2021 Better Data, Better Decisions, Better World Campaign

Participating foundations commit to:

— Update the ’s GuideStar profile — Encourage applicants and grantees to reach Gold Seal of Transparency and complete the Demographic Survey on their GuideStar profile — Regularly share grants data with

2021 Better Data, Better Decisions, Better World Campaign

Purpose

Candid, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit created through the combination of and GuideStar, gets you the information you need to do good. In pursuing its mission, Candid maintains a searchable database of nonprofit and foundation profiles on guidestar.org (aka GuideStar profiles) based on publicly available information. But a tax filing alone is not enough to answer your questions and the questions asked in our sector. If we want to be data-driven, relevant and responsive, we must have better information on which we can all rely–and it starts with organizations having a current GuideStar profile with in-depth, up-to-date information, recognized via a Seal of Transparency. Organizations can earn GuideStar Seals of Transparency and tell their full story on their profile by adding specific information about their programs such as measures of progress, operations–including diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) information—and financials.

We need your help. Ask your potential and current grantees to claim their GuideStar profile and earn a Gold Seal of Transparency.

By asking your grantees, you are advocating to increase and enrich sector-wide information about nonprofits–who they are, what they do, and why it matters. You are also ensuring better information for your organization in a way that is efficient and beneficial for the organizations that participate. Best of all, it’s free for anyone to participate and you will receive demographic data on your grantees from us at no charge.

To make it easy, Candid assembled the assets you’ll need, including template text and links to resources.

Best Practice: Keep it simple and link directly to Candid’s webpages for information on Seals of Transparency and GuideStar Profiles. We keep this content up to date so you can easily find the details.

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2021 Campaign Timeline

June-July 2021: Lead by Example Participating funders claim and update their GuideStar profile by completing: — Gold Seal of Transparency requirements

— Demographic survey

July-December 2021: Outreach to Nonprofits Participating funders communicate with nonprofits to explain how they will incorporate the nonprofits’ Gold Seal of Transparency and demographic survey information into their grant guidelines. Funders will encourage nonprofits to claim and update their GuideStar profile by completing: — Gold Seal of Transparency requirements

— Demographic survey

Supporting Materials:

— Sample emails (see Exhibit A) — Instructions for completing the profile and demographic survey: • How to update your GuideStar profile • How to collect and share DEI data — Webinar recording: New year, new Seals! Boost your by earning a 2021 Seal of Transparency — Help Center link — Contact us for help page

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June 2021: Share Your Grants Data Participating funders agree to share data on their FY19 - FY21 grants to date with Candid by June 30, 2021.

To share your grants data:

— Export a complete list of your most recent grants data in a spreadsheet, following our template. Our software partners have made it easy by building this report into their systems. — Email file to [email protected].

Supporting Materials: — Why & How to Share Your Grants Data with Candid resources: . How to share your grants data guide . eReporting webinar recording: Why & How to Share Your Grants Data with Candid . Resource links on the second to last slide of the webinar slide deck

— Frequently asked questions: • What information do I need to provide? • Why is it important to provide a grant description? • How frequently should I share my grants data? • How will my grant information be used and shared? • How do I responsibly share sensitive grants data?

If you have any questions, contact us at [email protected]

September-December 2021: The Final Push Participating funders will do a final push to encourage applicants and grantees to update their GuideStar profile before GivingTuesday (November 30, 2021). Candid will share upcoming webinar programs and support materials.

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Accessing Demographic and Profile Data

1. The monthly report (free)

Candid will provide participating funders with free access to the demographic data they are helping to collect via an Excel file that will be available online. Candid will update the file monthly and include a complete list of all demographic data collected. Contact [email protected] to explore this solution.

2. API integrations (fee)

Participating funders who would like information from their grantees profile, including the demographic survey, to automatically update in their grants management systems are welcome to explore API integrations. Contact [email protected] to explore this solution.

3. Custom data pulls (fee)

Candid can work to develop custom searches with participating funders who would like to include only certain fields of information. These can be generated at a regular cadence for the funder to either incorporate in their grants management system or help with separate analyses. Contact [email protected] to explore this solution.

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Exhibit A

Funder to Prospective Grantee Sample Email Communication

Dear prospective grantees,

We recently completed our GuideStar profile [link to profile] and want to encourage all of our applicants and grantees to do the same. Here is a little about why:

(Choose any or all the key reasons in order of preference…) 1. It helps with fundraising. Research shows that organizations with a GuideStar Seal of Transparency have 53% more fundraising success. 2. It increases your visibility while lowering your burden. The information you provide will be displayed on Candid’s GuideStar for all potential funders to access. It is also sent to all major U.S.-based donor-advised funds and 200+ charitable sites, including AmazonSmile and Facebook. 3. It standardizes how we collect demographic data. Over the last year, you have no doubt noticed that many funders are asking demographic questions about who you are and who you serve. Candid’s GuideStar Profile program aims to standardize our understanding at a sector level. We and many other funders are leaning on this survey in lieu of asking additional demographic questions on our application. 4. It’s good for the sector. GuideStar profiles help us all to centralize and standardize our knowledge about the social sector on GuideStar–a source that is heavily relied on for research and analysis.

For these reasons, we require [or strongly recommend] that funding applicants claim their profile, submit the necessary information to achieve a Gold Seal of Transparency, and share your organization’s demographics on GuideStar. It’s free and you can start here. Beginning in [xxx], we will reduce the number of questions we ask on our grant proposal – and we will rely more on your publicly available data which you share through your GuideStar profile. Earn your Seal today

To start collecting and sharing demographic information, use Candid’s DEI Survey Guide. By keeping your profile up to date, you decide what potential donors see about your organization on GuideStar. Take the opportunity to tell your own story and make a stronger case for funding.

