Perhaps middle schoolers focus better in class if they play sports in the morning. With some experimentation, SEED might find answers to these questions, and by doing so (and measuring the results), help all of our schools be more innovative in how they use time and schedule to improve student outcomes.

At a larger scale, the charter school movement has introduced new approaches and challenged school districts to re-examine how they deliver education. Yet recently, my observation is that the movement has been “mainstreaming”. Charter management organizations are taking on roles traditionally played by school districts, and the willingness of individual school operators to innovate is eroding in the face of accountability pressures. Despite having the autonomy to put in place game-changing innovations, too many charter schools have pedagogies, staffing structures, curricula, and strategies that mirror those of traditional district schools.  But even if charter operators could “build a better mousetrap” and outperform their district counterparts by 10%, would it be good enough to graduate 58% of our nation’s urban students instead of 53%? 

Let’s face it, incremental is just not going to cut it anymore given how far we are falling behind the developed world in producing college graduates. When Newark’s police force responded to incoming Mayor Cory Booker’s call for lowering the murder rate by delivering a single digit reduction, his response? Not good enough. The mayor took to the streets himself, changed the culture of the police force, experimented with new approaches to staffing and shift scheduling, and created special units to fight narcotics and track down fugitives—innovations which led to a 40% reduction in shooting and murders. The mayor’s response?  Still not good enough - “Despite this significant decline, to any victim of a handgun crime and certainly to me as mayor, the level of violence is still unacceptably too high. We can and must do better.” As educators, we must bring to bear this same commitment and unrelenting drive for not just incremental improvement, but dramatic improvement.  

So let’s forget about the efficiency of the factory and warehousing model. Let’s forget about getting kids home for the summer harvest and the evening milking. Let’s even forget about kids sitting in chairs in classrooms with sharpened pencils and notebooks.

Instead, perhaps we should take a page from Henry David Thoreau who wrote in Walden, “To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! — why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it."  Perhaps student performance would be significantly increased by having youth do all of their learning in experiential settings. Or by delivering multi-media curricula via new technologies. Or by creating fully virtual learning environments. Or by paying students for performance. I don’t know.

What I do know is that we need to find out. I’d like to see us explore innovations that are revolutionary and not incremental, and be insistent about measuring and examining the successes and failures of these innovations so we can determine which are effective and which should be spread. Instead of it being us educators on the boat, beating on against this current that draws us back into the past, let’s instead put our kids on the boat so they can take one turn down the harbor.

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The power of collective social movements for change has dramatic, real and lasting significance in our nation’s history.  One example of this is the ongoing momentum of the civil rights movement, witnessed most recently in the election of President Barack Obama. 

Foundations can play a key role in catalyzing social movements, yet few funders focus on movement building efforts which encourage multiple actors to develop community-focused solutions. By adding movement building approaches, funders can potentially increase the odds of generating the long-term impact to which they aspire. 

Rather than dictating a specific solution, or simply funding individual non-profits to address an issue, foundations can use movement building approaches to highlight particular social issues and motivate actors to come together to solve them. 

The Ford Foundation’s efforts to help build the civil rights movement in the 1960’s offer compelling lessons about how philanthropy can help catalyze grassroots action and help build movements for change and impact. 

In 1966, the Ford Foundation announced a bold, public vision of full equality for African Americans, calling it “the most urgent domestic concern of this country.”  The Foundation purposefully refrained from dictating specific solutions for “how” that vision should come about, recognizing that the power of local ownership in building any movement for change was core to its success.  By outlining a broad vision but surrendering some control to the communities it hoped to impact, Ford gained broader support and deeper commitment. 

Ford also used a diverse collection of resources beyond standard programmatic grantmaking to support the work and agendas of the community, and to build the base of the civil rights movement.  The Foundation focused heavily on technical assistance and capacity building for key organizing groups, and provided core operating support to the organizations best-positioned to build black political participation.  Recognizing its role in promoting dialogue and building strong coalitions, Ford supported programs to improve communication and collaboration among blacks, Hispanics, women, and others with shared concerns.  The Foundation also leveraged litigation to challenge discriminatory laws, and broadly supported and published research on race and sex discrimination to document the problem.  These collective efforts were critical for developing Ford’s strong case for the movement and building its capacity and ultimate momentum. 

