Check out the latest releases from around the nonprofit sector featuring items from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Exponent Philanthropy Funders for LGBTQ Issues and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Our Members
Strengthening Grantees: Foundation and Nonprofit Perspectives
The Center for Effective Philanthropy
Strong organizations, leaders, and networks are crucial to foundations’ and nonprofits’ ability to achieve shared goals. What support are foundations seeking to provide to help grantees strengthen their organizations? Is that support in line with what grantees really need? How can funders be most helpful in this area? The report provides a comprehensive examination of foundations’ efforts to strengthen grantee organizations and leaders. The data reveals that foundations are not as in touch with nonprofits’ needs as they think they are, and that both foundations and nonprofits alike have a role to play in closing the gap between the support nonprofits need and the support foundations provide.
Great Funder–Nonprofit Relationships Toolkit
Exponent Philanthropy
This toolkit is designed to help funders recognize the aspects of great relationships with nonprofit partners, assess competencies and consider ways to improve how to work with one another. Many ideas in this toolkit were generated by funders and nonprofits during a series of half-day programs around the country that Exponent hosted in partnership with the National Council of Nonprofits and with funding from the Fund for Shared Insight.
The Philanthropic Closet: LGBTQ People in Philanthropy
Funders for LGBTQ Issues
This new report highlights the findings of a first-of-its-kind pilot study on sexual orientation and gender identity, conducted in partnership with SMU DataArts and made possible by funding from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. Key findings include: Gay, lesbian, and bisexual people make up 16.2 percent of the staff and board at participating foundations; Transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people people account for 2.0 percent of the staff and board at participating foundations; the percentage of LGBTQ people varied depending on a foundation’s focus, with gay, lesbian, and bisexual people accounting for 22.8 percent of the staff and board at foundations with a social justice or LGBTQ focus and 11.6 percent of people at foundations with another focus; and the he majority of LGBTQ people in philanthropy are “in the closet” at work, meaning they have not disclosed their sexual orientation or gender identity to all or most of their co-workers. Across all foundations surveyed, 53.4 percent are “in the closet” at work.
From the Field
Scaling Solutions toward Shifting Systems: Approaches for Impact, Approaches for Learning
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
This new report highlights many of the practices used by funder collaboratives that have gained traction in creating systemic change. Among them, the study found that successful collaboratives tend to be launched with a small number of funders with existing relationships and that they grow organically, which keeps the emphasis on creating learning and impact rather than negotiating process details; that they identify and support strong leaders; that they are aligned with respect to theory of change; and that they are willing to embrace the complexity of systems change.
Charitable Giving Around the 2016 Election: Does Gender Matter?
Women's Philanthropy Institute, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University
Politics and charitable giving used to be seen as two separate worlds. But the relationship between the two grew much closer in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when many 501c3 charities anecdotally reported fundraising increases — what the media dubbed “rage giving.” This is the first report to explore this trend through a gender lens. WPI found that while the majority of charitable organizations did not experience donation levels above and beyond what would be expected in a non-election year, progressive organizations that engaged with key election issues did see a significant increase. That increase was driven primarily by female donors. In the week after the election, the difference between women and men’s giving to relevant progressive organizations increased six-fold.