The Purpose of a Foundation’s Website

What’s a foundation website for?

We aren’t the only ones who have asked this question. After all, foundations are not in the business of raising money or selling products or services. So what good can a foundation website do?

The Rockefeller Foundation has over one hundred years of experience promoting the well-being of humanity around the world, we have a significant amount of knowledge that can be leveraged to influence every sector to help us achieve our mission. We also recognize digital media’s transformative power to find and accelerate new ideas and networks to solve some of the world’s greatest social problems.

To reimagine the purpose of the Foundation’s website, we knew we needed to find a partner to step outside a traditional vendor relationship. This would mean becoming an extension of each other’s team, and establishing a deeply collaborative, transparent and open process. The Foundation’s partnership with A Hundred Years resulted in a new depth of insight and understanding of the Foundation’s knowledge, content and systems-level approach to philanthropy. Dozens of staff, grantees, and partners helped to co-design the experience and purpose of the site, which we’re thrilled to launch today.

Here’s a look at what you’ll find:

What solutions are hiding in our PDFs?
A few months ago, the World Bank published a noble and important report noting that nearly 50 percent of their policy reports have the goal to inform and influence the social impact sector, yet more than 31 percent of these reports are never downloaded, and 87 percent are never cited. Like so many organizations, the Foundation produces a number of informal and formal reports, publications, blog posts, stories from the field, thoughts shared on social media, and even drafts of “in-process” work. In a busy and crowded Internet, how can we be sure that our audience is discovering the information they need to make important business and policy decisions?

You might call this knowledge management in the world of digital media, and definitely a work in progress. To start, we’ve pulled out the key facts and figures on each initiative page, paired with recent tweets from our grantees and partners. The numbers represent statistically important numbers surrounding the work, such as a staggering fact about the problem we’re trying to solve, or a key learning from our research that could be leveraged by others. We’ve also affixed a topical and geographical tagging structure to all knowledge to enable dozens of entry points to our learning. Finally, we’ve installed a best-in-class Search tool to scan and surface intelligence, hopefully providing a little serendipity along the way.

Building on the success of our blog, the new Insights and Ideas section surfaces the thoughts and theories of some of the world’s brightest and boldest social innovators. We’ve posed questions around topics the Foundation is investing in–such as building urban resilience or advancing health–and curated ideas and options from our network of staff, grantees, and partners. These ideas are at once diverse and interrelated, and we believe they’ll spark new thinking and connections in our global audience.

The Foundation’s grantees are tackling pressing problems, and they have the stories and knowledge to prove it. We want the website to be a medium and mouthpiece that promotes their work to the important funders, influencers, and policy-makers who visit our site. Each grantee now has their own page, showcasing the publications, reports, and storyline of our shared journey.

Finally, a new section on the Foundation’s strategic approach to philanthropy. This section illustrates our broad view of systems and how we identify spaces where there is momentum for innovation that makes change likely to take hold. We also to seek to intervene where our “risk capital” can usher in new actors and larger flows of capital that have a shared interest in solving these problems.

Just like the Foundation, our website will continue to evolve and refocus. So take a look today and let us know of any feedback in the comments below.