The United States has the largest philanthropic sector in the world. Foundations and similar grantmakers have US$1.5 trillion in assets and disburse more than $100 billion annually to everything from hospitals and museums to making communities more walkable and improving care at the end of life.
Many foundations task in-house and outside communications experts with helping the public learn about their grantmaking and its impact. And yet polling indicates that few people know what foundations do or how philanthropy affects their lives.
We are communications scholarswho research ways that organizations seeking to bring about social change can harness behavioral, social and cognitive science. With our colleagues Yu-Hao Lee, Kate Ratliff and Jack Barry, we recently studied whether stories that clearly convey how foundations make decisions about what to fund could build trust with the public and help people understand them better.
Teaming up with the Council on Foundations, a philanthropy organization, we surveyed nearly 3,600 Americans. We identified two ways foundations could do a better job of communicating with the public: tell better stories about how they decide which projects to fund, and explain their goals and the results of their work more clearly using simpler language.
As part of this study, we also interviewed communications professionals who work in the field. One communication professional we interviewed called foundations’ unique jargon “philanthro-speak.” It includes some tax language, such as referring to charities as 501(c)(3)s, a technical term alluding to a passage in the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, vague metaphors borrowed from the military, sports and finance, and an array of unfamiliar abbreviations such as DAF, which stands for donor-advised funds, and RFP, shorthand for “request for proposals.”
It also includes vague terms that make nouns into verbs, like “center” and “partner.” None of this helps people understand what foundations do, how they make decisions or how they help resolve conditions such as poverty or inequity.
If you work at a foundation or frequently deal with them, you can follow along when you read or hear “awardee” or “theory of change.”
Otherwise, those words and phrases are probably abstract and meaningless to you. Speaking in code, we argue, can cause real harm because it hampers the ability of funders to build trust with the communities they serve.
“We tell a story of innovation that raises awareness of critical issues,” the post riffs. “Then we drown that story in jargon no one understands.”
The United States has the largest philanthropic sector in the world. Foundations and similar grantmakers have US$1.5 trillion in assets and disburse more than $100 billion annually to everything from hospitals and museums to making communities more walkable and improving care at the end of life.
Many foundations task in-house and outside communications experts with helping the public learn about their grantmaking and its impact. And yet polling indicates that few people know what foundations do or how philanthropy affects their lives.
We are communications scholarswho research ways that organizations seeking to bring about social change can harness behavioral, social and cognitive science. With our colleagues Yu-Hao Lee, Kate Ratliff and Jack Barry, we recently studied whether stories that clearly convey how foundations make decisions about what to fund could build trust with the public and help people understand them better.
Teaming up with the Council on Foundations, a philanthropy organization, we surveyed nearly 3,600 Americans. We identified two ways foundations could do a better job of communicating with the public: tell better stories about how they decide which projects to fund, and explain their goals and the results of their work more clearly using simpler language.
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