Minnesota Council on Foundations Blog – Philanthropy Potluck

Today MCF member Jeff Peterson, Director, Innovation & Strategy, General Mills Foundation, shares insights from the personal interviews that were — and weren’t.

Mention the words “site visit” to most folks and the mental picture it conjures likely includes hard hats or headstones. 

But to those who administer or receive corporate philanthropy, the “site visit” is a universally understood and practiced ritual of amicable quality control, where a grantmaker observes and assesses first-hand a grantee’s full operational efficacy – facilities, staff, programs, maybe even clients –  in about an hour’s time.

At best, the site visit gets the community relations staffer out of the office to actually relate to the community his or her mounting desk work is ironically denying.  At worst, the site visit pressures the nonprofit to manufacture an experience that exists only in the pages of its grant proposal – time and resources arguably better spent making the grant proposal a reality.

But at its best or worst, the site visit mostly just “is” –  a time-honored (if not tested) norm of philanthropy that probably isn’t worth the energy to avoid or overthrow.  Plus, every once in a while the grantmaker sees someone or something that makes a contextual impression, affecting longer-term decision-making.

Ethnographic Research with Working Poor
So while not in spite or instead of the conventional site visit, I recently (rather accidentally) participated in something that produced more community-serving insight than even the best site visit could have promised.   Through General Mills’ I-Squad (“Innovation” Squad, comprised of researchers, engineers and marketers leading the company’s most creative thinking), I participated in an ethnographic study of the working poor called “Project Levi” (after the hard-working blue jeans).

Ethnographic research is, as the name suggests, more commonly practiced in academic and social science circles of human cultural research, yet the I-Squad annually tackles a handful of these deep-diving, impressively thorough research projects to gather insights and probe the psyche and buying behaviors of consumers.

I was invited to sit in on two of Project Levi’s in-home interviews because the I-Squad hypothesized that these “target consumers” are also likely beneficiaries of General Mills Foundation grants. 

Paradox of the Poor: It Takes More to Have Less
The first two-hour session was with a group of neighborly women – all friends in varying stages of motherhood – in a southwest suburban Minneapolis townhouse.   While none were currently living at or below the poverty line per se, they all spoke openly about their past and current money-related anxieties, including the paradox of the poor: that it takes more energy to have less.

The lack of money brings with it an insult-to-injury burden of increased physical, intellectual and creative demands that show in chipped glassware, mismatched furniture, and second-hand baby toys.   Not as dramatic as Oliver Twist, but not as romantic either.

After two hours of stories, sounds, smells, and smiles – joy is thankfully not a socioeconomic condition – we corporate ethnographers de-briefed at an ironically upscale coffee shop to share observations and potential applications to General Mills business.

I was filled with an energy and resolve to do right by the working poor women I just met – really met – and the millions of others they represent, both in the products and services General Mills can create, and in the grants that the General Mills Foundation can make.

Not a ‘Subject,’ a Person
Literally hundreds of prior, conventional and intentional site visits had been trumped by two hours of conversation.  And I couldn’t wait to dive right back into reality the next morning, when we were scheduled for our second in-home “immersion” with an apartment-dwelling single mother and two teenage children.

We rang the doorbell at our confirmed time and waited to be buzzed in.  No answer.  Second and third rings produced the same effect, so our project leader called our subject directly.  Her son answered and explained that his mother wasn’t home, and that he wasn’t aware of any interview or when she was due to return.

With the interview and our morning officially declared a bust by about 8:45 a.m., I spent the drive back to my office frustrated by our subject’s negligence. Only later – thankfully – did I realize that what I attributed to negligence was, in fact, a manifestation of the reality I had celebrated the day before.  Our “subject” wasn’t being negligent, she was likely simply being.  And she wasn’t a “subject” that morning or any morning since.

Her absence, for whatever reason, may have offered me just as much insight into her life and state of living as 120 minutes of scheduled interrogation.

A site visit without the site, but with plenty of insight.