Letter from the President & CEO: Strategic Plan Process Update

Dear WA Women’s Foundation Members,

Since my last report in October, the Board of Directors has made further progress on our strategic plan, and some of you have been involved in giving us feedback. Our consultant Tara Smith has met with our Cabinet, Impact Assessment Committee (IAC), and Member Engagement Committee, sharing our work product, to-date, and asking for feedback. We also have plans to meet with the Pooled Fund Grant Committee in early March.

For some members, it may seem like this process has been going on for a long time.  It is true that we revised our mission statement more than a year ago but that was part of our rebranding. This current process actually started last August, when our Strategic Planning Steering Committee met for the first time and our consultants began their information gathering process.  Since then, we hosted member focus groups and held a Board retreat in September.  We also discussed strategic planning at the two other regular Board meetings that have been held since September (in December and January).

Crux Consulting has been leading us through a values-based strategy process based upon the work of Dr. Steve Patty (Moving Icebergs: Leading People to Lasting Change).   His premise is that in order to create lasting change in an organization, we need to not only shape the actions of individuals within an organization but also, dive below the surface to engage their shared values, aims, assumptions and beliefs.  Otherwise, change simply chips away at the top of the iceberg but doesn’t actually move it.

And yes, icebergs move slowly – as does this process as compared to others.  We also are moving slowly because we are a membership organization, and we know that you, our members, are highly invested in the Foundation.  We are trying to test our working ideas in front of many different subgroups of members as possible, and you are busy women!

The member engagement we have conducted to-date has shaped the work of our Board and Strategic Planning Steering Committee in defining what we value collectively, what we believe collectively and what we are trying to do in the world as Washington Women’s Foundation. We have placed these ideas into the boxes of the Iceberg Model – Box A (ultimate aims/values), Box B (core beliefs) and Box C (intended impact). Click here to see a visual of the Patty Iceberg Model.

We shared the content of Boxes A and B with Cabinet, IAC and Member Engagement.  Here are a few samples:

Box A – Our Ultimate Aims

In all things and with all colleagues, partners and stakeholders, WA Women’s Foundation will:

• Be in community
• Embrace discomfort
• Elevate or amplify the power of all who identify as women

Box B – Our Core Beliefs

These beliefs and assumptions shape our work at WA Women’s Foundation:

• Recognizing and challenging our conscious and unconscious biases leads to better decision-making
• Philanthropy is a powerful force for change, and it is one of several tools available to us
• Partnership-based relationships between nonprofits and philanthropists improve the condition of our community

Since August, the Strategic Planning Steering Committee has met a total of six times, including last week. At that meeting, the Committee reviewed feedback from the Member Engagement Committee, Cabinet and IAC and made some changes to Boxes A, B and C.  The Committee also decided to convene a task force of past Pooled Fund Grant Committee leadership in March.  We are asking this group to meet for 3 hours to brainstorm how they might change our Pooled Fund Grant Committee process with our Ultimate Aims and Core Beliefs in mind.  Their concepts, and feedback from grantee interviews being conducted by Crux in early March, will be shared with the Board at another full-day retreat in March.  At the conclusion of the retreat, we hope to have a full framework of the plan to again share with subgroups of members.

We are not far away from bringing this process to a close, but I also think that we’re facing a new reality where strategic planning is never really DONE.  We’re always learning, evaluating and adapting – as a learning organization I expect we’ll always be transforming in some way.  Thank you for being part of the transformation.  And if you have any questions along the way, please call or email me. I value hearing from you.

Membership Focus Group Highlights

Letter from the President

Dear WA Women’s Foundation Members,

We have completed another phase of this year’s strategic planning process, and I wanted to share some results and data points with you today.  Thank you to the members who participated in interviews and focus groups convened for us by Crux Consulting in mid-September.

