FoundationThat

FoundationThat is a fictional nonprofit initiative used to illustrate a model for documenting and analyzing philanthropic foundations. The project aims to catalog foundations’ missions, grantmaking policies, funding levels, governance structures, and reported outcomes, with the goal of increasing transparency, comparability, and learning within the philanthropy sector.

Origin and scope: The concept of foundationthat emerged in collaborative discussions about evaluating foundation impact and standardizing reporting practices. Proponents describe it as an open, community-driven data project and reference framework that can be adopted by researchers, grantmakers, and nonprofit organizations to share non-sensitive data and methodological notes.

Activities: foundationthat maintains a data repository of foundation profiles, grants data, and impact metrics, along with reporting templates and methodological guidelines. The platform emphasizes data quality, privacy, and consent, and provides an API and export formats to enable analysis and reproducibility. It also publishes case studies, best-practice guides, and educational resources to help organizations improve governance and monitoring.

Governance: It is described as having a governance body with rotating membership, an ethics advisory council, and working groups focused on data standards, equity, and user engagement. Funding for the initiative comes from a mix of donations and in-kind contributions from participating organizations.

Impact and reception: In community discussions, foundationthat is presented as a potential catalyst for greater accountability and learning, while critics note risks around data completeness, bias, and the limits of standardized metrics in philanthropy.

See also: philanthropic foundations, impact evaluation.