Giving Compass' Take:

• Bradford K. Smith shares how Foundation Center and the MacArthur Foundation developed the 100&Change solutions bank to spread information about the potential of organizations with the public. 

• How can other grantmakers share their data more effectively? How can you take advantage of this type of resource? 

• Learn more about the 100&Change solutions bank. 

Traditional grantmaking, whereby individual groups or people apply for pools of funding through a linear, all-or-nothing process, is inefficient, wasteful, and opaque to applicants and other outsiders. What if nonprofit proposals could come from a wider pool of candidates and be easily screened, mined for ideas, linked to related information, and shared with the world? In MacArthur’s 100&Change competition, Foundation Centersaw an opportunity to explore how philanthropy’s grantmaking process could be transformed in a way that would focus the field on generating and sharing knowledge, rather than simply getting and giving grants.

Grants of the size of the 100&Change project—$100 million—are extremely rare in philanthropy. Only four of this size were made in all of 2016. It is rarer still to make such a gift through a competitive process. Because 100&Change was designed by the MacArthur Foundation as a competition and as an open-application process, the foundation decided to share all the proposals with other foundations, nonprofits, researchers, and the public at large.

Sharing presents practical problems, since merely posting thousands of PDFs on a website is not an effective way to transmit knowledge. Moreover, the application process requested some confidential information.

In 2017, with MacArthur support, we turned a team of 25 data scientists, coders, and designers loose on the entire set of 1,871 proposals and 1,700 accompanying videos that were submitted to the 100&Change competition. The result was the Solutions Bank, a free online resource allowing users to explore proposals by subject, population served, strategy, and relationship to one or more of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

This process demonstrated that using machine learning to rapidly digest large volumes of proposals has enormous potential. The Solutions Bank allows users to fully explore all the knowledge contained in the entire body of proposals, not just the $100 million winner and finalists.

Today, America’s foundations are like black holes, absorbing enormous quantities of knowledge while reflecting back almost none. The laboratory created by MacArthur’s 100&Change suggests that this situation could change. Armed with abundant resources, fueled by the hope and creativity of millions of nonprofits, and powered by technology, foundations can become sources rather than sinks of information, radiating knowledge and valuable insights to the entire nonprofit community.

Read the full article about 100&Change by Bradford K. Smith at Stanford Social Innovation Review.