Three Things I'd Like To See From The Gates Foundation

One of the big philanthropy news items this week is the release of Bill Gates' first "Annual Letter," a debrief, recap and thought piece on the year past and the year ahead. The idea came from Warren Buffett, the Gates Foundation's biggest donor outside Bill himself.

The letter has a lot of good and interesting things to say. I'm glad to hear Gates encouraging the government to maintain or increase foreign assistance even during the recession. I like his vision of the role of the foundation, which focuses on meeting the demands and needs of those who don't have economic power to leverage the market. And I like that throughout the piece, he's forthright about where the foundation hasn't been able to do as much as it wants to (such as education).

That said, there are three things I'd love to see from the Gates Foundation:

Create a Social Venture Investment Fund: The Gates Foundation is the largest in the world. Even with the recession, they have over $30 billion in assets, with more to come as Buffett continues to give his gift in installments. Putting something like $150 million (one half of one percent of their assets) into a "Social Venture Investment Fund" that invested in blended value for-profit organizations with social missions could spur innovation and super-charge the social entrepreneurship arena.

A More Aggressive Focus on Policy Opportunities for Scale: Gates admits that they're still working out their approach to education, but the focus remains on Charter Schools. Charter Schools can produce some truly remarkable results, but at the end of the day, they don't change the underlying structural problems of public education. In the same way that he sees his foundation working in concert with the business sector where appropriate, I would love to see the Gates Foundation more actively promote policy as a mechanism for scaling the solutions they find to be most effective.

Innovate to Develop a Bottom-Up Feedback Loop: The Gates Foundation is characterized by its strong desire to measure and understand their real impact. In the letter, Gates articulates an extremely coherent reason for this:

"Another way that running a foundation is not like running a business is that you don’t have customers who beat you up when you get things wrong or competitors who work to take those customers away from you. You don’t have a stock price that goes up and down to tell you how you’re doing. This lack of a natural feedback loop means that we as a foundation have to be even more careful in picking our goals and being honest with ourselves when we are not achieving them."

As of now, I've yet to see a coherent, large-scale attempt to innovate a bottom-up feedback loop where the most significant piece of the impact assessment is the direct reflections of the people supposed to benefit from programs. Gates has an incredible opportunity to do this sort of innovation around measurement, and I'd love to see it happen.

Read Gates letter here or check out the video interview with Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times.