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2020-03-30
CF Insights;
The Community Leadership Assessment Tool is an instrument whose development was informed by conversations among community foundations who desired a structured mechanism to assess their community leadership activities and communicate the impact of their work beyond financial metrics. At the foundation-level, this tool is designed to inform practice. At the field level, results from this tool will be aggregated to provide a broader perspective on how foundations are engaging in community leadership efforts.
2020-03-06
Guidestar by Candid;
Is philanthropy less than the sum of its parts? We know of countless examples of individual organizational excellence: nonprofits and foundations that achieve extraordinary impact on the great challenges of our time. But it is hard to avoid the haunting sense that all this good work does not add up. The efforts of individual organizations are fragmented and isolated. This fragmentation yields real challenges: inefficient fundraising, infrequent collaboration, and uneven learning. All told, it is difficult to articulate the impact of the whole of philanthropy. Over the last few decades a new science has emerged that wrestles with the questions of systems-level behavior. The philanthropic community can learn much from this work. This paper is an initial effort to connect the insights from complex systems science with nonprofits, foundations, and all those devoted to making a better world.
2020-03-06
Guidestar by Candid;
The nonprofit sector accounts for more than $1 trillion in economic activity, employs 11 million people, and receives $300 billion in charitable gifts annually. There seems, however, to be no clear way to gauge how well these resources are being used. When it comes to information on how nonprofits perform, there is insufficient transparency, access, quality, and utility. It doesn't have to be this way. If we can collect the right data and create the right analytics, we could pinpoint the highest performers. That will consequently lead to better decision making and more efficient allocation of resources, which ultimately will provide greater value to those in need. This paper explores how the world of philanthropy can learn valuable lessons from an unlikely sector: the financial services industry.
2020-03-04
West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI);
Social accountability is an approach towards building accountability that relies on civic engagement in which citizens participate directly or indirectly in demanding accountability from service providers and public officials. It usually combines information on rights and service delivery with collective action for change. It has become a tool for direct engagement with service providers to ensure that citizens get adequate services or adequate explanation when those services are not available. When social accountability mechanisms are weak, the context becomes more challenging for communities or individual citizens to play a powerful role. Also, social accountability is fundamentally and ultimately a question of power as it requires both social and political pressure to ensure that duty bearers are kept on their toes. This piece will therefore explore the tools and approaches that some African social movements used to effectively drive the social accountability agenda. The tools we are exploring here are respectively social media and creative arts, while the approaches will be based on their ways of mobilising and organising. We conclude by making some recommendations for donors, government, citizens and other stakeholders.
2020-02-29
Guidestar by Candid;
Performance measurement is an important dilemma facing the philanthropic sector. Charities with similar missions may operate in parallel but lack shared, validated yardsticks with which to assess their social impact and efficiency. Other sectors facing similar needs have made notable strides in performance measurement. Healthcare, in particular, offers a useful analogy. Considerable recent progress in healthcare performance measurement invites emulation. This paper examines these developments and how the nonprofit sector can adapt them to benchmark performance.
2020-02-29
Candid;
Form 990, the reporting form larger nonprofits must file annually with the IRS, contains a wealth of information. It can be difficult to navigate, however. This paper reviews the parts of the form, identifies the fields people find most useful, and provides tips for deciphering the information in the 990.
2020-02-29
Guidestar by Candid;
Donors, journalists, and members of Congress frequently express outrage at the salaries nonprofit CEOs receive, especially if they head nonprofits that receive donations from the public. Excessive compensation can also draw fire from the IRS. This paper outlines what the IRS permits in setting nonprofit executive compensation, the consequences of failing to comply with the regulations, how nonprofit board members can protect themselves and the organizations they serve, the kind of data compensation decisions should be based on, and the importance of reporting compensation accurately in annual IRS filings.
2020-02-18
GrantCraft;
This case study has been developed as a part of Investing in Native Communities, a joint project of Candid and Native Americans in Philanthropy. Learn about how the Calgary Foundation is taking active steps to change its internal culture and build relationships with Indigenous communities.
2020-01-23
Media Impact Funders;
This report provides an examination of the current state of the field of media impact assessment, which Media Impact Funders (MIF) has been tracking for seven years.
It is meant to serve as a practical resource for funders who want to understand where to start. Informed by feedback from our network, it represents a synthesis of the past seven years of work we've done in the impact space, and includes examples of successful media impact evaluation, tools and frameworks for assessment, and the challenges of defining and measuring impact in a rapidly-shifting media landscape.
Our years of research have led us to four key insights, and this report includes a deep dive into each of them, as well as companion guest essays from leaders in the field. We hope you will use this guide to inform your own practice, and to continue this critical conversation.
2020-01-22
GrantCraft;
This guide captures the wisdom of philanthropic leaders who have participated in multi-party advocacy collaboratives. It synthesizes information to dig deeper and understand the pain points and levers of success tied to funding advocacy and donor collaboratives. Examples have been anonymized to ensure candor and clarity, as well as to broaden the appeal and applicability of wisdom derived from a specific collaborative example. Each bite-sized chapter is intended to make this work easy to reference and share, and to read as a full body of work or in pieces as is helpful and relevant to your work.
2020-01-22
Open Society Foundations;
This is a special edition of Amplifying Voices that includes highlights of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa's work from 2005 to 2015. Amplifying Voices documents different journeys the foundation has traveled with its partners since its launch in 2005 and the collective efforts to realize human rights and freedoms for all.
Amplifying Voices pays particular attention to those on the margins of society, including stories of working on the forced sterilization of HIV-positive women or those with mental health illnesses, promoting the rights of sex workers, or addressing the question of human rights and counterterrorism.
The Open Society Initiative for East Africa started as a one-program initiative in 2005 in Kenya and today has grown to include eight programs in the region. Geographically, the foundation now works in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Sudan. It addresses issues including health and rights, disability rights, and food security.
2020-01-17
GivingTuesday;
Giving Tuesday's 2019 Impact Report shares the results of GivingTuesday 2019; but also offers a glimpse into the implications of the generosity that occurred on the day, challenging us to imagine a world where radical generosity is unleashed every single day.
