Analysis: What Does This Mean?
Some notable causes of the negative response to the idea of mapping and sharing place-based grants data seem to be too much money, a fascination with complexity, and little understanding of information technology. When presented with the idea of mapping their place-based grants, most people who make the strategic decisions for foundations understand the potential value but have no understanding of the technology. The decision makers invariably see complex and expensive systems as being superior to easy to use and free, or inexpensive, alternatives. Perversely, since the time and cost of implementing mapping solutions is directly related to their complexity, this leads to the inevitable conclusion that they don't have the time, staff, or discretionary dollars to do what they acknowledge would be incredibly useful to their grant-making programs. The tendency to hand the ultimate decision off to technical staff (who have every career reason to want to see complex systems, requiring ongoing technical support introduced into their organizations) further handicaps the idea of free, shared mapping of place-based foundation grants and the benefit that would bring the sector.
However, I now believe that the most significant reasons foundations, largely self-proclaimed paragons of openness and transparency, are so hesitant to map and share their place-based grant information has little to do with time, technology, re-granting, or ongoing projects. Rather it has everything to do with the control of information and the power imbalances under which they have grown accustomed to operating. While I believe most foundation people are largely motivated by a desire to make the world a better place, I also believe that the unique conditions under which they work can lead to an unusual and “out of balance” relationship with their applicants and grantees. Foundations and foundation staff are almost always dealing with supplicants and this does something to one's view of the world and one's sense of control. When one is always on the dominant side of any relationship, it is hard to hold oneself accountable.
The increased scrutiny of foundation grant-making that we've seen in the last several years has also made foundation employees less comfortable with making public data more accessible. This is true internally, whether it is a concern with one's performance in the eyes of a supervisor, how a program fared in a grantee satisfaction survey, or with the opinions of one's board. It is also true externally, whether it comes from the reaction of unsuccessful community grant-seekers, the local press, or city, state, or federal government.
All of this, coupled with the view engendered by the inherent power imbalance in philanthropy, conspires to make it very hard for foundations to voluntarily make access to their grant-making data more accessible and to use it as the powerful tool that it can be.
Mapping place-based grants should be about the right way to visualize and use data that is already public. Once you've answered all the questions about time, technology, resources, and cost, the objections will always boil down to who gets access to the newly visualized data and the power it imparts.
Thinking About Solutions
So how does one map place-based grants in any location when there are so many grants that could be mapped and when foundations themselves resist the idea of the place-based grants data becoming public in a useful format?
I'm proposing several steps to show the ease and utility of the process. Since it is way beyond the ability of any individual or small group to map all these grants, it makes sense to concentrate on a few cities and a few place-based program areas first – show the value without diluting the effort too much.
Building on work already finished, it makes sense to initially concentrate on community development grants in Baltimore, New York, and Boston by posting and expanding the mapping work already completed.
The mapped grant data will be publicly available at several sites including a Foundation Mapping Project site and possibly Google Earth and ESRI sites. Since I want to encourage foundations to participate in mapping their own work here, I'll continue to offer to teach any foundation staff how to map their place-based grants data at no charge if they'll agree to make the data public and share it with their colleagues in other foundations. For a variety of reasons, many larger non-profits have expressed interest in mapping the grants they receive and there's no reason not to include them in the educational effort. Step-by-step instructions and sample maps and links to tutorials will be available through the project site.
The next step will be to demonstrate how much of the process can be automated so that grant data can be dumped from spreadsheets and grants management systems (initially Gifts) making drawing of the polygons the only manual task in the process.
Another step involves the realization that there is a big difference between mapping the data that is already available through the 990-PFs and annual reports and mapping real-time grant-making. 990-PF data is almost always at least 18 months out of date. The ability to see who is putting money in an area of interest right now, when you are considering making a grant, is even more powerful than the retrospective look we've considered up until now. If we succeed in getting foundation “buy-in” we can move toward making this close to a real time process by having foundation support staff map grants as they are approved.
A fourth step could be the addition of underlying demographic data, most of which is freely available from the Census Bureau. This would another dimension to real-time mapping as a decision making tool and would be another step in making mapping widely used for place-based grant-making. While it is impossible without community, program goal, and grant specifics to speculate on which measures might be useful in which communities, the easy availability of this data raises many possibilities. Are the right neighborhoods being served by your grant-making? Will a better objective understanding of the community's issues improve your grant-making? Are there over-funded or under-funded non-profits serving the areas in which you're working (and what could you do about it)?
Finally, in the future, with the addition of demographic data, tracking changes in this data over time might provide measurable indicators for the success of your program's funding.
Conclusion
I hope it is obvious that the mapping of place-based grant-making by foundations could provide tremendous gains in foundation effectiveness and add real transparency to the process. The recent availability of free, easy to use, and powerful mapping tools should convince the foundation world to consider their values and adopt public mapping and sharing of information as a way to improve the effectiveness of their place-based grant-making.
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