Come On In. The Water's Fine.
An Exploration of Web 2.0 Technology and its Emerging Impact on Foundation Communications

Produced for the Communications Network
Made possible by support from The California Endowment, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Opportunities for Greater Influence

So what are the opportunities for participating in this conversation?

There are two fundamental aspects of the private foundation model that have enabled them to be such powerful agents of change to date. The first is the liberty foundations enjoy as wealthy institutions that are largely free from the conventional consumer-driven market imperatives that drive most for-profit organizations. The second is their non-profit tax status and the freedom it affords to make sizeable, long-term investments in innovative, often untested, or even unpopular ideas, initiatives and programs.

“True accountability of nonprofits—including foundations—to public agencies is, for all practical purposes, slight,” wrote Joel Fleishman in his seminal 2007 book The Foundation: A Great American Secret. “Because of their peculiar combination of attributes, foundations are able to deploy wealth in what they regard as the public interest in ways that are available to no other entities in American society.”

Convening Networks
Foundations are uniquely positioned to fund the best and brightest ideas and convene broad communities of experts and stakeholders in order to identify those ideas and build on the lessons learned from them.

Web 2.0 technologies are ideally suited for helping foundations play this convening role. The tools themselves are largely inexpensive, many of them free, which allows foundations to increase the scale and scope of their convening power without diverting dollars from existing programs.

Many of these tools also allow grantees to participate without incurring costs, travel and time away from their core mission. The tools are increasingly ubiquitous and platform-neutral, allowing nontraditional stakeholders greater access and opportunity to participate. And they can help a foundation be more transparent about their strategies, goals and practices.

Several foundations that participated in this study have launched initiatives to convene grantees electronically. The idea is that more experienced grantees will help newer grantees learn about the foundation and that the online community will provide a forum for sharing best practices and lessons learned in a given program area.

For example, The Wallace Foundation has a grantee-only section of its Web site for education grantees. Several foundations have or are planning similar extranet sites for grantees.

As Lucas Held, director of communications for Wallace, points out, grantors have several reasons for ongoing communication with grantees during the course of a grant: to ensure goals and strategies remain clear; to hear what is working and what is not; to monitor performance; to allow grantees to learn from each other; and to surface insights and experiences that could lead to valuable lessons.

An extranet is one way to facilitate this communication, although it is not without challenges, namely that successful online discussions typically require a moderator, an agenda and a time-bound period in which they occur. Some foundations have concluded that convening grantees in this way is essential to advancing their goals, and online communication can make this more time- and cost-effective, especially for the grantees.