Foundation Center Lays Off 14% of Staff as It Moves to Give Grant Seekers More Data Faster

The Foundation Center, a nonprofit research group that provides data on grant making to foundations and charities, has cut 14 percent of its staff amid a multiyear overhaul of its technology systems. The goal of the effort is to provide grant seekers and others faster and more comprehensive information on giving trends.

The layoffs took place in February, Bradford Smith, president of the Foundation Center told The Chronicle. They included the elimination of 23 positions, two of which were vacant. The majority of the positions were in the center’s data and technology-strategy division.

“We knew when we set out on this it would involve some hard decisions along the way,” Mr. Smith said. “This is one of them.”

The staff count at the Foundation Center, based in New York, now stands at 143.

Mr. Smith said that the cuts were planned by Foundation Center executives and trustees and that they are part of a decade-long strategic overhaul of the organization that was set in motion in 2011. It includes expanding beyond the group’s annual foundation directory, for years a core part of its business, to provide more customized and sophisticated data sets, analysis, and visualizations.

Central to that plan — titled Foundation Center 2020 — is modernizing the center’s data system and the technology it relies on. To that end, the Foundation Center secured $21 million in funding and hired new staff.

New technology adopted last year has already vastly changed operations. For example, the staff used to hand code 250,000 foundation grants every year with tags such as “population group” and “strategy” to help streamline searches. The new database processed 470,000 grants in two weeks.

New System in Place

To ensure the transition from old to new technology went smoothly, the organization kept employees experienced with the old system for the past year, Mr. Smith said. Once it saw that the new system was stable, it needed to reduce its head count.

Last month’s layoffs are not the first for Mr. Smith. He took the helm of the Foundation Center in 2008, just weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession. Grants and other revenue tumbled, and in 2009 Mr. Smith trimmed his staff by 12 percent.

This year, the Foundation Center has a budget of $26.4 million, he said, a figure that includes $2.4 million in special funding raised to execute the 10-year strategic plan. In 2015, the budget was $30.7 million, including $7.8 million in special funding.

While the numbers fluctuate year to year, a little more than half the organization’s annual revenue comes from fees it charges people who buy its foundation directory and other products. The balance comes from more than 500 corporations and grant makers that want the public to better understand foundation and corporate giving.