What's New at Candid (formerly Foundation Center and GuideStar) — February 2019

Have you heard? Foundation Center and GuideStar have joined forces to become a single nonprofit organization, Candid. Together, we are dedicated to sharing information and insights that can fuel deeper impact. Candid will allow us to combine our knowledge and passions, and to do more than we could ever do apart. And the work continues! Here are some highlights of what we have been working on to start the new year.

Projects/Training Launched

• New research supports: (1) donors give more to transparent nonprofits, and (2) transparent organizations tend to be stronger organizations. The research, recently published in the Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance, analyzed more than 6,300 nonprofits in the GuideStar database. They found that, as a group, nonprofits that earned a GuideStar Seal of Transparency averaged 53 percent more in contributions the following year compared to organizations that didn’t earn a Seal.
• In partnership with the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, we've officially launched Funding for Early Childhood Care and Education, a joint effort to map the last ten years of philanthropic giving around family engagement and professional development. Foundation Center Midwest is partnering with the United Black Fund and the Cleveland History Center at the Western Reserve Historical Society to present The Soul of Philanthropy: Reframed & Exhibited.
• We launched a new CF Insights research brief that looks at which community foundations are accepting donations of cryptocurrency, the challenges they've faced, and the platforms they use.
• Glasspockets has unveiled a new transparency indicator that highlights whether foundations are publicly sharing their values or have policies that commit them to working transparently. The new "Transparency Values/Policy" indicator can be found on the Who Has Glass Pockets? page.
• We've added a new infographic to the Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy site. Learn more on voting districts and the bipartisan divide on immigration issues.
• In January, Foundation Center Midwest hosted an event in partnership with local arts stakeholders at which Foundation Center Midwest director Teleangé Thomas presented to a soldout room of young and emerging creative professionals on how Foundation Center can help them find funding with Foundation Directory Online and Foundation Grants to Individuals Online.
• Also in January, Foundation Center Midwest hosted the Neighborhood Leadership Development Program's fundraising workshop, a full-day contract training for twenty-five "dreamers" working in the social justice and entrepreneurship space.
• Foundation Center West successfully completed its contract training with the Creative Work Fund (CWF), a program of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund that is generously supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The training included a series of informational webinars and a convening around Mastering Collaboration featuring successful past CWF grantees and their grant award-winning artist + nonprofit collaborations.
• Foundation Center West also completed two fund development workshop series for the San Francisco City and County Department of Children, Youth and their Families (DCYF). The series consists of three workshops each: fundraising planning; crafting a competitive letter of intent; and project budgets.

Content Published

• New posts on the GuideStar blog, including "New Research Shows Nonprofit Transparency Matters," "Has the Flow of Nonprofit Data Been Affected by the Government Shutdown?," "Do Capital Campaigns Hurt or Strengthen Major Gifts?," and "Why Nonprofit Staff Should Not Be Asked to Donate to the Organizations They Work For."
• New posts on WASHfunders.org as part of a new series focused on sustainable WASH topics such as blended finance, working with the sanitation sector, and UNGA and the SDGs.
• New posts on PhilanTopic, including "Cryptocurrency and the Community Foundation Field"; a review of Edgar Villaneuva's "Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance," by Edgar Villanueva; a Q&A with Cathy Cha, president of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; and a New Year’s Eve roundup.
• New posts on GrantSpace including one on high-impact volunteer engagement and another on corporate relationships in action
• New posts on the Glasspockets blog, including a two-part series on family foundations and transparency.
• New posts on GrantCraft, including a piece that questions how funders are defining impact and another offering advice for funders from a former fundraiser.
• A new post on the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (our project partner for the Measuring the State of Disaster Philanthropy) blog on what we can learn from five years of tracking disaster-related giving.
• 327 new resources added to IssueLab in December and January, including Promoting Gender Equity Lessons from the Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program and Aligning Stakeholder Communications for U.S. Marina Aquaculture.

In the News

• So many great articles about our launch of Candid by outlets such as Fast Company, The Nonprofit Times, Alliance magazine, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Nonprofit Quarterly, and more. Check out our press page for a complete rundown.
• "Jockey Club engages local philanthropic foundations in finding better city solutions," by South China Morning Post
• "As America Rapidly Ages, Who's Helping to Find Better Ways to Care for Seniors?," by Alice Dickow, Inside Philanthropy
• "Informal Networks of Generosity Are Supporting Asylum Seekers," by Jamie Lynn Goodwin, Truth Out
• "Participatory Grantmaking," by Sarah Lutman, Twin Cities Business
• "Private School and Why It May Be Best for Your Child," by Nyketa Gaffney, Cincinnati Family Magazine
• "Accountants Prove Transparency Boosts Giving," by Mark Hrywna, The Nonprofit Times

