Unit 5: Advice From Peers
What advice do your peers have about assessing progress and impact?
READ: Goals and Success Measures Survey Results [members only]
This document shows the results of an early 2018 survey of NCFP’s community foundation subscribers asking about their primary goals and success measures for family philanthropy services.
“Right now, we focus our metrics on looking at how engaged our donors are with GHCF. As a newer foundation and one that has spent the past 7 years trying to change from a transactional foundation to a relational one, that is what we have measured so far.”
– Jennifer Touchet, Senior Director of Family Philanthropy, Greater Houston Community Foundation
BORROW AND ADAPT: Example Success Measures [members only]
In an August 2017 webinar, the Community Foundation of Northeast Florida and the Seattle Foundation shared their progress measures in these excerpted slides.
“[Family philanthropy services are] a line of business that we talk to professional advisors about, and family office advisors, and they talk to each other about. We track and measure all of those referrals and differentiate those based on what the referral is – if it’s for new fund creation or it’s for family philanthropy work.”
– Joanne Cohen, VP, Philanthropic Services, The Community Foundation of Northeast Florida
“Giving USA data confirms that total giving across the country has really not increased significantly over 40 years. [Our] Center for Family Philanthropy wants to address these issues in two primary ways. One is to create a stronger, more robust commitment to impact-driven strategic philanthropy. And then the other piece is providing the opportunities for multiple generations to get engaged based on where they’re at”
– Kim Wright, former Director of Family Philanthropy, Seattle Foundation.
TUNE-IN (60 minutes): Topical Call—Donor Perception Report [members only]
Community foundations in Calgary, Central New York, Fox Valley, and Minnesota and Saint Paul discuss how they used the Donor Perception Report to guide their family philanthropy services.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Donor Perception Report measures such issues as donor satisfaction and motivations, engagement and preferences, use of foundation resources, and potential future giving. As of early 2018, at least a dozen members of NCFP Community Foundations Family Philanthropy Network members had used the Center’s tool.