Blog Entry

I was blown away by the response to yesterday’s news that Grantsfire was becoming a Foundation Center project. I’ve always felt that Grantsfire was somewhat of a skunkworks project, so it was exciting so see so much interest, and it’s personally exciting for me as one of the initiators of the project.

Grantsfire is a story about a ragtag group of busy individuals who cared passionately about social change, who had a good idea and no time to do it, and who did it anyway. I want to share that story, and I want to offer a challenge to all grantmakers moving forward.

The Data Problem

To understand the premise behind Grantsfire, try answering the following questions:

• Which U.S.-based foundations invested in climate initiatives in 2009?
• How much was invested and in which specific areas?
• Who received these grants?

Substitute “climate initiatives” for any social change initiative, and your answers are probably the same: “I don’t know.”

Here’s the dirty little secret. Nobody really knows.

One of the huge problems in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors is the lack of good data on grants. The Foundation Center spends millions of dollars every year attempting to collect this data, but it takes at least a year to aggregate and scrub. That’s not a knock on the Foundation Center. Data collection is a hard problem, and the way that foundations do their reporting makes it even harder. Without this data, people can’t even get to the harder and more important problem: Making sense of the data.

So people try to apply bandages. Affinity groups, for example, spend a huge portion of their time surveying their members, trying to collect this data themselves. Program officers often rely on word-of-mouth from their grantees to learn about other foundations in their space.

Why does all this matter? Good, real-time data allows people to make good decisions in real-time. It helps foundations fund strategically, and it helps both foundations and nonprofits work collaboratively. Simply seeing where the money is being invested opens up opportunities for collaboration and smart followership.

Grantsfire Is Born

From left to right: Gavin Clabaugh, Eugene Eric Kim, Jason Ricci, Eugene Chan, and Patrick Collins. Missing Katrin Verclas and Michael Gilbert.

Katrin Verclas (then of N-TEN, now of MobileActive), Eugene Chan (then of Community Technology Foundation of California), and Gavin Clabaugh of Mott Foundation first conceived of Grantsfire in 2005 as part of the short-lived Innovation Funders Network. They were inspired by a proposal that Michael Gilbert made in 2004.

Michael’s proposal was simple and brilliant. Grantmakers should publish the grants they make in real-time on their web sites. If they used a standard format, anyone could aggregate and analyze that data. Michael suggested using RSS, which is a standard used across the web for syndicating information.

Katrin, Eugene, Gavin, and Michael discussed the idea, and decided that there needed to be an additional layer of structure over RSS that was grant-specific. Katrin had heard about something called microformats that she thought could be useful. She wanted to get some feedback on that idea. So she gave me a call.

Microformats are a clever way of structuring data using standard HTML, which is the language that all web sites use to present information. The advantage of using microformats is that you can use any standard web design program to generate them. There’s no need to learn a new language or use special tools.

I told Katrin that using a microformat was a smart choice. It lowered the bar for publishing structured data even further. I also told her that I thought that the overall idea was brilliant, but that I was too busy to do anything more than offer advice here and there.

A few weeks later, I found myself at the Community Technology Foundation of Californias offices in San Francisco with Katrin and Eugene, mapping out a schema for grants data, which we dubbed hGrant. A few months later, I found myself at TAG in Baltimore meeting with Eugene, Gavin, Patrick Collins, and Jason Ricci.

Patrick had just joined the Hewlett Foundation as its CIO, and he also loved the idea of Grantsfire. (He has a saying which explains how all of us suddenly found ourselves involved in this project: “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.”)

Jason “working” at one of our meetings hosted by the Community Technology Foundation of California.

Jason was a successful product designer who wanted to build an open source grants management tool. The synergy between the two ideas was obvious, and he wanted to participate. Jason is irascible and impatient. He’s also one of the nicest, most genuine people I know, and despite his pragmatism, he’s also an idealist. He, more than anyone, is the reason Grantsfire is where it is today.

Based on our discussions, I pulled together a spec and wrote a quick demo to show how easy it was to publish and parse hGrant. Eugene, Gavin, and Patrick scraped together about $15,000 from their combined budgets, and Jason and his developer (Keith Grennan) wrote the first aggregator. In the meantime, Gavin and Patrick drummed up additional resources to implement the spec at Mott and Hewlett. Total time from our last meeting to a working prototype with live data? Six weeks.