What We're Excited About

• Our offices in DC, Cleveland, New York, and San Francisco will host three-day proposal writing boot camps for the public in March and April. On average, Proposal Writing Boot Camp participants reported a 75 percent increase in their confidence after the session.
• March 26: The "All Together Now: Conversations in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” series continues. During a program titled "Skills for Overcoming Burnout – Refueling the Fire," our partners at Rhiza Collective will share proven methods of self- and collective care. Learn how stress and trauma impact individuals and teams, and get strategies to address conflicts and resolve tensions.
• We will travel to Miami in March to facilitate a funding panel, "Funding Collaborations and Building Ecosystems: A Grantmaker Meets the Changemaker Panel Discussion," in partnership with the Miami Children's Trust and Miami Dade Public Library System.
• We've updated our self-paced e-learning courses, including "How to Cultivate Meaningful Relationships with Funders," "How to Use Data to Raise More Money from Corporations," and "How to Start a Major Gifts Program."
• February 15: Foundation Center Midwest will be moderating a program in partnership with AFP Greater Cleveland, "Donor-Advised Funds: How to Find and Secure Support," featuring representatives from the Cleveland Foundation, Glenmede, and Fidelity. The program is a shared-cost contract program and, with a hundred attendees, is sold out.
• The second webinar and watch party presented as part of Foundation Center West's California Wellness: Strengthening California Nonprofits grant will happen on February 27: 7 Lessons Learned from Nonprofit Leaders with Sean Kosofsky. In addition, five California Funding Information Network partners — Cal State University - Chico; the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy at John F. Kennedy University; Santa Barbara Public Library; Santa Monica Public Library; Pasadena Public Library — and one lapsed FIN, Cal State University - Fresno, have signed up to host watch parties and engage in a facilitated community discussion post-webinar.
• GuideStar is providing nonprofit data to more people than ever before and in the last year recorded its 10 millionth unique visitor at GuideStar.org!
• We're thrilled to announce that more than 66,000 nonprofit organizations have added information to their GuideStar Nonprofit Profiles, thereby earning a Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum GuideStar Seal of Transparency.
• More than 70,000 university students and faculty in California now have access to GuideStar Pro resources for academic purposes thanks to UC Irvine and UC Berkley. Both colleges signed on to become GuideStar Library Services clients, providing institution-wide IP access to the GuideStar database.

Upcoming Conferences and Events

Our staff will be attending these upcoming events:

• Foundant Summit, March 3-5, Tempe, AZ
• PEAK Grantmaking Annual Conference, March 11-13, Denver, CO
• Case District One, March 13-15, Boston, MA
• Nonprofit Technology Conference, March 13-15, Portland, OR
• Association of Black Foundation Executives conference, April 4-6, Detroit, MI

Services Spotlight

• 458,072 new grants added to Foundation Maps in January, of which 2,960 grants were made to 1,836 organizations outside the U.S.
• Foundation Directory Online now includes more than 14 million grants. In the new My FDO, new tools can help you manage your prospects like a pro.
• New data sharing partners: Alaska Children's Trust, Alaska Community Foundation, Apex Foundation, Community Foundation of Snohomish County, Delta Dental Plan of Colorado Foundation, Inc., The Funding Network, George Alexander Foundation, John & Denise Graves Foundation, JRS Biodiversity Foundation, Kitsap Community Foundation, Sheng-Yen Lu Foundation, Melbourne Women's Fund, Montana Healthcare Foundation, Raynier Institute and Foundation, Satterberg Foundation, Thrivent Foundation, United Way of Pierce County, Westpac Foundation, and Sherman and Marjorie Zeigler Foundation. Tell your story through data and help us communicate philanthropy's contribution to creating a better world — learn more about our eReporting program.

Data Spotlight

• Since 2006, private foundations in the U.S. have made grants of more than $7 billion to improve early childhood care and education, reflecting a deep commitment to the importance of supporting children and their families during a critical developmental period in their lives.
• Total GrantSpace sessions for January 2019 exceeded 195,000.
• As of November 2018, our Online Librarian service had reached its 2018 goal of serving more than 130,000 people.
• We recorded nearly 30,000 registrations for our online programming in 2018.
• We exceeded our goal for in-person attendance to our classes, with more than 16,000 attendees in 2018.
• A five-year trends analysis of the largest 1,000 U.S. foundations demonstrates that foundations contributed an average $150.4 million a year specifically for disasters. Funding spiked in 2014 due to large grants for the Ebola outbreak, then declined over the next two years. Learn more about these trends at foundationcenter.org.
• We completed custom data searches for Grantmakers in the Arts, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, McKinsey, the Mississippi Association of Grantmakers, the City of Phoenix,the City and County of San Francisco, Skidmore College, TCC Group, the University of San Diego, and GiveWell.

If you found this update helpful, feel free to share it or shoot us an email! I’ll be back next month with another update.

Jen Bokoff is director of stakeholder engagement at Candid.