Focus groups were organized based upon members’ years of membership (3 years or less; between 3 and 10 years, 10+ years of membership). Not surprisingly, many common themes emerged out of the three groups:

• The Importance and Relevance of Being a Collective of Women
  Participants expressed a strong commitment to women and the need to organize, support, and empower women in today’s political climate – now more than ever.
• Appreciation and Respect for the Foundation
  Participants shared an appreciation for the personal learning and growth made possible through the Foundation and also for the multiple ways in which they can be involved and engaged in our collective work and learning.  They also expressed pride in the impact of our grants.
• Change
  Participants expressed a strong curiosity about change and an openness to strategic evolution by the Foundation.  Some shared specific ideas about how the Foundation should change.  Interestingly, for some participants (mainly those who have been members for 3 to 10 years) there was an expressed expectation or need for change.

Participants also were asked, “In your time as a member, what has WA Women’s Foundation done that matters?”  Again, there were some common themes:

• The Foundation Has Made Impactful Grants
  The impact was described as twofold – both the dollars we give away (“giving away a lot of money strategically”) and the visibility our grants bring to organizations and issues.  It also was noted that “the Foundation takes risks with who we fund.”
• The Foundation Has Contributed to Personal Learning 
• The Foundation Has Helped Build Personal Relationships & Community 
• The Foundation Has Given Women a Voice

When asked what they would like to see change or evolve through this next strategic plan, participants identified the diversification of our membership, specifically to include more women of color, and tools to tell our collective story better out in the community.

The Board of Directors had a full day meeting in late September to review the focus group data and begin working on the specific elements of our strategic plan.  At that meeting, the Board also reflected sentiments similar to those of the focus groups:

• A commitment to elevating or amplifying the power of women; and
• A belief that women are a powerful force for change.

While we are still in the early stages this planning process, we are still committed to having a new strategic plan in place shortly after the Board’s annual retreat, which will occur next March. We also are committed to reporting on our progress on a regular basis and including as many members as we can in different aspects of the process. So there’s more to come.

Fortunately, it hasn’t been all work and no fun this fall at WA Women’s Foundation.  Over the course of just a few weeks we hosted two luncheons.

The first luncheon was for our Founding Members.  Did you know that of the initial investors of WA Women’s Foundation (members who joined in the fall of 1995 and spring of 1996), 60 are still active members of the Foundation today? These women have truly been a powerful force for change!

The second luncheon was for members celebrating their “five year anniversaries” as members.  No, John Floberg, Executive Director of Washington State Parks Foundation has not been a member of WA Women’s Foundation for five years!  However, he has been a member of our Impact Assessment Committee for 2 years, and as his organization received a grant from WA Women’s Foundation in the year that this class of members joined our collective, we invited him to share lunch and stories of the impact of our grant with us.

Looking at the women in these photographs, I feel confident about our fearless future, because I know that it is rooted in the ground-breaking spirit that has always been a part of our DNA. I’m curious to see where it takes us next.  Thank you for your membership in our collective and your commitment to ensuring that the Foundation remains a dynamic, women-powered force for change in our community.  We’re on this journey together!

With gratitude,
Beth McCaw, President, Washington Women’s Foundation

Membership Focus Groups

Letter from the President

Dear WA Women’s Foundation Members,

As the summer comes to an end, the next phase of our strategic planning process is beginning.  As you will recall, in May we invited all of our members to complete an online survey.  More than 150 members took the time to complete the survey, and I shared a summary of the responses with you in my June President’s Letter.

Over the summer, the Board of Directors convened a Strategic Planning Task Force that is assisting us in determining what data we need from members and the community, how to make the process as member-inclusive as possible, and how to best structure discussions at the Board level.  The Task Force is being chaired by our Board Chair, Grace Chien, and meets on a monthly basis.  Many thanks the following members who are serving on the Strategic Planning Task Force:  Board members Jodi Green and Carrie George, Pooled Fund Grant Committee Chair Susan Heikkala, Patricia Kiyono, Jill McGovern and Julie Stein.

We also had a second task force meeting over the summer.  Earlier this year, thanks to the advocacy of our Board member Bo Lee, WA Women’s Foundation received a $30,000 grant from Bo’s employer, BNY Mellon, to launch a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative at the Foundation.  The grant did not lay out specific requirements or guidelines for this initiative, so our Board of Directors convened a second task force to research options, discuss opportunities and make a recommendation to the Board that could be folded into our strategic plan. Grace Chien, our Board Chair, also chairs this task force, which will be continuing to meet over the next few months.  Again, thanks to the following members who are serving on the DEI Task Force:  Board members Cherry Banks, Donna Lou, Martha Kongsgaard, and Bo Lee, and at-large members Maura Fallon and Diankha Linear.

