How Can Foundations Demystify Their Work?

“Opaque and inaccessible”—that’s a common charge to which most foundations are vulnerable. It’s a tiresome and irksome refrain, yet it’s one that we at the Ford Foundation and other philanthropies must acknowledge has some truth to it.

The very nature of what foundations do remains a mystery to most. In the United States, only four in 10 people can identify a foundation by name. And those who can are fuzzy about the difference between a private foundation and a charity.

For more than 15 years, we at the Ford Foundation have published a list of our grants online, along with descriptions of the grant-making programs the foundation supports. More recently, we have published details of our governance policies. This has all been available on our Web site.

Even so, we’ve discovered that a sense of mystery about our operations—and that of other foundations—remains. Our own research has shown that grantees and others who have a big stake in our work are still not clear about what we support and what drives our grant-making decisions. They want a much better understanding of the overall strategy behind each grant. In short, what do the nearly 2,000 grants we make each year add up to? And what, if anything, do we know about whether these investments make a difference?

How does a foundation that has been making grants for close to 75 years offer more clarity about its work and the results it has achieved?

The answers may be complex, but that does not mean we can keep ignoring the questions. Today, clarity must trump complexity. In the dynamic and expanding field of philanthropy, openness about strategy is currency and credibility. All of us in philanthropy need to embrace that truth and communicate clearly about our foundations’ strategies and ambitions.

That sentiment was echoed in the unveiling in February of the Foundation Center’s Glasspockets Web site, which seeks to inspire foundations to achieve a new level of openness and thereby a better understanding of what they do; in Paul Brest and Hal Harvey’s recent book, Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy, and in The Foundation: A Great American Secret: How Private Wealth Is Changing the World, a book by Joel L. Fleishman.

And it’s that sentiment that drove us at the Ford Foundation to do something at once bold and conventional (at least to people who were born into the digital era): overhaul our Web site to make our grants crystal clear. The real innovation in our new site, which made its debut today, was challenging ourselves to be as open as possible about the philosophy and strategies that inform our grant-making decisions. While we did change the look of the site, what matters most is the new way we are trying to reveal our thinking.

We’re doing this by creating a visual map. We state our grant-making objectives and strategies and directly link them to the nonprofit efforts we have financed. In some grant-making areas, you will see an emphasis on research grants, while other areas may focus on advocacy or leadership development. So rather than expecting grant seekers and others to navigate long lists of grants in our database trying to reverse engineer our grant-making rationale, we hope visitors to our site can now immediately see the strategic thinking behind every grant and how each fits within a broader body of related work.

Ford’s new site is a work in progress but we think it starts us down an important path. And as we continue to work on the site and to provide greater transparency and clarity, we ask ourselves these questions:

• Are we giving time-pressed visitors clarity about our intent, our approaches, and our grant actions in a format they can use?
• How are we creating dialogue? How can we encourage interaction among people in and out of philanthropy who need to know what we are doing—including what we are learning about what works and what does not as we seek to solve social problems?
• Are we offering value beyond our grant-application information and grants database? Is there a reason to spend time on the site?
• Where else—and how else—should we publish our content to tell our story and share our knowledge?

Like many foundations, we are tackling some of the most intractable issues facing humankind with limited resources. But we believe our commitment to transparency—not solely on our Web site but also in all our communications and interactions—can maximize those resources and help us achieve the kind of social change for which we strive. We hope grant seekers and others will debate in The Chronicle’s comment section below just what foundations can do to make their operations less mysterious.

Marta L. Tellado is vice president for communications at the Ford Foundation.