A GuideStar profile is a simple way to showcase your organization’s work. For more information about GuideStar profiles, including how to claim your profile and start earning Seals, view GuideStar’s handy “best practices” guide.

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Samples by Other Foundations

Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Dear XXX:

The Mott Foundation’s mission to promote a just, equitable and sustainable society compels us to strive to do the best we can to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in our grantmaking. While we have historically asked our grantees to share a lot of organizational information with us, we have not asked for demographic information about your staff and board. We believe that the time is now for all of us to lead with action on equity, and to that end, we will start collecting the racial and gender makeup of each grantee organization’s board and staff. With this action, we are not making any programmatic or policy shifts. We are committed to our existing program priorities and grantmaking areas. Quite simply, we intend to be more data driven to ensuring that we are doing our utmost to promote equity. We will use GuideStar as our tool to capture and report on the demographics of our grantees. You can find background on GuideStar and its parent organization, Candid, at https://candid.org/about and https://learn.guidestar.org/products. To aid us in this endeavor, I am asking all current grant recipients and future applicants to the Foundation to update their GuideStar profile to include demographic details. We would greatly benefit from your help in ensuring that Candid has claimed its GuideStar profile and provided up-to-date demographic information. Candid was created through the merger of GuideStar and Foundation Center in 2019. Both organizations are longtime Mott grantees and key pieces of the information and data infrastructure for nonprofits and foundations in the U.S. In addition to being the largest repository of grantmaking data in the world, GuideStar is also widely used by due to its certification by the IRS for its “ Check” function to determine an organization’s nonprofit status. We have long used this function of GuideStar for our internal due diligence. So, we think of this not as introducing a new tool, but rather of us maximizing and fully utilizing a longtime asset to us and the field. The primary benefits of using GuideStar to capture demographic data are: • It is already the largest source of philanthropic data. • It will ease a burden on nonprofits as more foundations use GuideStar because organizations will have to enter their data only once per year, as opposed to custom forms for each and every funder. • It is publicly accessible and free for basic users, and paid subscribers get access to advanced analytics. • The database is used by individual organizations for internal analysis, by journalists and researchers for information on the field, and by advocates and activists who seek

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to support the field and/or hold philanthropy and nonprofits accountable. So, this effort will help ensure an accurate database and a more complete database. GuideStar is a free service. While there are fee-based upgrades that allow more functionality, the free account is all you need to enter and utilize demographic data on your organization. This information will be used by the Mott Foundation for us to assess the diversity and equity in our grantmaking, and it will simultaneously be available for you to share with your other funders, as well as to contribute to important data for the field that is accessible to all. If you have any questions or concerns about this data or how it will be used, please contact your program officer. By way of full transparency, you can see that the Foundation has entered our data in our GuideStar profile. You can see our profile here: https://www.guidestar.org/profile/38-1211227. If your organization already has a GuideStar account, please log in and update your organization’s demographic profile. If you do not currently have an account, identify the appropriate person in your organization to manage your GuideStar profile and register an account: https://learn.guidestar.org/update-nonprofit-report. The GuideStar organization profile has many fields of data available. You can enter as much as you like, but the Mott Foundation is specifically asking that — at a minimum — you complete the fields for race and ethnicity, as well as gender identity, of your staff and board members. This data will help the Foundation have a clear picture of how well we achieve diversity and equity in our grantmaking. We thank you for your voluntary compliance with this request.

Thanks,

Neal Hegarty Vice President – Programs Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

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Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Dear Mr. XXX,

I first want to thank you for all the work you do.

And, I wanted to reach out to you to provide some context to an upcoming change in our grant request process.

If you apply for a grant after April 9, you will notice a request for demographic data about your organization and the people you serve. This is the first change in an ongoing process to get better at what we do to support both you and the communities in which we work.

In the spirit of our founder, Ewing Marion Kauffman, we seek to build inclusive prosperity through a prepared workforce and entrepreneur-focused economic development by changing the conditions, addressing root causes, and breaking down systemic barriers that create inequities based on race, gender, and geography.

As I have written about previously, we started that imperfect journey internally by examining how our own practices must change to support equity and inclusion. We will commit to continually improve our strategies, our processes, and policies. We’re also committed to making our own data transparent and will be sharing data for our team on our website and updating our data annually.

In taking on this commitment to racial equity, diversity, and inclusion, it is necessary to understand who is leading the work and who is being helped through our grantmaking.

I do want to highlight a few key points: • The collection of this data and your answers do not impact whether you receive funding.

• As you go through the process, please make sure to mark “unknown” rather than guess.

• We attempted to make this request as easy as possible for grantees. By modeling our questions after those on GuideStar by Candid, we are hoping to reduce redundancy for you.

• If you have a GuideStar by Candid profile, you can update your profile according to their guidance and we will pull the data over into our system. If

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you have not updated your Candid profile, we will collect it during the grant application process.

Accurate data is key to ensuring that the Kauffman Foundation has a better understanding of our overall grantmaking.

Collectively, the data will help the Kauffman Foundation evaluate its own grantmaking to understand the degree to which we are funding organizations working to provide people with the opportunity to achieve economic stability, mobility, and prosperity.

Sincerely, Wendy Guillies President and CEO Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Sample Grant Agreement

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