Utterly shocking news from the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Charities founded by hip-hop artists, such as the Ludacris Foundation, which focuses its philanthropy on children, sometimes find their efforts hampered by negative perceptions of the music behind their money.

Lyric sample here.

A conservative catholic philanthropist finds it hard to do the right thing:

His boldest charitable venture by far, however, is Ave Maria University, a four-year liberal arts campus under construction 30 miles northeast of Naples, Fla., to which Mr. Monaghan has donated or pledged $285 million so far. Along with the university, which enrolled its first students three years ago on a temporary campus, he and a local developer are building an adjoining new town called Ave Maria.

The bar for the school has been set high, with plans to eventually attract up to 6,000 students to what supporters, including Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, predict will be a top-tier academic institution devoted to the Catholic faith.

Mr. Monaghan, who has called the Florida campus and town “God’s will,” has even loftier intentions. He has said that he sees the university, which says it adheres to a strict interpretation of Catholic doctrine, as a chance to save souls. “I’m a businessman. I get to the bottom line,” Mr. Monaghan, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told The Orlando Sentinel in 2004. “And the bottom line is to help people get to heaven.”

Yet as he aims for the divine, Mr. Monaghan has been facing some unexpected earthly trials, including a revolt at his law school in Ann Arbor and sharp criticism by many of the conservative Catholics who once supported his foundation’s projects.

In many ways, Mr. Monaghan’s troubles illustrate how difficult it can be for wealthy, driven entrepreneurs to make the transition to full-time philanthropy, particularly when they have single-minded ideas about how they want their money spent. Traits that make successful business leaders — ego, ambition, determination, even a touch of imperiousness — do not necessarily go over well in charitable work, causing even the most well-intentioned projects to founder.

As the legendary investor Warren E. Buffett recently noted when he donated most of his $40 billion fortune to an established foundation rather than create one of his own, making a mint — as difficult as that is — can be easier than giving it away.

As he tries to build a new university and town in his own image, Mr. Monaghan has been experiencing some of those difficulties firsthand. Faculty members, students and parents tied to his Detroit-area schools have complained that he runs his charitable foundation like a sole proprietorship, starting and abandoning projects as whim strikes him. And they characterize his new Florida university as a vanity venture that could well prove to be a colossal waste of cash.

When your philanthropic mission is to save souls before the apocalype hits, you might encounter some difficulty trying to come up with consistent, well-thought-out giving strategies. With apologies to the Beatles, maybe money can't buy me salvation.

Regarding my previous post Phil asks, basically, what's the point? Why should foundations seek publicity? It's a good question.

Foundations began publishing information about themselves as a way of countering the accusations of secrecy and malfeasance that led to the Tax Reform Act of 1969. The mantra was, and remains, "transparency and openness," to the degree that the self-publishing [read: editing] of data can be construed as such.

Somewhere along the way, I'd say during the '80s, foundations got the bright idea to invest some resources in drawing attention to the work of grantees. They began to publish newsletters, magazines, journals, etc. highlighting what grantees were doing with their funding.

Then along came the Internet, which allowed foundations to broaden their audiences but, I would argue, didn't really change their thinking about how to approach the issue of publicity.

Today, if you ask your run-of-the-mill foundation CEO why she or he invests resources in public relations, you'll likely hear a homily about accountability and drawing attention to the work of grantees.

What I'm suggesting is that new ways of thinking about marketing, including use of new technologies, offer opportunities for foundations to tackle the issues they care about [and, ostensibly, that their founders cared about] in other ways than just donating money to charity. Say the Rich Socialites Foundation of Greater Palm Beach is dedicated to the preservation of contemporary dance as a viable art form. It could, of course, give a bunch of money to a variety of contemporary dance companies, ensuring their long-term survival. But it also might look at some other approaches. Wouldn't getting high school students interested in contemporary dance help meet the mission? How might Socialites go about doing that? In particular, if Socialites is a well known organization within the community, why not leverage its brand to accomplish its mission? Build an interactive Web site about contemporary dance targeted to teens? Form partnerhips with online portals already being used by teens in the community? Fund a buzz marketing campaign using star quarterbacks and cheerleaders?