More than forty years later, the effects of the Ford Foundation’s investments in the civil rights movement endure. Articulating a clear vision, and enabling others to develop and own solutions through a diverse set of approaches including capacity building, operating support, coalition building and research can result in the creation of powerful movements for change. Creating opportunities for collective, concerted action and movement building can offer foundations the chance to achieve large scale and lasting social impact.

We look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas about movement building. Please share your comments with our team at insights@fsg-impact.org.

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Nonprofit organizations often perceive they must choose between funding their programs, and allocating limited resources for evaluation. This perception can be fed by disappointing evaluation experiences which leave organizations wondering about value, or that an organization can’t clearly see what an evaluation project would accomplish. This is the true story of an organization ‘forced’ to evaluate itself, and how finding the right evaluator –one that fit the organization’s culture, style, and approach--made all the difference. 

For example, consider the story of Jane Gonzales, who is an Executive Director of a state-wide domestic abuse prevention nonprofit organization in the southwest. Jane has always thought of evaluation as academic and costly, and as a result, has done little to meet her funders’ evaluation requirements.  Recently, however, one of the organization’s key funders has told Jane that unless she does an evaluation within the next 6 months, the donor’s funding may not continue.

Having new fiscal motivation, Jane hired an evaluation firm to design and conduct the evaluation. At the request of the evaluators, she invited a cross-cultural group of women to attend a half-day meeting to help design the evaluation.

The evaluators began the meeting by asking the women to pair up with one another to tell a story about a time when they were working on behalf of the organization and they felt proud, energized, and excited to be a part of this incredible nonprofit because of the impact it was having on children and women in throughout the state.  As the women told their stories, the excitement, passion, and joy, was felt throughout the room.  There was much laughter and even a few tears.  After telling their stories, the women took turns briefly re-telling each other’s stories, and then discussed common themes they had heard. 

The evaluators then facilitated a conversation about what the evaluation’s focus should be, based on the women’s stories of what the organization would look like when it was achieving its goals and mission.

When the meeting was over, one of the Native American women approached the evaluators, and said, “I really appreciated the opportunity to tell my story, and then to hear it told aloud by someone else.  I would never have spoken up if we had started out having a large group discussion. I felt my voice was honored. Thank you.” 

During the 4-month evaluation, the evaluators kept in touch with Jane, apprising her of the evaluation’s progress and answering her questions along the way. After all of the data had been collected, they sat down with Jane and her staff and reviewed the findings, collectively interpreted the findings, and discussed their implications. Jane responded, “That was the best $25,000 I have ever spent! I plan on doing this every year!” 

Today, Jane spreads the word about the value of evaluation by presenting at conferences around the country, and sharing her evaluation experience with her peers in the nonprofit community. We’d love to hear your words on evaluation, please share them with our Evaluation team at insights@fsg-impact.org.

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In the last 10 years, more than $10B¹ has been committed to addressing global health challenges through large new partnerships. The Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) and product development partnerships are among the most ambitious approaches ever attempted to solve intractable social problems. While several of these partnerships have been independently evaluated, the evaluations have not been designed to facilitate organizational learning. Other fields have come to recognize that evaluations can not only assess impact but they can also drive organizational learning when structured appropriately.

As new and large investments, GHPs need to take advantage of every opportunity to learn from their experiences, and to apply this learning to their strategies going forward. Evaluations are an important catalyst for that learning. We have identified four considerations that will help ensure that future evaluations more directly drive organizational learning in GHPs, which can then quickly translate to improved impact through their work.

