Fay Twersky, the Director of our Effective Philanthropy Group, has responded to Bill Schambra’s recent op-ed about our decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative in a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
As we have already shared openly, we took advantage of the fact that a whole new team had arrived—not just a new president but also my own arrival as head of the newly created effective philanthropy group and Lindsay Louie’s coming to replace Jacob Harold as program officer for philanthropy grantmaking—to take a fresh look at the initiative.
By then, we had more information than just the Money for Good data from 2010, including several more years of experience and a recently completed external evaluation from Arabella Advisors. Taking all that data into account, we concluded that we were not making the headway we had hoped for and were not on track to do so. After a discussion with our board of directors, we ended the initiative and shared the decision and reasons publicly.
We’ve written about our decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative previously.