How Funders Can Get Better at Getting Better: The most effective donors listen to the people they give to.

• Author: Weiss, Lowell
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

Shortly after I finished working as a White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton, I decided to join the philanthropic sector. I was thoroughly burned out on politics. I felt that 80 percent of my 80-hour weeks were consumed by partisan food fights. I wanted a job that would give me a chance to create more light--that is, more helping, healing, and improving.

Twenty years later, I'm grateful I made the switch. In a country with enormous and growing social and environmental challenges, we are very lucky to have such a robust philanthropic sector to help drive change--whether it's in the form of better schools, improved health outcomes, a more informed civic discourse, or faster energy innovation. And yet I've come to see that there's plenty of waste in the philanthropic sector, too. It usually doesn't come from ideological battles. Instead, it comes in the form of underperformance.

Governments receive constant feedback from constituents in the form of calls, emails, visits, polling, and votes. For-profit companies solicit feedback from their customers in many ways--from focus groups to surveys to sales. Philanthropy, in contrast, has "no built-in systemic forces to motivate continuous improvement," in the words of philanthropy giants Joel Fleishman and Tom Tierney.

Consider a recent unpublished regression analysis produced by the nonprofit Center for Effective Philanthropy. Looking across tens of thousands of data points from 15 years of grantee surveys, CEP discovered that, on the whole, foundations are not improving in the eyes of their grantees.

CEP is the pioneer of a survey called the Grantee Perception Report. Because the survey is anonymous, grantees get a rare opportunity to speak truth to power. They rate their funders on a wide range of measures, including how well the funder understands its grantees' work, how much value the funder adds beyond its checks, and how much influence the funder has on public policy. When you look at foundations that have commissioned GPRs for the first time recently, the results look almost identical to those from first-time GPR users 15 years ago. There's no upward trend.

But CEP's data shows that one group of funders is making consistent improvements over time: those who survey their grantees repeatedly. According to Ellie Buteau, CEP's vice president of research, "We see a strong and clear association between more positive grantee experiences and funders who receive regular feedback from their...