• Organizational learning should be a stated priority of the evaluation. Evaluations to date have been guided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Criteria (DAC), which defines the aim of evaluations as “determining the relevance and fulfilment of objectives, development efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability.”²  This is a helpful framework from an impact and accountability perspective, but it overlooks the opportunity to explicitly support the organization in learning from the evaluation results.
• The GHP should be a primary architect of the evaluation approach. This is important for generating a sense of ownership on the part of the GHP as well as ensuring that the evaluation targets the most important issues. Today, the donor-driven process largely identifies the questions to be addressed based on the DAC principles (e.g., relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact, sustainability) and then the GHP adds its own issues for investigation. Valuable time and resources have been spent conducting analyses that have no direct relevance to future decision-making by either the donor or the GHP (e.g., counterfactual analyses). Where the GHP is more directly involved in shaping the evaluation, there is a much greater probability that organization will learn from and act on the results.
• Evaluation should stem from the GHP’s strategic plan and stated goals. Orienting the evaluation around the GHP’s unique strategy and stated goals further ensures that the findings will be uniquely relevant to the partnership and the challenges it faces. With the current strategy as a starting point, the evaluation can shed light on some of the most pressing questions the GHP faces.
• A plan for learning should be a key deliverable from the evaluation.  Beyond the current practice of issuing a final report that lists recommendations, the evaluation team can work with the GHP to develop an implementation plan that considers the cultural, political and systems implications of acting on the findings. The evaluation process can lead to a “learning agenda” that identifies the key areas for investigation as the GHP moves forward.

Reorienting GHP evaluations to more closely drive organizational learning would ensure that the time and money invested in the evaluation aligns as directly as possible to improving impact on the ground. This doesn’t preclude donors’ traditional needs with respect to ensuring the accountability of their grantees, but it does suggest a shift from the current, donor-driven approach. Such a shift will enable these important new partnerships to better learn from their experience.

We look forward to your reactions to these ideas. Please share your comments and related ideas with our Global Health team at insights@fsg-impact.org.

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As community foundations look toward 2010 and beyond, forecasting an economic picture can be daunting as market volatility, unpredictable donor behavior, and strained budgets continue to stress operating models. The Council on Foundations’ Community Foundation Leadership Team (CFLT) has recognized the need for community foundations to have a “stress test” tool to model varying pictures of future sustainability, and has commissioned Community Foundation Insights (CF Insights) and FSG to create a dynamic Economic Scenario Planning (ESP) model, which helps community foundations answer questions such as:

• When might the foundation’s assets return to pre-recession levels?
• What level of grantmaking can we expect in the next few years?
• What happens to our economics if donors behave in different ways?
• What is the gap in operating revenues we are facing in future years?
• Will we have enough operating cash or are further budget cuts needed?

The CFLT wants community foundations of all sizes to have access to the ESP toolkit; and it is available for free download. The toolkit includes an ESP Model that creates three five-year forecasts, a PowerPoint Presentation tool to help present findings to stakeholders, and a User Guide to help work with these tools.

To learn more about how to use these tools:

• Watch the online tutorial that provides an overview of the model, including how to enter historical data, build forecasts,  and interpret and present results
• Join a Peer Learning Community to discuss learnings with peer foundations
• Learn more at the Council on Foundations’ Fall Conference for Community Foundations at the learning lab and the concurrent session about the ESP model.

Community foundations that have begun using the tool say:

• “We will use it with our Board as we are planning how to budget for the next two years”
• “The model will be focus of our trustee board's annual strategic planning session in November”
• “We have been looking for something like this for a long time - and greatly appreciate the opportunity to back up our strategy and long range planning with some data models that will provide guidance”

We look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas; please share your comments with the CF Insights team at insights@fsg-impact.org. 

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Crossing the Finishing Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson
Not all colleges are equal. Graduation rates vary widely among public universities. Bowen and co-authors show just how divergent educational outcomes can be, depending on which institution is attended.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations
Clay Shirky
Shirky puts the Web 2.0 phenomena in the larger context of economics at organizations (e.g., the effects of lowering transaction costs: when you lower the cost of organizing activities, many more activities will be organized). Also, a chapter on the value of lowering the cost of failure, and the use of failure as information.
  
Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey
The Emmy-winning series Mad Men is inspired in large part by John Cheever’s stories of the joys and sorrows of suburban life. Cheever’s life was just as complicated as that of any of his characters. Bailey tells the fascinating story of how Cheever transformed his (many) conflicts and demons into incandescent prose.

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