It took us about three months working in our limited spare time to take a good idea and make it real. We thought the road to transforming the sector was just around the corner. We felt justifiably high.

Then we got stuck.

The Adoption Challenge

“Never confuse a clear view with a short path.” –Paul Saffo

From day one, we felt that our biggest challenge would be adoption. Our first goal was to eliminate technical barriers as an excuse. We felt we had done that. Our next step was to overcome the cultural barriers. We were optimistic. We thought that our rapid proof of concept, our large collective network of connections, and having two major foundations on board so quickly would galvanize others to participate. We started fundraising and evangelizing.

One of the first questions we had to grapple with was, “Are you competing with the Foundation Center?” Our answer was no. We saw our work as naturally complementing the Foundation Center, and in private, we all thought that the natural future home for this work was the Foundation Center. Our goal was real-time data, and we were willing to sacrifice certain things to get rough numbers quickly. We saw the Foundation Center’s value in a world of openly available data as cleaning it up and making sense of it. We wanted to make it easier for the Foundation Center and anyone else to do just that.

Furthermore, we released the code under an open source license. Anyone could take our code, run it,, and modify it. We didn’t want to assume that ours had to be the only aggregator. Our goal was to catalyze change and to maximize the potential for emergence.

While we generated lots of interest, we weren’t able to raise the funds we needed to really sell the concept. We had three people on our team from foundations, and one person with significant fundraising experience, so the odds should have been in our favor. This was the first time I was personally involved making a grant pitch to foundations, and I found it grueling and frustrating. In the meantime, we all continued trying to convince foundations to adopt the spec and make their data available.

We ran into three main barriers:

• The people who were most excited by the idea tended to be the least empowered to make that decision within their organization. These included CIOs and communications people.
• Many people felt that they were already doing their part by publishing their 990s or giving their data to Foundation Center, and they didn’t see the value in making their data publicly available in real-time.
• Fear.

Many people didn’t understand the technology, and they naturally didn’t want to mess with something they didn’t understand. Many more were scared of the implications of this kind of transparency, which in fairness, are not simple or straightforward. And frankly, many people were simply afraid of looking stupid. In their eyes, it was better to do nothing than to risk failure.

We kept running into brick wall after brick wall, and we hadn’t raised the money to sustain our energy. A few of us, including me, essentially dropped off the project. Everyone else kept trucking along, including Jason. I was surprised by that, because Jason was probably more frustrated than any of us. I hadn’t realized how stubbornly persistent he was, and how much he believed in the importance of our work. We also acquired more valuable talent along the way, including John Soulsby, Kristen Barrali, and Casey West.

Breakthroughs and a Gauntlet

Starting in late 2008, we experienced three breakthroughs. First, Gavin managed to secure a grant from Mott to push Grantsfire forward. It was the first significant funding we had received, and Jason was tasked to manage the project.

Second, Jason became the CIO of Energy Foundation, where he was given the opportunity to implement his original vision of an open source grants management tool. (Watch out for it. It is spectacular. Energy Foundation is already using it, and it will release it to the world later this year.) Not having to deal with startup hours and the grind of product management enabled him to refocus his energies.

Third, Brad Smith became president of the Foundation Center. I have not had the pleasure of meeting Brad, but by all accounts, he is someone who gets it.

I don’t know the exact details of how Grantsfire became a Foundation Center project, and so that’s not my story to tell. I will say that the experience seems to have been very positive, and I am personally thrilled that this happened. Foundation Center is the right home for this work, and I hope they understand the value of why we designed it the way we did. Furthermore, our adoption strategy has always centered around eliminating excuses. We’ve now eliminated the question of whether to give it to Grantsfire or the Foundation Center (which was always a red herring anyway). Now the answer is, give it to the Foundation Center.

I feel blessed to have been included in this project and to have had the opportunity to work with such a remarkable group of people. That said, the work is not done. At the end of the day, foundations still need to commit to publishing their data openly and in real-time. It’s shameful that it hasn’t happened already, especially considering the comparable transparency of our financial markets.

And so, I’d like to offer the following challenge to all of the foundations listening: Have an open conversation about this. Your concerns are complex and real, and they need to be addressed. But don’t fall into the trap of analysis paralysis either. Grantsfire offers a simple, straightforward way to do some good and improve the sector. Take that first step, and support the work that the Foundation Center will now be doing.

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