Many social innovators have a love-hate relationship with the foundations on whom they depend for funding. Love their money, when they can get it. Hate their processes for deciding what they will fund. Even people with good track records for scoring when they pitch to foundations are privately critical of the philanthropies. The litany of complaints is endless: the foundations don’t know what they are looking for or they are too specific and narrow about what “fits” their agenda and aren’t open to other good ideas; they only want to fund sure things and won’t take much risk; they take way too long to make a decision; they never give you enough money to get the job done; they won’t fund long-term projects… and so on. But being openly critical of how foundations do what they do is a no-no. Biting the hand that feeds you will leave you hungry—at least that’s the fear. Tell ‘em what you assume they want to hear, if they even bother asking. So here’s a game-changing idea: a “customer rating” system for scoring foundation grant-making processes, along the lines of eBay’s buyer reviews of seller performance and Amazon’s customers’ book reviews. This came to mind when I read an email from Luis Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation. It asked me to respond to a survey for the foundation, assuring that my answers would be confidential and the foundation would not know who said what, would only see the aggregated data. “We will have no way of identifying who provided what responses.” (This acknowledges the grantees’ fears of giving negative feedback.) The survey is what business management literature calls “bringing the voice of the customer” into the organization. It’s a good practice—but it doesn’t go far enough. After all, the foundation decides what questions to ask and only it sees the answers. None of us outside the foundation is any wiser and, depending on the questions, much of what we’d like to say might remain unsaid. Consider, instead, the effect that might be made by a foundation customer review Web site, call it “GrantsRUs.com.” Let’s say that customers reported on a scale of 1-5 just how much of a fruitless pain in the ass (PITA) the foundation’s grant-making process had been. If you saw on the site that the track record of Foundation X was a very high PITA score with little likelihood of success, then maybe you wouldn’t waste your time preparing and sending in a proposal. And maybe if a foundation found its well of proposals drying up, it would consider changing its processes. Such a site could serve several purposes if it got some “legs” (meaning attracted significant users): Foundations could use the site as part of the evaluation process for program officers. Users could share insights about various foundations’ processes and funding opportunities with each other. If community foundations were included, donors could use the site to inform their decisions about where to put their philanthropic capital. The end result could be an “Angie’s List” for philanthropy—perhaps a significant innovation in the philanthropy field. Some foundations might argue that potential grantees aren’t really customers of foundations. Instead, they are recipients of investments or co-producers of results. But this begs the question. Foundations engage in grant making processes with tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations. There are no “industry standards” for how well the tasks should be performed. There is no feedback or real evaluation about how well they are being performed. And when they are not performed well, there are no consequences for foundation staff, CEOs, or directors. Is this any way to run the nation’s social innovation capital markets? | 
