December 10, 2015 | Read Time: 9 minutes
ST. PAUL, MINN.
A group of nonprofit fundraisers, all good friends, have gathered for drinks, and the discussion turns to a local foundation.
“We would love to get money from them,” one says, “but we don’t really know how to break in. Any advice?”
“To be honest,” one friend replies, “unless you have a good connection with someone on the staff who’s given you the green light, it’s probably not worth your time.”
“If you do apply, get ready for the buzzwords,” another says. “They love to use words like ‘innovation’ and ‘inspire.’ But it’s not clear what they actually mean. And they embody an almost old-world philanthropy that focuses far too much on themselves, their staff, their board, and egos.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” a third friend chimes in. “I’ve had good luck working with them. I like their ideology and their direction.”
What if, instead of sharing such observations privately over drinks, grant seekers recorded them online for others to see?
People review charities on GreatNonprofits, restaurants on Yelp, companies on Glassdoor, hotels on TripAdvisor, home-repair companies on Angie’s List — and just about every other entity somewhere. Foundations have so far mostly escaped such public scrutiny, but now their time has come.
Meet GrantAdvisors.org, an embryonic online review site that asks grant seekers, grantees, foundation employees, and others to describe their experiences working with foundations: Were their guidelines helpful, their staff members receptive, their reporting requirements reasonable? And, in the end, would you recommend working with them?
Breaking Down Walls
In fact, all of the comments above were made (in slightly different form) about a real Minnesota foundation by reviewers who filled out a survey that the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits posted in October to test the GrantAdvisors concept. The Minnesota group is working with the California Association of Nonprofits (CalNonprofits), GreatNonprofits, and others to get the new site off the ground in several geographical areas in 2016.
The project aims to open up the often-mysterious world of grant making by encouraging insiders to share information that could help others, and to provide honest feedback to foundations about their operations — something not always easy to do given the power imbalance between those seeking money and those controlling the purse strings.
“It’s really difficult for fundraisers to raise honest concerns about funders, or even to talk about, if you like, the responsiveness, the customer service, the support that funders give them,” says Andrew Watt, chief executive of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, who is advising GrantAdvisors.
Jan Masaoka, chief executive of CalNonprofits, likens grant seeking to penetrating a castle. Some nonprofits are already inside the castle, she says, perhaps “because their predecessors got into the castle.” But others lob their grant application “over the castle wall, not knowing where it hits.”
Each group is seeking different kinds of information, she says. “The people who are in the castle wall are more interested in talking about, How is the funder affecting the field?,” she says. “People outside the castle are like, How do I get them to return my calls?”
The GrantAdvisors project is part of a growing movement to break through foundation bubbles. The Center for Effective Philanthropy conducts interviews with grantees, donors, and rejected applicants to help foundations assess their performance. Inside Philanthropy, a website that offers news and analysis about foundations and major donors, debuted last year. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog, in 2014 started Philamplify, a program that produces comprehensive public assessments about the operations of individual foundations.
Limited Interest in the Past
Previous efforts to get people to post public reviews have faltered. Inside Philanthropy invited readers to “Speak Truth to Money” and post what they really thought about foundations, program officers, and philanthropists.
But out of almost 500,000 people who visited the site during its first year, fewer than three dozen posted anonymous reviews, prompting the publication to phase out that feature.
“Why have people been mum, when we all know there’s enormous pent-up frustration with funders?” David Callahan, the publication’s founder, wrote last January. “That’s a good question. Fear seems like the most obvious explanation. But I think another factor is that people are busy and overworked in nonprofits.”
Thousands of people responded candidly to Philamplify’s anonymous grantee surveys, Lisa Ranghelli and Yna Moore, the committee’s director of foundation assessment and communications director, wrote in June. However, they added, “Our efforts to engage these same folks on Philamplify.org have not taken off as we had hoped. Even with the option to post anonymously, we have seen limited use of our online platform enabling commentary on the recommendations we’ve made for each foundation we philamplified.”
The GrantAdvisors architects are aware that motivating people to post reviews is one of their key challenges.
But Perla Ni, founder of GreatNonprofits, says she thinks people will contribute to GrantAdvisors for the same reason they do to TripAdvisor and similar sites. “People want to read about other people’s experiences, and we want to share our own,” she says. “It’s very human.” The involvement of groups like the Minnesota and California nonprofit associations will help, she adds, because they are known and trusted by local charities.
GreatNonprofits — which since 2007 has been posting reviews and ratings of charities by donors, clients, volunteers, and employees — is building and hosting the GrantAdvisors site.