As part of the next phase of data collection for our strategic plan, our consultants Tara Smith and Barbara Grant of Crux Consulting are conducting staff and individual member interviews.  In addition, they will be convening member focus groups in mid-September.  Many members volunteered to join in these conversations, and we have arranged the focus group participants in separate sessions based upon their years of membership (3 years or less; between 3 and 10 years, 10+ years of membership). To those of you who volunteered for the interviews and focus groups, our deepest thanks.  We appreciate your commitment to the Foundation and your interest in helping us craft a vision for our future.

Aviva Stampfer, our Grants Program Manager, is also working with the Strategic Planning Task Force and has developed an online survey that we are going to send to all of our past grantees.  We are interested in hearing their opinions about the process of applying to WA Women’s Foundation for funding.  As a learning collective, we are always interested in process improvement.  We know that the grants application process is time-intensive and for smaller nonprofit organizations, can be a drain on already limited resources.  If you attended the first day of Discovery Days 2015, you may recall our speaker Vu Le encouraging funders to look at their grant making processes to determine whether they are “stacking the deck” against certain organizations, especially small, grassroots organizations serving communities of color and led by people of color.  We think it would be helpful to know this about our processes.  In addition, we are sensitive to the fact that an intensive process is often a barrier to a Foundation’s ability to be nimble and responsive to urgent and critical community needs.  If we want to increase our impact, we may need to become more nimble.

The grantee survey also is a vehicle for collecting more data that we haven’t necessarily collected in a systematic way in the past.  Obtaining this data will allow us to complete a “gap analysis” to better understand what issues, communities and geographic areas we have traditionally funded and which we have not.  This analysis will help us better define what impact we have had in the past as we think about what impact and influence we want to have in the future.

The Board of Directors has a full day meeting in September to review the survey, interview and focus group data.  I will make a report at the Annual Meeting of the Membership, which will be held on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, at noon in the 2100 Building. I do hope you will join us.  Click here to register for the Annual Meeting.  Our goal is to have a new strategic plan in place shortly after the Board’s annual retreat, which will occur next March.  As I mentioned in my previous President’s Letter, our overarching goal is create a plan to make the culture of the Foundation more inclusive, our educational programming more informative and our influence and impact more transformational. Thank you for helping us by sharing your thoughts and your vision for the future of WA Women’s Foundation.  Our collective thinking and action makes the Foundation stronger.

With Gratitude,

Beth McCaw, President, WA Women’s Foundation

Membership Survey Results

Dear Members of WA Women’s Foundation,

In May we invited all of our members to complete an online survey.  The survey collected several important points of data that will be helpful to the Board of Directors and staff as we develop the next strategic plan for the Foundation.  Because more than 150 members took the time to share their thoughts with us, I wanted to highlight some of the survey results.

Membership – Why Join?

The vast majority of the respondents joined WA Women’s Foundation because a friend, family member or colleague is or was a member of the Foundation.  Not only was it one of the factors influencing the decision, it was ranked by about half of the respondents as the most compelling factor.

Of those who indicated that an event was an influencing factor, most mentioned Discovery Days, the Grant Awards Celebration and the Annual Philanthropy Celebration at SAM.  Thanks to those of you who recently attended our Grant Award Celebration at SAM and brought guests with you.  We hope many of them will join the Foundation before the end of the year!

We also wanted to better understand what women hoped to gain by joining our collective. The following are the top five reasons respondents joined the Foundation:

• I wanted to learn about important community issues.
• I wanted to increase the impact of my individual giving.
• I wanted to meet and work with like-minded women.
• I wanted to learn about not-for-profit organizations active in my community.
• I wanted to influence community transformation.

Membership – Why Renew?

The responses indicate that the Foundation is delivering on our promises – women are renewing because we increase the impact of their individual giving and they have learned about important community issues through Washington Women’s Foundation.

