Search

About

  • “Foundation Center 2020” is the 10-year strategic plan for the Foundation Center, launched in 2011. A continual work in progress, we invite your feedback to help shape, strengthen, and guide our progress in advancing knowledge about philanthropy.

« Strategic Priority: Connect Nonprofits to the Resources They Need to Thrive | Main | Strategic Priority: Build the Global Data Platform for Philanthropy »

Strategic Priority: Empower Donors With Knowledge Tools They Need to Be More Strategic

The Foundation Center’s rich data on decades of foundation giving, philanthropy news, and foundation-funded research provides a wealth of information ripe for mining on virtually any cause in which a donor might be interested. Add to this core competencies in 03_empower data architecture, visualization, and web design, and the Foundation Center is uniquely positioned to build the kinds of knowledge tools that donors, foundations, regional associations of grantmakers, affinity groups, donor advisors, and others need to make giving more strategic, efficient, and effective. Our vision includes a one-stop shop for grantmakers that offers a suite of standard data tools, “how-to” resources, specialized databases, and issue-focused portals filled with research—in addition to custom knowledge tools built on demand. Together these will significantly reduce the barriers to information exchange that make effective collaboration among foundations so difficult, thereby unleashing its potential for greater impact.

GOALS

Data-driven decision making on how best to allocate donor resources

  • Offer versions of Philanthropy In/Sight and other mapping/visualization tools customized around issues/geography to tell donors who is funding what, where
  • Conduct custom data searches for both new and experienced donors and their advisors
  • Build issue-based web portals combining foundation grants information, data visualization, research, news, and other indicators to lower the transaction cost of donor collaboration
  • Make significant amounts of FC data open and free so that others can develop their own tools and applications

Better skills, better processes, better philanthropy

  • Acquire and expand GrantCraft for production of printed and online training material for grantmakers here and abroad
  • Launch a training/internship program for foundation grants managers on handling grants information and data
  • Improve TRASI and other tools for impact and effectiveness
  • Build an interactive benchmarking tool for foundation expenses
  • Deliver Foundation Center data directly to foundation knowledge managers

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

The comments to this entry are closed.