The project’s backers hope the effort will improve philanthropy in the same way that other review sites have kept businesses on their toes. Ms. Ni points to an academic study that found ratings of Irish hotels on TripAdvisor improved over a two-year period as the hotels responded to a growing number of reviews.
Jon Pratt, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, says participants at the council’s annual conference in October were enthusiastic about the GrantAdvisors concept. About 90 percent of 200 people who attended a session that discussed it said they would use the service, and about 70 percent said they would contribute to it.
‘Us Versus Them’ Concerns
With the potential to win a $250 Amazon gift card, more than 145 people have since answered a GrantAdvisors survey — anonymously — about the 20 most active grant makers in the state, including heavyweights like the Bush, Cargill, McKnight, Minneapolis, and Target foundations.
The survey asked open-ended questions (“If you could change one thing about the fundraising process with this funder, what would it be?”); factual ones (“What types of grants does this funder provide?”); and whimsical ones (“If this funder were a Hollywood movie, what genre would it be?,” with possible answers including “horror film,” “feel-good buddy flick,” and “comedy of errors”).
Mr. Pratt says that about 60 percent of the reviews, which have not yet been published, were positive and the rest neutral or negative.
Dominick Washington, communications director at the Bush Foundation, says his organization strongly encourages feedback from grantees, grant applicants, community members, and others, and GrantAdvisors will provide “additional data points.” However, he says he told Mr. Pratt: “I hope this doesn’t become a slam book where people pile on a foundation.”
He says his organization awards 50 percent of its money in open competitions, such as the Bush Fellowship Program and the Bush Prize for Community Innovation. “A lot of people apply. A lot of people are obviously disappointed that they didn’t get a grant.”
Mr. Washington says he favors more conversation between nonprofits and foundations but worries that a public forum like GrantAdvisors could harden the “us versus them dynamic.” He also questions whether foundations can be compared with hotels. “The hotel needs to be a place that a broad swath of people want to go to,” he says. “Many foundations have the luxury of being very particular about what types of organizations they’re working with.”
Both the Minnesota group and CalNonprofits have held focus groups of nonprofit fundraisers and others to get feedback on how to design a successful site — one that is not a magnet for vindictiveness, on one hand, or flattery, on the other.
“We don’t want to be attack dogs,” says Sheila Bayle, a fundraising consultant who attended a focus group in St. Paul last summer. “I’m a big believer in framing it in a positive way: We’re trying to change the world here and we need your help to do it because you are a barrier.”
But Ms. Masaoka says focus-group participants in California surprised her by saying that all reviews should be anonymous to avoid the opposite problem: using the opportunity to curry favor with remarks like “‘Oh, my God, they’ve got the greatest people, they’re got their priorities right.”
Guidelines in Development
GrantAdvisors says it will publish feedback publicly once it has collected 10 reviews on a foundation. Grant makers will be able to respond to reviews on the site, but the project leaders haven’t yet decided whether there will be a chance to see the comments before they are posted, Ms. Ni says.
The site will post community guidelines for appropriate speech similar to those that appear on other online review sites (banning threatening, discriminatory, or pornographic comments, for example) and set up a system for deciding whether to remove “borderline” comments at a foundation’s request, Ms. Ni says.
One grant maker has opened its pockets to support the cause. The Peery Foundation, a family foundation that awards grants to youth and family programs in the San Francisco Bay Area, last year committed $100,000 over two years to help GrantAdvisors build up the project.
“Considering how nonprofits have always been under the microscope, I always joked with Perla [Ni] that she needed to start something that rated foundations, and that we’d be happy to be guinea pigs for such an experiment,” David Peery, the managing director, said in email.
The foundation wanted to help level the playing field “between fundraisers (who are so regularly assessed and reviewed) and funders (who are seldom accountable to anyone external regarding their performance),” the executive director, Jessamyn Shams-Lau, added.
Besides Minnesota and California, the project is rolling out in Washington State. Vu Le, executive director of the Rainier Valley Corps and author of the popular blog Nonprofit With Balls, has been asking participants at executive-director happy hours in Seattle to fill out paper surveys about state grant makers. They can now review a list of foundations online.
Mr. Pratt says GrantAdvisors will eventually also seek feedback on government funding agencies.
Ms. Masaoka recalls dealing with a program officer who would ask her to buy Mary Kay cosmetics during phone calls to discuss her grant proposal. GrantAdvisors will give fundraisers a way to let foundations know about inappropriate behavior like that, she says.
“When foundations hear feedback, they get better,” she says.
