Alison Fine is a well respected voice in the field of philanthropy.

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Gates Foundation and Radical Transparency

A better title for this post may have been, “Gates Foundation Misses an Opportunity for Radical Transparency” but that seemed awfully long. But now that you’re here and reading, I’ll explain why that’s really the story.

Last week, Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy wrote an interesting post on donations that have been made in the last year to the Gates Foundation. As Sean wrote, “Yesterday the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation received $10.4 million in unsolicited donations.”

One might have thought that individual donors would have believed that a foundation with an endowment the size of about the sixtieth largest country in the world was large enough, but apparently not. Sean believes that the donations are reflection of a growing interest on the part of donors for impact. These donors want to pool their funds with the foundation for the same reason that Warren Buffet did, to leverage their money and piggyback on the considerable due diligence and smarts of the foundation staff.

Makes good sense to me. There’s only one drawback to this speculation — the fact that it has to be speculation rather than fact.

The Gates foundation listed the outside donations as part of their tax returns. They fulfilled their legal requirements. And that’s it. What a shame to miss an opportunity for full, radical transparency to share with the world who all of these donors are, why the foundation believes the donations were made and how they were used. The foundation has made it abundantly clear that they are not interested in soliciting contributions. In their guidelines about outside contributions posted on their site, they write:

We prefer that people give directly to our grantee organizations rather than to the foundation if they want to help advance the causes we’re passionate about. We have the stable funds we need to help us fulfill our mission, but our
grantees often do not.

Nonetheless, folks are sending in what adds up to a significant amount of money in the real world. According to the foundation’s guidelines they reveal the name of donors who give more than $5,000 as part of their tax returns as required by law.  But, my question is why not just reveal the names of any donors? As Sean wrote in a Twitter back and forth we had about this:

@Afine I think they only need to follow the law. But I think that for a foundation their size, it would be best to list all donors. Why not?

Yes, exactly, why not?  Why wait for the tax returns, why not just list donors on their website when they come in and whatever the amount? Transparency is so easy, particularly with social media tools, and can avoid so many unnecessary suspicions and theories, why not just make the default setting radical transparency?

There is absolutely no reason to keep information bundled up. Post it, let it go! As a community of people and organizations we need to start, right now, today, to move beyond the letter of the law to a new level of radical transparency that all donors, board members, staff members, volunteers and clients should expect as the norm.

http://afine2.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/gates-fdn-and-radical-transparency/