Honoring Grant Makers for Communicating About Their Work

The Council on Foundations will present 55 awards this week to honor grant makers

that have created exceptional materials aimed at educating the public about their work.

The 17th annual Wilmer Shields Rich Awards for Excellence in Communications, named after the council’s first executive director, will be given at the council’s annual meeting, in Los Angeles.

Every year the awards recognize outstanding annual reports and Internet sites. Awards in other categories are given in alternate years. Additional categories honored this year include guidelines for grant seekers, magazines and other periodicals, and public-information campaigns. In alternate years, awards are given for special reports and newsletters.

Among the winners is Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania/Maryland for developing a comprehensive campaign to promote opera, ballet, music, and other performing-arts programs in the Pittsburgh area. The campaign, which included inserts in the company’s bills as well as advertisements and materials to encourage teachers to take their students to performances, is credited with significantly increasing the number of people who took advantage of the offerings of local arts groups.

In addition to award winners in the competition’s main categories, a special recognition award is being given to the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving for a book called Here to Help. Here to Stay. The book documents the history of philanthropy in the Hartford, Conn., area, through more than 100 black-and-white photographs and profiles of donors and grantees. Each of the chapters, which appear in chronological order, contains historical data on employment, housing, and news of the time to help put the contributions made by philanthropy into perspective.

More than 200 entries were submitted to this year’s competition, and were reviewed by more than 50 judges with expertise in communications, publication design, and philanthropy. Winners were chosen for their basic concepts as well as for being clearly written, well organized, attractively designed, and useful.