CMF partnered with the research team at the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Plante Moran Financial Advisors to update, deepen and expand critical research around the relationship between the mandated 5% payout rate and actual distribution rates of private foundations.
Phishing emails, spam texts and cybercriminals are leveraging more sophisticated ways to try and access your personal and organizational information. How can you protect your data?
How visible and accessible should your family's philanthropy be to others? It's a classic question with multiple correct answers based on faith, family tradition, regulatory frameworks, strategy and many more factors.
From February 3 through 21, 2025, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) surveyed leaders of nonprofit organizations across the United States that receive funding from foundations that give at least $5 million in grants annually. The report's findings summarize nonprofit leaders’ most pressing concerns with the current political climate and what they would find most helpful from their foundation funders.
Individuals, families and companies regularly reach out to CMF to learn how they can give back to their community through philanthropy. This typically takes one of five forms, known as the “Five Ts” of philanthropy: giving back with time (volunteering, active engagement), talent (expertise), ties (connection making), testimony (advocacy) and treasure (making a financial contribution).
This resource focuses on four financial contribution pathways available to individuals and families, each with important distinctions:
Board members and staff of philanthropic institutions regularly reach out to CMF to learn more about “tipping” and the public support test. Grantmakers of all types may encounter the public support test, whether in respect to their own organizational status or the impact of their grantmaking on public charities. As good partners, grantmakers should help nonprofits be aware of the potential impact of large gifts and grants on their public charity status.
This report from Independent Sector, The Retreat of Influence: Exploring the Decline of Nonprofit Advocacy and Public Engagement, explores how advocacy and civic engagement may vary by organization size, geography, communities served, and leadership demographics.
Through Ask CMF, community foundations and other philanthropic grantmakers frequently submit questions related to making changes to fund agreements for the funds that they hold. This resource is intended to provide further clarification on this topic, building on the material included in the CMF resource, “Frequently Asked Questions About Fund Agreements.”
Recognizing that much of the educational material available nationally to assist foundations is designed for foundation orientations – to assist those just getting started – this resource alternatively focuses on the needs of executives, staff and board members of maturing foundations.
Whether your philanthropy quest is to end homelessness, fight poverty, enable gender and racial equality, lower teen pregnancy rates, or provide a path to college for disadvantaged youth, government funding and policy are bound to affect your results. This is especially true in today's climate of fiscal austerity and political polarization.
As an example, consider work towards ending homelessness. Chances are that any homeless shelter you would choose to fund draws most of its revenue from government and is seeing that revenue steadily decline, which puts more pressure on its already unsteady finances. Even if a particular nonprofit has foregone government funding, as some do, it will now be seeking private funding in a much more competitive philanthropic market as peer organizations seek to backfill shrinking public funds
Since success in philanthropy often depends on working with or around government, we've put together advice on how to approach these collaborations. The first section covers some promising approaches to how philanthropy can work in partnership with, or to accelerate the work of government. The second discusses how some innovative city leaders and their partners are using data to make headway on social progress and ways philanthropists can help. The third discusses community collaboratives, through which leaders from government, nonprofit, philanthropy, and business are truly moving the needle on challenging social issues—and how they're making that happen.
This report contains three sections:
Three Approaches to Working with and Around Government
Geek Cities: How Data is Fostering Social Progress
How Some Community Collaboratives Are Moving the Needle on Change
