Established in 1956, in the wake of McCarthy–era hearings on philanthropy, the Foundation Center brought transparency to the work of foundations by publishing large subscription-based directories on U.S. grantmakers and their grantees. It operates research, education, and training programs through its network of 480 funding information centers nationwide and around the world. As 2011 approached, the Foundation Center identified significant risks to 70 percent of its non-grant revenue. The U.S. government looked likely to offer to make free and open the data the Foundation Center was synthesizing. With this in mind, the Foundation Center began charting a long-term strategic transformation to evolve from a data-publisher to a knowledge services organization. 

 

To address this transformation challenge, the Crossland Group was brought in. We focused on five core levers to implement the Foundation Center’s strategic plan: shared leadership; human-centered design; HR systems and talent; organizational design; and project management. We built multi-generational, cross-functional groups to spread a sense of ownership across the organization, surface leaders, and translate the Foundation Center’s strategic priorities for all internal audiences. We also identified solutions voiced directly through end-users, building personas of different stakeholders to identify beneficiary pain-points and develop new products. We mapped talent gaps, critical and future skills, and performance management, to support the new strategic plan and services. Next, we identified core competencies and functions, developing a new organization that would free people up to do their highest value work. Finally, we embedded a series of operational project plans into a project management  “gearbox”, developing a shared organizational resource pool, and dramatically increasing the project load the organization was capable of managing.

 

Over $18M in new investments

 

Together, Crossland and the Foundation Center co-created more than twenty-five solutions, which directly resulted in over $18M in investments from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Conrad Hilton Foundation, Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and other donors over several years.