Increasing Impact Before the Project Is Funded
Since most of the impact will occur after a project is funded, it seems counterintuitive to consider that impact can be increased before a project is funded. It is nonetheless true that even before your foundation has decided to support a project, you can take steps that will greatly increase the splash it makes later on. These steps require foresight, strategic planning, and sometimes a little luck.
Coordinate Funding with Other Foundations
One way to magnify impact before a project is funded is to seek to coordinate your own foundation's funding of the project with support from other foundations. This is no mean feat, comparable in some ways to building the international space station, in that it must be done under conditions of zero gravity and without benefit of an atmosphere. As program officer you often have zero gravity (leverage) because you are attempting to interest other funders in supporting that which your own foundation has not yet supported. (It should be noted, however, that in some foundations, program officers are given budgets with discretion on how to expend them; in these cases, grantmakers do have the leverage to make commitments.) You have little air (breathing room), for you are attempting to coordinate many different institutional schedules and requirements so that all begin funding at about the same time. The complexities are daunting, but the payoff in terms of broader impact is potentially enormous. The obvious benefit is that several foundations will be able to grant much more money to the project than could any one. More subtle impact-increasers also come with such a package deal, including access to the other foundations' networks, dissemination channels, and policy clout. There is also a certain credibility—a sort of “good grantmaking seal of approval”—that comes with funding by multiple foundations. It adds believability and respectability to a project that it can get in no other way.
There are two methods by which foundations can work together to fund a single project: cooperatively and collaboratively. The distinction between the two lies mainly in the level of integration. In cooperative funding, a number of different foundations back the same project, each for its own reasons. A job training project for youth, for example, might be funded by Foundation A because the project fits the foundation's education criteria, by Foundation B because the project fits that foundation's youth development guidelines, and by Foundation C because it is interested in job creation. They are funding the same project, but without a common goal or plan. In collaborative funding, the level of integration is much higher. Multiple foundations coordinate their funding with a common plan and timetable, seek a common goal, and agree on a common evaluation plan.
Of the two approaches, the cooperative is obviously easier to implement, although it is still not easy to achieve. Cooperative funding is often orchestrated by the applicant organization without any of the foundations involved actively attempting to participate in a cooperative venture. The applicant organization is successful in securing multiple sources of support, and the cooperative venture—for the foundations, at least—happens by serendipity. On other occasions, program officers at the participating foundations are the organizers of the cooperative venture. These grantmakers work across institutional lines, sometimes with official organizational blessing, sometimes informally, to coordinate funding as best they can so that it will arrive at about the same time, to be used for closely related purposes. Coordinating events so that the processes at multiple foundations (each with its own requirements and set of deadlines) lead to approximately the same results at the same time is a high-wire act to rival that of the flying Wallendas.
The collaborative approach is much more formal and hence much more complex. Although it is theoretically possible for program officers at the various foundations to organize a collaborative venture, formal alliances between or among foundations ultimately require approval by the foundations' officers and boards, and in practice, collaborations are usually driven by leaders at the highest levels of these organizations. Such agreements are complicated and take a great deal of time and effort to negotiate, so are best reserved for large, complex, and expensive projects or programs that have the potential to repay all this effort with profound societal impact.
Budget Adequate Funding for Evaluation
Evaluation, of course, is invaluable for the lessons it can teach grantee and grantmaker alike about how to sharpen their level of practice. But evaluation can also do much more, particularly when it comes to leveraging impact. Before anything else can be done about a project—before the good news about its achievements can be disseminated to interested audiences, before the project can be expanded until it is brought to scale—it is necessary to have evidence that the outcomes of the project were actually positive. In order to get that evidence, it will be necessary, before the project is supported, to adequately fund formative and summative evaluation.
How much is “adequate” will depend on many factors, but it is an inescapable fact that hard statistical data are usually the most valuable and persuasive. It is one thing to say that “Many women were helped by this project”; it is quite another to say that “75 percent of the eight hundred women participating in this project found full-time employment, and nearly 80 percent of these had retained their jobs after six months had passed.” Gathering these data, crunching the numbers, and drawing validated conclusions from the data make for a rather expensive proposition. It is a common error to underfund evaluation on the front end and then to suffer disappointment at the conclusion of the project, when the evaluators cannot produce the hard data needed to leverage more impact out of the project.
If a project is funded for mainly localized impact, you should usually add 4 to 5 percent of the total programmatic project cost for evaluation. If, however, the goal is to extensively disseminate information about project outcomes or to undertake social marketing or, especially, to bring the project to scale, then you will need a much beefier evaluation component. In such cases, 10 to 20 percent of the total programmatic project cost is not out of line, and even more may be justifiable.
Budget Adequate Funding for Dissemination, Strategic Communications, and Social Marketing
Just as evaluation needs to be adequately funded up front, so too do dissemination, strategic communications, and social marketing. A quick definition of these three terms is in order. Dissemination is a long-standing concept in the foundation field, and as its name implies, it focuses on spreading information widely. When a project returns encouraging outcomes, foundations have traditionally been willing to add funds to spread the word about these outcomes to potentially interested audiences.
Strategic communications is a relatively recent tool added to the foundation toolbox. Unlike the old conception of public relations, which was to promote general goodwill and to respond to criticism of the foundation or its programs, strategic communications is a component of programming. Its purpose is to identify the most important messages of a project and to deliberately deliver these messages to the most important audiences for the project. Public relations was essentially a passive tool; strategic communications is very much an active tool.
Social marketing is also a recent addition to the foundation toolbox. As its name suggests, it borrows practices and concepts from for-profit marketing and applies them to the needs and opportunities in the nonprofit sector, in which foundations and their grantees live and work. Traditional foundation dissemination was essentially a report on findings: its most typical approaches were a conference to discuss outcomes and a book to share lessons learned. Social marketing is essentially a call to action and an attempt to alter behavior. Its approaches are many and varied, including conferences and publications, but it also uses film, video, public service announcements, the Internet, popular culture venues (for instance, printed tray liners at fast food restaurants), inserts in mailers, and a host of other informal media. One of the tools borrowed from for-profit marketing is the concept of market segmentation: zeroing in on selected audiences to deliver information and calls to action. The practitioners of social marketing hold that it is not enough simply to inform people through dissemination; it is necessary to persuade them to act—or not to act.
Traditional dissemination is usually relatively inexpensive but also generally has little demonstrable impact. Strategic communications efforts often have little direct impact but lay the groundwork with key audiences for social marketing efforts that can truly magnify impact. Social marketing can significantly leverage impact, but its reliance on multiple forms of media to get the message out and to alter people's behavior is inherently expensive. Effective social marketing campaigns can easily match the expense of fully funded evaluation programs, and cost 10 to 20 percent (or more) of the programmatic cost of a project.
Just as with evaluation, the tendency is to try to do social marketing on the cheap, and, just as with evaluation, this is a mistake. If a full-blown marketing campaign is beyond the reach of the project budget, it is probably better to forego doing one at all and to conduct a dissemination program instead. In any case, deciding on which approach (or combination of approaches) to use and funding them adequately up front will set the stage for multiplied impact when the project comes to an end.