Overview: Mapping Place-based Grants
A significant number of charitable foundation grants to non-profits are place-based, that is, the grant dollars are spent in a specific , definable geographic area or areas that can be represented on a map. Different foundations and different program areas within foundations will have different mixes of place-based vs non place-based grant-making. Community development, housing, the environment, and public health may have a large number of place-based grants, while other foundation funding areas (medical research, advocacy, social action) seek outcomes that may not be limited to specific geographic areas. In discussing this with the research department at Guidestar, we reached the conclusion that, conservatively, 40% of foundation grants were place-based.
Surprisingly, given the emphasis on openness, transparency, and collaboration, one of the common themes one hears in talking with groups of foundation staff doing similar work in the same geographic areas is that – for the most part - none of them know where the others are spending their money. This is true both within, and between, grant-making foundations. Even funders groups that form around specific place-based community issues will bring up the lack of common knowledge in group meetings, yet there is almost never effective follow through. My purpose in writing this paper is to look at the reasons this is happening and to suggest ways in which mapping geographic information can be used to help us all make more effective place-based grants at almost no cost.
Rationale
A geographic approach just makes sense with place-based grants. There isn't an area of business or government where geographic information isn't used to save time and resources, track assets, increase efficiency, accuracy, and productivity, generate revenue, increase collaboration, aid in budgeting, add to transparency, and support decision making. Yet, as far as I've been able to determine in several years of work, geographic information is completely absent as a shared, open decision-making tool in the foundation world. Mapping certainly exists as a tool in some program areas of some foundations and as an external, third party service, but I've been unable to find any examples of consistent, open, and shared mapping of place-based grant-making in the foundation world.
If a foundation program officer can see on a map where her money will be spent, which foundations have spent money in the specific area in the past, who is spending money in adjoining neighborhoods or communities, there is a tremendous opportunity to communicate and collaborate with other grant-makers, to leverage one’s investment, to avoid redundancy and waste, to make intelligent use of up-to-date demographic information, and ultimately – when one takes a longitudinal point of view - to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of one’s grant-making.
All but one critical piece of information to make this approach possible is already available in each foundation's form 990-PF and, in many cases, in their annual reports and grants management systems – that is, exactly (down to the neighborhood level) where the place-based grant dollars were spent. All grants management systems will contain the addresses of the offices of non-profits that received grants and it is usually a simple matter to get these addresses given the information in 990's and annual reports, but that doesn't tell where the money was actually spent. Mapping the office location of non-profits that received grants can be automated and gives foundations a certain “window dressing” level of information (which is frequently confused with mapping where the money is spent) , but it doesn't provide the extra data that can enable a host of additional and substantial benefits.
Mapping: Staus Quo, The Problem, and a Way Forward
Today there are several organizations that offer geographic information in one form or another. Knowledgeplex's DataPlace project offers free access to housing and demographic maps and data. TRF's PolicyMap offers a web-based GIS (geographic information system) with access to 4000+ indicators. PolicyMap's Premium subscription level adds the ability to upload and plot one's own data-sets for a substantial fee. Foundation Search, a for-profit company, offers analysis and geographic visualization of foundation grants on a state, county, and city level, but there is no detail available at finer than the city-wide level (in other words, if you care about neighborhood or block level data, you're out of luck). Even when the existing services list all the grants to non-profits down to the city or zip-code level, they only show the location of the office of the non-profit that received the grant – not where the money was actually spent. These are frequently very different locations.
What none of these solutions do is enable the average foundation or non-profit employee to easily and freely add and share place-based grant data at any level of detail with any of her colleagues anywhere in the world. Because they use custom-developed software platforms, the least expensive of the alternatives mentioned above is still several thousand dollars per user per year and they are sufficiently complex that most people will need to have their IT departments handle the data transfer.
What is needed is a powerful, free mapping application that will run on any system connected to the Internet, has access to huge amounts of public data, has the ability to save and share user-created data-sets, and can be learned in 20 minutes by anyone who can type and use a mouse. When Google released Google Earth and the .kml file format in 2006, we got just such an application. Both ESRI (ArcGIS Explorer), the world leader in GIS, and Microsoft (Virtual Earth), have added support for the .kml file format in their recent releases.
I've been working for several years through the non-profit Foundation Mapping Project to get foundation staff to use inexpensive mapping tools and techniques, such as Google Earth, ArcGIS Explorer, or Virtual Earth to help in making more effective grants.
[Next: A Chronology of Conversations with Foundations About Mapping Grants]
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