PhilanTopic

U.S. Foundation Archives: An Endangered Species (Part 2)

(John E. Craig, Jr. is executive vice president and COO of the Commonwealth Fund. Read the first post in this two-part series here.)

In an earlier post, I reported on the findings of a December 2012 survey by the Commonwealth Fund of foundations' current archiving practices. It is of considerable concern that no more than 20 percent of even large foundations (those with assets of $240 million or more) maintain archives, given the importance of historical records to researchers and helping to assure accountability and good management in the sector.

A review of the literature, the survey findings, and conversations with leading archivists and foundation officers suggest ways in which the state of archiving in the foundation sector could be improved. Here are a dozen for your consideration.

1. The number of foundations currently maintaining archives is far fewer than it should be, and foundation boards and executives should give more attention to the issue than they do now. Audit and compliance committees of foundation boards should ensure that at least the short-term records-retentions policy required by Sarbanes-Oxley is developed and enforced and should take an active role in seeing that the question of archiving important records is addressed at the board level.

2. Chief executive officers of foundations should see one of their responsibilities as assessing the foundation's need for archives and, if the decision is affirmative, delegating clear responsibility for their development and maintenance.

3. Boards and managements should see that resources are set aside as needed to achieve archiving objectives. The 2012 survey reveals that most foundations will find that maintaining archives, if done efficiently, is not a major expense.

4. Every foundation should have a stated archiving policy -- even if it is "none" -- to ensure that the question has been addressed. Policies should specify which records are to be preserved, archiving model to be pursued (in-house vs. outsourced), access guidelines and restrictions, and guidelines for paper and electronic preservation. Archiving policies should ensure that the intensity of the archiving effort varies with the potential value of materials to users. The policy should be reviewed every five years to ensure that it keeps up with advances in information storage technology.

5. Archives are a "glasspockets" issue, and the Council on Foundations should be encouraged to include maintenance of archives among its best-practice guidelines for foundations above some minimum endowment size.

6. Outsourcing the archiving function to an external archive center is a viable option that many foundations, including multi-billion dollar ones, should consider. The choice of external center, however, must be made with care and performance monitored regularly. Important questions include the following: Do the foundations or other organizations that are currently donating archival records to the external center share similar objectives and expectations? Does the external center have other significant collections that provide a valuable context for the foundation's archive? Can the center meet the foundation's expectations regarding the speed with which records are processed, provided with online finding aids, and opened to researchers? Does the archival institution have the capacity to manage the long-term preservation of digital records and to provide access to them?

7. Many foundations, especially small and newer ones, may find that their archiving objectives going forward can be met with cloud-based content management systems that can be adapted in various ways for use by external researchers.

8. Two-thirds of larger foundations were established after 1989, but youth should be no excuse for postponing the question of whether to archive or not. Indeed, young foundations are in the enviable position of being on the ground floor with respect to technology and often start out with state-of-the art information systems in which virtually all their records are kept digitally. Under these circumstances, archives are almost a natural byproduct of a good information system and entail minimal marginal cost.

9. Spend-down foundations are prone to establish archives, but they often confront the issue only as the date of their sunset becomes imminent. Ideally, the question should be addressed early in a foundation's life.

10. Information technology staff of foundations should have as one of their major responsibilities the development of systems within the foundation that advance archiving objectives. They should work closely with the external archive center, when the foundation uses one, to coordinate and promote IT initiatives.

11. An affinity group of foundation officers with responsibility for archives (in-house or outsourced) would greatly advance the spread of best practices in the sector. Foundations without archives reported in the 2012 survey that if there were a foundation-led group developing archiving standards and guidelines and providing information on consultants and experienced-based advice on technical issues, they would be better equipped to activate nascent plans for establishing archives.

12. Most importantly, consideration should be given to development of archive cooperatives by a consortia of foundations with common interests and archiving objectives. It is doubtful that existing archive centers have the capacity to take on large numbers of new foundation clients. Given the enormous number of foundations, inter-regional differences, and frequent commonality of interests at the regional level, multiple foundation archive coops might well be easier to launch and operate than a single national one. If the concept were to be judged promising, it could be piloted and capitalized by a few very large foundations in an "early adopter region" -- with replication of the model in other regions justified by the experience of the pilot.

