Candor and Communications in Philanthropy | Arabella Advisors

Earlier this year, I started an occasional series on this blog focused on challenges to communications in philanthropy. In my first post, I talked about the ?curse of institutional knowledge.? Today, I turn to a new topic: candor.

Candor is crucial to effective philanthropy. Whether funders focus on supporting impactful programs or outstanding organizations, they need clear and candid feedback from grantees, fellow funders, and other stakeholders to know whether their efforts are effective, how to adjust, who to join forces with, and more. This is especially true when the efforts they?re mounting don?t lend themselves easily to quantitative monitoring and/or when funders operate at great distance from the people they?re trying to help. Unfortunately, candor is difficult in any field, and it can be especially difficult in philanthropy. Why? I can think of at least three reasons:

1. ?It?s hard to speak truth to power. Those who hold the purse strings hold the power, and speaking truth to power is never easy. As such, being candid with funders can be difficult, whether the truth you need to tell regards their own actions or the effectiveness of programs or organizations they support. It?s easier to downplay difficulties, hide problems behind a dense fog of euphemism, or just ?tell the funder what they want to hear??which, if it isn?t true, probably isn?t what they want to hear at all.

While no one wants to bite the hand that feeds, we can?t afford to let fear of being ?bitten? prevent us from facing?and relaying?truths. Just as importantly, we can?t afford to ?bite? when someone tells us something that?s difficult to hear. Wherever power dynamics naturally tend to undercut candid communication, we need to take special care to build relationships of trust and mutual respect that enable it to happen anyway.

2. ?It?s hard to say bad things about good people. Not only do people in the social sector sometimes hesitate to speak truth to funders, we also sometimes strive mightily to avoid saying bad things about good people?effectively covering over poor results with those peoples? good intentions. Caroline Preston wrote a compelling article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy on this topic a few months back.

Good intentions proverbially pave the road to a place no good person wants to go, including the people we?re trying to protect when we do this. Politeness is important, and sensitivity is critical to effective criticism, but candor should be king. Again, building trustful and respectful relationships is critical: within them, we can criticize ineffective work without demeaning those who did it.

3. ?We?re still waiting on final data. Conclusive final results make candid feedback a bit easier to deliver since, to some extent, they speak for themselves. But conclusive final results are few and far between in philanthropy, where the challenges we face are often difficult to pin down and well-nigh impossible to defeat. Often we are working toward faraway goals to which there is no clear path, which can make it hard to tell when we are lost or off course, much less to say to others ?you?re going the wrong way.?

Ironically, candor is all the more important under such circumstances?as we need to be able to tell each other both what we do know and what we don?t know. We all need to be able to admit our limitations, and then we need to be able to move forward and make decisions anyway, based on the best information we have at our disposal.

In the end, we need to be both candid and careful in our communications?and we need to recognize that these two needs can cut deeply into each other. We also need to recognize that these challenges show up across and within organizations as surely as they show up between and among them. Candor is cultural. And we need to build cultures that support it throughout our field. After all, those are the types of cultures that continually learn and improve and have the potential to generate greater impact.

Steve Sampson?oversees writing and learning programs throughout Arabella, and engages on a wide range of client projects and external publications spanning the full range of philanthropic endeavor.

Source: http://www.arabellaadvisors.com/2013/06/candor-and-communications-in-philanthropy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=candor-and-communications-in-philanthropy

Chris Brown Tattoo Innocence of Muslims Clara Schumann Jael Strauss Alison Pill Sam Bacile sprint