How Foundations Like Kauffman and Walton Use Data Dashboards to Guide Giving
Grant makers big and small are using them to vet proposals, track strategy, and see what their peers fund. Here's what the tools can do — and what they can't.
By M.J. Prest
Senior Editor, Solutions
July 27, 2026 | Read Time: 8 minutes
After months of meetings, the leader of a work-force development funding collaborative in Connecticut kept running into a frustrating problem: He couldn’t tell what the grant makers at his table collectively had funded. Each foundation knew its own strategy, yet no one could zoom out to see the landscape view.
But Karla Fortunato could. The president of the Connecticut Council for Philanthropy opened the data platform her organization launched this spring, built a report limited to those funders, and pulled snapshots of each portfolio. A shared interest came into focus immediately: Nearly every funder in the group was investing in careers for young people.
That insight became their common ground, Fortunato says, giving the leaders in the collaborative the confidence to move forward.
“Philanthropic people don’t want to fund things they don’t understand,” Fortunato says. “They want to understand the organizations doing the work, and they want to understand who’s funding this stuff. And that doesn’t happen without data.”
The data report didn’t tell the funding collaborative what to do, but it did provide valuable insights. None of the foundation leaders interviewed for this article could point to a single decision a data platform made for them. That may be the point.
Foundations have never possessed more data about their grantees or their own grant making. The data dashboard — which gathers an organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place, presents them in easy-to-understand charts, and tracks them over time — has become philanthropy’s go-to tool for making sense of all the information. From small family funds to grant makers with many billions in assets, foundations are adopting them and relying on them to track progress against strategy.
What dashboards reveal, how they’re designed, and the expertise required to maintain them look different depending on their scale. To find out how grant makers are using them and what it means for grantees, the Chronicle spoke with data and evaluation leaders at the Connecticut Council for Philanthropy, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
An out-of-the-box tool eliminates the need for technical staff.
For years, Fortunato was using an Excel spreadsheet to track data from the Connecticut Council for Philanthropy’s members. “There are some real benefits to lo-fi — everybody knows how to use this data,” she says. “It worked. It worked for many years, and it was a very low-cost solution.”
However, inputting and maintaining the data was tedious and time-consuming, and she wanted to offer members a view of philanthropic funding across the state. She had been using other data tools from Impala, so when the company released its Philanthropy Sector Hub product this spring, she was quick to adopt it.
The council used the tool to build 10 issue-area dashboards accessible to its 77 foundation members, 44 of which have logged in since its launch in May. The platform has eliminated the need for manual data compilation and delivers a statewide view with far less work.
Impala’s goal was to develop a product to “democratize these highly professional processes across the entire sector,” says Guy Miasnik, its CEO. “To do that, we wanted to make it very simple. So you don’t need to be a very techie person in order to subscribe and start using it.”
Fortunato reports the council’s subscription costs around $11,000 a year, paid out of its general budget — a mix of revenue from dues, grants, service fees, and other fundraising. Impala handles all of the dashboard’s maintenance so the council’s staff doesn’t have to.
Convenience comes with a tradeoff: The council depends on Impala for everything from error fixes to knowing who logs in. Fortunato would also like the tool to categorize grants by strategy — the way many funders actually think about their giving — and notes that data recency remains a perennial challenge, one she hopes to ease by getting members to upload fresher figures directly.
Still, the time saved is real to her. “I’ve been extremely grateful for not having to compile and categorize grants by hand,” she says. “It’s really nice to just be able to turn to this tool and download some quick reports.”
A well-designed dashboard earns its keep for program officers.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has relied on data dashboards since at least 2016, and one current iteration is for staff as they vet grant proposals.
The foundation, which has $2.5 billion in assets, switched to a responsive grant-making model in 2024, structured around economic mobility in three areas: college access and completion, career and work-force development, and entrepreneurship. Under the model, grantees come to the foundation through open application cycles rather than by invitation.
Its data dashboards — which Kauffman built in-house and a data officer oversees — pull together the materials nonprofits submit with their applications, along with the numerical scores and summaries that Kauffman’s impact officers assign after reviewing them.
The point is to widen the conversation. Kauffman’s review process convenes a broader group of impact officers than the handful who examined any single application most closely, so the foundation can draw on collective knowledge. The dashboard keeps that group discussion organized and efficient.
A discrepancy score takes it a step further, flagging the applications where reviewers picked up on different things and may need more time to talk them through, says Dan Tesfay, Kauffman’s director of research, learning, and evaluation initiatives: “In that way, the dashboards can be a bit of a spotlight, and they’re anchored in the process.”
Philanthropy attracts “a type of Type A hard driver,” he notes, and the trickiest part is often persuading staff to give the dashboard time to do its job before changing its design. “A lot of our work in dashboards has been, like, can we just let it sit? And just see if it works?” Tesfay says.
Dashboards don’t replace judgment. They don’t make decisions, but they improve the conditions for good decisions by making that evidence visible, organized, and easier to discuss.
That patience reflects a larger conviction about how the tool and the team shape each other: “The dashboard changes how you work, and how you work in turn should change the dashboard — but you can’t skip the step where you work with it and really let it live.”
Ultimately, the best dashboard is a trustworthy one that works quietly in the background. “I want it to be so subtle that it’s just taken for granted,” Tesfay says. “We trust it. It works. It’s simple. It’s bringing different pieces together in a way that’s elegant.”
The hard work is deciding what to measure.
Even the most sophisticated dashboards at the largest foundations don’t set strategy, but evaluation leaders say they make better collaboration possible.
“Dashboards don’t replace judgment. They don’t make decisions, but they improve the conditions for good decisions by making that evidence visible, organized, and easier to discuss,” says Brett Hembree, senior adviser to the Walton Family Foundation’s Strategy, Learning and Evaluation Department. (The Walton Family Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)
The $8.6 billion grant maker uses three performance dashboards tied to its program areas: education, environment, and its home region of Bentonville, Ark. Each is tailored to a strategy for one of the core funding areas and to meet the needs of the program officer implementing them. The dashboard tracks each measure from a baseline through annual results toward five-year targets and draws on grantee-reported data and outside sources like the Census Bureau.
“The learning really happens when folks sit around that data, interpret it, bring in their own context, their own lived experience, and then work together to decide what that means for the work,” says Hembree.
Walton reimagines its dashboards every five years and is midway through building its 2030 version. One current focus is easing the burden on grantees that supply the underlying data. “You’re not collecting data from grantees just to collect data from grantees,” Hembree says, “but actually using it.”
You don’t need a Walton-size budget to design a dashboard that works, Hembree says — or deep technical expertise on staff to maintain one.
“The hard work is defining the KPIs,” he says. “The front end and the back end are the most important, and then there’s some minor technical stuff in the middle — usually not a limitation for most organizations.”
That reassurance carries a condition: You have to identify your goals first. Data hygiene is most of the job — “90 percent of the work of a dashboard is getting the data right,” Hembree says — but firing up a dashboard before you’ve defined your KPIs undercuts the whole purpose.
Without setting KPIs, he says, “you throw 30 data points up and call it your strategy dashboard, but nobody really knows what the data points mean or why they’re up there.”
The barrier, in other words, is clarity — not budget and not technical skill. “Any foundation can develop a dashboard,” Hembree says, “as long as they can get really clear on what it is we’re actually trying to drive towards.”
So start small. “You don’t need 30 KPIs,” Hembree says. “Maybe you only need three.”
