Learn, Share, and We All Win! Foundation Center Releases #OpenForGood Guide and Announces Award Opportunity

Open For Good CoverMelissa Moy is special projects associate for Glasspockets.

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.

Knowledge is a resource philanthropy can’t afford to keep for itself, and as a result of a newly available guide, funders will now have a road map for opening up that knowledge. The new GrantCraft guide, Open for Good: Knowledge Sharing to Strengthen Grantmaking, supported by the Fund for Shared Insight, illustrates practical steps that all donors can take to create a culture of shared learning.

Philanthropy is in a unique position to generate knowledge and disseminate it, and this guide will help foundations navigate the process. Each year, foundations make $5 billion in grants toward knowledge production. These assessments, evaluations, communities of practice, and key findings are valuable, yet only a small fraction of foundations share what they learn, with even fewer using open licenses or open repositories to share these learnings. Foundations have demonstrated that some of the information they value most are lessons about “what did and didn’t work.” And yet, this is the same knowledge that foundations are often most reluctant to share.

The guide, part of Foundation Center’s larger #OpenForGood campaign, makes a strong case for foundations to openly share knowledge as an integral and strategic aspect of philanthropy. Through interviews with leaders in knowledge sharing, the guide outlines tested solutions to overcome common barriers to impart learnings, as well as essential components needed for funders to strengthen their knowledge-sharing practice. The guide emphasizes that sharing knowledge can deepen internal reflection and learning, lead to new connections and ideas, and promote institutional credibility and influence.

Knowledge comes in all shapes and sizes – program and grantee evaluations, foundation performance assessments, thought leadership, formal and informal reflections that are shared among foundation staff and board members. The guide will help your foundation identify the types of information that can be shared and how to take actionable steps.

Download the Guide

OFGaward-528To further encourage funders to be more transparent, this week Foundation Center also announces the opening of a nomination period for the inaugural #OpenForGood Award  to bring due recognition and visibility to foundations who share challenges, successes, and failures to strengthen how we can think and act as a sector.

Three winning foundations will demonstrate an active commitment to open knowledge and share their evaluations through IssueLab. Winners will receive technical support to create a custom knowledge center for themselves or a grantee, as well as promotional support in the form of social media and newsletter space. Who will you nominate as being #OpenForGood?

--Melissa Moy