Don’t Cut Spending on Communications

By JOANNE EDGAR

In the last few years, foundations have grown in both numbers and assets, and yet the grant-making world’s unbounded optimism of just six months ago is now shaken by rocky economic indicators and receding assets. This uncertainty has led to the inevitable discussions about cuts in grant making and administrative budgets. But one expense, communications activities, should not be on the chopping block.

Smart communications policies are an integral part of effective grant making and should be a major portion of every foundation’s work, even during hard times.

Only in the last decade have foundations begun to put significant resources into communicating. They are learning how best to tailor their communications efforts to support the goals of their programs. Some foundations are making major investments in efforts to evaluate the influence of their communications activities. And they are just getting to the stage where they can show some results from those investments.

The California Wellness Foundation, for example, undertook a 10-year grant-making program that focuses on preventing violence against youth. Included is a multimillion-dollar public-education campaign, a goal of which is to reframe handgun violence as a public-health issue and shift the focus from youth as perpetrators of violence to youth as victims of violence.

The foundation’s grantees developed a series of communications activities, including public-opinion surveys, paid advertising, news-media relations, special events, and more.

The campaign is still a work in progress, but already the California legislature and an array of localities in the state have passed some of the toughest gun-control laws in the country. Public opinion in the state has changed, and the legislature is spending more money on violence prevention than ever before.

Had the foundation cut back on its commitment to communicate, would this project have worked as well? Would it have been as successful if the foundation did fewer checks of public opinion to help shape its messages? Would it have reached as many people if it had eliminated paid television ads — a forum in which the foundation could control air time and audience — and relied only on free public-service ads that tend to run haphazardly in the middle of the night? I doubt it.

The California Wellness Foundation’s communications strategy in this effort was inseparable from its mission and grant-making goals. Community and corporate foundations have always understood that approach. They communicate early and often, focusing on the visibility of their institutions as a necessary way to raise money or highlight their corporate images. Communication is a natural priority for them, one that is unlikely to change even if their assets decline.

The larger private foundations that have pioneered strategic communications — groups such as California Wellness, Casey, Kellogg, Mott, Pew, Robert Wood Johnson, and Rockefeller, to name a few — are also likely to remain committed to integrating communications activities into the mainstream of their grant making regardless of what happens with their assets. But for smaller foundations and those that are more recent converts to the power of communicating, concern about the bottom line may tempt them to snip activities here or there — or worse, to bypass communications altogether.

What opportunities might they miss if they do so? Here are some hypothetical scenarios.

• A foundation has successfully supported model child-welfare programs in three sites. Each project includes a communications component designed to reach out to local leaders and residents. Program officers want to expand to another six sites, but don’t believe they have the funds to retain the communications component. If they make that choice, they will lose the ammunition — the public awareness and documentation — needed for success in the new sites.

  What’s more, they will lose the lessons and examples needed to take the effort far beyond the model sites. They might even lose the opportunity to gain new dollars and partners that could arise if the visibility of successful programs attracts the attention of other foundations or the corporate world. This foundation would be better off expanding to fewer sites and increasing its communications activities for maximum visibility and impact.

• A foundation that supports parents’ involvement in education improvement decides to eliminate public-opinion and focus-group surveys, or do them only at the end of a grant-making cycle. Members of the grant maker’s staff will miss the opportunity to get help in shaping powerful, convincing messages. And they will not have a base line with which to judge the success of their communications activities when the work is finished.
• A foundation wants to cut administrative costs and decides to cut back on employees. Because outside consultants can often be hired to do the foundation’s communications work, a communications staff position is dropped. But without a skilled internal staff member to work as a liaison between the foundation and its outside consultants, the grant maker risks diminishing the quality of its communications activities.
• A foundation has just poured big dollars into its Web site, but wants to save money and staff time by simply copying onto the Web everything it produces in print, with no special attention to length, language, or usefulness to readers. The foundation risks losing regular contact with people who can make a difference to the success of its work. This is a particularly crucial oversight if the foundation seeks to become an information source for journalists, who have little patience with cumbersome, long-winded Web sites.

Those are just some of the pitfalls that foundations could encounter if they are too quick to cut their communications budget.

At the same time, any foundation, regardless of the economy or the size of its assets, needs to be smart about its communications strategies. That means spending wisely and linking every communications activity directly to the foundation’s goals, evaluating the work, and applying the lessons.

Foundations of all sizes can also maximize their communications budgets by joining forces with other grant makers. Together, they can support a series of issue-oriented meetings, at which program and communications officers join grantees and consultants to share market research, jargon-busting techniques, evaluation guidelines, and more. After the meetings, the larger participating foundations can coach smaller ones in communications techniques.

One other caution about cutting communications budgets: Besides seeking to maintain their visibility and influence in the face of an economic decline, foundations should maintain their communications spending out of a sense of duty to the causes that they serve. With declining revenues, some states are facing shortfalls in money for education, child-welfare, and Medicaid programs. While foundation programs can never take the place of government services, grant makers can invest in potential solutions that help to maintain a safety net for the poor and seek new ways to reduce poverty.

They won’t make that difference, however, if they do not include communications as an integral part of their grant making and share what they learn about it.

Joanne Edgar is a New York-based communications consultant. She was formerly director of communications at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.