In giving inadequate attention to the preservation of its historical records, the foundation sector is shortchanging historians and researchers of public policy, social movements, and important institutions and individuals who made a difference in their time. Above all, foundations are shortchanging themselves, by not ensuring that records exist for learning from experience and demonstrating their worth to society. It's time for the sector to address these shortcomings.

-- John E. Craig, Jr.

The Archives of U.S. Foundations: An Endangered Species (Part 1)

(John E. Craig, Jr. is executive vice president and COO of the New York City-based Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that works to "promote a high performing health care system." A version of this post originally appeared on the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog).

A foundation's archives preserve records of the programs, activities, products, governance, people, and history of the organization that may have enduring cultural, historical, research, or institutional value. Yet despite the important role archives play in a field that focuses on investing in ideas, a recently released survey about foundation record management practices reveals that only a small minority maintain foundation archives. Clearly, there is a need to make a case for why foundations should devote resources to archive development and management. And there are at least six compelling reasons for why foundations should give their inactive files and historical records serious attention.

1. Historical Research on Social and Economic Developments and Influential Institutions and Individuals.
The late Paul Ylvisaker described philanthropy as "America's passing gear," and foundations serve this purpose in numerous ways: by helping to launch movements (such as civil rights, environmental protection, or health care reform); by developing new institutions and strengthening existing ones; by making society more inclusive through support of programs to improve the lot of vulnerable populations; by building up the knowledge base for social improvements and scientific advancement and, through the support of individual researchers, contributing to the nation’s intellectual capital; and by strengthening the social fabric and physical capital of the communities in which foundations operate. In the hands of good researchers, the records of foundations can provide guidance for future generations in tackling new and continuing social problems. For example, no history of the civil rights movement would be complete without access to the permanent records of the Ford Foundation; no history of the development of the "miracle" rice strains that sparked the Green Revolution, which helped transform Southeast Asian societies in the 1960s and 1970s, would be complete without the records of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations; and no history of the healthcare reform legislation of 2010 would be complete without the records of the Commonwealth Fund, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and other national and regional healthcare philanthropies.

2. Promoting Accountability in the Foundation Sector
The permanent records of foundations help foster accountability among this very privileged group of institutions. Foundations, given their exemption from most federal and state taxes, owe it to the public to provide clear and accessible records of how they have conducted their business and what they have accomplished -- records that enable rigorous independent assessments of the impact of foundations’ strategies and programmatic investments.

3. Protecting the Foundation Sector and Defending Institutions from Misinformed Attacks
Individual foundations and the sector as a whole periodically come under attack -- by regulators, elected officials, the media, or academics. In the absence of good historical records, foundations are at risk of not being able to make their case for being tax-exempt convincingly, or they may simply be caught flatfooted in being able to produce records of their accomplishments and actual behavior.

4. Facilitating Strategic Planning and Fostering a Learning-from-Experience Culture
Archival records enrich the research base for consideration of foundations' future directions and help ensure program continuity. The lessons from earlier experience that they hold can help prevent strategic and tactical mistakes by current and future foundation managers.

5. Ensuring Institutional Memory and Sense of Accomplishment
Permanent archives are also a primary source for the institutional memory that is vital to learning organizations, as well as for the institutional pride that ensures the strong staff morale needed to achieve high performance.

6. Good Management and Administrative Efficiency
Finally, the care given to archives is a beneficial operational discipline, with orderly archives being a reflection of efficient office practices and good management. Inactive records are not allowed to pile up and get in the way of current files and information from inactive files can be retrieved quickly when needed.

2012 Survey of Foundation Archives

As important as archives are for good foundation management, a confidential December 2012 survey of the three hundred largest foundations conducted for the Commonwealth Fund by Mathew Greenwald & Associates found that, even among very large foundations, no more than 20 percent maintain archives. (The survey findings are reported on the Commonwealth Fund Web site.) The surveyed institutions account for approximately 52 percent of the foundation sector's endowment assets, including private, community, corporate, and operating foundations. Among the responding foundations, those with larger endowments and staffs, as well as those that are older, were found to be more likely to maintain archives.

