Will the Summit change anything? A first look at the evaluation

Meetings come and go. But how many of them change anything? The Global Summit on Community Philanthropy, held in Johannesburg on 1 – 2 December 2016, set itself the ambitious goal to #ShiftThePower in development aid. The Summit brought together 360+ community philanthropy practitioners, institutional funders and other civil society actors. They discussed how to support local people to build their own assets, capacities and trust so that they hold the power to develop their own communities. Here we ask, how did the Summit do?

In this report, we give emerging results from an evaluation of the Summit, based on a survey of people who were there. We sent out this survey some six weeks after the Summit, giving participants time for mature reflections and to assess what, if any, ways in which they had used the Summit to change their working practices. The survey consisted of questions on impressions of the Summit, likes and dislikes, takeaways, use of social media, interest in following up the eight pillars designed to #ShiftThePower, and suggestions about the role of the GFCF in taking forward the agenda.

The ratings of the meeting were spectacular. In my 20 years’ experience of evaluating large meetings in philanthropy, never has so much praise been heaped on a conference. Here are some typical spontaneous reactions from the survey:

“It was the best international conference I have been to.”

“Excellent.”

“It was a truly remarkable event.”

One question was designed to give an overall rating. We asked: “Looking back at the Summit, how many stars would you give the event (1 being the lowest score, 10 being the highest)?” The mean response was 8.75 and two-thirds of respondents gave 9 or 10 stars. By any standards, that is a remarkable result.

We asked about takeaways from the meeting: personally, for the field and for people’s work. Personally, people took away the value of being on a common platform across different groups – community foundation practitioners, funders and civil society groups – where there was an exchange of vibrant ideas, energy and tools. For the field, the main takeaway was the understanding that the field of community philanthropy is now firmly established in the development arena. For people’s work, the most common takeaway was to work with others from the meeting to apply the results of learning from the Summit.

A central feature of the Summit was its concentration on social media. While fewer than 400 people could be in the room, there was the intention of sharing the results of the Summit with people who couldn’t be there and, in fact tweets reached the astounding total of 37.5 million people. During the Summit, participants were encouraged to tweet using #ShiftThePower and, according to the evaluation, more than four-fifths did so and around half of these continue to use the hashtag.

What was remarkable from the Summit was the commitment people showed to following up with the GFCF. We asked “Are there particular areas raised at the Summit that you would be interested in taking forward?” We gave people 10 options for becoming involved and the level of interest for all of them was very high. In each of the 10 cases, at least 20% of participants said they were “passionate to play a leading part.”

Not everything at a meeting can be perfect and there were some items that people were less keen on. Not every session worked well and some people felt that important issues were glossed over. A small number of people complained that the social media strategy distracted from the main conference agenda.

Overall, however, there was great enthusiasm. Here is a selection of comments from individuals that expressed particular value in attending the Summit:

“From before, the biggest percentage of the budget of my organization was from individuals and companies, and we had freedom to react on different needs in the communities without too much bureaucracy. After the Summit, I was again motivated to try to find ways to involve as many as possible local stakeholders. We started to create the 2017 fundraising campaign using some of the creative and innovative approaches that I learned during the Summit.”

“The main take away from the Summit for the field of philanthropy; aid and development was crystallized for me in a comment made by Rita Thapa: We can’t do good work from flawed structures. To me, the takeaway for the field is that we have to do something new – something different. We have to think beyond the traditional community foundation and 501c3 grantmaking model. If the field of philanthropy really wants to #ShiftThePower, it has to be willing to take risks and do something different. For example, invest in leaders and organizations that are tasked with the challenge of developing new models and alternative structures that put resources directly in the hands of people in the community.”

Further details can be found in the evaluation report. The data from the survey will be analysed further and a more detailed report will be published at a later stage. The GFCF will be following up on the Summit over 2017, and will publish a “One-Year On” report later in the year, when the effects of the Summit will be clearer.

Do you have anything to add to the evaluation? Let us know in the comments section below!

Barry Knight, GFCF Adviser