SVPP Investees Tell Us How We’re Doing

(from the December 2008 Newsletter)

Since the inception of Social Venture Partners Portland eight years ago, we have given more than $1.3 million to organizations in our community. Any nonprofit would be happy to receive the money we grant, but our relationships with them go far beyond. In the venture philanthropy model, we develop a working partnership with the organizations to understand their challenges and determine where we may add value. Thus, we provide know-how, networks and resources to help resolve their challenges.

Sound valuable? Sound simple? It is until you’re one of the parties in the relationship. It’s an intensive model that requires great trust and openness by the SVPP Investee leaders. We also work hard to make it successful and continually improve our service. Thus, we asked our Investees to evaluate us this year and received responses from 10 out of 11 representatives.

Generally we did hear that our Investees were happy and benefited by the partnership. We also received high scores for our sensitivity to nonprofit culture, which can be challenging when matching volunteers from outside the nonprofit sector to their needs. The highest marks for our capacity building work came in four areas: executive management/leadership support, human resources, mission/vision/planning and program design and evaluation. Investees also reported that our greatest lasting impacts on their organizations were:

• Formalizing/institutionalizing strategic planning
• Strengthened board of directors
• Broadened/expanded resources
• Shift in culture to effective use of data for decision-making and planning
• Effectively telling the organization’s story in the community

This level of satisfaction is heartening to our Partners and holds true throughout the SVP network worldwide. Since its formation in 1997, the SVP network has contributed more than $26.5 million in grant investments to more than 300 nonprofit organizations. In 2008, SVP Partners gave more than 14,000 hours of volunteer time for strategic projects with Investees. The quality of interactions between nonprofit organizations and SVP Partners was evaluated specifically on Approachability, Responsiveness and Knowledge. Cumulatively, all were rated 4.5 or above out of a possible 5.0.

Finally, SVP Portland learned that most of our Investees thought we are not adequately distinguishing ourselves from other funders and not fully capitalizing on our Partners’ time and talent. This feedback came at a critical juncture in our strategic planning earlier this year. We look forward to sharing our response in the strategic plan we’ll introduce in the next newsletter.