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The challenges for foundations — and the nonprofits they support — will be stark in 2018, given all that has happened in the past year.

Hurricanes and wildfires ravaged dozens of American communities. White supremacists marched boldly in our streets. Deadly mass shootings happened with alarming regularity. Murders of black men and boys by police continued unabated and unpunished. President Trump stoked fires of hatred toward immigrants, Muslims, and people of color. Republicans forced through a tax plan that benefits the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, that will decimate charitable giving, and that sets the stage for spending cuts that will disproportionately hurt the poor and the vulnerable.

Read the entire article (paywall) in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

A new year means new goals, new hopes and sometimes, a revitalized sense of purpose. At the beginning of the year, it’s important to both reflect and move forward, understanding that now is the time to welcome tips, wisdom and guidance from our peers. How can we grow in this upcoming year? What did we miss last year? How can we focus our efforts to be more effective?

As we think about these questions, we want to turn some attention to funder-grantee relationships. In 2018, what are some ways to deepen funder-grantee relations? NCRP staff members share their thoughts below:

“Often grantees and program officers communicate only in relation to pending proposals. You can break this pattern and deepen relationships by setting up regular phone calls outside of the proposal process. Pick a handful of key contacts, and plan to speak at regular intervals during the course of the year: monthly, quarterly, etc.”

– Dan Petegorsky, Senior Fellow and Director of Public Policy

“Stay in touch with your grantees throughout the year. And during those conversations ask, ‘How can we help?’

“Grantmakers have limited resources and their own internal and external constraints. But by asking grantees what they need while being transparent about what is and isn’t possible, these conversations can surface other ways that funders can help: connecting grantees to other nonprofits or donors doing related work, taking a public stance behind the issue your grantee is working on, sharing that grantee’s initiative on social media, covering the registration fee to leadership development opportunity and other ways of showing support.”

–Yna Moore, Senior Director of Communications

“A one-on-one up-close-and-personal lunch date with each grantee representative(s) at a restaurant of the grantee’s choice. Sharing a meal brings out the best in all of us. Sharing a meal in a neutral place removes some of the trappings of power and difference (fancy office, big desk, formal attire) and serves as a reminder of the simplicity and equality of the partnership, i.e., success cannot exist without each of the partners.”

– Beverley Samuda-Wylder, Senior Director of Human Resources and Administration

“Check out these three resources for building trust and transparency to strengthen relationships with grant partners: The Whitman Institute’s Nine Key Practices of Trust-Based Investment, Foundation Center’s GlassPockets Steps to Transparency tool and Project Streamline’s best practices to reduce burdensome grant requirements.”

– Lisa Ranghelli, Senior Director of Assessment and Special Projects

What are some tips you can think of to deepen funder-grantee relations in 2018? Does your organization have goals, aims or resolutions for the New Year? Let us know in the comments below!

Jack Rome is the communications intern at NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Approximately two dozen fundraising and nonprofit influencers are slated to meet in Dallas on Feb. 7 in an attempt to come up with a plan for a national push to increase giving past the stagnant roughly 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Coordinated by The Giving Institute, an organization of mostly fundraising consultants and technology firms, the gathering is to begin discussions on whether there is a need for a national examination of giving practices, similar to the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs in 1973-75, tabbed as the “Filer Commission.” The commission’s 240-page report, “Giving In America,” was the launching pad for infrastructure organizations such as the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and Independent Sector (IS).

Read the entire article in The NonProfit Times.

“It is going to have a detrimental effect on charitable giving overall,” said Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. “Corporate giving may go up, but most of the giving is done by individuals in this country.”

Within the banking industry, corporate giving has changed in several important ways since the crisis, Dorfman said. He noted that big banks, such as Citigroup, have begun to recognize the importance of making long-term grants to nonprofits – and allowing those organizations to use the funds in the best way they see fit.

Read the entire article (subscription required) in American Banker.

MapLight logo

Editor’s note: This post is the first in a series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Undisclosed donations. False information. Compromised elections. Corrupted democracy. The rise of online propaganda, political bots and fake news has jeopardized our ability to separate fact from fiction in a public discourse that has grown increasingly antagonistic to the truth.

Irresponsible loopholes in campaign finance regulations have robbed everyday Americans of their right to know who’s bankrolling their candidates’ campaigns and, ultimately, their ability to influence those candidates once they’re in office.

There are organizations that are eager for philanthropic partners bold enough to confront the root causes of these societal perversions and committed enough to make changes at the system level. Philanthropy needs to heed their call.

One particularly enterprising potential partner is MapLight, which combines journalism, data and advocacy to fight back against the hidden forces who seek to disrupt our politics.

