While arrogance combined with a great excess of infallibility is the black lung of foundation program work and a nearly unavoidable occupational hazard for even the best program staff, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) has the treatment for the disease. Their Grantee Perception Report (GPR) gives both confidential feedback from grantees on foundation operations and puts it in the comparative context of other foundations. When we commissioned a GPR in 2008, we had the great good fortune to find that CEP had surveyed our grantees in 2006 to gain comparison data. That gave us the added benefit of comparison over time.
We were delighted to find that you, the experts in the field, felt that we had very high impact and were going in the right direction to improve the quality of care for older adults.
We were somewhat less than delighted to find that grantees felt we were not particularly clear in our communications and that program staff in many cases needed to be more helpful. We have been working on these issues diligently in between financial and other crises, and it is very helpful to our understanding of the field to experience the "tyranny of the urgent" firsthand.
The hardest news for me personally in this was that despite the disarray the foundation experienced in 2006 and my own return in 2007, the grantees seemed pretty unmoved. Our satisfaction ratings actually declined from 2006 to 2008, and we fell backward on a number of important ratings. I am committed to redoing our GPR in 2010 and really listening to the results. As someone at the CEP meeting said, "Facts are our friends." The Hartford Foundation is committed to facing the facts with an unwavering will and acting upon them so as to give us the best hope of accomplishing our mission.
The entire report is available on the foundation web site.
For additional feedback and comments, we also created our own anonymous (I swear, cross my heart and hope to die) feedback mechanism on the site. So far we've only gotten one comment (thanks, you know who you are!), but we sure would like to get more. We take your opinions seriously and we are looking for ways we can improve. Let us know your thoughts, and we'll try to share ours: look for another post about effective philanthropy and the importance of setting objectives soon.