The survey revealed that only 37 percent of the non-archiving large foundations have formal short-term records-retention policies, as required for nonprofits under the 2002 federal Sarbanes-Oxley legislation -- suggesting worrisome laxness or informality with respect to institutional record-keeping within the sector.

The survey also found that most large foundations without archives warehouse their historical records, at least for a time (48 percent), and that many simply allow files to accumulate in their offices (Exhibit 1). While 20 percent of this group chose "doubt the importance of historical records" as a major reason for not maintaining archives, neither cost, privacy, nor confidentiality was identified as a major reason for not maintaining an archive. A sizable number of foundations cited their relatively young age as contributing to their failure to set up archives, explaining that the issue is either something they have not gotten around to or have not needed to address thus far.

For large foundations that do have archives, the survey found that two-thirds manage them in-house; 17 percent place their historical records with independent nonprofit archive centers; 9 percent place records with a historical society, museum, or research library; and 7 percent place them with a university or college archive (Exhibit 2). An example of a very large foundation that historically managed its archives internally but recently switched to the outsourced model is the Ford Foundation. In 2012, Ford selected as its repository the Rockefeller Archive Center, the independent archive organization most often used by large foundations, including, since 1985, the Commonwealth Fund.

In addition, many foundations that maintain archives indicated that they put all important records in them. Foundations generally follow traditional archiving practices in preserving program files, foundation publications, public relations documents, organizational records (for example, board and committee minutes), key administrative records, and, if they have them, photographs, documentaries, and videos. Most institutions do not archive declined proposals and no longer attempt to keep traditional archival material such as officers' calendars. External archive centers typically do not accept financial or human resources records, owing to lack of space and to processing priorities. Most foundations with archives (80 percent) are not preserving important e-mail correspondence, and over half are not archiving Web site information.

Most foundations restrict researchers' access to their archives, but nearly half will permit access if the research objective is deemed worthwhile (Exhibit 3). About a third (31 percent) routinely open their archives to researchers. The most common restriction is on access to administrative records.

The survey also found that the cost of archives varied with foundation size, age, and the nature of the foundation's work. For a 94-year-old, $650 million foundation with extensive intramural program operations and publications like Commonwealth, the annual cost of maintaining an archive is about $100,000. The mean annual cost reported in the survey was $60,000.

Like other institutions, foundations see their archiving system at risk of being overwhelmed by an influx of materials. Even so, foundations with archives seem to be keeping up with the paper flow relatively well: two-thirds say that at least 75 percent of records sent to archives have been processed. And many foundations with archives are using their own information technology systems to advance their archiving objectives, with some quite advanced in doing so. That said, over half of survey respondents say that IT system improvements could improve their archiving performance, while half expect that, over time, their archives will be primarily electronic (Exhibit 4).

Finally, most foundations with assets under several billion dollars find that outsourcing their archives to an external center is more efficient than attempting to build a professional internal archives unit. The survey found that half of foundations using external archives centers find the services, overall, to be "very good" to "excellent," while another 35 percent rate the services "satisfactory." Echoing challenges facing the archiving profession, the chief areas of concern among foundation officers are the timeliness of such centers in processing materials and their ability to use information technology to maximum advantage.

Clearly, the state of foundation archives is a neglected "glasspockets" issue in the sector. In a follow-up post, I will present some recommendations for improving the archiving practices of foundations.

-- John E. Craig, Jr.

Here Today, Not Gone Tomorrow

(Lisa Brooks is a co-founder of IssueLab and director of knowledge management systems at the Foundation Center. In her last post, she wrote about the importance of archiving old research.)

About a month ago, IssueLab received an e-mail from a man in Jackson, Michigan, who runs an organization focused on mentoring high-risk youth. He found a report on the IssueLab site he wanted to share at a meeting he was about to host, and he wanted to know how he could obtain twenty-five hard copies. The report, The Promise and Challenge of Mentoring High-Risk Youth: Findings From the National Faith-Based Initiative, was published in 2004 by Public/Private Ventures (P/PV). The fact that the report was published nine years ago by P/PV made his e-mail especially interesting.

