Contents
Wallace's Report '09: Appraising a Decade
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Wallace's Report '09: Appraising a Decade
I.SUMMARY
BACKGROUND
In 2000, Wallace had a solid reputation as a major funder and for being “smart and strategic” in its fields of interest. But our annual report essay that year, titled “Beyond Money,” signaled our intention to radically reshape that reputation: from a foundation whose chief asset was the money we had to give away to one dedicated to using the power of ideas to help leaders in particular fields bring about beneficial changes. Three years later, that redefinition of our role was given more tangible expression when – in a step unusual at the time for a foundation – we developed a unified brand that encompassed all of our work and positioned us as a source of effective ideas and practices. In addition, we recognized that in order to be relevant to field leaders, we needed to expand and diversify our range of publications and other knowledge products to meet users’ needs and make it easier for others to find our ideas. We revamped our website and anchored it on a “Knowledge Center” housing our growing library of Wallace reports and other publications. And we intensified our other strategies for knowledge-sharing in a number of ways, including designing conferences more deliberately around the exchange of ideas, working with membership organizations to reach constituencies related to our goals and underwriting media coverage.
OVERALL ASSESSMENT
Successes: We have issued close to 200 reports and other publications since 2000, and annual downloads of these works have risen more than 60-fold since 2003 to nearly 200,000. Thanks to an updated website and a range of other communications devices, we have also become much more adept at sharing our ideas with key audiences. Moreover, we have greatly extended our reputation and reach to both grantees and non-grantees in the three fields we concentrated on for much of the decade: education, the arts and out-of-school time learning. Field leaders now compare us favorably with other information sources, according to periodic surveys we commission from an independent source, AED (formerly the Academy for Educational Development).
But: At the same time, we have found that it is difficult to translate complicated research findings into brief, practical formats, and that we have not always done enough to make our commissioned research as accessible as possible.
II. STRATEGY MILESTONES
1999:
- Wallace reorganized to create multi-disciplinary teams to ensure that communications, program and evaluation expertise would be applied to the planning and implementation of our focus area work.
2000:
- We launched our education leadership initiative with a national awareness campaign including a six-city “road show,” a Washington news conference and our first national conference on education leadership in New York City (subsequent national conferences were held in 2002, 2007 and 2009).
2001-2003:
- Wallace funded the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media to conduct seminars for journalists on covering education leadership, our first direct effort to inform media coverage.
- The Arts4AllPeople website was launched to share arts participation success stories and create a “virtual community” for practitioners to share ideas; the site was shut down and its contents shifted to the Wallace website in 2004 as part of our strategy to have a single foundation brand.
- A new foundation-wide brand strategy was launched, based on research showing that while we hadn’t yet solved a “bottleneck” in getting knowledge out to key audiences quickly, we were still well-regarded in our chosen fields and had “permission” from them to identify ourselves as a source of useful ideas.
- Wallace published its first research synthesis using the new brand – Beyond The Pipeline: Getting the Principals We Need, Where They Are Needed Most – designing the publication to give the foundation’s point of view in an area of growing expertise.
2004:
- Wallace launched its new website featuring a new logo, brand system and “Knowledge Center.”
- We began pay-per-click advertising to increase the visibility of our website and encourage visitors seeking information on our topics to visit the Knowledge Center.
2005:
- Demonstrating the growing attention within the philanthropic community to Wallace’s grantmaking approach, a presentation by Foundation President Christine DeVita at the Council on Foundations annual convention on how to measure foundation impact drew approximately 400 people.
- This led to a Wallace publication, How Are We Doing? One Foundation’s Efforts to Gauge Its Effectiveness.”
- For the first time, we used a multi-city informational “road show” to draw wide attention to a major Wallace-commissioned study (RAND’s Gifts of the Muse). This more intensive strategy was later used to draw attention to other major publications.
2006:
- Creative Philanthropy: Toward a New Philanthropy for the Twenty-First Century included a case study of Wallace’s approach for achieving philanthropic impact.
- Leadership for Learning, the first in a new product line called Wallace Perspectives, made public our education leadership theory of change.
2007-2008:
- Wallace’s efforts to improve our grantee relations and our non-monetary assistance were the subjects of two case studies by The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
- Demonstrating the power of social media to drive awareness, Wallace hosted a highly-successful blog on arts education on artsjournal.com that generated 18,000 visits and 5,000 downloads of the Wallace-commissioned RAND study Cultivating Demand for the Arts.
- Education Leadership: A Bridge to School Reform, the first in a series of conference reports, proved exceptionally popular and became a model for other publications aimed at sharing Wallace conference proceedings more broadly.
2009:
- A Wallace-supported film, The Principal Story, premiered on PBS and attracted strong response from practitioners and others to the topic of leadership. We created a special section at our website to publicize the film and related resources.
- To encourage use of a research study on the cost of quality out-of-school time, we launched an online OST cost calculator which as of the end of 2009 had attracted more than 6,700 users.
