Writing on the SSIR blog, Lucy Bernholz is chock full of good ideas that new foundations and seasoned philanthropists alike can use to re-think their strategies going into "the giving season" these next few months. Bernholz is the founder and president of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helped to cement some of the formative ideas behind our advocacy evaluation and planning tool, Continuous Progress.

Bernholz is eager for new foundations to build on past shortcomings and avoid the insular, sluggish habits that tempt philanthropists -- who do, after all, set priorities with their funding decisions -- to keep their cards close. She wants new foundations to think about how they might put the "wisdom of crowds" to work; or outsource program decisions to expert partners who "make the direct grants, manage partner relations, and report on metrics." These approaches hold special promise: they could wring more value out of foundations' investments and lead to easier measurement and clearer results among different philanthropies working on similar issues:

The expertise of these expert partners (read: investment manager) can be easily leveraged – lots of foundations can bet their “education” strategy on the same explicit set of metrics and goals. The cost of foundation work would go down, the aggregation of resources would go up, and the use of shared metrics and concrete goals would increase. The market would function to make sure there was both a range of partners, and that they succeeded as promised – those that wouldn’t, would go out of business. The range of entities that might play this outsourced program investment role is wide and diverse – nonprofits, consulting firms, commercial media outlets, public agencies – an attribute that should lead to competitive creation of identifiable niches, markers of success, and more standardized metrics.

There's a lot more: Observing a "bubble" in philanthropic prizes, Berholz wants new foundations to think carefully about their funding strategies to make sure they connect with the foundation's goals over time; she advises foundations to look carefully at "where the information you need to achieve philanthropic progress lives" and how to access and disseminate it; she notes that broader social and market trends can be the best resources to spur (and fund) change; and, finally, Bernholz wants foundations to think about how to reward success the way Kiva.org and other innovative organizations have done.

For foundation planners, philanthropists and program staff, this is a cornucopia of forward-thinking. Be sure to allow time for digestion.