The Annie E. Casey Foundation sought our help with the 2006 program to support organizations strengthening families displaced by the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes. We vetted the 17 candidates for its Families Count Award, amassing information from an array of sources and analyzing the results, while ensuring complete anonymity to protect the Foundation’s relationships. Our recommendations enabled a timely, informed decision, and the Families Count Award of $500,000 in unrestricted support went to four worthy organizations.
When The Woodcock Foundation decided to repeat BeHeard! – a program to build communications capacity among the Foundation’s grantees – it asked us to assess the effectiveness of the first round of grants. Our research of the communications-assistance landscape and analysis of each step of the project helped us identify the program’s strengths and opportunities for improvement. Recommendations that spanned the request for proposals to implementation were incorporated into the second round of grant making in March 2007.
In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its partners chose Arabella Advisors to conduct one of its largest independent grantee evaluations. We designed and directed a six-month assessment of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank. The Gates Foundation’s partners were The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation.
Our team of five experts conducted more than 150 in-depth interviews. Our staff administered a written survey with more than 1,100 responses, mapped more than 20 competing organizations, and analyzed the think tank’s web-communications efficacy. The funders incorporated our recommendations in structuring subsequent grants, and our evaluation methodology has been adopted for other major grantee evaluations around the world.
We helped a cohort of donors evaluate and understand how to fine-tune a collaborative enterprise, Connect US, and more effectively pursue their goals to strengthen and network U.S. foreign policy advocates. The Connect US network, funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Open Society Institute and managed by the Tides Foundation, was designed to support a sustainable, long-term movement for responsible U.S. foreign policy. It aims to link disparate advocates, make grants, and build partnerships around a wide array of issues – health promotion, arms control, women's and human rights, and the environment. We compiled information about the network’s many programs and outlined the management tools and methods to unify and capture its communal strength.
When we saw a strategic opportunity for a group of like-minded environmental donors, we built a collaborative grant-making strategy to pursue it. The resulting alliance, focused around environmental activism among young evangelical Christians, gave the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and several anonymous funding partners a three-year grant-making guide to build capacity and strengthen the growing “creation care” movement.
Our analysis incorporated in-depth interviews with more than 40 stakeholders, ranging from Surfers for Christ to student leaders at Christian college campuses nationwide, as well as a literature review of 21 online and print periodicals focused on the target audience. The work was profiled at the 2006 Environmental Grantmakers Association Conference and has been heralded by leading environmental and evangelical leaders. The original clients and a host of additional anonymous funders have engaged us to build and manage a pooled donor collaborative to pursue the ideas we developed.
MSN asked for help finding nonprofit partners for its broadcast of Live Earth, a concert series to raise awareness about climate change. We guided its partnership decisions with an analysis of the various ways nonprofits educate, advocate, and drive action on the issue. We developed more than 30 profiles of organizations around the world and provided guidance for building lasting relationships. Our advice gave MSN more than good content from partner websites; our outcome-oriented strategy strengthened the ability of MSN to educate its hundreds of millions of visitors.
The Motley Fool, a financial-services firm that provides online investment advice to more than five million members, asked us to help evaluate its ten-year-old annual grant-making program, known as Foolanthropy. The company, which customarily made annual grants to the various causes its members voted to support, sought to align the program with its business model of making people smarter investors.
We not only mapped the arena of financial literacy to identify where a grant might best help the company’s members, but also vetted the group of potential winners. In the process, we delivered a new methodology for the volunteer committee that chooses from the yearly field of Foolanthropy nominees, instilling the principles of long-term, effective due diligence.
The Kresge Foundation engaged Arabella Advisors to assess the impact of the Foundation’s Green Building Initiative, launched in 2004 to promote sustainable design in construction and renovation. The Foundation sought recommendations on how to continue providing leadership in promoting green building in light of the rapidlychanging landscape.
We interviewed more than 40 grantees and experts in the field, developed a written survey to which over 175 organizations responded and assessed the green-building movement. Our report provided a comprehensive evaluation of the Green Building Initiative and concrete recommendations for ongoing leadership.
The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, a generous funder of youth programs in the arts and environment in the Chicago area and in the low country of South Carolina, engaged Arabella Advisors to inform its grant making. We developed an extensive database of youth programs in the arts and environment and their sponsoring organizations. The database provides the Foundation a comprehensive map of its chosen sectors and the basis on which to make further grants.
As a family’s younger generation became increasingly engaged in its foundation, the family asked Arabella Advisors to develop a more strategic approach for its philanthropy. Through several family meetings and interviews with each family member, we helped the family develop a legacy statement, refine the foundation mission, investigate sectors consistent with its mission, conduct due diligence on potential grantees, and build relationships with nonprofit partners.
We also helped develop operational systems that meet family needs and enable effective and efficient grant making. Our operational plan incorporated solutions for the structure and function of the governing board, day-to-day management of grant making, and back-office administration.
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