Glasspockets is a Start for Transparency

The Foundation Center announced a new effort called Glasspockets last week. The name comes from Russell Leffingwell, Chair of the Carnegie Corporation in 1952, “We think that the foundation shoudl have glass pockets.”

The site dives deep into the internal processes, rules and procedures of ten of the largest foundations in the country: Carnegie, Ford, Gates, Hewlett, Irvine, Kellogg, MacArthur, Packard, Moore and Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Each foundation has a page on the site. On each page is a long list of criteria intended to add up to transparency and accountability. The list includes governance policies, hr procedures, financial information, performance measurement and communications channel. Each broad category is broken down into sub parts. For instance, here is the portion of the page for the Carnegie Corporation dedicated to governance:

The magnifying glasses indicates that those data are available. [Personal Peeve Alert: clicking on a magnifying glass downloads a document. I'd much rather have a pop up window rather than these PDFs now sitting on my desktop.]

No complaints here about foundations sharing more information about how they operate. However (you kinda knew a “However” was coming, didn’t you?) I wouldn’t call it Transparency 2.0 as the site claims. This is Transparency 1.0, and again, it’s a good thing, however, it just scratches the tip of what transparency in philanthropy could be.

There has been a lot of discussion of transparency and philanthropy over the past six months. I’ve written about it from the nonprofit perspective, Lucy and Elizabeth Miller have from the philanthropic side. And each one of us have urged institutions to think of transparency as a value not a process or a tool.

Standing behind a glass wall isn’t transparency. Taking the wall down, whatever it’s made of, is what we’re aiming for. In our book, The Networked Nonprofit, Beth and I call this acting more like sponges – the natural kind, that are anchored to the ocean floor but open themselves to a huge amount of water and nutrients rushing through. As Michael Hamill Remaley writes on the Public Policy Communicators blog, “But until foundations are willing to simply open themselves up publicly to examination and critique, they will never truly be understood or accepted as leaders in social change.”

Yes, it’s good to know how the Ford Foundation compensates its executive staff and I certainly don’t want to go back to not knowing. But Transparency 2.0 means that the foundation’s program officers, not just its communications staff, was on Twitter discussing what they were learning, what they were planning, and their struggles. Here’s my advice to the Foundation Center. Keep going wiht this area of the site, but call it Transparency 1.0 (I didn’t say they would do it, just what my advice would be!) Then create another area of the site called Transparency 2,0 with examples of Foundations like the Case Foundation using social media to really engage with world.  H and maybe we shouldn’t expect the largest, most visible foundations to get there first, but we can start to define what we hope, ultimately, philanthropic transparency will look and feel like. We’re inching our way there.

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