Founded 12 years ago to shine a light on money in politics, Berkeley, California-based MapLight has since expanded to add exposing the spread of intentionally misleading information online. MapLight works in three primary ways to illuminate and combat money’s role in politics.

First, they advocate making money in politics a top political issue through a targeted use of contributions data and their own investigations.

Second, they publish specific news stories based on their findings to push the government to act in citizens’ best interests.

Third, the organization compiles Voter’s Edge, an online guide for nonpartisan information on candidates and how they’re funded, made through a joint project with the League of Women’s Voters.

Because of MapLight, communities across the country have made their governments more responsive to them. MapLight partnered with the International Business Times on an investigation in New Mexico that found “hundreds of millions of investment dollars ha[d] been flowing to firms whose executives donated to groups that supported” Gov. Susana Martinez.

Her platform included a commitment to stamp out corruption in her state, so her donors’ disregard for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rules on pay-to-play schemes was particularly egregious.

This investigation led Martinez to request the removal of all elected officials – including herself – from the State Investment Council, federal officials in New Mexico to pressure the SEC to apply pay-to-play laws to political groups and a state legislator to call for an investigation into the results of the report.

In Berkeley, MapLight helped pass a ballot measure for publicly financed elections and partnered with the California Clean Money Campaign to improve transparency in state elections through the California DISCLOSE Act.

MapLight’s work clearly supports a healthy democracy, but it could shine even brighter if more foundations invested in the kind of work they do. The organization currently earns some of its revenue by licensing its proprietary data for media and data companies to use commercially, but philanthropy remains the primary fuel for MapLight’s work.

Dan Newman, MapLight’s co-founder and president, expressed appreciation for the funders he partners with who help his organization develop project ideas and connect MapLight with other groups in their networks.

Newman expressed particular gratitude to the financial supporters who are strategic in their actions and see the needs to address root problems in democracy, including unchecked money in politics.

Unfortunately, these funders are hard to find, according to Newman. MapLight aims to solve systemic problems, yet few donors focus on making fixes at the system level. The vision to address root causes lags behind attempts to address their snowballing consequences.

Local campaigns across the country seek MapLight’s guidance in interpreting electoral finance data and advocating for citizen-funded election legislation. There’s a groundswell of populist disgust for the role special interest plays in our national discourse. Meeting this hunger for information and insight can be challenging. The systems of our democracy are broken, and philanthropy’s poor track record in funding systemic solutions is of great concern.

But challenge yields opportunity.

MapLight continues to expose how deeply money perverts our politics, pairing scrupulous investigative reporting with concrete policy solutions. If they had all of the resources they need, MapLight could reveal the scope of foreign and secret influences in our elections, and do so in alignment with groups who confront root causes and make changes at the system level.

The fervor to rein in an electoral process overrun with dark money presents a rare moment of confluence for the American people to rally around, and then insist upon, the redistribution of power from shadowy special interests to the will of the people. Will philanthropy seize this opportunity to right a fundamental injustice of our time and push dark money into the light? MapLight has already begun to illuminate the way.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

As someone who has shed plenty of blood and tears after almost twenty years living and breathing Southern philanthropy, I am thrilled with the deep and committed work of Grantmakers for Southern Progress and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) on the As the South Grows series of publications. The writers — Ryan Schlegel and Stephanie Peng — spent a great deal of time outside the walls of their offices to capture the authentic voice of residents of six Southern sub-regions that have had small to middling philanthropic investment over the years.

My experience as a locally embedded Southern funder — first with the Rapides Foundation and then the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust — over the past couple decades prompted a reaction to both what is presented and what I hope will be addressed in future reports. The following observations come from a same church/different pew perspective of someone who has spent the bulk of his professional career trying to get philanthropic activity connected to local champions in a way that makes sense to funders and communities alike.

Read the entire post in Philantopic.

There were some on the funder side [e.g., NCRP and the Forum to mention only a couple of which I am aware] who spoke eloquently about the impact on people and not the impact on taxation of potential changes in the law. In my mind, they got it – and spoke to the underlying issues. To be fair, I am sure that many other groups also did but I simply didn’t see their public advocacy statements.

However, the overriding attention of the philanthropy support world focused on two things: keeping the Johnson Amendment [a topic for another time] and holding on to tax deductibility for charitable donations. Both of these are worthy goals that I support, but they missed an essential point.

Read the entire post in Wise Philanthropy.

Democrat Doug Jones’s victory over Republican Roy Moore in the special election to fill Attorney General Jeff Session’s vacated seat in deep red Alabama was “a victory for the black women-led voter registration and mobilization movement…that has been working against stiff headwinds for months — decades, really — to ensure democracy prevails in a state with some of the most onerous barriers to voting in the country,” writes Ryan Schlegel on the NCRP blog. 

Read the entire article in Philantopic.