Listen for Good Initiative 2017 Grant Program Announced

The Fund for Shared Insight (FFSI) is a collaborative effort among funders that pools financial and other resources to make grants to improve philanthropy. FFSI emerged from the belief that foundations will be more effective and make an even bigger difference in the world if they are more open – if they share what they are learning and are open to what others want to share with them, including grantees and the people they seek to help.

The Fund for Shared Insight has several opportunities for your members to be involved in their Listen for Good initiative.  Listen for Good (L4G) is an initiative dedicated to building the practice of listening to the people funders seek to help. They invite nonprofits and funders to join in exploring a simple but systematic and rigorous way of getting feedback from the people at the heart of their work. Listen for Good is focused on applying a semi-standard survey instrument, which includes using the Net Promoter SystemSM (NPS®) employed widely in customer feedback circles, to the nonprofit beneficiary context. Organizations implementing L4G are all customer-facing nonprofits.

In 2016, FFSI made 46 L4G grants supported by 28 nominating co-funders. 2017 grantees of L4G will receive $45,000 over two years ($30,000 from Fund for Shared Insight and $15,000 from a nominating co-funder), as well as access to technical assistance to guide their implementation efforts.

Details 

FFSI is holding a series of open conference calls on April 7 and April to answer questions from potential co-funders about how to nominate a grantee(s) for Listen for Good. FFSI created a page about Listen for Good called “Information for Funders” with details on Listen for Good and how to nominated grantees.

Building Nonprofit Fiscal Strength — September 22

Building Nonprofit Fiscal Strength

FMA, in conjunction with The Wallace Foundation, has designed a website to help nonprofits build their fiscal strength and achieve operational excellence.

StrongNonprofits.org features more than 60 free tools, how-tos and guides for anyone involved in nonprofits’ financial planning, monitoring, operations or oversight.

Among a variety of resources, StrongNonprofits.org offers:

a nonprofit accounting guide

information on sensible growth strategies

a podcast on how to understand the true cost of programming.

The site also offers an array of helpful tools, including the “Go or No Go Decision Tool,” an interactive assessment that helps an organization decide whether accepting a contract would help–or hurt—the  bottom line.  Please pass the website information on to your nonprofit partners!

If you’d like a guided tour of the website, Register

Tools for Nonprofit Sustainability and Financial Stability

Building Nonprofit Fiscal Strength

FMA, in conjunction with The Wallace Foundation, has designed a website to help nonprofits build their fiscal strength and achieve operational excellence.

StrongNonprofits.org features more than 60 free tools, how-tos and guides for anyone involved in nonprofits’ financial planning, monitoring, operations or oversight.

Among a variety of resources, StrongNonprofits.org offers:

a nonprofit accounting guide

information on sensible growth strategies

a podcast on how to understand the true cost of programming.

The site also offers an array of helpful tools, including the “Go or No Go Decision Tool,” an interactive assessment that helps an organization decide whether accepting a contract would help–or hurt—the  bottom line.

FMA will provide a free webinar guided tour of StrongNonprofits.org on September 22 and November 29.

Register

Importance of Funding Infrastructure for Nonprofits and Philanthropy

GCRI’s recent focus on Nonprofit Resilience and Sustainability has been echoed nationwide.  Deb Linnell, who has done extensive work on organizational development and sustainability with van Beuren Charitable Foundation grantees, especially from a financial perspective, sent along this resource from the Nonprofit QuarterlyKeeping It In Reserve: Grantmaking for a Rainy Day.

Spearheaded by the leaders of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and Guidestar, 22 national organizations signed on to a letter last week encouraging foundations to consider giving 1% of their annual giving to organizations that support the sector’s capacity and effectiveness.  The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers (GCRI’s national affiliate) was one of the authoring organizations, recognizing the importance of an infrastructure to enable civil society to effectively address the challenges facing our communities today.

An economy needs roads, bridges, and train stations to thrive. A community needs schools, parks, and houses of worship to ensure the flowering of human potential.

And civil society needs infrastructure to ensure that nonprofits and foundations can act with integrity and impact. Nonprofit infrastructure organizations run the training programs that support the growth of our staff and volunteers. They do the research to help us understand what works, and what doesn’t. They build the technology platforms that make communication and learning possible. They hold the conferences that gather nonprofit leaders together and provide them the resources and connections to improve their work. They advocate for new levels of excellence to push us all to do better — and for policies that create the legal environment in which we work.

In short, they make foundations and nonprofits more effective in their quest to make the world better.

For more information, you can read Jacob Harold’s blog post at Guidestar or Dave Biemesderfer’s Forum blog post, which also gives information about the Forum’s efforts to engage the philanthropic support organizations in a collaborative effort to better support the needed work in our communities.