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  • “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.

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Strategic Priority: Encourage Greater Foundation Transparency

Coming in the wake of congressional allegations about foundation activity at the height of McCarthyism, the Foundation Center was born out of a conviction that philanthropy would be best served by proving that it had nothing to hide. The Center’s original mission was to make the world 06_encourage of foundations more transparent. Today, as more and more people are accessing greater quantities of information online, pressure is growing on foundations to be more transparent about operations and how they fulfill their missions to serve the public good. The Center intends to play a leading role in galvanizing a transparency movement within philanthropy by demonstrating the many positive steps foundations are already taking in this regard and encouraging foundations to learn from their peers. This will increase public trust in foundations as greater numbers of foundations openly communicate information about their governance, procedures, programs, and impact to the public. At the same time, greater transparency will reduce duplication of effort in the field and facilitate greater collaboration among foundations.

GOALS

Knowledge and tools to help foundations be more transparent

  • Provide foundations with a rich array of examples showing what their peers are doing to meet the growing demand for online transparency
  • Design self-diagnostic tools for foundations to assess and improve their own transparency
  • Re-design and re-launch our service to design and host foundations’ web sites by focusing on start-up and smaller foundations and adding new features including mapping, databases, knowledge centers, Facebook pages, and more

A community devoted to transparency in philanthropy

  • Constantly improve our flagship transparency web portal, Glasspockets, with more foundation profiles, tools, and user-generated content in collaboration with partner organizations
  • Develop a robust communications strategy—including public events, thought leadership pieces, and social media—around the need for and practice of transparency
  • Launch “Eye on the Giving Pledge” feature to lend greater transparency to what is so far the century’s biggest philanthropic development

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