Attitudes and Practices Concerning Effective Philanthropy

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

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Introduction

In 2003, The Urban Institute conducted a survey of 1,192 staffed grantmaking foundations in order to construct a wide-ranging and rigorous portrait of attitudes and practices concerning effective philanthropy in the foundation field today. The study was funded by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation in partnership with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO). Members of the GEO Research Task Group served as an advisory committee for the study. This report presents the results of that survey.¹

Coming at a time of growing attention to foundation performance and accountability by government, the media, the public, researchers, and funders themselves, the information in this report could not be timelier. If efforts to strengthen philanthropy are to be effective, they must be informed by reliable data on the current state of the field. This volume provides a wide array of such data. The survey results have a great deal to tell us about how foundations today see themselves, how they function, and whether they are fully functioning in ways that they feel they should be. Certain patterns that we uncovered (e.g., in the areas of communication and responsiveness) warrant very careful thought by those seeking to enhance foundation performance, and should assist funders to better appreciate and respond to public demands for greater accountability.

One way this study's findings can help strengthen foundation performance is to show the importance of avoiding broad-brush characterizations of the foundation field. While commonalities do exist, foundation practices and beliefs in fact often differ dramatically, notably among foundations of different sizes and types. Indeed, these differences are frequent and substantial enough that it would be misleading to present aggregate findings for the foundation field as a whole. This report, therefore, details findings separately for different categories of foundations according to their size, type, region, and geographical area served. Moreover, this report offers a typology of effectiveness frameworks that we developed, frameworks that cut across demographic characteristics and have profound influences for the individual practices foundations choose to undertake. In short, discussions and debates about effectiveness must recognize variations in the field and target comments and proposals accordingly. In sum, this report is intended to serve the following major purposes:

• Advance the field's discussion of effectiveness by clarifying the concept of "effectiveness," offering a typology of effectiveness frameworks, and recognizing that effectiveness has multiple components and usages;
• Provide foundation staff and leaders with a detailed overview of how their peers strive for more effective grantmaking, including practices that may be useful in their own efforts;
• Present findings indicating that substantial numbers of foundations are not engaging in practices that, according to their own standards, are important to effectiveness;
• Convey findings highlighting the need for foundations and those seeking to strengthen them to carefully consider their current levels of awareness and responsiveness to external parties (e.g., the media, grantees, the general public);
• Point out the need for foundations to think about the purposes for which they collect information and how they can utilize information they do collect and connect it to their mission and goals;
• Underscore the need to incorporate the role and significance of donors into discussions of effectiveness;
• Provide benchmark data that can be used to track changes in foundation practices over time in order to assess the impact of efforts to strengthen philanthropy; and
• Allow those seeking to foster more effective philanthropy to identify and target their efforts on areas of greatest need.

Given these goals, our purpose is to get the most information out to the field as possible. The degree of response to the survey, expressions of interest in our results, and growing levels of attention to effectiveness issues in the field testify to a widespread desire for information relevant to improving effectiveness. Accordingly, this is a highly data-intensive report. Detailed tables enable readers to focus on results for categories of foundations that may be particularly relevant to them. After presenting a voluminous amount of data and a typology of effectiveness frameworks developed to help us understand these data, the report offers a set of more general initial observations. Mining and analyzing these voluminous data to more fully develop the extensive analytic and practical implications of the material, however, goes well beyond the scope of this report. Our major purpose is to get badly needed information out to the field, information that until now was unavailable. A major task for future analysis is to conduct multivariate analyses to disentangle the impact of multiple foundation characteristics and look for potential interactions among them. There remains much to be done with and learned from these data.

About the Study

We sent the survey to all the staffed grantmaking foundations in the United States that we could identify.² The 1,192 respondents represent a wide array of foundations. Of these, 853 (72 percent) are independent foundations, 238 (20 percent) are community foundations, 92 (8 percent) are corporate foundations, and 8 (less than 1 percent) are public foundations other than community foundations.³ Sixty percent of the independent foundations are family foundations, in which two or more trustees are donors/and or family members of the donor.⁴ With respect to size, 444 (37 percent) have $10 million or less in assets, 426 (36 percent) have between $10 and $50 million, 132 (11 percent) have between $50 and $100 million, 129 (11 percent) have $100 to $400 million, and 59 (5 percent) have more than $400 million in assets.⁵ The geographical distribution of foundations is fairly equal: Approximately 27 percent of the foundations are located in the Midwest, 26 percent are in the South, 25 percent of the foundations are in the Northeast, and 22 percent are in the West.

The response rate to the survey was 35 percent, but response rates varied notably by foundation size. Response rates were 25 percent for foundations with less than $10 million in assets; 41 percent for foundations in the $10 to $50 million range; 48 percent for those in the $50 to $100 million range; 51 percent for those in the $100 to $400 million range; and 58 percent for those whose assets were in excess of $400 million. Thus, although the number of the small foundations exceeds the number of very large ones in the study, the response rate was notably lower for the smallest foundations, and thus particular care should be exercised when considering findings for that group.

The focus of this study was ambitious—to survey all foundations that we could identify with at least one staff member. Most foundations in this country, however, do not have any staff and thus the results of this survey cannot be generalized to them. As in all studies, we had to make a trade-off between breadth and depth. Given our wide-ranging purpose and the fact that this was the first survey to attempt to document the state of the field, we opted for breadth. Thus, we included the widest range of practices that have been hypothesized to bear on foundation effectiveness, oftentimes by those with very different perspectives on the matter. The trade-off for this breadth, of course, is that we simply were unable to go into greater depth on individual topics. Likewise, because we included such a variety of foundations in our sample, we had to focus on those questions that would be relevant to the widest range of foundations, and had to forgo many more detailed and specialized questions that would be applicable only to a particular subset. Such specialized studies could eventually prove a quite useful way to build on the present study and to pursue in greater depth some of the variations we found among particular foundation subsets.

The specific attitudes and practices covered in the survey fall under the following general topics:

• Ideas about foundation effectiveness;
• Approaches to grantmaking;
• Grant application and review processes;
• Monitoring and evaluation;
• Investments (program-related investing and social investing);
• Collaboration and professional involvement;
• Communications;
• Staff training and development; and
• Self-assessments of effectiveness.

Keep in mind that these data come from foundation self-reports. As in all such surveys—even those that assure confidentiality, as ours did—respondents may be more inclined to choose answers they perceive as more positive or favorable to their institutions. In the case of this survey, therefore, the percentage of foundations that reported they engaged in particular practices may be biased upwards, and this may be particularly true in the case of practices (e.g., conducting formal evaluation) that are subject to a wider variety of interpretations. There is no reason to believe, however, that any particular subgroup was more or less likely to exhibit this tendency.

Notes from this section

1. A summary overview and examples of findings presented in this report may be found in Attitudes and Practices Concerning Effective Philanthropy: Executive Summary. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute. April 2004. http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=310986.

2. We identified staffed grantmaking foundations from a list obtained from the Foundation Center. In the course of our research, we learned of additional foundations eligible for the study, which we then added to our list. Likewise, as we learned of foundations that were ineligible (because they were operating foundations, had no staff, or had closed down), we deleted them from our list.

3. Data on type are missing for one foundation. Size percentages here sum to slightly more than 100 percent due to rounding error.

4. The status of 18 foundations could not be determined due to missing data.

5. Data on assets are missing for two foundations.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

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The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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