I think it's time foundations start to play more directly in some of these spaces in which they've traditionally said, "Well we wouldn't do that but certainly we'd fund someone to do it."

That kind of self-limitation is why foundations get beat up in the marketplace of ideas.

An essay in the latest issue of Fast Company magazine got me thinking about foundations and hipster status. A number of Fortune 500 companies are hiring marketing agencies run by twenty-somethings to keep their brands cool:

Companies are outsourcing cool. They’re paying other companies – smaller, more-limber, closer-to-the-ground – to help them keep up with customers’ rapidly changing tastes and demands. Talk about a core competency! It’s like farming out your soul – or at least, asking someone what you should wear in the morning. 

Assuming for the sake of argument that foundations have souls, I wonder if they ever think about how building a more progressive [and, dare I say, hip] image of themselves among their audiences could contribute to their effectiveness as grantmakers. When’s the last time you read something about a foundation and thought, “Wow, that’s cool”? Something that would perk up the eyes and ears of your average 16-year-old?

 

Foundations are lousy brand managers. I think that’s because they think their images are derived from the identities of their grantees. How unfortunate. This plays itself out in two ways: 1] Foundations don’t recognize all of the other ways in which their images get shaped [example: speeches and presentations given by foundation employees to outside audiences]; 2] Only very traditional tools are used to for communications and marketing activities and adoption of new tools, particularly in the communications technology arena, is excruciatingly slow. By the time they get into a new marketing space corporations have long moved on to something more current and effective.

 

Back to the Fast Company essay:

To get closer to customers and speed the feedback loop, Samsung’s U.S. marketers established relationships with some 1,500 Web sites that serve its target markets, from fly-fishing sites to the home pages of rock bands. When designers in Korea give the word that a new product is on the way – often with only a few months warning – marketing puts out the word through its network. Presto! Instant product launch. 

I’m not saying foundations should look to organize groups of 14-year-old girls via text messaging to sell tickets to the local nonprofit community theater production. The nature of the business of foundationland has its marketing limitations. But it would be nice to see some foundations thinking outside the box a little bit when it comes to sharing their agendas with the outside world. Maybe take off the suit and put on a pair of hip jeans every now and then.

In a column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Bruce Trachtenberg and Grant Oliphant make a few suggestions about how foundations and the news media can both do a better job getting the media to cover the activities of private foundations. Get away from talking about individual grants and grant amounts; the story isn't the money itself, they argue, but what happens with it.

Good advice, I'd say. There is much naval gazing within the philanthrosphere about why the news media can't seem to find an interesting angle on private foundations other than malfeasance. Name your theory: Giving away money just isn't that interesting; foundations use language that only foundations understand; despite posting Web sites and publishing magazines and annual reports, foundations aren't really that interested in having a spotlight on them. There some legitimacy in each of these theories.

Trachtenberg, who runs the Communications Network, an association of communicators within private foundations, and Oliphant, a veep at the Heinz Endowment in Pittsburgh, get it especially right here:

When reporters cover the business world, they produce articles when new products or strategies are announced, when money is made or lost, and when companies grow or fail. And in between the coverage of those developments, enormous attention is paid to the types of businesses they are, what underlies the decisions companies make, and what they could do to become more successful.

That same approach should guide philanthropy coverage. Reporters should be encouraged to provide in-depth and analytic coverage about the underlying problems in society that foundations are trying to solve, the likely results of their investments, and follow-up coverage about what did or didn't happen.

I'd put about 80 percent of the blame for why private foundations don't receive more analytical news coverage at the feet of the private foundations themselves. Talk all you want about openness, community accountability, etc., foundations are notoriously reticent to reveal any more than what's absolutely necessary to ensure they're looked upon favorably. In a field that in and of itself is difficult to explain to the outside world, why should reporters go the extra mile if foundations don't return their calls?

Memo to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:

Speak up.

As the "nation's largest philanthropy devoted to health and health care," perhaps you can shine some light on this "insidious, incestuous, insider system."

Your truly.

