From the Tactical Philanthropy blog, July 19, 2010

Bill and Melinda Gates along with Warren Buffett recently announced their commitment to devote the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. Perhaps more notably, they are encouraging other billionaires to pledge a similar commitment, and a new website, www.givingpledge.org, has been launched to encourage their peers to follow suit and to document these pledges.

This is certainly audacious. And it got me thinking about what similar “pledges” those of us privileged enough to work within organized philanthropy should be thinking about. Obviously, each of our foundations effectively makes a pledge by deciding where to focus our grants, whether on issues of education, health, economic development, the environment or the arts.

But, I’d suggest there are other commitments we should consider related to how we as foundations engage in our work in addition to what we do with our resources. The big-dollar pledges that foundations can make are certainly compelling, but the ways in which we engage with our grantees deserve as much attention as what we fund. Our ability to create positive social impact through our grantmaking is directly related to our capacity to be effective and thoughtful partners with the organizations we are privileged to support.

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From the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, April 26, 2010

Fueled by new technology and a change in mind-set, foundations have become more transparent about their activities and operations in recent years. This has been heartening, given the responsibilities and privileges inherent to our tax status, and the fact that we must work in partnership with many constituents and stakeholders in order to achieve our goals.

Just recently, there has been a major contribution in this regard by the Foundation Center’s Glass Pockets website, which provides a look at best practices in foundation transparency and which encourages the field to move further in this direction. The number of foundations and array of practices reflected on that site is impressive, and Irvine’s work on performance assessment, the subject of these blog posts, has sought to contribute to this movement. 

In the first three posts of this series I described why we developed a performance assessment framework, outlined some of the challenges we’ve encountered in assessing Irvine’s performance, and shared feedback from our board, the primary audience for the Annual Performance Report. In this final post I want to argue that robust performance assessment activities — and the transparency they encourage — serve to make philanthropy more effective.

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From the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, April 22, 2010

In an earlier post on this blog, I pointed out that the audience for the Annual Performance Report (.pdf)is Irvine’s board of directors. As we delivered the fourth of these at our annual board retreat last month, we devoted some time to learning more about the board’s perspectives on the report.

There were two key themes that emerged, related to the value of context, and the appropriate frequency of the report. Regarding context, board members expressed in numerous ways how much they value the contextual information that the report provides.  Two sections stood out in this regard: first, a table that describes how Irvine’s funding compares to other funders in our program areas, and second, a section on program context indicators, where we provide broader indicators related to our programs, such as per capita public spending for the arts across the U.S. or data on high school drop-out rates in California. This latter section is not meant to suggest that our work will necessarily affect those numbers, but rather to expose the board to broader data sets that help contextualize our program work. 

The positive reaction to these sections of the report underscores for me how important it is to help our boards gain a deeper understanding of the environment for the Foundation’s activities. We can explain our goals and strategies and describe grants aligned with them, but there will always be a missing piece if the board is not able to contextualize our foundation’s work. The board’s feedback encourages us not only to consider other ways to use the report to provide such context, but also to explore how we can shape other board materials and meetings in ways that expose them to the broader environment for our work.

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From the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, April 20, 2010

In my last blog post I described why we started assessing our performance as a foundation and how we developed an Annual Performance Report (.pdf) that balances analysis of our grantmaking with tracking of overall institutional effectiveness. As we have engaged in institutional assessment work, we have encountered three broad challenges I will explore in this post: 

1. The need to distinguish between reporting on activities and describing outcomes and impact
2. The difficulty of summarizing complex social change
3. The inherent conflict of assessing the past in a forward-facing enterprise   

Activities vs. Impact

We are always looking for quantitative ways of describing and analyzing our work. Since the grants we award (and the ways we track those grants) are clearly quantifiable, they have become a prominent part of the Annual Performance Report. For example, we examine trends and changes in our grantmaking over time, explore the geographic distribution of our funds, and examine the populations served by our grants. While this provides an easily quantifiable way of examining our grantmaking, we realize that describing where our resources go is not the same as conducting an assessment of impact.

The same challenge applies to other sections of the report, where we describe financial and investment performance, summarize reports we have published, or discuss how we have refined our strategies based on what we are learning. While all of this together provides a comprehensive picture of our activities in a given year, it may or may not provide a complete assessment of institutional performance.

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From the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, April 15, 2010

At last year’s CEP conference in Los Angeles, I presented (.pdf) on the Irvine Foundation’s approach to assessing foundation performance, joined by David Colby from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I think it’s fair to say that David and I were presenting approaches used by our respective foundations that remain works in progress – Irvine’s even more so than RWJF’s given its focus on this area for many more years.

In view of the interest in this topic at the conference, and my own desire to share what we are doing at Irvine in an effort to improve upon it, I appreciate the opportunity offered by CEP to write a series of blog posts on the subject of assessing foundation performance.

 I plan to do this in four parts, addressing the following topics:

1. Why we developed an approach to foundation performance at Irvine
2. What we have found particularly challenging about assessing foundation performance
3. How our board has engaged with us on this subject
4. Why assessing foundation performance is both important and necessary

In reflecting upon Irvine’s experiences, I hope to stimulate readers’ contributions to deepening our collective understanding of this important subject and to improving our efforts to measure and understand our performance as foundations.

View Jim's 2009 presentation on assessing foundation performance.

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The following op-ed article by Jim Canales, Irvine's President and CEO, ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune on February 8, 2010