Increasing Attention to Transparency: The MacArthur Foundation Is #OpenForGood

Chantell Johnson is managing director of evaluation at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This post is part of the Glasspockets’ #OpenForGood series 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.

Chantell Johnson photoAt MacArthur, the desire to be transparent is not new. We believe philanthropy has a responsibility to be explicit about its values, choices, and decisions with regard to its use of resources. Toward that end, we have long had an information sharing policy that guides what and when we share information about the work of the Foundation or our grantees. Over time, we have continued to challenge ourselves to do better and to share more. The latest refinement of our approach to transparency is an effort toward increasingly sharing more knowledge about what we are learning. We expect to continue to push ourselves in this regard, and participating in Foundation Center’s Glasspockets  and #OpenForGood movements are just a couple of examples of how this has manifested.

In recent years, we have made a more concerted effort to revisit and strengthen our information sharing policy by:

  • Expanding our thinking about what we can and should be transparent about (e.g., our principles of transparency guided our public communications around our 100&Change competition, which included an ongoing blog);
  • Making our guidance more contemporary by moving beyond statements about information sharing to publishing more and different kinds of information (e.g., Grantee Perception Reports and evaluation findings);
  • Making our practices related to transparency more explicit; and
  • Ensuring that our evaluation work is front and center in our efforts related to transparency.

Among the steps we have taken to increase our transparency are the following:

Sharing more information about our strategy development process.
The Foundation's website has a page dedicated to How We Work, which provides detailed information about our approach to strategy development. We share an inside look into the lifecycle of our programmatic efforts, beginning with conceptualizing a grantmaking strategy through the implementation and ending phases, under an approach we refer to as Design/Build. Design/Build recognizes that social problems and conditions are not static, and thus our response to these problems needs to be iterative and evolve with the context to be most impactful. Moreover, we aim to be transparent as we design and build strategies over time.

“We have continued to challenge ourselves to do better and to share more.”

Using evaluation to document what we are measuring and learning about our work.
Core to Design/Build is evaluation. Evaluation has become an increasingly important priority among our program staff. It serves as a tool to document what we are doing, how well we are doing it, how work is progressing, what is being achieved, and who benefits. We value evaluation not only for the critical information it provides to our Board, leadership, and program teams, but for the insights it can provide for grantees, partners, and beneficiaries in the fields in which we aim to make a difference. Moreover, it provides the critical content that we believe is at the heart of many philanthropic efforts related to transparency.

Expanding the delivery mechanisms for sharing our work.
While our final evaluation reports have generally been made public on our website, we aim to make more of our evaluation activities and products available (e.g., landscape reviews and baseline and interim reports). Further, in an effort to make our evaluation work more accessible, we are among the first foundations to make all of our evaluation reports publicly available as part of Foundation Center's #OpenForGood campaign.

Further evidence of the Foundation's commitment to increased transparency includes continuing to improve our “Glass Pockets” by sharing:

  • Our searchable database of grants, including award amount, program, year, and purpose;
  • Funding statistics including total grants, impact investments, final budgeted amounts by program, and administrative expenses (all updated annually);
  • Perspectives of our program directors and staff;
  • Links to grantee products including grant-supported research studies consistent with the Foundation's intellectual property policies;
  • Stories highlighting the work and impact of our grantees and recipients of impact investments; and
  • Center for Effective Philanthropy Grantee Perception report results.

Going forward, we will look for additional ways to be transparent. And, we will challenge ourselves to make findings and learnings more accessible even more quickly.

--Chantell Johnson

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