These tools offer some new ways to be more transparent and have active conversations with people behind the grantmaking wall.
– Claire Baralt, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
Ultimately, the hope of some foundations is that this leads to commitment and action. Electronic communications create an opportunity to connect people who are interested in an issue with each other and the grantees working on the issue. As foundations experiment with how to best conduct and benefit from the myriad digital conversations about their priorities, they are also hoping to reach new audiences.
Because many of the Web 2.0 tools themselves are very inexpensive or free, foundations can increase the scale of their communications dramatically to a broad audience without a corresponding increase in cost. In contrast, communications professionals traditionally invest significant resources to promote their brand to a targeted and segmented key audience. When you want to influence highly educated, progressive-leaning news junkies, you buy sponsorship time on National Public Radio; if you need to reach sports fans, you advertise on Monday Night Football; and so on. Foundations also traditionally spend money on producing high-quality materials such as an annual report and mailing them to their mailing list. Now, with Web 2.0 tools, foundations can potentially reach people anywhere in the world who are interested in or curious about the foundation’s issues, inexpensively and immediately, by building or tapping into online networks and contributing content.
Transparency
and Accountability
Many
of those interviewed for our study cited the desire for greater transparency
and accountability as a significant impetus for participating in and convening
conversations about the foundation’s work online. Any tools that
help demystify or shine greater light on the deliberative, and often difficult,
work of responsible grantmaking are worthy of consideration, several respondents
said.
But others questioned the presumed connection between Web 2.0 technologies and greater philanthropic transparency—pointing out that moderated “public” conversations are still moderated and controlled, even if they happen in a public medium like the World Wide Web. There are still gatekeepers controlling what is or isn’t posted, and editorial judgments being made about content and message. Respondents in this camp were not sure that Web 2.0 tools in and of themselves provided any greater daylight on the secretive world of grantmaking. For example, online grant databases, 990s, financials, funding guidelines, program officer contact information and grantee perception reports can all be posted on a basic Web 1.0, “brochureware” Web site. The act of making such information public is only “transparent” by degree.
However, the interviewees that did see a strong connection tied it to a further step of not just posting information about priorities, strategies and activities, but doing it in a way that allows people to comment and even disagree and creating a feedback loop, a window into the way the foundation works.
In this case, the feedback loop is the “big idea” that separates Web 1.0 from Web 2.0. As Claire Baralt of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation described it, “These tools offer some new ways to be more transparent and have active conversations with people behind the grantmaking wall.”
These conversations may increasingly be thrust upon foundations, whether or not they want to face them. William Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, described in a 2005 column for The Chronicle of Philanthropy how blogs latched onto a column in the New York Post questioning foundation influence in campaign-finance laws. He predicted that the growing network of bloggers across the political spectrum will increasingly scrutinize philanthropy’s activity, concluding that “Any foundation interested in public-policy activism can now expect its implicit political inclinations to be vetted far more thoroughly and publicly than before…All foundations—not just those on the right—that want to shape public policy will now be treated as political actors.”
Calls for foundation transparency and accountability are increasing from all corners. Grantees want to better understand how funding decisions get made. Policy makers and regulators want to see how tax-exempt foundations are spending their money. Media watchdogs are closely tracking how foundation investments do, or don’t, align with foundation missions. And so on.
Foundations are traditionally reluctant to self-promote, and some will make the argument that they should not be spending their resources on any form of self-promotion. It can be advantageous to a foundation’s brand and strategic priorities, however, to be seen as a credible, expert convener of a community working to solve a problem, and it does not need to be about self-promotion. It can be about promotion of the issue and the entire community working on it, and transparency of the foundation’s role in the larger picture. By making the whole community working on a program area more visibly involved, Web 2.0 technologies can be a relative easy and economical way to expand a foundation’s credibility, influence and effectiveness.
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Related Links The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
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