Blogging Our Way to Transparency

Transparency. It’s a concept that is reshaping how our institutions, big and small, are doing business. It is fundamentally about accountability. It is equally about power and access. In strategic philanthropy, it’s just as much about leadership and knowledge development as it is about accountability and access.

GrantCraft’s guide Opening Up: Demystifying Funder Transparency describes many of the ways that foundations can increase transparency. Two issues are touched upon that deserve much more attention. First, as foundations embraced strategic philanthropy, they absorbed much of the leadership of the field. No longer did we turn to the organizational leaders to set direction and build consensus on the key issues to address. Instead, with the approval of foundation leadership, program staff set the direction (ideally) through a collaborative process with organizational leaders in the field.

If foundations are going to take on strategic grantmaking, then they also need to take on the leadership responsibilities that come along with that role, including ensuring that the broader field has an opportunity to understand the strategic direction and how they might contribute. Thus, transparency may be part of their leadership responsibilities.

Second is the issue of knowledge development and dissemination. Essentially, foundations are learning organizations. They invest, reflect on those investments and changes in the context of their giving, and make new investments. Opening Up describes a number of ways philanthropies are moving from viewing this learning as an internal function to one that can be open and shared. Foundations tend to use centralized communication operations with the expectation that program staff consistently send out the same message. Thus, it was fascinating to read about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s use of social media in the section “Foundation Staff Speaking In Their Own Voice.” RWJF expects program staff to have their own voice and use it.

Why is this so groundbreaking? Why shouldn’t program staff share their insights, reflections, and questions? They are constantly learning, being exposed to new ideas, reviewing research, and gaining insight from the folks doing the work. Their job is to have their finger on the pulse of an issue or a community. It hurts us all when they aren’t able to share their insights. Just imagine if program staff blogged weekly or monthly about:

• New and exciting innovations seen during a site visit
• Big take-aways after major conferences and small convenings for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend
• Trends and emerging opportunities
• The questions that make it hard to implement their strategy, so that leaders in the field could share shaping solutions.
• Insights about how their strategies could or are being refined, allowing us to know about and understand mini-shifts in their strategy

I wonder what it would take for foundations to build a transparent culture of learning. What assumptions and values would need to be revisited – about how we do our work, about the role of program officers and how they are evaluated, and about the use of different lenses (economic analysis, power analysis, racial analysis) in shaping strategies?

directors and their officers would open the daily conversation, the ongoing dialogue in which we contribute to and challenge each other to have deeper understanding of issues and solutions, to others?