Um, maybe that big announcement wasn't such a grand idea:

But as the euphoria of Buffett's record-breaking act recedes, his gift has triggered another, entirely different result -- intensifying questions in Congress and elsewhere about how well charities spend their money, how accountable they are to donors and government and the general condition of "civil society."

Long live self-regulation!

I'll second many of White Courtesy Telephone's comments about the Bush Administration's latest budget shenanigans. Turns out the Bushies are cutting funding for a small schools program, stating in the budget that the availability of funding from the Gates Foundation and other private sources lets it off the hook. WCT makes some astute observations about the "scrimmage between public and private responsibility:"

Foundations that elect to stand firm should, at the very least, help de-funded organizations make the case for restored public dollars and/or help these organizations find new sources of support.  Foundations, in their treatment of grantees, should be setting the example for other funders.  This means making general operating support grants and grants to strengthen nonprofit infrastructure.  It means supporting an organization over several years to help it grow.  It also means never chopping an organization off at the knees by suddenly withdrawing funding.

This is exactly right. Foundations can play a role in ensuring quality organizations don't shut their doors if government funding dries up. I would add, though, that this scrimmage should be played on two fronts. While doing all it can to shore up the long-term prospects of the sector, foundations need to call bullshit on government when calling bullshit is required. The move by the administration to justify cutting funding for programs when private funds are supposedly available is blatantly cynical. It's lazy government. It would be one thing if the administration had negotiated beforehand with the Gates Foundation to fill this funding gap. No chance of that. And where is the criticism from the foundation sector? As has been the case with most of the disasters brought to us by the Bush Administration, it's the sound of silence.

Bryan Preston at Hot Air blathers on about 9/11 conspiracy theories promoted by the "hardcore left." This is to be expected, since Preston and his colleagues over at Hot Air such as Michelle Malkin like to dig up fringe characters and paint them as official spokespersons for the Democratic Party. This one statement from Preston, however, did catch my eye:

The anti-war left that poses as the voice of the little guy can’t seem to raise campaign funds without billionaires like Soros and assorted leftwing foundations shovelling in the cash.

I'm sure the IRS, in its current configuration, would appreciate a list of all those private, left-wing foundations that are doling out the campaign cash.

Perhaps give this a read before declaring sainthood:

That the myth of Buffett is so pervasive is no accident. The "Oracle of Omaha" actually gives few interviews outside of his famous annual meeting in Nebraska each year. Those whom he does talk to, such as Fortune's Carol Loomis, are either on his payroll or don't dare criticize St. Warren lest they lose access.

 

But people as successful as Buffett don't accumulate $44 billion in wealth through charitable dealing. Long after the public turned on smoking and health, Buffett infamously explained his investment in the tobacco business: "It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty."

A few things got lost in the avalanche of coverage about the world's second richest man giving most of his fortune to the world's richest man. Although hailed as unprecedented, brilliant, innovative, etc. etc., the deal has all the markings of a handshake on the 5th green after successful completion of a particularly troublesome up and down.

Let me state unequivocally before I leave the impression of the grinch who ate the charitable impulse that I think what Buffett has done is a good thing; better than, say, building a $37-billion house in Omaha. It's just a shame Buffett made the announcement as if he was striking up a distribution deal for widgets. We learned from the announcement that Buffett cares about three things: 1] Keeping his children's paws off the vast majority of his dough; 2] Getting the vast majority of his dough out the door more quickly than any philanthropist in history; 3] His friendship with Bill Gates.

We didn't learn if any of the areas in which the Gates Foundation funds are of any interest to Buffett. "I trust Bill Gates not to blow it" makes for an odd philanthropic strategy.

We're back. We've retooled a bit, and done some thinking about what we want this blog to be. After having a pretty loose focus [like a three-year-old in a sandbox with 30 toys], we've decided we really want to focus on the public face of institutional philanthropy and private foundations. What do they do well and what can they do better, particularly when it comes to advocating for the issues they care about? Of course, we'll retain the right to occasionally divert to other related topics. Thanks to those of you who payed attention to Philanthropybeat ver.1. We hope the next iteration will be a meaningful reentry into the ongoing dialogue about philanthropy occuring in blogworld.