What’s Important to You?

We heard once again that having the time to participate is a challenge, especially for working women.  For that reason, we are trying to have fewer events in the morning, host more over the lunch hour and find late afternoon times that are not challenged by traffic. This year, two of the five Pooled Fund Grant Committee Work Groups met in downtown Seattle, and one met at the end of the work day. This fall, we are planning to schedule our Partner Grant Committee meetings in the late afternoon as well.  If you are looking for evening or weekend meeting times, let us know that specifically.  When we have tried some of those in the past, they were not well-attended.

In terms of our grant making, the survey respondents told us it was very important that we make five $100,000 grants each year and that we give $2,000 Merit Awards to each of the 5 organizations not selected for the 5 Pooled Fund Grants. In fact, many comments encouraged us to increase the size of the Merit Awards.  This could be a possibility, depending upon your financial support of the Foundation.  This was the first year that member contributions fully funded the Merit Awards; in past years, the Board has used operating reserves to fund the awards at the current level.

Values – Collaboration, Connection, Education, Equality, Impact, Inclusiveness & Leadership

Like our Board of Directors, the survey respondents had a very difficult time ranking our organizational values, especially since they have not been specifically defined.  When the Board ranked the values, their top three were:

• Impact
• Inclusiveness
• Collaboration

When members were asked to rank the values in order of importance to their experience as a member of the Foundation, the top three responses were:

• Impact
• Collaboration
• Education

When asked to rank the values in the order of importance to our mission, survey respondents’ top three values were:

• Impact – by a significant margin; it was ranked the top by 48% of the respondents
• Collaboration – also by a fairly significant margin
• Inclusiveness

A number of respondents commented on the value of “equality,” which was given the lowest ranking each time.  One member noted that equality was important “internally” but that “equity” was a more important “external” value. Another commented on the importance of the concept of “equity” in the fulfillment of our mission.

Next Steps

As many of you who have served on Boards know, the strategic planning process has many phases.  Last year, as we refreshed our brand, we also updated our mission statement.  Next, we’ll be discussing our organizational values and determining a process by which Board members and members can agree upon shared definitions for our values.  Reaching agreement around our values will allow us to make values-based decisions about what goals we want to set and what strategies we will implement to pursue those goals.

We also want to hear more from you as well as from our grantees. At least one survey respondent asked for more “substantive ways” to contribute to the strategic planning process. As we noted when we distributed the survey, we view it as simply the first step and one tool in a process that will take many months. To that end, the Foundation has engaged a strategic planning firm to help us determine how to best involve as many of you in these conversations going forward with the hope of reaching shared agreement about how to make the culture of the Foundation more inclusive, our educational programming more informative and our influence and impact more transformational.

With Gratitude,

Beth McCaw, President, WA Women’s Foundation

Strategic Planning

by Beth McCaw, President

This year marks the end point of our current strategic plan and thus, brings an opportunity for our Board of Directors to establish new goals and objectives for WA Women’s Foundation.  Because WA Women’s Foundation is your Foundation, we will be asking you to help us with our planning process.  Before doing so, I wanted to report on our progress against our current plan.

When I joined the staff in September 2014, we had just begun the implementation of our 2014-2017 Strategic Plan, which was developed under the leadership of my predecessor. Our strategic plan has three goals:

• Increase financial strength and sustainability;
• Engage more women in philanthropy and leadership; and
• Build our institutional knowledge or community needs and our capacity to respond to them.

To increase financial strength and sustainability, we set a goal of maintaining a solid financial position, now and in the future.  Strategies for doing so included managing our operations in a cost-effective and efficient manner and broadening the base of fundraising support for the Annual Fund and sponsorships.  On the operations side, we performed better than budget in 2015 and 2016. In 2015, much of our success was due to your generous support of our 20^th Anniversary Annual Fund Campaign, which exceeded goal by more than $40,000. Did you know?  Members’ $500 annual contribution toward operations covers less than 38% of our operating costs?  The rest is paid for by the Annual Fund, a payout from our endowment and reserves, and, to a very small extent, corporate sponsorships.

