CF Insights, an online information resource for community foundations, is under new management.
The transfer follows an agreement by New York-based nonprofit information clearinghouse Candid to relinquish full ownership of the site to the Council on Foundations, a network of about 850 grantmaking organizations headquartered in Washington, D.C. The switch took effect Sept. 1.
CF Insights is a membership-based tool that lets community foundation managers assess organizational sustainability, performance, growth over time, and other data including compensation and benefits in comparison to their peers. The information is intended to help them make better decisions and dovetails with similar data that the Council on Foundations already collects from annual surveys of foundation executives.
“The main driver of the transfer is to enable more community foundations to benefit from more resources in one place. With this move, CF Insights members have direct access to the Council’s growing offerings for community foundations,” Candid CEO Ann Mei Chang told The NonProfit Times.
Leaders of Candid and the Council on Foundations began discussing this move during early 2022. The deal appears to be the latest in an ongoing organizational reshuffling that began five years ago when Candid was formed from the merger of GuideStar and the Foundation Center. “Given the Council’s expanding network of community foundations and Candid’s recent shifts in strategy, a transfer made sense to explore,” said Kathleen Enright, president and CEO of the Council on Foundations.
The transfer gives the Council on Foundations complete ownership of the CF Insights website. The Council also is taking on the website’s full community of dues-paying members, as well as the site’s benchmarking database, annual survey instrument, and related publications and tools.
Financial terms of the transfer have not been disclosed, but a Candid spokesperson said there was not a “meaningful” payment involved beyond basic costs to cover prepaid membership dues, web hosting and related fees for the duration of this year.
David Rosado, Candid’s former director of CF Insights, has also moved to the Council on Foundations as the new senior advisor for community philanthropy. None of Candid’s approximately 200 other employees were affected, according to the spokesperson.
The timing of this transfer coincides with Candid’s support of a newly launched initiative among charitable giving data platforms to create a clearinghouse for raw, clean and standardized nonprofit financial information from nonprofits’ Form 990 tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Other participants in the initiative include the Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation, Charity Navigator, CitizenAudit, GivingTuesday, and the Urban Institute.
“From Candid’s perspective, this transfer helps us increase our focus on the areas where we can make the most unique contributions, which is in high-quality data and insights about nonprofits, foundations and the social sector,” said Chang.