As many of you know, P/PV, after thirty-five years in operation, closed its doors in the summer of 2012. About six months later, the Public Education Network (PEN), which had been doing good work for twenty-years, closed its doors. One of the last tasks both organizations completed was to partner with IssueLab to preserve their respective publications. So while neither organization is around today, anyone can browse P/PV's research reports, case studies, and evaluations or PEN's white papers, case studies, testimonies, opinion polls, and survey results through the special P/PV and PEN collections on the IssueLab site. And that's a good thing, because as our friend from Michigan can attest, these publications continue to provide data, insights, and case studies that can inform the efforts of those working in the fields of education and children, youth and families.

What would have happened to P/PV or PEN's publications had they decided not to turn over stewardship of their published collections to IssueLab?

In a recently released report from the Commonwealth Fund titled The Archives of U.S. Foundations: An Endangered Species, author John E. Craig, Jr. wrestles with exactly this question and provides the sector with a thorough accounting of why foundations need to take seriously the archiving of their own publications. Among other things, Craig argues that foundations play a key role in social change through their efforts to build "the knowledge base for social improvements and scientific advancement and, through the support of individual researchers, contributing to the nation's intellectual capital." What's more (and directly to the point of this post), Craig notes that "foundation records are also frequently one of the few sources for historical research on small, relatively short-lived organizations (and their leaders) that had significant impact in their day."

Neither PEN nor P/PV were short-lived organizations, and in this case IssueLab rather than a foundation has assumed responsibility for archiving their research and publications going forward, but Craig's point is no less valid: organizations close their doors, and it is up to other organizations and individuals to preserve their legacies and learnings. IssueLab continues to ensure that the work of P/PV and PEN will remain a part of the historic record and that their documentation of specific social problems and solutions designed to address those problems will continue to be shared.

The story of P/PV, PEN, and IssueLab is a hopeful one, and the attention that groups like the Commonwealth Fund are giving the issue of knowledge preservation is encouraging. But the question remains: How can the social sector shift from "knowledge preservation by chance" to a more sustainable approach that encompasses the complete cycle of knowledge generation, distribution, and preservation in perpetuity? At IssueLab, we're looking for answers and for thought partners. Use the comments section below to post your thoughts and ideas, and let's get this much-needed conversation started!

-- Lisa Brooks

Weekend Link Roundup (November 17-18, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Communications/Marketing

With the critical holiday fundraising season right around the corner, new reports from Charity Dynamics/NTEN and Blackbaud remind us that "Establishing emotional connections with donors remains paramount," writes Katya Andresen on her Non-Profit Marketing blog.

In a guest post on Beth Kanter's blog, Big Duck's Meghan Teich has some advice for nonprofit communications pros in the aftermath of a crisis or major natural disaster:

• Make sure your staff is kept up to date on your communications plan and that they have a clear understanding of your messaging.
• Strike while the iron's hot, but not so soon that it looks like you're capitalizing on the crisis.
• Don't use the crisis as an opportunity to do general fundraising for your organization (unless you have a particularly relevant mission). Instead, create a specific fund or give donors a tangible item or event to which they can donate.
• Reach out to other nonprofits, even those you view as "competitors," to explore how you might work together.
• Keep your supporters and donors updated on the progress you're making in real time via e-mail and social media.

"I urge you to take the steps necessary to make sure you are engaging the right people in the right ways to reach your marketing goals," writes Nancy Schwartz on her Getting Attention blog. "And to start today." Sounds like good advice to us.

Nonprofit Management

On the Social Velocity blog, Nell Edgington argues that for nonprofits looking or needing to change, merely wanting to change is not enough; certain key building blocks need to be in place. They include someone in a leadership position willing to be a champion for change; a clear statement of why change is necessary; a funder or funders willing to support the change process; and a "navigator" who can guide the organization through that process.

Philanthropy

In the first of a series of posts, the Association of Small Foundations' Andy Carroll argues that foundations, small foundations in particular, do not acknowledge the complexity of the problems they are trying to address "openly enough." Indeed, writes Carroll, "Many funders who keep asking how they can have more impact eventually come up against challenges that are too big for them to solve alone."

On the Philanthropy Potluck blog, Anne Bauers shares findings from a recent NCRP report which found that "foundation giving to support the general operations of nonprofits increased through the recent recession, but the share of foundation dollars classified as providing this vital type of funding remains the same, at about 16 percent." As the report explains, general operating support benefits nonprofits in a number of ways. For that reason, writes Bauers, funders should award more general support grants in addition to or in place of other types of support.

