February 3, 2014 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Updated February 7, 2014.
The online world is full of anonymous opinions: Diners review restaurants, students rate professors, patients evaluate doctors.
Now fundraisers are getting their turn. A new website, Inside Philanthropy, is asking them to “Speak Truth to Money” and say what they really think about foundations, program officers, and philanthropists.
“Have you ever wanted to give constructive feedback to a funder without risking the relationship?” the site asks. “Or wondered whether other grant applicants have the same experiences with a funder that you do? Well, Inside Philanthropy’s Rate a Funder community is here to help.”
Anonymous Ratings
The anonymous-ratings feature is part of a broader effort by the online venture’s founder, David Callahan, to penetrate philanthropy’s inner sanctums.
“You can find out more about what people think about the laundromat down the street than what grantees think about the Ford Foundation in the age of Yelp,” says Mr. Callahan, who in December left his position as senior fellow at Demos, a liberal think tank that he co-founded in 1999, to devote himself full time to his new project.
Inside Philanthropy offers news items, blogs, and tips about 32 causes, along with detailed and colorful profiles of program officers, tech philanthropists, Wall Street donors, and others.
A sample profile—of Ben Cameron, a program officer at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation—reads: “Cameron is a superstar philanthropist and personality in the performing arts. When he isn’t jet-setting or entertaining a crowd, he’s overseeing the ‘largest allocation of cash grants ever given to jazz, dance, and theater artists.’”
The for-profit venture—which will focus heavily on philanthropy in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area—sells subscriptions for $29.95 a month or $295.95 a year, though readers without a subscription can post reviews or view up to 10 items on the site each month.
A Frustrated Fundraiser
Mr. Callahan, who has been quietly building the site for more than a year, put up his own money to get Inside Philanthropy off the ground—and designed and constructed the website himself. He gets help from 11 editors in areas like arts, health, and science who Mr. Callahan says have agreed to work for minimal compensation until he can afford to pay “real salaries.”
With plans to sell advertising and job listings, he says he hopes he can make a living within a year.
Mr. Callahan traces his interest in philanthropy to his childhood, when he watched his father raise money for a bioethics think tank. In the 1990s, he wrote about the role of foundations in promoting liberal and conservative causes and in 2010 authored the book Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America.
He says the Inside Philanthropy project evolved from the frustration he faced raising money for Demos. The Nathan Cummings Foundation helped create the think tank, and Stephen Heintz, now president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was founding president.
“We were about as well connected as you can get in the foundation world,” Mr. Callahan says. “But I was still often mystified about basic questions like who to talk to. Or it says on their website they’re funding that, but you hear they’re no longer funding that.”
While his publication is geared to grant seekers, Mr. Callahan says it should help foundations, too, by weeding out inappropriate applications. Unlike a foundation website, Inside Philanthropy can say: “This program officer will not in a million years fund your rinky-dink grassroots organization. This program officer is the type who only gives to big global NGOs.”
In fact, Mr. Callahan seems to be going out of his way to ease whatever paranoia might exist at groups unused to such scrutiny. The “rate a funder” box on his site’s home page urges reviewers to “be nice.”
“We know pulling back the curtain on grant making and sharing the inside scoop on decision makers like yourselves will at times be uncomfortable,” the site says in a “message to funders.” But, he adds, “we will not dish the dirt,” and “there will be no petty name-calling here.”
Filling a Niche
Inside Philanthropy joins a market for foundation news that already includes The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Foundation Center, and GrantStation, all of which publish information about grants and news about grant makers. But Mr. Callahan sees a niche for a site providing more “inside” information, such as the email addresses of program officers. Not everyone is thrilled by that idea. Mr. Callahan says one foundation asked him to replace the direct addresses with its institutional email address— but he declined.
“Publicly available staff email addresses have become a transparency norm for any number of major institutions, from the U.S. Congress to the Fortune 500 companies to The New York Times to most of the nonprofits that foundations fund,” he says.
One foundation complains that Inside Philanthropy’s description of it is full of mistakes. Wendy Garen, head of the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, says profiles of the foundation and of two program officers include both factual errors, for example about the size of its endowment and the types of grants it awards, and bad advice about how to apply for money.
For example, she says the site reports that one of the program officers is in charge of arts grants, when in fact the four people who review grant applications are all generalists who work on a variety of portfolios.
“This is shocking that they’re charging for something where they’re literally making something up,” she says.
Mr. Callahan says other foundations have called him about mistakes and “we correct them immediately.” He says he spoke to Ms. Garen and plans to revise the Parsons entries.
He adds that Inside Philanthropy sent questionnaires to all program officers the site planned to profile asking for information. It followed up with emails, asking for help in fixing mistakes in the written blurbs, he says. “Our response rate for that was astonishingly low.”
Future Plans
Inside Philanthropy, which has just a handful of subscriptions so far, is about to start a marketing push. If the site succeeds, Mr. Callahan says, he hopes to add investigative reporting and coverage of global philanthropy to the mix.
Joel Orosz, a retired professor at Grand Valley State University who has written books about grant seeking and foundation management, says lack of public accountability to their “customers” has made foundations “arrogant, lazy, and unresponsive.” Inside Philanthropy, he says, could “expose a lot of dreadful foundation practices to the disinfecting qualities of sunlight.”
Phil Buchanan, head of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which does confidential surveys of grantees for foundations, says “it was inevitable” that someone would start a ratings system like Mr. Callahan’s.
“There’s a sense among a lot of folks that foundations have sort of been immune from the kind of feedback that others receive routinely,” he says. But the challenge will be to get a meaningful sample of reviews, he says. “If one person has a negative interaction with one person, what does that mean?”
Mr. Callahan says he is aware of that challenge, so the site will start by integrating reviews into its profiles of grant makers, rather than posting them “in a freestanding way.” But, he says, “that is likely to change later when we have a critical mass.”
