The Foundation Performance Dashboard - Vital Statistics for Social Impact

Mark Kramer and John Kania

Boards and foundation leadership rarely have a clear, consistent, and comprehensive picture of their foundation’s performance.

Interestingly, this situation persists despite the fact that nearly 60% of foundation CEOs would like to have more board involvement in reviewing the foundation’s philanthropic mission and effectiveness.

Our experience suggests that this conundrum results from a fundamental uncertainty: Foundations are unsure how to bridge the chasm between the readily available and concise metrics for investment performance and the much more complex, expensive, and subjective data from internal operations and program evaluations.

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