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Blogs continued
Social Edge
www.socialedge.org/blogs/
A collection of blogs by and for social
entrepreneurs can be found at this SKOLL
FOUNDATION project, headed by Victor
D’Allant.
Social Entrepreneurship
socialentrepreneurship.change.org
NATHANIEL WHITTEMORE’s blog at
change.org.
Stanford Social Innovation Review
Opinion Blog
www.ssireview.org/opinion/
SSIR’s forum for leading thinkers on civil
society, philanthropy, program effectiveness,
and more.
Tactical Philanthropy
www.tacticalphilanthropy.com
Sean Stannard-Stockton discusses
philanthropy and chronicles “The Second
Great Wave of Philanthropy.”
Uncivil Society
uncivilsociety.org
By JEFF TREXLER, Wilson Professor of Social
Entrepreneurship at Pace University.
VA£U€$
www.philanthrocapitalism.net
MATTHEW BISHOP and MICHAEL GREEN
are co-authors of Philanthrocapitalism:
How the Rich Can Save the World.
White Courtesy Telephone
postcards.typepad.com/white_
telephone/
News, opinion, and commentary from inside
the Third Sector, by Greater New Orleans
Foundation President, ALBERT RUESGA.
Wise Philanthropy
wisephilanthropy.blogspot.com
RICHARD MARKER, senior fellow in
philanthropy at NYU’s Heyman Center
for Philanthropy and Fundraising, facilitates
a conversation about current issues in the
donor and funder community.
Online Reports
New Realities, New Opportunities: Impact,
Transparency, and Diversity
As foundations grapple with the effects of the economic
crisis on their endowments, their grantees, and society at
large, the need to measure impact and performance in
meeting urgent needs comes into sharper focus. Of the
thousands of reports published and/or funded by foundations in
2009, we highlight here a selection of publications that address
the issues of impact, transparency, and diversity (see inset).
New Financial Realities: The Response of
Private Foundations (Commonwealth
Fund) surveys the damage to foundation
endowments, offers lessons learned in
endowment management, and considers
the implications for spending plans
and program strategies — especially for
perpetual social improvement foundations
such as the Commonwealth Fund
that must work closely with grantees to
design projects likely to produce results
and to communicate those results to
policy audiences.
How, then, should foundations measure
impact? Breakthroughs in Shared
Measurement and Social Impact (FSG Social
Impact Advisors) considers an array of
shared measurement platforms, comparative
performance systems, and adaptive
learning systems that enable social enterprises
not only to measure outcomes
and report performances across multiple
organizations but also to coordinate
their efforts. Doing Good Today and Better
Tomorrow: A Roadmap to High Impact
Philanthropy Through Outcome-Focused
Grantmaking (William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation) discusses lessons learned
about designing a portfolio of grants to
ensure maximum impact as well as its
challenges, including a lack of data, complex
modeling requirements, and hardto-quantify
value judgments.
What makes an organization strategic?
In Essentials of Foundation Strategy,
the Center for Effective Philanthropy
explores the defining characteristics of
strategic foundation leaders: an external
orientation to their decision making and
a focus on logical connections between
resource use and achievement of goals.
The James Irvine Foundation and the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have
been developing their own measurements
for organizational performance,
as seen in their 2008 Assessment Report
(Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) and
2008 Annual Performance Report (James
Irvine Foundation), respectively.
Grantee perception reports represent
one external indicator of organizational
performance, and Aiming for
Excellence at the Wallace Foundation: Update
(Center for Effective Philanthropy)
highlights improvements in the Wallace
Foundation’s grantee relationships following
changes made based on an earlier
grantee perception report.
If publicly reporting on program
effectiveness and assessments by grantees
and experts are essential elements
of transparency, diversity increasingly is
seen as an essential element of program
effectiveness. In Diversity in Action:
Strategies With Impact (Rockefeller
Philanthropy Advisors; Council on
58 | Philanthropy Annual 2009