Listening to Learn: Your Feedback is Shaping the Future of the Council

Over the last five years, the Council on Foundations has been on a journey to become a learning organization—one that experiments with innovation, seeks fresh input, and keeps its eyes focused on the horizon. A key part of this commitment is listening to feedback from the 900+ organizations that form our membership.

To gather that feedback we partnered with Harder+Company Community Research to survey our members. With this membership survey, our first since 2011, we wanted to understand what support our members need from the Council to advance their work.

Turning Your Feedback into Insights

Thanks to the nearly 600 people who participated--representing over 40% of Council member organizations--we gathered actionable insights.

What Matters to You

We heard that members value our strategic direction and agree that the Council’s priorities are important to advancing the field of philanthropy. Members also reported they highly value the tools, resources, and services we offer that aim to advance these priorities, especially benchmarking tools, legal services, training on philanthropy practices, and federal policy analyses. While we learned members were aware of most of our offerings, some were unfamiliar to those completing the survey. Some of these included virtual peer-to-peer spaces, leadership development programs, and timely disaster response updates.

Our Impact

Overall, 68.2% of members expressed satisfaction with how we are performing. They highlighted the Council’s influence on their work, with over 75% reporting they had learned something meaningful through their engagement with us. However, slightly fewer — 65% — felt that the Council's work has had a tangible impact on their work. This feedback underscores the importance of ensuring our offerings remain timely and relevant to you, and we are committed to increasing the difference we make in your work moving forward.

Turning These Insights into Action

We recognize and celebrate the diversity of our membership, understanding that each organization we serve has unique realities and challenges. To better meet these needs, we dug deeper into the survey responses to uncover tailored insights. For example:

• Community Foundations shared growing challenges in aligning staff capacity with increasing commitments.
• Private Foundations highlighted the need to continue advancing their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.
• Corporate Grantmakers emphasized their interest in strengthening disaster grantmaking and fostering cross-sector collaboration.

We have been hard at work transforming your feedback into actions. Your feedback has helped us evolve our benchmarking offerings and it’s informed our efforts to expand the products and services we provide such as our new DEI Services, Center for Community Foundations and global resources. Additionally, survey insights are being incorporated to better underline the importance of intentional efforts in our programming to promote relationship building. We also sent an email benefits series aimed at informing all members about resources available to them through their membership. These are just a few examples of how your input is guiding us, and we hope you will soon see the results reflected in your experience with the Council.

Looking ahead, we are committed to deepening our role as a learning organization. We plan to continue soliciting feedback through a comprehensive survey every three years.

Keep an eye out for the next invitation to participate in 2026. In the meantime, we are always just an email away. Let’s keep the conversation going.