Candid Announces Inaugural #OpenForGood Award Winners

Janet Camarena is director of transparency initiatives at Candid.

This post is part of the Glasspockets’ #OpenforGood series done in partnership with the Fund for Shared Insight. The series explores new tools, promising practices, and inspiring examples showing how some foundations are opening up the knowledge that they are learning for the benefit of the larger philanthropic sector. Contribute your comments on each post and share the series using #OpenForGood. View more posts in the series.

Left to Right: Meg Long, President, Equal Measure (#OpenForGood selection committee); Janet Camarena, Director, Transparency Initiatives, Candid; Awardee Savi Mull, Senior Evaluation Manager, C&A Foundation; Awardee Veronica Olazabal, Director, Measurement, Evaluation & Organizational Performance, The Rockefeller Foundation; Clare Nolan, Co-Founder, Engage R + D (#OpenForGood selection committee).

Yesterday as part of the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Learning Conference, Candid announced the inaugural recipients of the #OpenForGood Award, which is designed to recognize and encourage foundations to openly share what they learn so we can all get collectively smarter. The award, part of a larger #OpenForGood campaign started in 2017, includes a set of tools to help funders work more transparently including a GrantCraft Guide about how to operationalize knowledge sharing, a growing collection of foundation evaluations on IssueLab, and advice from peers in a curated blog series.

The three winning foundations each demonstrate an active commitment to open knowledge and share their evaluations through IssueLab, an open repository that is free, searchable, and accessible to all. Selected by an external committee from a globally sourced nomination process, the committee reviewed the contenders looking for evidence of an active commitment to open knowledge, creative approaches to making knowledge shareable, field leadership, and incorporating community insights into knowledge sharing work.

And the Winners Are…

Here are some highlights from the award presentation remarks:

C&A Foundation
Award Summary: Creativity, Demonstrated Field Leadership, and Willingness to Openly Share Struggles

The C&A Foundation is a multi-national, corporate foundation working to fundamentally transform the fashion industry. C&A Foundation gives its partners financial support, expertise and networks so they can make the fashion industry work better for every person it touches. Lessons learned and impact for each of its programs are clearly available on its website, and helpful top-level summaries are provided for every impact evaluation making a lengthy narrative evaluation very accessible to peers, grantees and other stakeholders. C&A Foundation even provides such summaries for efforts that didn’t go as planned, packaging them in an easy-to-read, graphic format that it shares via its Results & Learning blog, rather than hiding them away and quietly moving on as is more often the case in the field.

Ian Potter Foundation
Award Summary: Creativity, Field Leadership, and Lifting Up Community Insights

This foundation routinely publishes collective summaries from all of its grantee reports for each portfolio as a way to support shared learning among its existing and future grantees. It’s a refreshing reinvention of the traditional grantee report, placing priority on collecting and sharing the kinds of information that will be helpful to other practitioners, rather than questions to satisfy the typical ritual of a grant report that goes something like submit, data enter, file away never to be seen, and repeat.

Beyond being transparent with its grantee learning and reports, the Ian Potter Foundation also recently helped lift the burden on its grantees when it comes to measurement and outcomes. Instead of asking overworked charities to invent a unique set of metrics just for their grant process, foundation evaluation staff took it upon themselves to mine the Sustainable Development Goals targets framework to provide grantees with optional and ready-made outcomes templates that would work across the field for many funders. You can read more about that effort underway in a recent blog post here.

The Rockefeller Foundation
Award Summary: Field Leadership, Consistent Knowledge Sharing, and Commitment to Working Transparently

The Rockefeller Foundation can boast early adopter status to transparency and openness—it  has had a longstanding commitment to creating a culture of learning and as such was one of the very first foundations to join the GlassPockets transparency movement and also to commit to #OpenForGood principles by sharing its published evaluations widely. Rockefeller Foundation also took the unusual step of upping the ante on the #OpenForGood Pledge aiming for both creating a culture of learning and accountability, with its monitoring and evaluation team stating that: “To ensure that we hold ourselves to a high bar, our foundation pre-commits itself to publicly sharing the results of its evaluations - well before the results are even known.” This ensures that even if the evaluation reports unfavorable findings, the intent is to share it all.

In an earlier GlassPockets blog post, Rockefeller’s monitoring and evaluation team shows a unique understanding of how sharing knowledge can advance the funder’s goals: “Through the documentation of what works, for who, and how/under what conditions, there is potential to amplify our impact, by crowding-in other funders to promising solutions, and diverting resources from being wasted on approaches that prove ineffectual.”  Rockefeller’s use of IssueLab’s open knowledge platform is living up to this promise as anyone can currently query and find more than 400 knowledge documents funded, published, or co-published by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Winners will receive technical support to create a custom Knowledge Center for their foundation or for a grantee organization, as well as promotional support in knowledge dissemination. Knowledge Centers are a service of IssueLab that provides organizations with a simple way to manage and share knowledge on their own websites. By leveraging this tool, you can showcase your insight, promote analysis on your grantees, and feature learnings from network members. All documents that are uploaded to an IssueLab Knowledge Center are also made searchable and discoverable via systems like WorldCat, which serves more than 2,000 libraries worldwide, ensuring your knowledge can be found by researchers, regardless of their familiarity with your organization.

Why Choose Openness?

The #OpenForGood award is focused on inspiring foundations to use existing and emerging technologies to collectively improve the sector. Today, we live in a time when most expect to find the information they need on the go, via tablets, laptops, and mobile phones, just a swipe or click away. Despite this digital era reality today only 13 percent of foundations have websites, and even fewer share their reports publicly, indicating that the field has a long way to go to creating a culture of shared learning. With this award, we hope to change these practices. Rather than reinvent the wheel, this award and campaign encourages the sector to make it a priority to learn from one another, share content with a global audience, so that we can build smartly one another’s work and accelerate the change we want to see in the world. The more you share your foundation's work, the greater the opportunities to make all our efforts more effective and farther reaching.

Congratulations to our inaugural class of #OpenForGood Award Winners! What will you #OpenForGood?

--Janet Camarena