On the new Markets for Good blog, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations' Darin McKeever and Victoria Vrana, Brian Walsh, the executive director of Liquidnet For Good, and the Hewlett Foundation's Kelly Born share the first draft of a vision paper "that signals how and why we think that the sector needs to upgrade its information infrastructure. By that," they add,

we mean the architecture that helps to connect, organize and structure information so that it can be supplied and used more easily. We acknowledge that upgrading the information infrastructure will not change the sector's use of information overnight, and that other elements are needed to support the free flow of quality data in the social sector. But we believe that in order to move towards a more effective sector, powered by information, we need to begin by strengthening the core building blocks of data exchange....

It's buzzword time, which means Lucy Bernholz is collecting the words and terms that were on every philanthropoid's lips in 2012. But she needs three more to complete the list, so hop on over to Lucy's Philanthropy 2173 blog there and leave a suggestion or two.

Transparency

On the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, Andrew Wolk of Root Cause and Wendy Yallowitz of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation discuss the benefits of collaborative learning, which, as Wolk explains, is "an intentional effort between two organizations to exchange, analyze, and apply knowledge that will lead to better outcomes."

And on NCRP's Keeping A Close Eye blog, Kevin Laskowski commends the Foundation Center for its recently announced Reporting Commitment initiative, which, in an effort to help foundations more effectively address the many complex problems confronting our communities and the world, aims to develop more timely, accurate, and precise reporting on the flow of philanthropic dollars.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great Thanksgiving!

-- The Editors

Old Reports Are New Again

(Lisa Brooks is a co-founder of IssueLab and director of knowledge management systems at the Foundation Center.)

Often when talking with folks who contribute content to IssueLab, we encourage -- indeed, urge -- them to share all their publications regardless of date published. More often than not, we get a response along the lines of "that report is so old we don't want to include it. It's not relevant anymore."

Well, reading the New York Times on a recent weekend, I came across an editorial titled "The Struggle to Cast a Vote: Wrongly Turning Away Ex-Offenders." A timely article, given that the 2012 elections were at that point only two days away. So, I started to read and what did I notice? A 2005 study by the Sentencing Project, an IssueLab contributing organization, was cited. I repeat: the editorial cited a 2005 study. Total word count of the piece? Four hundred and sixty-seven -- and more than a quarter of them were dedicated to a seven-year-old study. How's that for legs?

In that same issue of the Times, another editorial, "How Romney Would Treat Women," also zeroed in on a key issue in the election and mentioned a fact sheet published in August 2011 by the Guttmacher Institute, another IssueLab contributor. While that publication was of more recent vintage than the Sentencing Project report, I couldn't help but wonder whether it would still be available to the public a few years from now. Yes, the Times will archive its editorial in perpetuity. But will the link to the institute's fact sheet still be live in, say, 2019?

We can't know the answer to that, of course. And perhaps the more interesting question is one that focuses on decentralized vs. centralized knowledge sharing and management. You may not know this, but using the IssueLab platform to share your knowledge resources doesn't lock those resources up in a single centralized location; instead, they become part of a constellation of networked services. In fact, everything collected by IssueLab is included in our Open Archives Initiative-compliant data provider service, which, in turn, pushes those resources out to Worldcat, which, in turn, makes them available through catalog searches performed at more than ten thousand brick-and-mortar libraries and online library networks around the world. And here's some more good news: We're working hard to expand this network in an effort to provide IssueLab contributors with a comprehensive distribution solution for their knowledge resources and end-users of that knowledge with multiple ways to learn about and locate such resources. All a knowledge provider has to do to get in on the action is to create a free IssueLab account and start adding resources. We take it from there.

That's because we believe there is no expiration date on social change or attempts to understand, analyze, and explain it. Indeed, everything we collect through IssueLab contributes to a more accurate picture of the efforts of the social sector -- where we've been, where we are, and where we might be heading. Older publications are a vital part of that picture.

If you are a knowledge provider and have older works you believe are no longer relevant, please reconsider. And know that at IssueLab, we value these works and want to preserve and share them with others.

