Conflicting Trends in Grant-Making: What do you think?

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Popularity funding vs. greater outcome accountability
Years ago, when I lived in Chicago, I read an article detailing the method used for determining the most popular exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry. The method was simple -- how often the tiles in front of the exhibit needed to be replaced.

The most popular exhibit was the incubator where chicks were hatching day in and day out. How did the tiles play into it? People stood there quite fascinated, watching the miracle of birth, shuffling their feet, wearing out the tiles in front of the exhibit. (Perhaps this was the origin of the concept of voting with your feet.)

This story came to mind when I read yet another article about funders looking for ways to hold agencies, museums, arts programs accountable. We've talked about the struggle to find meaningful, short term, and do-able measures of accountability before. It's a challenge.

The same afternoon I received an email from a local soup kitchen asking me, and everyone else on their email list, to vote daily for their program in Pepsi's Refresh Everything campaign. And, get all our friends to do the same. Pepsi is giving away $15.6M in grants ranging from $5000 to $250,000 -- all based on which agency got the most votes. Kohl's retail chain ran a similar popularity-based grant program this summer, Kohl's Cares, $500,000 to 20 public and private K-12 schools.

Whether we're talking $5K or $500K, we're talking real money here. Money generating a lot of publicity for the sponsors, Pepsi and Kohl's, without any accountability for whether that money will "do good." Is this a viable program that will benefit the community? All we really know is that the winning agencies can get out the vote.

This "social media grant-giving" is heavily weighted in favor of communities that are digitally sophisticated, the digital-haves,leaving behind those with less access to digital tools and a social media-savvy population -- the digital-have-nots.
So, there we have two conflicting trends. Traditional foundations seeking ways to hold grantees more accountable while corporate foundations seek ways to make grant-giving into tax-free advertising. (Pepsi Refresh site on Facebook notes 92,000 monthly active users. KohlCares indicates 2,729,440 people "like" this.)

Hmmm. Your thoughts?

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#56: Evaluation Tools for Your Grant Application

Clients often have a difficult time determining an easy, low cost, and meaningful way to evaluate the impact of their program. In fact, the evaluation process does, on occasion, devolve into mayhem! Here's a United Way website that youth development programs may find useful.

Toolfind - Youth Outcomes Measurement Tools Directory | United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley: "Toolfind is a free directory designed to help professionals in youth-serving programs find measurement tools for up to 11 youth outcome areas. Your time is valuable, so we have identified 46 tools to help you get started. All tools address one or more of the outcome areas, are tested, low-cost and have few restrictions. Tools included in this database address elementary, middle and/or high school students and youth, parent, staff and teacher respondents."

Photo cropped from a photo by Xiaming

#18: How Can You Prove Your Outcomes Are Worth the Money?

Oh, finally someone has said something sensible about outcome measurement. What do they say? You can't prove it -- and, it can be counter productive to try.

Stanford Social Innovation Review : Articles : Drowning in Data (August 30, 2006): "The only surefire way to show that a program is helping people more than they could have helped themselves is to conduct expensive and lengthy studies involving control groups. Because so many people underestimate the difficulty and cost of demonstrating impact, nonprofits often collect reams of data that are not only useless, but also misleading. As a result, evaluation is failing to help make the social sector more effective."

Yes, the team needs to have a logic model and identify goals. But, my money is on program improvement, not long term outcomes.

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