The Pittsburgh Foundation: Changing the Game

Wednesday, October 28, 2009, is a day that will live in Pittsburgh history. For that's when the Pittsburgh Foundation's roll-the-dice Match Day fundraising gamble crashed the computers.

With Pittsburgh Gives matching 50 cents for every dollar raised, the call went out: people, average, everyday people, not foundations, not major donors, could use the Pittsburgh Foundation as a pass-through and donate virtually any amount to favorite charities or causes. Nice idea, very democratic, very diverse. But would it work?

Work it did, in overdrive. The traffic that fall morning was so blindingly heavy that in a whopping 22 minutes and 11 seconds, when Pittsburghers bellied up $1.3 million, the site simply fainted.

The implications have been enormous. Some opine that on October 28 Pittsburgh reached a kind of tipping point, with the balance shifting seismically from traditional top-down giving to grass-roots giving -- using the most democratic ever created, the Internet.

For the Pittsburgh Foundation's new CEO Grant Oliphant, that august body's fourth since its 1945 founding, Match Day confirmed that all his instincts, all his endless hours of thinking, and talking, and interviewing had been worthwhile. That there was more -- far more -- willingness on the part of individuals to give through on-line resources than anyone had previously imagined. "We're anxious to do this again," he muses some three months after the fact, "and do it right.  Because," he adds, watching snow swirl outside his PPG Place headquarters, "it's a game-change. If we don't do it, shame on us."

OK, as one close observer puts it, turning around any large enterprise, much less the hearts and minds and giving patterns of an entire region, is a lot like turning an oil tanker. No one would argue that Pittsburgh is still moving sluggishly from the time when a handful of global corporate giants ruled the town -- for good or for ill. Today, there are more and different players, more diverse thinking, and Grant Oliphant is not only part of that change, he is one of its principal architects.

A quiet, focused man, born in Australia, raised in Denver, the son of the famous political cartoonist Pat Oliphant, he came to town in 1991 after working as the late Senator Heinz's press secretary. Cutting his teeth as the Heinz Endowments' vice president for programs and planning, he moved over to the Pittsburgh Foundation in 2008.

Oliphant found a now-65-year-old organization that had spent its life reinventing itself -- just like the city it serves.  In 1945, it sprang to life as a community foundation to bankroll the Renaissance -- and a spectrum of good works from the symphony to the boy scouts. By the '60s, its charge had changed, to social action -- pre-schoolers to troubled youth to senior care. Through the '80s and '90s, it helped emerging community development corporations and the new Cultural District. In the new century, with assets of more than $550 million, and annual grantmaking at the $30 million plus level, the Foundation focuses on education, the arts, families, healthcare, and economic development.

With all that history in mind, upon his propitious arrival Oliphant studied how community foundations work. "We have to attract donors," he says. "We have to fund-raise. We have to excel in customer service. We have to create an impact." With those as givens, he then asked two major questions: "how can we be better at engaging a broad constituency -- and make an impact -- in the community? How can we engage donors in issues which we consider paramount?"

Engaging in an extended dialogue with the community -- literally hundreds of non-profit, community, and organizational heads -- he kept probing: where do we go? Where do you want us to lead? What he kept hearing was that for all its change the Pittsburgh Foundation had been too narrow, had concentrated on sure-fire hits. "If you want to be a community leader," he notes, "you have to lead broadly. In our case, we had to be more opportunistic and spread dollars around in a more constructive fashion." Overall, he says, "they wanted us to be a force for philanthropy in the community."

With that as his charge, and with his own predilection for change, Oliphant set out "to broaden philanthropy in the community," he says. "We had to expand what we defined as 'our donors.' We had to democratize. We had to have people feel as if they're making a difference. As if they're making a change." He pauses. "We've done that.

"Most donors come to the Foundation because they love Pittsburgh," Oliphant emphasizes. "While today's donors are often less wealthy, they're more sophisticated. So we're talking to them about the future purpose of their funds. This intersection of place and priorities has worked very well."

Take, for instance, the Foundation-developed PittsburghGives, an enormous menu of nonprofit organizations wed to easy-to-use on-line giving tools. Potential donors can stroll into the site, check out the local charities, and click their credit cards to cash out.

"What we've achieved," Oliphant says, "is that we've hit our stride at an important moment in Pittsburgh history. We reinvented what a foundation is at a time when community was particularly receptive." He pauses. "It's not about foundations doing this for the community. It's about the community doing it for itself."

So it happened on Match Day. By leading in social media, by positioning the Pittsburgh Foundation as the go-to place for philanthropy, by offering donors clearly presented information on who was doing Pittsburgh's best work on key community issues, the Foundation attracted so many willing partners that the wholly unexpected occurred -- the technology itself couldn't take it.

"Pittsburgh is at a decisive moment in its history," Oliphant says. "We have to change things for the better -- our schools, Downtown, the economy. We won't have these chances 10 years from now.

 "There's been a real receptivity to a different direction. People wanted to do more. My role is to make a difference in real time -- a real difference in the community."

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Abby Mendelson's latest book, End of the Road, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.


Images courtesy Pittsburgh Foundation except photographs of Grant Oliphant copyright Brian Cohen