Playbook: Sample Use Case

We, funders of nonprofits, want to collect data from our current and potential grantees to learn about the impact of our funding.

• The primary data collector is an individual donor or foundation that provides funding to a nonprofit organization.
  The data is collected directly from organizations that have received grants or other philanthropic funding from such a donor or foundation.
• Secondary data stakeholders may include the individuals and communities the recipient nonprofit serves, as this data may include information that the nonprofit has collected from or about them.
• Downstream data stakeholders may include monitoring and evaluation consultants, peer foundations, policymakers, press, researchers, or others who use this data in their work.

• Data is generally collected from funding applications, proposals, and budgets, as well as periodic financial or narrative reports.
• Data might include overall program metrics or impact statistics, such as the number of individuals served in a given year, or the percent decrease in a beneficiary community’s need.
• Data may also be more granular, such as demographic or population data about those being served, e.g. age, ethnicity, gender, geography, health, housing, or status.
• Data is generally anonymized, however in some contexts individual beneficiary information may be shared. For example, a nonprofit might share the names of, and schools attended by, its scholarship recipients.

• This data is used to improve and inform grantmaking and the broader field, help measure progress against portfolio objectives, manage program resources, and ensure compliance with ethical and legal obligations, for example, verification that a grant was used for legitimate charitable purposes or completing government mandated reporting.
• Grantees, and the larger philanthropic sector, benefit from measurable objectives, shared milestones, and quantifiable reporting,
• Challenges stem from the high stakes nature of fundraising, especially for large grants, which create some incentive to bend the data to increase the odds of renewed funding.
• While detailed data about individual beneficiaries should not be requested by donors, there is a risk that even aggregate data that is collected to provide impact statistics may endanger the community a grantee serves, for example, sharing data about how many people receive addiction or immigration services in a given location.

• Yes. Individuals and institutions who provide philanthropic funding to nonprofit organizations are increasingly reliant on data to guide and gauge their giving. Aligning with BD4D for their own data practices assures strong stewardship and trustworthiness.
• BD4D adoption can also be a reasonable requirement for a funder’s grantees, providing a common, trusted standard for data collection, sharing, and use across organizations.
• Adopting the BD4D Standard changes the status quo. Aligning with the BD4D Commitments ensures that philanthropies’ own data practices do not place their grantees, or the communities their grantees serve, at risk by sharing more data than is necessary in order to fulfill impact data requirements.