Criteria

Our Criteria for Evaluation:
The Eisner Foundation is especially interested in four main criteria when evaluating organizations for their worthiness as potential philanthropic partners.

• Efficiency: The Eisner Foundation believes that charities have an obligation to their donors, the taxpaying public, and the people they serve to operate as fiscally efficiently as possible. We generally do not fund organizations that are unable to allocate at least 75% of their operating expenses directly to their programs, whatever they may be. In addition, we do benchmark organizations against their peers, and will compare the efficiencies of charities with similar missions and geographical locations.
• Effectiveness: The Eisner Foundation seeks out organizations with demonstrated records of success, with quantifiable and measurable patterns of achievement that can be used as a benchmark to assure future accomplishments. Organizations unable to point to proven past results are unlikely to garner Eisner Foundation support of any substantial level.
• Exceptional Leadership: The Eisner Foundation believes that in the non-profit world, great organizations are often the by-product of great leadership. In a crowded marketplace with many redundant charities, those that succeed are usually led by visionary and extraordinary management. Thusly, we seek out organizations with exceptional leaders or leadership teams, and are more inclined to approve a proposal from institutions led by true innovators.
• Expected Outcomes: The Eisner Foundation is not interested in vanity philanthropy designed to bring attention to the founding family or our work; we are focused entirely on identifying and partnering with organizations that are likely to produce likely and reproducible results. Our goal is to ally with high-performing institutions able to create sustainable long-term solutions to the societal problems we seek to eliminate, not merely alleviate the symptoms. As a result, we evaluate organizations on the basis of their ability to actively understand the conditions in which they work and to predict with a reasonable degree of certainty what impact their work, enabled by our funding, will bear. We are actively seeking charities that can produce specific, objective, and measurable outcomes that can be assessed and documented externally.