In addition to financial assistance, the Foundation provides targeted support in areas that are critical to grantees’ organizational development. Though it is highly individualized, this extra-financial support generally falls into five categories: talent and board development, peer learning, evaluation assistance, communications, and technology.

Talent and Board Development

Foundation grantees and many other high-performing, high-growth nonprofits face daunting challenges in recruiting and retaining top talent, implementing the best systems to support this talent, and continuing to strengthen their boards’ leadership capacities. EMCF provides funding for executive coaching and search, succession planning, organizational and leadership development, and board development and recruiting. The Foundation and its grantees continue to explore new ways to provide such assistance.

Peer Learning

Many grantees have found each other to be among their most helpful resources and “thought partners.” The Foundation works closely with the Research Center for Leadership in Action at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the Center for Applied Research, a management consulting firm, to provide grantees peer-learning opportunities and support. Annual grantee retreats have led to smaller peer-learning groups addressing a range of common problems, including performance management, strategies for providing effective employment services to young people, and ways to build leadership pipelines in their respective organizations.

The Foundation also offers grantees opportunities to visit high-performing businesses (grantee CEOs toured McDonald’s University in 2006, for example, to learn about its leadership development system) as well as exemplary nonprofit organizations. Foundation grantee Youth Villages hosted a two-day event showcasing its performance-management culture. In addition, Foundation grantees often connect directly with each other, in some cases forming working partnerships to deliver youth services. The Foundation considers peer learning a good way to build a community of leaders who challenge each other and themselves to continue to improve their work.

Evaluation Assistance

Given the importance the Foundation places on measuring performance and outcomes, a robust evaluation system is a critical component of a successful grantee. In addition to enabling organizations to report accurately and quickly on their performance, strong evaluation systems also provide data that can be analyzed to adjust programs and operations to improve the delivery of services to youth.

The Foundation provides a wide range of assistance in evaluation, including underwriting the costs of outside experts to help sharpen and clarify a theory of change, helping to implement a performance tracking system, and working with external evaluators to implement rigorous and independent evaluations. The Foundation’s own Evaluation Advisory Committee, a panel of distinguished, independent evaluation experts, is an invaluable resource.

The Foundation’s efforts to integrate evaluation throughout its grantmaking and operations are documented in the papers Mainstreaming Evaluation and Making Evaluation Work

(Learning Series #2).

Communications

On occasion the Foundation helps grantees develop communications strategies. Several grantee leaders have received communications training from the Communications Leadership Institute, a specialist in helping nonprofits craft unique and compelling stories about their programs. Other grantees have worked on media outreach with Goodman Media International.

Technology

In conjunction with or following business planning, the Foundation often provides technology consulting through a contract with NPower, a network of nonprofits that offers such assistance to other nonprofits. This frequently yields a strategic IT plan to complement the business plan. At other times NPower provides targeted assistance to implement a performance-management system. Foundation grantees are also able to take advantage of NPower’s discounted software purchase program.