This story was submitted by Yelp
Beyond the usual philanthropic playbook, the Yelp Foundation pushes the boundaries of grant-making, focused on a trust-based approach and three guiding principles. These principles allowed us a more dynamic and collaborative strategy that created greater impact this year. These guiding principles include: first, it’s our job to find, research, and evaluate a nonprofit organization before we ask anything of them. Second, we trust the nonprofit to know much more about how funds should be spent than we do. As a result, we always give unrestricted funding. We want our nonprofit partners to keep their lights on, pay their employees fairly, and keep the organization's wheels turning so they ultimately keep doing the work we want to support. Lastly, the Yelp Foundation has resources and expertise outside its grant funding that could help our nonprofit partners raise money, tell their story, and expand the reach of their efforts.
With our established principles in mind, we adopted a more dynamic and collaborative strategy which led to greater impact this year.
ONE: This year, we sought to deepen our relationships with our grantee partners. We wanted to do more than just write a check by using our resources to help them tell their stories. In partnership with Yelp’s Studios team, we spent a few months traveling to our grantees’ sites filming and interviewing nonprofit employees and their beneficiaries. We wove that footage into a short-form video for each of the Yelp Foundation’s strategic partners. These brief, punchy films tell the story of the organization through the eyes of a funder who believes in their mission and proudly promotes their efforts. Our aim was to help each organization raise money from other prospective donors by pointing to each respective video that ends with a statement of clear support by Yelp Foundation.
TWO: In partnership with two grantee partners, Yelp Foundation used its brand and voice to advocate for causes we mutually care about by co-authoring joint op-eds. In July, we co-wrote a two-part series in Triple Pundit in partnership with Hot Bread Kitchen entitled “How Supporting Gender Equality in the Workplace Supports Us All.” The second piece in the series was “Agency Begets Equity: A Holistic Approach to Help All Workers Succeed.” In partnership with i.c.stars, we published “Honoring Authenticity: The Key to a Thriving Workforce.” These articles not only serve as a touchpoint for meaningful partnerships we already have with these organizations, they also speak to our shared values. Yelp Foundation has and will continue to use our voice to advocate for causes that matter to us and our partners.
THREE: At the end of this year, we’ll celebrate the completion of our first-ever multi-year grant cycle. Each of our partners received $50,000 annually for three consecutive years. This time together enabled us to establish mutual trust. We received regular updates from our partners, keeping us informed of their programmatic wins and organizational changes. While obtaining the necessary information from them, we demonstrated clearly that we are committed for the long haul. In Yelp Foundation’s opinion, multi-year funding is not only generous, reasonable, and logical, but also the most effective way to showcase commitment to nonprofit partners, supporting and believing in both their operational effectiveness and their mission.
We firmly believe that as our program evolves, grows, and expands its reach, that we can be better partners, better supporters, and better advocates by leveraging creativity and building a foundation of trust.
