As times change, there are numerous foundations starting to experiment with this interactive way of communicating. When the W. K. Kellogg Foundation established an online forum, “What Helps Vulnerable Children Succeed,” it opened the doors to all those interested in discussing this strategic priority. Any member of the public could simply register and comment in the forum. Rather than leading with their own assumptions and beliefs about the needs of vulnerable children, the foundation framed an online conversation with three questions: What makes children vulnerable? What could make vulnerable children successful? What’s working now, or what’s possible? The foundation opened its site to encourage user-contributed feedback, moderated the comments that arrived and adopted a policy of removing only posts that were inflammatory or inappropriate.
Kellogg Director of Public Affairs Dianne Price acknowledged the risks inherent to this approach. Inevitably, perspectives that the foundation disagreed with would be surfaced on their Web site’s forum. “That was the point,” Price explained. “If we didn’t hear those other opinions, this experiment would have failed. We were looking to generate new ideas and hear from many points of view.”
One of the reasons commonly cited for inviting stakeholders to post and share alternative perspectives—even those that may bump up against a foundation’s chosen strategy—is the opportunity it gives the foundation to know what’s being said and respond publicly as appropriate.
In August 2006 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched a blog called “Pioneering Ideas” as an initiative of their Pioneer Portfolio. The Pioneer Portfolio “seeks ideas that could lead to health or health care breakthroughs.” From their Web site: “Several Pioneer projects apply approaches from diverse sectors such as finance, design and entertainment to forge new solutions in health and health care arenas.” Given that RWJF’s portfolio strategy is to discover novel ideas from inside and outside of healthcare, it follows that they would employ a Web 2.0 strategy to generate discussion and ideas from a broad audience (see case study abstract, Appendix D).
Larry Blumenthal, the senior communications officer responsible for the foundation’s Web operations, understood the internal concerns that people might use the blog as a forum to criticize the foundation or advocate different points of view. However, he didn’t see those concerns as a reason not to move forward. “A key goal behind launching the blog was to provide a forum for interesting, direct dialogue that would move the field forward. We know there are people with different viewpoints working on the same issues as us. We want to encourage those discussions. What better way to hold that conversation than on your own forum, where you have the ability to pose questions and respond to different points of view?”
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Related Links The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
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