February 7, 2011 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Too often, foundations don’t get as much out of a research grant as they could. That’s because grantees and foundations don’t distill the lessons in ways that organizations can easily find out about and apply to their day-to-day work and conversations.
But now some grant makers are collaborating with nonprofit organizations to take different approaches. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company, in Chicago, chose to make public the results of a new report on attracting and engaging theatergoers in their 20s for the benefit of other organizations facing the same challenges.
The Nonprofit Finance Fund provided assistance in this effort and asked the report’s author, Patricia Martin, to organize and publicize the findings in the report through interactive social-media channels used by creators and consumers of culture.
I asked Ms. Martin, who is author of RenGen, Renaissance Generation: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business, to discuss how grant makers can do more online to extend the benefits of the research they finance.
Here’s her guest post:
Every year more than 7,800 grants are made in the United States to finance research to find solutions to critical social problems. The culminating intellectual property from these investments is usually a written report.
What happens next?
More often than not, these reports gather dust on a shelf. But translating research and final reports into digital, easy-to-download form can maximize the number of charities that can benefit from the information.
Here are two examples of this approach in action:
* As Ms. Thomas noted, the Nonprofit Finance Fund and Steppenwolf Theatre Company, with financing from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, collaborated to share the findings of a study on the best approaches to engage young people.
Executives at world-class companies such as Ford Motor, Google, Red Bull, and Starbucks opened their marketing playbooks to help Steppenwolf learn from their experiments.
Taking a page from the findings, we didn’t produce a 200-page bound report to sit on a shelf. Instead, we transformed the report into a punchy electronic book, broken down into themed micro-reports made available on a dedicated Web site.
It’s too soon to know the full expanse of our reach, but early traffic patterns show that designing the material so it could be easily featured in tweets, blogs, Facebook pages, and other social media is paying off in pass-alongs around the world.
* The Finra Investor Education Foundation found a way to spread the information gleaned from its financial-literacy grants to public libraries. By creating the Web site http://smartinvesting.ala.org/ on a blogging platform, the grantees and other charities doing similar work were able to interact and tell their stories in an intimate environment.
Case studies of grantees leapt off the page and prompted conversations. For instance, one the library invited local women to start a retirement-planning club hoping to attract boomers and beyond and ended up creating a network that attracted more than 200 women, some as young as 22.
This and other stories on the Web site were accompanied by templates and tools to make it easier for libraries around the country to copy projects that had already succeeded elsewhere.
There is something transformative about the process of sharing what we’ve learned using interactive media. First and foremost, it makes it easy to spread social progress quickly.
It also creates communities around shared ideals when people can comment on and exchange their stories. Unleashing the information held captive in file drawers may create a wave of innovation, turning private foundations into public agents for change in a digital culture.
Money is tight, but information is elastic. It’s time to view the lessons grantees learn as a dynamic resource to spark innovation. Think of it as social research and development that can magnify the impact of philanthropic dollars.
