Though many foundations claim to believe in the value of having a strategy for giving, few actually have one, suggests a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Beyond the Rhetoric: Foundation Strategy.

Only 11 staff members out of 42 CEOs and programme officers interviewed fell into the category of what the report calls total strategists – people who fully embrace strategy, with well-defined goals, tools to assess their efforts, and a written plan they refer to regularly. The other four categories comprise: charitable bankers, who focus mainly on internal management processes; perpetual adjusters, who use strategy infrequently and instead spend a lot of effort searching for the next local or national problem to help fix; and partial strategists, who use at least one strategy to guide their decision-making, but who fail to make the connection between their charitable giving and the goals they want to achieve.

To download the report
http://www.effectivephilanthropy.org