Let’s Not Focus Simply on Size of Buffett’s Gift

When Warren Buffett announced that he was committing more than $30-billion to the Bill & Melinda

Gates Foundation, his stupendous act of generosity commanded prominent news coverage around the world.

As wonderful as it is to see reporters all over the globe devoting their energies to this monumental event, an important ingredient has been missing from much of the coverage. That is the opportunity for a closer examination of the practice of philanthropy in America, a still widely misunderstood element of civil society.

Part of the blame for this rests with foundations themselves. For many years foundations were tight-lipped about how they worked and what they were trying to accomplish — often because donors didn’t want to engage in what to them appeared to be self-promotion.

Unfortunately, as history shows, silence, regardless of the motivation, sometimes is viewed as secrecy, not humility.

So, to remedy that, foundations — for at least the last two decades — have actively engaged in a range of public-information and awareness efforts. In recent years, more and more professionals have been hired to oversee increasingly sophisticated communications operations at foundations, bringing with them the kinds of activities that businesses have long practiced and adapting them to the nonprofit world. Today, annual reports, Web sites, newsletters, and active efforts to work with the news media are the mainstay of foundations both large and small.

Yet a recent study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and conducted by FoundationWorks, an independent organization that promotes effective use of communications to advance philanthropic causes, found a steady increase in news coverage of foundations from 1990 to 2005.

However, the primary thrust of most articles has been about the amount of money foundations have awarded individually and collectively. Conversely, the report found that “expressions of the benefit or impact of the funding philanthropy are barely visible among news stories about philanthropy over the last 15 years.”

Part of the reason that the news media, or the public for that matter, aren’t paying deep enough attention to what foundations are trying to do with their money could be because people who work for philanthropic entities typically refer to themselves as grant makers and say their primary work is grant making. When they do that — for shorthand or out of habit — they, too, are contributing to the perception that there’s little more to their stories than that they give away money.

At the same time, the fact that foundations make grants all the time provides an easy excuse for reporters to pass on an announcement of an award, and especially the opportunity to ask more about its purpose. Too often, one grant seems just like another. Or as one editor once quipped when being told about a grant announcement: “Call me back when you’re announcing you aren’t making any more grants. That will be news.”

Clearly there’s more going on than gets attention in most mainstream news coverage.

The missions of foundations all involve bettering people’s lives. They focus on a wide array of concerns, such as eradicating and controlling disease, dealing with both the causes and effects of poverty, increasing access to high-quality education, and much more. But more important, the grant choices they make and the money they invest are intended to achieve specific and, where and when possible, measurable results.

There’s hardly a better example of that than the Gates Foundation itself. In a few short years the foundation has won a well-deserved reputation for high-impact philanthropy — taking risks, effecting change in key areas, failing in instructive ways in others, actually changing things in some places.

Why isn’t that part of the story getting more attention? Why can’t reporters and new commentators get beyond their fixation with the size of the gift and begin serious discussions about what this money can do?

A more thorough analysis of the Buffett announcement, for example, might suggest that $30-billion is a nice down payment toward bettering the world, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to make the kind of impact that is needed.

When reporters cover the business world, they produce articles when new products or strategies are announced, when money is made or lost, and when companies grow or fail. And in between the coverage of those developments, enormous attention is paid to the types of businesses they are, what underlies the decisions companies make, and what they could do to become more successful.

That same approach should guide philanthropy coverage. Reporters should be encouraged to provide in-depth and analytic coverage about the underlying problems in society that foundations are trying to solve, the likely results of their investments, and follow-up coverage about what did or didn’t happen.

As the FoundationWorks study put it: “If there were more stories about what is being accomplished or achieved by philanthropy, there could be more public discussion and understanding of the role foundation philanthropy plays to solve problems and make the world a better place.”

Obviously if we expect the news media to conduct more in-depth reporting and produce more thoughtful analysis of foundation activities, then those responsible for communicating about the work of foundations must help reporters and editors see the bigger picture, and that it’s not just about the size of a grant.

For instance, as the authors of the FoundationWorks study and others have suggested, when foundations announce that they are supporting new efforts, their news releases should routinely be more explicit about the goals, expected achievements, what success will look like, and when they will be able to demonstrate whether that effort is working (or not). By doing that, reporters might be encouraged to focus more on the potential results of a grant, rather than the fact (or size) of the award itself to the exclusion of all else.

In that same vein, routine progress reports about what’s being done, and what’s being achieved — even learned — over the course of the project, instead of waiting until it’s over, would keep the news media (and the public, too) focused on the work.

Given the emphasis that the Gateses and Mr. Buffett put on results, it seems certain that their philanthropies and their grantees would welcome a discussion of what that money can do, how it will be spent, and how they’ll monitor and measure the impact of their investments, and report what is accomplished and learned.

Let’s hope they will lead an effort to encourage the news media to engage in a thorough and full discussion of the mechanics — and potential promise — of philanthropy. Then the question will be: Is the news media willing to listen? And will the public be better served?

Grant Oliphant, a vice president of the Heinz Endowments, in Pittsburgh, is chair of the Communications Network, and Bruce S. Trachtenberg is executive director of the network, an organization that represents communications officials at foundations.