The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation spent more than $1-billion to tackle a big challenge: improving the care of people with chronic illnesses.
Over the course of 30 years and thousands of grants, the foundation saw glimmers of success.
But the billion-dollar crusade ultimately proved a dud.
“The overall effort did not make a dent,” says David Colby, the foundation’s vice president for research and evaluation.
Foundation officials hired an outside evaluator to identify the reasons the effort didn’t work and last year published a 78-page report on its Web site that lays out the findings in detail.
It concludes that the foundation’s grant making was not as well coordinated as it should have been, that grant-making priorities were unclear, and that the scattershot approach undercut the potential of the overall effort.
Acknowledging such painful truths can help all grant makers, says Mr. Colby. The foundation has in recent years been undertaking major outside evaluations to put attention on what’s working and what’s not.
“If a failure isn’t a learning opportunity, it is a complete waste of resources,” he says.
Seeking Bluntness
Charities today want to see such blunt evaluations from foundations.
In a study released last month, 88 percent of nonprofit leaders polled by the Center for Effective Philanthropy said they want foundations to speak more openly about what doesn’t work.
A growing number of grant makers agree and are seeking new ways to share such experiences openly to help donors avoid making similar mistakes or wasting money on ineffective solutions to social problems.
“When I think of how complicated some programs are, I think ‘failure’ should be put in quotes,” says Robert Gallucci, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
“We should extract from the experiences what we can learn, and we should share it as absolutely broadly as possible.”
Among the latest efforts to promote discussions about failure is the Case Foundation’s Be Fearless campaign. The philanthropy, started by the AOL founder Steve Case and his wife, Jean, has spent roughly $500,000 to encourage grant makers to take more risks—which requires a willingness to fail.
The foundation has held conferences in association with the TED series, made grants to 20 people and nonprofits that are taking creative and sometimes unusual steps to solve social problems, and has enlisted American University’s social-enterprise program to conduct a survey of foundations and charities, all with the goal of shedding light on why failures are kept secret and what else hobbles experimentation.
This isn’t the Case Foundation’s first such effort.
Three years ago, the “Frontline” public-broadcasting program highlighted the shortfalls of PlayPumps, a water project that Case financed in Africa. Jean Case wrote a detailed blog post saying that no matter how embarrassing it was to see the public spotlight focused on what went wrong, it was important for foundations to stop sweeping “mistakes under the carpet.”
Chances to Succeed
While foundations have made such pushes before, they have rarely done much to transform philanthropy’s unwillingness to talk openly about failed grants. But it’s possible that the growing popularity of evaluation will lead more grant makers to talk about projects that didn’t succeed.
The Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit that aids low-income New Yorkers, is one grant maker that is gearing up to share more of what it learns from its grants. It has created an evaluation system to figure out early which grants are failing and has pledged to help grantees improve their struggling programs.
Robin Hood is making all of its evaluations public by the end of this year, with the hope that doing so will persuade other grant makers to spend their money more wisely.
It is so convinced that the approach is worth emulating that it has just issued a new book on the subject, published by Columbia Business School.
Before Robin Hood gives out money, it quantifies what it expects the project to do to curb poverty and then assesses how close it came.
If after one year a project has fallen short of benchmarks, the foundation gives the organization a year to improve, offering management assistance, additional money if needed, and other types of help.
If by the third year the charity’s approach has still not done enough for the amount of money Robin Hood has provided, the support is cut off.
Michael Weinstein, the group’s chief program officer, developed the measurement system and says it helps the group avoid spending money on ineffective programs, thus freeing up cash for charities that can deliver results.
“If you do metrics, it isn’t always fun,” he says. “It isn’t always comfortable. But, boy, does it tell you the things you need to learn.”
No Penalties
Another prominent effort to tackle the issue of failure more directly comes from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which wanted to help arts groups experiment with ways to reach more people.
To do that, it awarded $3.2-million to groups for new projects and promised that it would not pull the grants or otherwise penalize groups if their efforts failed.
“If a new project didn’t succeed as well as planned, that nonetheless could provide them with a breakthrough insight, a new strategy, a new set of relationships that are going to pay off in the next step,” says Ben Cameron, Duke’s program director for the arts. “We shouldn’t abandon them just because they didn’t do what we thought they would do.”
Streb, a Brooklyn, N.Y., dance company and community center, won $25,000 from Duke to start a new project to attract teenagers.
Kim Cullen, a Streb producing director, said Duke’s stalwart support allows groups like hers the freedom not only to experiment but also to identify when an experiment isn’t working and to learn from that.
“There is no such thing, except maybe in a scientific experiment or a mathematical equation, as a hard line between success and failure,” says Ms. Cullen, whose group reported the mixed results from its Duke grant online.
Mr. Cameron says he hopes such candor will help other nonprofits learn from missteps. And he says that Duke held to its commitment: The foundation awarded Streb another $25,000 after its first attempt to reach teenagers flopped.
Perceptions a Concern
While the efforts by big foundations like Case, Duke, and Robert Wood Johnson to talk openly about what doesn’t work are notable, some philanthropy veterans who have been trying for years to promote more candor about failures are not sanguine that this time will be any different.
James Canales, president of the James Irvine Foundation, in 2007 posted online a report detailing a $60-million failed effort his fund supported to improve after-school programs in California. He and Paul Brest, then president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, pleaded with other foundations to be more candid about failure.
But Mr. Canales says he hasn’t seen much change since then. One reason, he says, is that trustees are especially worried that if they declare failure, outsiders will think grant makers are wasting money.
“One of the impediments to our progress as a field is that we’re still not where we need to be in terms of our relationships with our boards and the ways in which we engage our board in the substantive work of our organizations,” says Mr. Canales. “If more progress on that score were made, then perhaps we would have a culture that would embrace and permit us to talk openly about these issues without fearing that the board would be troubled or worry we’re not doing the right thing.”
Foundation presidents and program officers are also part of the problem, because they often don’t tell their trustees about failure, says Joel Fleishman, a professor at Duke University and author of The Foundation: a Great American Secret—How Private Wealth Is Changing the World.
Instead, he says, they gloss over things that aren’t working, because they know many trustees don’t want hear about it and fear of the effects of the public’s learning about failed efforts.
Foundation leaders, Mr. Fleishman says, need the support of trustees willing to “ferret out the truth about the results of grants.”
An ‘Empty Exercise’
As talk about failure has risen to the surface, Brad Smith, head of the Foundation Center, says he hopes foundations understand that the only reason to talk about misguided grants is to learn from them. Otherwise, nonprofits that were participating in the failed projects could end up feeling that their efforts were unfairly held up for public criticism simply as a way for a foundation to demonstrate that it is transparent, he worries.
“It’s like in a job interview where people ask you what are your weak points and you say you work too hard,” observes Mr. Smith. “You always try to relativize it to make it a strength.” If talking about failed grants “is being done just to show they can be self-critical, then it’s an empty exercise.”
Mr. Gallucci, the MacArthur president, says concerns about tarnishing charities’ reputations and endangering their ability to seek other support are important but shouldn’t be a stumbling block.
When publicly highlighting failures, he says, foundations can simply “change the names to protect the innocent.”