Impact

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a GIFTS User Group meeting in Ontario.  Besides the hospitality and the joy I get out of spending time with our actual users this group reminded me that measuring the results of foundation giving continues to be at the forefront of theirs and their foundation’s minds.  In the room we had Grant Managers, Corporate Foundation staff at all levels and Executives, and the topic kept returning to how can they make improvements on the data going into their system so the data coming out of their system tells a much stronger story about the result of their giving.
When we start to talk about grant results we often find ourselves having the same conversation about many different things.  Depending on who you talk to we talk about impact, outcomes, effectiveness, often using the same word to describe different things and different words to describe the same things.    For this room on that cold January Thursday it was more about how do they help get the ‘right’ data into their system so that they can make better grants in the future and share that information more broadly with their constituents.

Every year when we reach out to our user base we hear again and again that outcomes is their number one issue.  This past year we learned that 44% of the time our users rely on their grantees to selectively report on their grant outcomes.  We also learned that this data often comes into your system in attachments, not directly linked to the fields in your system.  So if you wanted to quickly run a report of this data in your system you wouldn’t be able to.

Some foundations have become really good at telling the story of the impact of their giving through case studies, reports, blogging, bringing to life the strength of the stories that your funding has helped create. 

We also learned that many of you find it challenging to work with the historical coding in your system.  That you’ve made the coding so unique and specific to your organization that your grantees struggle to have it make sense to your users.  We have been following the Foundation Center’s work on coding with the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities.   

The good news is that there are some giving institutions who are doing this really well today.  Does it take time? Yes.  Does it take money?  Most likely.  If this is a direction you are interested in heading in, let us know how you plan to approach it.  If outcomes are something that you successfully track and manage in your system, please let us know how you do it.  How do you track and measure impact at your organization?  Why is it important to you and your leadership?


In the meantime, I’ll share a few helpful resources with you to get you thinking:

The Power of Small, WSJ, 12/12/2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204528204577009941057561440.html

Grant Craft: Making measures work for you
http://www.grantcraft.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&pageId=1543

Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation Case Study and Results:
https://www.microedge.com/~/media/2292C46B28274BD7AF6FBB10F961767D.ashx

A Working Paper on Housing and Poverty

Outcome mapping:

MicroEdge and TRI:
https://www.microedge.com/~/media/00B268EA89834FE2929B8465608C2B8C.ashx

From Grants Management to Foundation Management

We’ve been hearing this past year that many foundations are looking at their grants management solution to do more than just manage their giving, they want their solution to help them manage more of their foundations overall activities.  We are seeing this shift from the large corporate foundations all the way through the smaller family foundations.  This shift is a result of many things including foundations trying to do more with less, foundation stakeholders wanting to see more results based data, foundations expanding their giving programs to have more of a reach in the communities they serve and giving institutions wanting to connect their giving with their employee engagement. 

Some examples that we’ve seen are foundations that have extended their grants management solution to include grant pipeline management, scenario planning, outcome measurement, workflow, data management, grantee communication, payout planning and portals for either board members or grantees.  Their focus was to give broader access to internal and external stakeholders like board members, financial staff, grantees/applicants and other non-grant related staff.  We’ve seen other foundations take the first step in  moving towards foundation management with providing more of a dashboard type view for their executive staff like we have delivered in an interactive way with the GIFTS Alta and GIFTS Online interactive dashboards, with the advanced SQL reporting or the way Giving Data provides a one-way push of information to their dashboards.

This real time access to information has been great for the casual stakeholders who want to see the grant information at their fingertips but what is that next piece of critical information stakeholders need access to?  Last summer we conducted a survey with all of our users and the number one benefit our respondents cited for using MicroEdge products was having all of your data centralized in one place.  The 2^nd and 3^rd most cited benefits were reporting and ease of use.  What’s interesting to us is that executives that responded were half as likely to cite reporting as a benefit and 30-40% of all users wanted to see decision making and efficiency improved in the system. 

This means that we need to help our users harness the power of that information in their system so we can help you and your stakeholders make a successful move to a broader view of your foundations giving.

In addition, we are seeing more and more stakeholders interested in viewing their foundation information on a mobile device or remotely on their laptops, so they can have that anytime anywhere access to their real-time data to help them make decisions.  More and more foundation leaders are turning to mobile devices to inform them of their giving.

Foundation Management, things to consider

http://www.comerica.com/Comerica_Content/Wealth_Management/Trust_Services/Charitable%20Services/Managing%20a%20Family%20Charitable%20Foundation.pdf

Mobile Giving

http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/commentary/co_item.jhtml?id=351500004