#PFwhiteboard: crowdsourcing strategy at the Peery Foundation

Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Filed under Synthesis

Back in July I noticed something rather surprising pop up in my Twitter feed. The Peery Foundation was holding a strategy session to define the focus of its giving, and it was going to share the entire exchange in real time on Twitter. Intrigued, I started reading the posts under their hashtag (#PFwhiteboard), and what I saw made me sit back in my chair. A constant stream of remarks, responses, ideas, and counter-proposals were flowing out of the Peery Foundation’s Twitter account, and every now and then another twitterer would weigh in with an answer or alternative view. (Modern Giving was among the blogs that took note, and Tactical Philanthropy called it “a rather stunning form of transparency.”) Transparency for foundations is typically discussed in soft tones – making grants data easier to follow, clarifying strategic goals, sharing lessons learned from failed grants, etc. This was something different, with an experimental nature and a crowdsourcing twist on par with the Packard Foundation’s use of a wiki to develop a nitrogen pollution strategy. It spoke of an attitude akin to that of the social-sector-wide collaboration movement that Idealist is trying to spark: we all want social change, so why be cagey about how we’re making our choices when someone out there is probably interested in helping us out?

I got to hear that attitude in person just the other week when the Peery Foundation’s Jessamyn Lau (twitter: @jessamynlau) graciously agreed to take time aside for an interview. Here’s a summary of our exchange.

Could you give me some background on the foundation?

We’re just now getting together our strategic goals. The foundation has existed on paper for about 30 years, but the family just started their giving about five years ago. It began with “checkbook giving,” but about two years ago Dave Peery (twitter: @davepeery) became more heavily involved and started establishing a strategic direction, partly based on his evolving understanding of social entrepreneurship. The family is now becoming more strategic in how it employs its philanthropy and is focusing in on social entrepreneurs. I was hired in May, which marked the point at which the family has begun professionalizing their giving. That opened up the opportunity to do a deep strategic planning process: to establish what it is that they’ve been doing, what they like about that, and what they want to change. The organizational environment is now like a startup. The family is interested in continuing to be entrepreneurial but in a more structured fashion. I came straight from my MBA, having graduated in April. One of the things that Dave wanted was someone who would learn with him and with the foundation rather than coming in with existing ideas about how a foundation should work.

How did you decide to share the conversation openly on Twitter?

I started out my work by scouring the Internet to find out about philanthropy, and I’d been on Twitter, as had Dave. We had just one conversation to weigh whether it was appropriate to have the foundation on Twitter, which we decided wasn’t an issue, so long as we could keep some personality in it. We thought it was interesting and wanted to explore it as a platform for communication.

This is a very lean shop, so there were only two of us in the room, and we were aware that while we were working with limited information there were a number of philanthropy professionals that were following us on Twitter. Dave came up with the hashtag and we started putting it on the end of any questions we were asking. It was spur-of-the-moment, really—we didn’t strategically plan to do this. We hadn’t fully figured out Twitter and we were playing, to be frank. We realized as we started doing it that it could provide a lot of value. Sean Stannard-Stockton is a close associate and we knew we could rely on him to offer advice from afar.

The result was that a lot of people listened to it but there wasn’t a cascade of dialogue. There were quite a few retweets, and they got some responses, and very occasionally they would start conversations. I hope it was valuable for other people.

How would you like to carry this kind of interaction forward?

It was valuable for us in the sense that even when the responses weren’t an answer to what we put out they still made us think more deeply about the questions we were asking. We especially enjoyed the comments that came directly from social entrepreneurs about how a foundation should act. Twitter is fleeting, so it encourages honesty.
Another benefit was that people pointed us in the direction of resources—reports, organizations, and people—making connections so we could find more information. We also got answers and more thought-provoking responses to specific questions, especially from people who had particular expertise. It also helped established a peer group. We’re at an early stage, still developing, and it helped us establish who has similar opinions. Also, the geographic focus has definitely been on the Bay Area.

We’d like to build something like this into our website, perhaps by having a blog called PFwhiteboard, to explore the idea of foundations listening to grantees. I’m thinking that we may have social entrepreneurs blog about their best and worst experiences with foundations, and that as a funder we can get other funders to listen to what they say.

Working openly like this reflects a lot of Dave’s personality and the informal way that we naturally work. We’re not looking for proposals and specific criteria. We’re developing more of a formal process, but we’re most interested in having an honest dialogue with social entrepreneurs. It helps us be a little more trust-based.

What we’ve realized is that we would definitely like to continue being an experimental foundation. The family has a tradition of entrepreneurship, so they recognize the value of taking some risks. We’d like to do both tactical and strategic philanthropy, as well as grassroots philanthropy in the tradition of Bill Somerville. We’re also interested in market-based solutions, PRIs, and MRIs. We don’t want to close off any doors—rather, we’d like to employ multiple methods as necessary to create a powerful result.

Given that, I do see social media being a big piece of our work. We use Twitter, we have an internal blog for the family to keep them up to date, an internal wiki for fleshing out ideas and gathering together foundation resources, and Dave is starting to create videos. We’re also exploring ways to use media to support our grantees. (Do they need a short video made about them? Would Twitter be useful to them? Do they need to learn how to use Salesforce?) People like Tipping Point are fantastic for that.