An Organization That Aids Grant Seekers Tries to Modernize

Bradford K. Smith went to graduate school just a few blocks from where he works today, in the Foundation Center’s unassuming headquarters building near Manhattan’s Union Square. But in the intervening 26 years, he has worked for the Inter-American Foundation on projects in Latin America and for the Ford Foundation in Brazil, and led the Oak Foundation, a grant maker in Switzerland started by a partner in the Duty Free Shopping empire.

Mr. Smith is now drawing on those experiences as president of the Foundation Center, a nonprofit research group that has long been a leading source of information for fund raisers and others on grant makers and their giving.

Not only has he worked to speed up delivery of the center’s data, a goal shared by his predecessor, Sara L. Engelhardt, but he hopes to expand the group’s research beyond the United States and push the organization to take on a more analytical role.

For all Mr. Smith’s ambitions, he is realistic about the center’s economic situation. He arrived at the Foundation Center on October 1, 2008, two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a global financial meltdown.

With grants and other revenue down by 15 to 20 percent this year, the Foundation Center was recently forced to trim its staff by 12 percent. Mr. Smith says he is reaching out to more people — those who advise wealthy donors, for example — in an attempt to gain new revenue and help the center remain relevant in an era when news and information are increasingly a commodity.

Returning to the ‘Roots’

Hoping to become an authority on global philanthropy, the Foundation Center has begun to seek data from grant makers outside the United States. It’s a tough task, given that nothing like the Form 990-PF — the informational tax form U.S. private foundations are required to fill out — exists in other countries.

Mr. Smith has developed a partnership with the European Foundation Centre. The two organizations plan to unveil a Web site this month illustrating how grant makers in Europe responded to the economic crisis. He anticipates more such alliances.

Another priority for Mr. Smith is promoting foundation openness, which he describes as returning the Foundation Center “to its roots.” When the group was created in 1956, it was with the goal of helping grant makers defend against McCarthy-era suspicions that their money was going to support Communist activities.

The center is creating a Web site called Glasspockets.org, a nod to a statement made by one of the group’s founders that “foundations should have glass pockets,” allowing the public to see what is inside.

The site, which Mr. Smith hopes to unveil by the end of the year, will be a place where people can go to learn more about individual foundations: what causes they support, what others think of them, efforts they have taken to explain their work.

He sees the site not as punishing foundations, but as nudging them to reveal more about their work. It will include examples of ways grant makers have shared information and invited feedback, such as the Otto Bremer Foundation’s “community listening tours.” It will also feature a checklist, and, perhaps, even a rating system.

That would surely upset some grant makers. Mr. Smith agrees the notion is a controversial one and difficult to carry out. He also says some trustees are lukewarm about the idea.

But he says foundation leaders he has spoken with about the Web site support the concept. “They feel that one way or another this is coming, and they would rather the Foundation Center do it than a lot of others out there,” he says.

Money Challenges

As Mr. Smith seeks to help the Foundation Center speed up the delivery of its data, he also wants to find new ways to display and use it. For example, the center now offers a mapping tool, Philanthropy In/Sight, which enables people to find the foundation grants that have supported the cause they care about in a specific location.

He has also been working more with other organizations, like the Council on Foundations, and federal agencies such as the Department of Education, to produce reports and Web sites that will be of immediate use to grant seekers.

Mr. Smith says he wants to continue to find ways to use the center’s data to power other group’s research on issues of current interest, even on controversial topics. The furor over the release this spring of a report by the watchdog group National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which provided guidelines for how much grant makers ought to give to poor people based on Foundation Center data, shows the kind of debate such efforts might provoke.

“I’m not at all afraid of controversy,” says Mr. Smith, adding that when he applied for the job he told trustees the Foundation Center should “mix it up” more. “The worst that will happen is people will come away with the impression that philanthropy is responsive and relevant.”

Finding the money to pay for new ventures, however, presents a major challenge.

The Foundation Center currently has 144 staff members and a budget of $20.5-million, roughly 10 percent less than it had planned for last year.

The center draws 62 percent of its support from money it earns by selling its reports and other information, and 38 percent from foundations and other grant makers.

Mr. Smith says he will pursue a “more complex mix of fee-based and free products” in the future and try to reach more grant makers and wealth advisers with the center’s products.

Lucy Bernholz, a consultant to foundations, praises the steps Mr. Smith is taking to modernize the Foundation Center. But she says his task is a tough one in an age when people demand that information be free, and ordinary people increasingly have the ability to analyze data. “Brad is very aware of how the world of data and access to data are changing, and he’s also incredibly aware of the asset that is their huge database,” says Ms. Bernholz. “But I’m not sure he has the answer, any more than I have the answer for newspapers.”

Team of Rivals

To cope with the financial challenges, Mr. Smith is seeking out partnerships with competitors and would-be rivals.

One of the first things he did in his new job was to meet with Bob Ottenhoff, president of Guidestar, a nonprofit group in Williamsburg, Va., that provides online information about charities and foundations. The two recently held a teleconference on the recession’s impact on giving and are discussing other ways to work together.

While many of the efforts are ones Mr. Smith always intended to pursue, he says the job he inherited has turned out to be different from the one he thought he was taking on before last fall’s stock-market plunge.

It’s also far different from the one his predecessor stepped into two decades ago, when print publications provided the bulk of the group’s revenue. Subscriptions to the Foundation Directory Online, its signature resource for grant seekers, have grown by 20 percent, to 12,000, since 2004. Over that same time, subscriptions to the print directory have fallen by 45 percent, to 1,650.

Mr. Smith says that looking too far into the future is difficult, given how rapidly the nonprofit world and the world of information are changing.

Asked what the Foundation Center might look like in a decade, he hesitates before settling on a few answers: The center will be less hierarchical, more diverse, and “we’ll be reminiscing about the old days of mapping data like [we do now about] that big book the Foundation Directory.”