Impact Moment: Ford Motor Company Fund Creates Process Efficiencies to Manage International Grants
By Cori Cunningham, Program Director, The Conference Board
Ford Motor Company Fund (Ford Fund) is the philanthropic arm of the Ford Motor Company and directs its funding into four priority areas: sustainability, community needs, education, and driving safety. To facilitate the management and measurement of its international grants, Ford Fund has partnered with a third-party vendor—Global Giving—to supplement its internal resources.
The vendor is used to assess grantee applications during a request for proposal (RFP) process and to measure self-reported grant outcomes from grantees at six- and 12-month intervals through surveys and impact reports. Coaching is also provided to Ford Fund’s nonprofit partners that may not have the capacity to assess program strengths on their own (e.g., developing budgets and financial statements, and metrics), if needed.
By leveraging a third-party vendor to more efficiently manage its grants process, Ford Fund has been able to execute pilot programs and then determine (through the six and 12 month impact reports) which programs merit continued funding beyond year one.
One of its pilot program success stories is a public–private partnership in India called Sustainable Urban Mobility with Uncompromised Rural Reach (SUMURR). Through leveraging Ford technology and partnerships with NGOs, universities, and governmental agencies, the initiative aims to improve the delivery of maternal and child healthcare services by addressing accessibility gaps in remote rural villages. More than 100 doctor visits and 20 health camps have been completed, and more than 10,000km traveled. Safe institutional delivery was facilitated for 41 pregnant women belonging to the “high-risk” mothers category, and, by the end of February 2013, due to the success of the pilot, Ford expanded the program to 44 villages and reached more than 3,100 people to facilitate community awareness programs about maternal and child healthcare.
The Ford Fund has been exploring a web-based communication tool that Ford Fund staff around the world can access and use to share best practices and strategies. In addition to facilitating communication, this tool ideally will also enable the Ford Fund to more efficiently monitor and collect measurement information from all of its global locations in a more centralized way.
About The Conference Board’s Impact Measurement Portfolio
This case study is taken from Measuring the Impact of Corporate Social Investments, the report of a 14-company research working group that examined challenges related to impact measurement. It is one of a range of publications on the topic that The Conference Board has published in the past 12 months. The other publications, including Framing Social Impact Measurement, are available here.
Cori Cunningham
Program Director
The Conference Board
Cori Cunningham is the founder of C. Cunningham Advising and an accomplished consultant and solutions-oriented leader with more than a decade of experience advising corporations and social sector organizations on strategies designed to drive positive change. She specializes in uniting teams and stakeholders around common missions, and is a highly skilled strategic planner, analyst and facilitator. Cori works with clients to align community engagement strategies with business goals in the corporate sector, and create thorough and thoughtful plans for identifying and securing corporate relationships in the social sector.
