Foundations and Social Media: Fad or Future?

The few well-known examples of foundations acting like Networked Nonprofits have become so oft-repeated that they’re almost cliches – the David and Lucile Packard Foundation using a wiki to generate new ideas for their nitrogen program, the Case Foundation’s use of their blogs to weave conversations, the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge to invest in next generation news businesses infused with social media. I began to wonder whether these examples were becoming the few exceptions in foundation world or harbingers for other foundations?

I asked Linda Wood of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and Elizabeth Miller of the Overbrook Foundation their take on the state of foundations and social media for this month’s Social Good podcast for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The answer according to Linda and Elizabeth was unqualified: social media is the future of philanthropy. They both emphasized the risk averse nature of foundations that are just now inching their way into the use of social media and the early state writ large of social media. Linda has been blogging about foundations and transparency and using online videos to share the experiences of the foundation’s leadership program grantees. Linda said that she has couched the use of social media internally as “pilot” projects, which eased the potential fear of senior staff and trustees that social media would turn the entire foundation upside down.

Elizabeth has also written about philanthropy and transparency and said that the Overbrook Foundation was looking for discreet opportunities to test social media. One of my favorite moments was Elizabeth talking about how it feels to her to use Twitter as a foundation staff person. This is perhaps the most oft-cited fear of foundation staff that I hear, “I don’t want to be overwhelmed with requests and criticisms by being online.” Here is what Elizabeth had to say on this topic:

I think thatTwitter has helped me build relationships with existing grantees in a
major way, I’m able to RT their work, learn more about the individuals
working at the organizations etc. If anything it also exposed me to new
organizations that might be right for the foundation, and just generally
kept me up to speed in the issue areas that we fund, what interesting
articles are out there, what other foundations are doing the kind of
work we are, how to collaborate better, who to collaborate with.

There are occasionally people who will follow me or DM asking about
Foundation guidelines, proposals, how to apply for a grant (not as much
as you may think), but for me, I feel like answering those questions is
part of working for a Foundation. And if you’re being open/transparent
(like Linda talked about) then you can be clear about what you fund, why
etc. This might be skewed because I’m a program associate tweeting and
it’s not the official Overbrook Foundation Twitter feed, but that’s my
general feeling.

I love Elizabeth’s take on this – particularly that being accessible is part of her job!  Hope others are listening.

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.