In order to engage more women in philanthropy and leadership, we made a commitment to maintain high-quality programming narrowly focused on philanthropy and leadership.  We host more than 40 workshops and events each year. One of our signature events is Discovery Days, and due to the efforts of members Amy Michaels, Nicole Resch, Rosalie Gann, and our entire 2016 Discovery Days Planning Committee, last fall’s event had record attendance.  Our audiences and speakers were our most diverse ever, and this clearly was a program very relevant to its time.

In our 2013 membership survey, you told us that you wanted us to vary the timing and location of our events and programs.  Last year 43% of our events and programs were somewhere other than the 2100 Building, and this year, 2 of our 5 Pooled Fund Work Groups are meeting downtown. We also understand that you want more opportunities to network and build relationships even while working on grant making so more “social” components are being included in almost all of our programming.

We are fortunate to have a 91% member retention rate. However, the number of new members joining declined in 2015 and 2016.  As of December 31, 2016, we had 469 paid members.  Did you know?  We’ve never quite reached the 500 paid member mark.  We have, however, had $500,000 in the pooled fund for several years now, primarily due to additional gifts, including IGRs, designated by members to the pooled fund.  2017 marks the first year in which member contributions also are covering the amount of our Pooled Fund Merit Awards.  Last year, we funded those awards from operations.  Between 2010 and 2016, our cash reserves and operations funded more than $170,000 in grants (Pooled Fund, Merit Awards and Partner Grants).

While the number of members participating on the Pooled Fund Grant Committee has declined the past two years, we are seeing growth in participation on the Partner Grant Committees and increased civic engagement and leadership by those Committee members.  Members of last fall’s Diversity Partner Grant Committee continue to personally contribute and raise funds for TEACH, a higher education program run by the Black Prisoners Caucus at Clallam Bay Correction Center.  Members also are engaged in ongoing advocacy in support of Washington CAN’s efforts to reform the Legal Financial Obligations and parole systems in Washington state.

In order to build our institutional knowledge of community needs and our capacity to respond to them, we are looking for opportunities to build new partnerships and deeper relationships with other philanthropic organizations.  Last fall, we partnered with the Social Justice Fund for the first time, and this fall, we partnering again with Women’s Funding Alliance. We also are participating in the Central Washington Conference for the Greater Good in Yakima next week. I will be meeting with Yakima nonprofit leaders and well as women from the Yakima area who are interested in collective grant making, trying to extend our reach into Eastern Washington.

We also have increased our engagement with our own network – the Women’s Collective Giving Grantmakers Network.  Board members Laura Midgely and Kathy Edwards joined me in presenting at the Network’s National Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, last month.  Colleen Willoughby was on a plenary panel and member Jackie Bezos gave the keynote on the first evening of the conference. Board member Bo Lee and former Board member Alison Wilson also attended. Did you know? Washington Women’s Foundation is the oldest collective grant making organization in the country and while we are still leading in terms of dollars granted each year, many of the other organizations within the Network have memberships very close to the size of ours.

Beyond the goals of our strategic plan, it’s important to note that all together collective giving and grant making organizations are having an impact on women’s philanthropy, which has now been studied and documented by researchers at The Center on Philanthropy at the University of Indiana.  We are achieving the vision originally set for us by our founders – to change the course of women’s philanthropy through the power of collective giving. Our own data support the conclusion that the collective giving model of Washington Women’s Foundation has changed the course of women’s philanthropy over the past 20+ years.

So what comes next? This is the question that our Board of Directors is considering as we begin working on our next strategic plan and as this conversation begins, we hope to hear from you. We are planning on sending a few short surveys to the full membership to better understand what more you want to learn, what experiences and opportunities you hope WA Women’s Foundation will make possible for you, and what relationships and networks are important for you to build to support your philanthropy and community engagement. 

Two decades ago, our founders saw an opportunity to create something new – the result was an innovative, inclusive model of women-powered philanthropy. Now that we’ve become a model for others around the country, how can we challenge ourselves – and others – to up our game? Thank you for your membership and thank you for helping us continue to move boldly forward.