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If philanthropy really wants to bring people together, it might consider how its jargon and penchant for grandiose language keeps average Americans at arm’s length.
Like any field, philanthropy has its own vocabulary. Insiders talk about pay-out rates, mission-related investments, and fiscal sponsorships. Some of these technical terms are legal necessities or the lingo of highly specialized practices. But they can fall flat with a broader audience, says Tony Proscio, a retired consultant to large foundations. “They definitely leave outsiders scratching their heads,” Proscio says.
So why are letters, blogs, and annual reports from philanthropy littered with 75-cent words?
One possible reason: Program officers and directors often come from academia and are accustomed to a specialized vocabulary. Also, with many foundations designed to last in perpetuity, their leaders are very conscious of building a legacy, suggests Sean Gibbons, chief executive of the Communications Network, a membership group of nonprofit communications professionals.
“On some level, they think they are talking to the future, and they want to sound smart,” he says. “But people don’t want to go running to a dictionary to figure out what the hell something someone just said means.”
Often nonprofit and foundation staff adopt language they hear from others without understanding its meaning or proper context. As a result, words and phrases get overused, their meaning diluted, says Jara Dean-Coffey, director of the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, an effort to redefine how foundations determine grant results.
“We often choose words that do us a disservice,” she says. “At best, they actually don’t mean what we intend. And at worst, we don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
In a series of surveys, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, a network of donors and foundation leaders, has found a disconnect between philanthropy professionals and the public. Foundations, for instance, freely use “civic,” as in “civic engagement” and “civic infrastructure.” But the term barely registers with the average person.
Philanthro-speak often lands differently on different people, says Amy McIsaac, the group’s managing director of learning and experimentation.
“We’re using the same words, but our meanings are so different that we’re actually not having the same conversation,” she says.
The Worst Offenders
Here are a few terms — suggested by our staff as well as nonprofit leaders and communications experts — that may alienate or confuse rather than inspire:
Asset mapping
This is a popular term in community-development work. “Asset mapping,” explains the Local Initiatives Support Corporation on its website, “is a capacity-focused way of reimagining the place-making practice around the strengths and gifts that already exist in our communities.” More simply, the phrase describes the process of cataloging a community’s strengths and resources. A derivation perhaps more confusing: “asset-based framing.”
Best practice
The phrase was first found in Scientific American in the 1920s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and burrowed into the business and management consultant fields in the 1980s. It since has migrated to medicine, government, education, and the philanthropy and nonprofit worlds. The problem, experts say: Something is best practice only until research finds something else is indeed better. The phrase also encourages standardization — a one-size-fits-all approach that fights against the philanthropy trend captured by another buzzword: “participatory grant making,” in which communities or individuals closest to a problem are the ones that decide what’s best.
Bridge building
Words from the design or construction fields — including “scaffolding” and “infrastructure” — suggest that philanthropists are expert planners. “Bridge building implies an architecture designed to bring things together that weren’t intended to be together in the first place,” Dean-Coffey says.
Concretize
An authority no less than the Allied Grant Writers advises grant seekers to “concretize your overall idea of a project.” Dictionaries confirm it’s a word — the OED says it dates to the 1800s — but a more user-friendly piece of advice might be: “Offer details to illustrate your project.”
Ecosystem
National Geographic Society, the venerable nature and science nonprofit, calls an ecosystem a “geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscapes, work together.” Nonprofits often use the term to describe the set of relationships between groups in a network of organizations. The result can be quite confusing. When Deloitte Consulting’s Monitor Group identified 45 roles for community philanthropy organizations, it included those “proactively planning for the long term,” some “building collaboratives,” and others “managing formal collaborations.”
Impact
It’s probably one of the most seemingly benign yet most overused words in philanthropy. Every program officer wants their grants to result in change. But “impact” is something that happens to something; it suggests, for instance, that a community working with a foundation has no role in its betterment, says Dean-Coffey.
Meteors make impact. Teeth get impacted. The word is “violent, nonconsensual, and not fair,” she says.
Leverage
Too often, Proscio says, philanthropy leaders use fancy words from other fields that shroud what they really mean. “Leverage,” which is borrowed from the financial world, is “the one I despise the most.”
Socialize
Foundations sometimes say they need to “socialize” a big idea — shorthand for testing whether the people they want to help will embrace the concept. Merriam-Webster’s third definition — “to organize group participation in” — might be appropriate, but the word can strongly suggest training others in established values and habits — in other words, bending others to norms.
Systems change
This phrase typically describes efforts to “tackle the root causes” of a societal issue, not the symptoms. But it’s so dense with connotations that Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors even wrote a “topic brief” to explain the term (complete with an infographic). Ambitious grant makers reach for “systems transformation.” And when change efforts grow complicated, they require an “orchestration mechanism” to coordinate parties involved.
Theory of change
The authors of a 2004 study commissioned by the Annie E. Casey Foundation suggested that without a theory of change — that is, a plan for how to solve a problem — nonprofits and the people they serve are vulnerable to “wandering aimlessly.”
Enter a foundation, which will present a plan, packaged as a theory of change. Barriers to change will be identified, partners in the work engaged, money will be well spent, and the problem will be managed. But the term suggests a single answer to a problem and a prescriptive approach.
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