- Wallace’s 2008 annual report for the first time was based on the contents of our internal State of the Foundation report, thus providing a more public accounting of our progress toward philanthropic goals.
- In the fall, we began “tweeting” on Twitter, our first systematic use of social media.
III. RESULTS
DEVELOPING USEFUL KNOWLEDGE1
Wallace has greatly expanded both the number and the variety of publications and other knowledge products it has helped develop, including more writing and publishing that provide Wallace’s point of view. Grantees and non-grantees say they value our products for their usefulness.
- Since 2000 we have commissioned or ourselves written 183 publications: 79 in education; 46 in the arts; 29 in OST; 16 in philanthropic sector issues; and 13 on other topics. In 2009, we greatly expanded our product line to include a significant number of new multimedia and interactive products on our website.
- Surveys between 2005 and 2009 indicate high levels of satisfaction among field leaders with Wallace-commissioned or produced publications but also indicate a desire for accompanying practical information that could provide guidance on how to put ideas into effect.
New Wallace Knowledge Products by Year
SHARING KNOWLEDGE2
Wallace has expanded its reach to key audiences by using a wider range of communications strategies – including an upgraded website, speaking engagements, conferences that were more knowledge-focused and a growing number of partnerships – to share lessons.
- Downloads from our website have risen from 3,000 in 2003 to 190,000 in 2009, propelled by print and online advertising, promotional brochures, e-mail alerts and other techniques to let visitors know what is on the site.
- The proportion of non-grantee leaders giving high marks to Wallace’s ability to share effective ideas rose from just 27 percent in 2004 to 71 percent in 2009.
- Since 2007 we have expanded the number of communication partnerships we have with key membership and professional groups to help share what we have learned with field leaders. We now have about a dozen such partnerships3 in all.
Non-grantee Ratings of Wallace vs. Other Sources of Effective Ideas/Practices
REPUTATION AND INFLUENCE4
Field leaders say they value Wallace as a source of effective ideas and practices – and there is evidence that leaders have found these ideas useful in their own work.
- Surveyed non-grantee leaders who rank Wallace highly5 as a source of effective ideas and practices increased from 39 percent in 2004 to 76 percent in 2009. They also ranked Wallace above other sources of information including membership organizations, specialized organizations, government and research journals.
- Wallace-commissioned or authored publications have been cited nearly 2,000 times in various publications: 1,079 in education leadership; 590 in arts; and 310 in OST.
IV. REFLECTIONS
Our decision to focus our outreach strategies on a limited number of thought leaders and influencers – rather than on a much broader band of potential audiences including the public – was effective.
This decision dictated the kinds of knowledge products we produced, our website design, the communication partnerships we developed, our speaking engagements, advertising and the way we positioned ourselves. It also reflected, and perhaps reinforced, our decision that given limited resources, we were more likely to help catalyze positive change by pursuing a “top-down” strategy to inform the thinking of policymakers, practitioners and influencers, rather than a broader “bottom-up” change strategy that relies on public pressure to drive positive change. A trade-of from this decision to limit our target audiences, however, has been that much of the public and the media are unfamiliar with what we have learned.
For the first half of the decade, we at times overestimated both the ability and the motivation of our grantees and other partners to assume the bulk of the burden for sharing emerging lessons with others.
In our Leadership and Excellence in Arts Participation (LEAP) initiative, for example, we relied excessively on busy arts organizations to carry out the work of gathering and communicating lessons on participation-building to their peers – and we did not do enough to credibly capture results and share them. And in a number of our strategic partnerships with member organizations in our initiative fields, we put too heavy a burden on our partners to adapt or synthesize Wallace research in ways that were useful to their constituents.
Creating effective networks of grantees – either online or through in-person conferences – to ensure that research and ideas are informing action is a worthwhile strategy but extremely resource-intensive.
Our experiences in creating and managing various online grantee information networks – for example, the Education Leadership Action Network and online communities for the START initiative and Leading Change Learning Community – showed that they work when well-connected to the ongoing work of grantees and when they have low technical barriers for participation. Similarly, participant surveys show that our in-person grantee conferences have been highly valued by our grantees as a means of exchanging ideas, new knowledge and effective practices with their peers and outside experts. But they have also proved very costly in staff and financial resources. At a time of limited resources, it will be important to craft strategies that make the best use of a mix of online and interpersonal gatherings to help grantees learn from their peers and others.
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References
1. Sources: Online and telephone surveys of non-grantees about satisfaction with Wallace publications by the Academy for Educational Development (AED), 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009; Wallace online survey of website visitors; surveys by Wallace staff of education grantees in 2008-2009.
2. Sources of evidence: AED surveys of non-grantees; Wallace staff analyses.
3. A few examples of these communication partnerships include: the National League of Cities in OST; the National Staff Development Council in education; and Americans for the Arts in arts participation and our newer arts learning work.
4. Sources of evidence: AED surveys of non-grantees; 2008 Grantee Perception Report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy; Wallace staff analyses.
5. “Ranked highly” means that in the AED surveys they rated Wallace as a 4 or 5, on a scale of 1-5.