May 4, 2006 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The Council on Foundations next week will honor 91 grant makers for outstanding materials designed to inform the public about their work.
The 22nd annual Wilmer Shields Rich Awards for Excellence in Communications, named after the organization’s first executive director, will go to foundations that have created innovative annual or biennial reports, magazines and periodicals, information campaigns, special reports, and Web sites.
A record 255 organizations submitted entries for the competition, among them many small foundations and first-time entrants. The council will hand out 112 awards to organizations selected by a committee of 80 judges.
Among the gold-prize winners in the Web-site category is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which redesigned its site last year. The Princeton, N.J., grant maker wanted to give grant seekers more-comprehensive information about which types of projects it supports, so it created slideshows with audio footage that tell the stories of previous grant recipients’ work.
About 100,000 people visit the foundation’s Web site each month — an increase of nearly 100 percent since the redesign.
The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation also won top honors after it revamped its Web site to make it more accessible to grant seekers and others. The Little Rock, Ark., foundation recognized that few of its visitors had high-speed Internet access, so it minimized the use of flash and newer programs that depend on a fast connection, while still providing detailed information about its work to readers.
Other winning Web sites include the online home of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, in Washington, which took a silver award. The site provides a variety of information, including links to other grant makers working on similar causes and educational opportunities for nonprofit staff members.
The Headwaters Foundation for Justice, in Minneapolis, used a brochure to illustrate the grant maker’s mission for potential donors. The postcard-sized pamphlet featured a hole drilled out of the center of each page, highlighting the foundation’s efforts to “poke holes” in the notion that providing social services is the most that can be done to help society. The foundation promotes structural change to solve problems like injustice and poverty. Recent grantees include aMaze, a Minneapolis group that teaches children the importance of being tolerant.
The fall 2005 issue of the Lumina Foundation for Education’s magazine, Lumina Foundation Focus, won a silver award for its cover article on spiraling college costs. The Indianapolis foundation timed the story to coincide with the announcement of a new program to make college education more affordable and a national meeting on the topic held in Washington. The foundation’s staff members stocked the event with copies of the magazine and brought them to meetings with journalists and lawmakers.
In the annual-report category, the Tow Foundation, in Wilton, Conn., won a gold award for a report that featured a photo essay showing stark, black-and-white photographs of children in the juvenile-justice system. The images were coupled with a narrative describing the children and the problems they face.
“We have really tried to pick a few very targeted statements, facts, statistics, things that will hopefully shock people into having a little more concern or care about a population that they might not even know about,” says Emily Tow Jackson, the foundation’s executive director and a trustee.
The report helped reaffirm to lawmakers and advocates the foundation’s expertise in juvenile justice: Staff members are regularly invited to participate in state and city commissions to discuss mental-health services, youth violence, and ways to improve the juvenile-justice system.
The Winston-Salem Foundation, in North Carolina, found a way to encourage generosity among donors with its 2004 annual report. The report, which received a gold prize, included a “generosity card” to be given to recipients of anonymous acts of kindness in hopes that they would pass the card along to others in performing their own acts of generosity.
