75 Foundations Honored for Outstanding Communications Materials

The Council on Foundations this week honored 75 foundations for creating outstanding annual and biennial reports, newsletters, public-information campaigns, special reports, and Web sites.

The 23rd annual Wilmer Shields Rich Awards — named for the council’s first executive director, who led the organization from 1957 until 1968 — provided 102 prizes to grant makers for their “comprehensive, integrated, targeted, and well-timed” communications materials.

A committee of judges chose the winners from the 173 submissions this year.

Among the winners:

• The Headwaters Foundation for Justice, in Minneapolis, won a gold award for a campaign to publicize its annual Walk for Justice, which it holds as a fund-raising event for small grass-roots groups in Minnesota.

  Hoping to increase both the number of people who participated in the walk and the amount they raised, the group asked the beneficiaries of last year’s race to write stories of their experiences and explain why they were participating again.

  The Headwaters Foundation sent the stories, along with pictures, to news-media outlets, garnering four interviews and about a dozen articles.

  As a result of the campaign — which also included advertisements, posters, flyers, and mailings — the Walk for Justice broke its own records: The number of organizations that signed up to benefit from the walk was 30-percent higher and the amount raised was its highest ever, by 15 percent.

• The Foundation for Appalachian Ohio’s “I’m a Child of Appalachia” campaign, which won a silver award, strove to promote education in a region where educational achievement and ambitions have been lower than in the rest of the state.

  Recognizing that storytelling is an important part of Appalachian culture, the Nelsonville, Ohio, foundation created a campaign to share success stories of former and current residents of the impoverished region.

  The foundation produced classroom materials, mailings, and advertisements, and ran an essay contest for middle- and high-school students, all with the goal of broadcasting a message of pride in Appalachia and in education.

  As part of the campaign, the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio began a partnership with Ohio University to promote a new scholarship program for academically talented students.

  Additionally, winners of the essay contest received savings bonds and grants from the community foundation to help pay for their education. All those efforts attracted considerable press attention, the foundation said.

• The Skoll Foundation, in Palo Alto, Calif., won a gold award for its annual report, which was designed to look like a photo album (complete with a cover that looks like aged leather), and included photographs and profiles of its grantees.
• The Ruth Mott Foundation, in Flint, Mich., won a silver award for its 2001-5 special report, the first the six-year-old organization has ever issued. Organized around a theme of “connection,” the foundation included several photographs of grantees and beneficiaries with their arms spread wide open to suggest they were joining in a circle.
• The Charlevoix County Community Foundation, in East Jordan, Mich., won a gold award for a colorful annual report that features pop-art images and photographs.

  With “Make Your Mark” as the theme, motifs of fingerprints and barcodes are repeated throughout the report, which includes stories of how donors’ giving benefited the foundation and local charities.

A full list of the winners is available here.