(Image: Design Inspiration)

-- Lisa Brooks

From Open Data to Open Knowledge: Foundations, Nonprofits, and the Production of Ideas

(Bradford K. Smith is president of the Foundation Center. In his last post, he looked at what philanthropy can do to help underresourced communities in tough economic times.)

If you think foundations are only ATM machines and nonprofits just service providers, think again. With the launch of IssueLab, there is one place you can go to find more than eleven thousand knowledge products published, funded, produced, and/or generated by foundations and nonprofits in the U.S. and around the globe.

Last month, the Foundation Center announced the Reporting Commitment, an effort by fifteen of America's largest philanthropic foundations to make their grants data -- who they give money to, how much, where, and for what purpose -- available in an open, machine-readable format. Starting today, through IssueLab, the social sector can also access what it knows as a result of that funding. A service of the Foundation Center, IssueLab gathers, indexes, and shares the sector's collective intelligence on a free, open, and searchable platform, and encourages users to share, copy, distribute, and even adapt the work. It's a big step for philanthropy and "open knowledge."

What's in it for you? Read on.

Issues -- IssueLab is about issues. Been hearing about employment this election season? There are more than twelve hundred reports in the IssueLab collection with titles like The Problem with Structural Employment in the U.S. Interested in energy and the environment? You can choose from nearly eight hundred and fifty titles, including Who's Winning the Clean Energy Race?

Authors -- Some of the world's best minds are busy analyzing the challenges, successes, failures, and lessons learned by the social sector. From Melinda Abrams to Stephen Zuckerman, you can browse the IssueLab collection by author, identifying issue experts in dozens of fields.

Geography -- IssueLab lets you search the globe for reports related to the continent, country, region, or city that interests you most. China? Read about the growth of foundations and public charities there or the impact of returning entrepreneurs on the Chinese economy.

Organizations -- Maybe you work at a foundation that wants to know more about the "thought leadership" of a prospective grantee. Or you're a consultant working with a donor who wants to learn more about charter schools before she starts making grants. IssueLab allows you to search by a particular organization, assess the breadth of its knowledge output, and dive into individual reports.

Special Collections -- Within hours of Hurricane Sandy making landfall, IssueLab posted a special collection of reports from foundations, nonprofits, and think tanks that reflect on and distill lessons learned from the response to past disasters. The title of the first resource listed says it all: Creating Order from Chaos: Roles for Philanthropy in Disaster Planning and Response.

Free -- IssueLab is a free online service; it belongs to the social sector for which the Foundation Center already serves as a central knowledge source. Anyone can explore the IssueLab collection to find (and share) the knowledge they need. You can also register to have issue alerts and e-newsletters delivered directly to your e-mail account.

Open -- Free is good, but IssueLab promotes openness in a number of other ways. First, the metadata -- the abstracts and "tags" developed for all reports in the collection -- is available under a Creative Commons license and can be grabbed and/or remixed by anyone as long as they use it for non-commercial purposes. Second, only work that is available for free is included in the IssueLab collection. These are public "assets," in that the organizations which produced them already have tax-exempt status and/or have received government funding, and they should be easy for the public to find. Sorry but Kardashian Konfidential will not be found on IssueLab. Third, IssueLab itself is an open-source platform whose underlying codebase/framework is continually being improved by a community of developers. And fourth, our own developers embrace the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which develops and promotes interoperability standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of online content.

Distributed -- IssueLab also builds third-party Knowledge Centers. Beyond helping to make your own research and reports more accessible on your Web site, Knowledge Centers link you and your knowledge output to a broader universe of users and potential collaborators. For example, a report on advocacy around water access issues posted to the WASHfunders Knowledge Center immediately becomes part of the underlying IssueLab collection and from there is shared with Wiser Earth, an online community of 72,852 users committed to sustainability, as well as the online WorldCat network of ten thousand libraries.

As more and more of it becomes open and free, data are becoming both ubiquitous and commoditized. In a world awash in petabytes of information, managing -- and sharing -- knowledge effectively will be the crucial distinction between those organizations that produce lasting change and those that merely do good. From open data to open knowledge, ideas matter. Now you can find them on IssueLab, a service of the Foundation Center.

-- Brad Smith