Honest Practice: How the Public Sector Can Look at Itself (New article in Resources)

Howie Fisher — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:15:47 +0000

We provide here a detailed summary of the article “Honest Practice: How the Public Sector Can Look at Itself” by Howie Fisher with illustrations and design by Billy Brown. Download the full pdf from attachments.

In this article the Transmission Project contests the convention of collecting “best practices” and offers in its place a narrative approach to assessing nonprofit organizations’ capacity building efforts. The Transmission Project calls this approach Honest Practice.

So-called best practices claim to encapsulate successful organizations’ hard-earned knowledge and experience in the form of simple, ready-to-use solutions. Practices are canonized with little regard for what led to success. Research in the field illustrates that what “best practices” obscure is the hard work it takes to get a practice to function correctly in a new environment. The Transmission Project’s observations as capacity-building practitioner attest to the potential pitfalls of blindly adopting so-called best practices.

Although multiple accounts corroborate the risks associated with “best practices,” they remain popular among organizations – primarily as a way to appeal to funders in terms they can grasp. The diversity of nonprofit sector work complicates attempts to establish reliable ways of measuring success while making meaningful comparisons across the field. With the endorsement of funders, “best practices” become a way to discriminate superficially between organizations that do good work and organizations that don’t work.

We explore the depth of the problem. When organizations chase so-called best practices, they under-invest in other forms of overhead. These include evaluation and tracking systems that, when neglected, leave organizations unable to define and measure success on their own terms. The cyclical nature of the problem makes it difficult to address head-on. Without proper infrastructure to measure and understand their work, organizations lose track of their needs and cannot challenge the prescribed standards of excellence.

The fundamental importance of evaluation having been established, the evaluator or researcher emerges as an influential force in representing organizations’ work to funders and the rest of the field. The author suggests that the real challenge is insisting upon a more narrative, process-centered approach to discussing capacity building work as opposed to a myopic focus on success in terms of end results.

The article offers examples of the kinds of qualitative questions writers and researchers can ask. What follows is an analysis of the Transmission Project’s own attempts to evaluate its work without the full support of its funders to do so.

We conclude that while researchers can influence the field by keeping context intact when discussing organizations’ work, evaluation entails not only collecting information, but also processing and integrating it into an organization’s operations. As opposed to relying on “best practices” as markers of success, funders need to provide organizations with the resources to invest in tracking systems to build their capacity to define success, measure it, and articulate what they need to perform better.

Media, the Internet and Philanthropy

Ben Sheldon — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:40:33 +0000

The Transmission Project has always recognized the need for supporting public media and technology—and its necessity for community and economic development. Luis Ubiñas, President of the Ford Foundation, recently made a similarly passionate argument:

In years past, foundations have tended to view grant making focused on Internet policy as a “media” issue. The thinking was, “Let those grant makers already focused on media policy pursue that work, while others remain focused on their own important issues, from education and economic development to human rights and the arts.”

It’s clear that this binary thinking no longer fits with contemporary reality.

Today the Internet is fundamental to every issue we care about. Efficient and low-cost health care, for example, will soon depend on high-speed access to online medical and diagnostic tools. Some 77 percent of Fortune 500 companies accept job applications solely online, according to one study. And digital classrooms that use high-speed Internet are already connecting students with a vast new world of ideas and information…

The effort to ensure universal access to high-speed Internet among all citizens is a critical next step to ensuring that America realizes its great aspiration of equal opportunity for all…

A second major challenge is sometimes harder to see but is as significant. Even if all Americans gain access to the Internet, we need protections in place to ensure that the Internet itself remains neutral and open….

All of us committed to progress, social justice, and rigorous public debate have a stake in this effort, and foundations are uniquely suited to building discussions among business, government, and nonprofit organizations in a way that no other institutions can.

That is why the Ford Foundation is committing $50-million over the next five years to support efforts that ensure both that broadband access to the Internet becomes a reality for all citizens and that public-interest values in the online space itself are protected. We want this to be an open conversation.

Every person should have the opportunity to access high-speed Internet connections.

Everyone should have a choice of providers to drive competition and innovation.
Everyone should have the same legal rights and protections online as off-line.

We collaborate with citizens, companies, and government to build common-sense rules to prevent censorship and anticompetitive behavior that can stifle innovation.

There is a real debate to be had: How can government, business, and nonprofit organizations lead innovation? How can citizens enjoy the access they need on the Web? How can government craft workable, smart rules of the road for all? The debate needs many voices.

At Ford we have come to see that our commitment in this dialogue is critical to protecting all of the other work our foundation supports; indeed, it is central to supporting any work that relies on the freedom of people to come together and to communicate.

While we are fortunate to be joined by many other grant makers that are realizing the importance of broadband to the issues on which they work, many other donors must join the effort.

Hot on the heels of those prescient statements is a new report from Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media’s (GFEM): “Funding Media, Strengthening Democracy: Grantmaking for the 21st Century”. It similarly seeks to put information and media at the nexus of social change:

The importance of media and the crucial role played by philanthropy is laid out within these pages. Media, in all its incarnations, influences our decision-making processes, whether personal choices or professional ones, in policy-making, and at the local, national, and international levels. Regardless of how much or how little media one may personally consume, the world is saturated with and driven by media.

Philanthropy, with its mission to improve the human condition, has yet to meet the challenge of keeping pace with the growth and influence of media. We would like to change that. Funding Media, Strengthening Democracy continues a critical dialogue on how philanthropy can best harness its resources—dollars and leadership—to meet the needs of a media-saturated world, in an age of increasingly rapid innovation, where media and social uses of media can have revolutionary impact on individuals and, indeed, entire nations.

The report makes 10 great recommendations (and has the data to back them up), but I will highlight 2 of them here:

First, acknowledge the prevalence and impact of media. Foundations and government agencies of all sizes and in all fields will benefit from recognizing the growing importance of media, and screen-based media in particular, to the future of every field—education, health, the environment, and more.

…

Tenth and finally, funders should recognize that media reinforces their missions. If the public and government are going to understand and appreciate the work of philanthropy, they are going to be looking, or listening, or watching, or gaining and expressing these attitudes through media.

Transmission Project - philanthropy

Honest Practice: How the Public Sector Can Look at Itself (New article in Resources)

Media, the Internet and Philanthropy