Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else!” Fortunately, CF Insights offers tremendous benchmarking tools to help community foundations develop individualized peer groups and collectively analyze trends across our field—and figure out our destination in the process.
Guideposts Point to Growth, a study based on the Columbus Survey 2010 Results, has just been released. This work builds on the hallmark community foundation surveys conducted by The Columbus Foundation on behalf of the field from 1988–2007. More recently, the Council on Foundations and its Community Foundation Leadership Team have worked with CF Insights to create a longitudinal field-wide dataset of great breadth and depth.
Our field, as represented by Columbus Survey participants, held assets of more than $50 billion in 2010. We made grants of $4.1 billion and received $4.5 billion in gifts. We experienced an average growth rate of 13 percent. Balancing that optimism is the fact that 52 percent of survey respondents are not yet back to 2007 historical highs.
Members of CF Insights can dig deeper to access more than 60 online reports with metrics spanning asset development, grantmaking, investment performance, and sustainability. My board regularly reviews peer group reports created via CF Insights tools to determine where we are going—and ensure we don’t end up someplace else! Take a look for yourself at www.cfinsights.org I think you will like what you see.
Michael L. Batchelor is president of The Erie Community Foundation.