Researchers

Paul Brest

Faculty Co-director, Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS); Former President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Former Dean of Stanford Law School. Read full bio.

Nadia Roumani

Walter and Esther Hewlett Foundation Fellow and Visiting Scholar, Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) and Lecturer and 2012-13 d.school Fellow, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Stanford University. Read full bio.

Overview

The Effective Philanthropy Lab, conducted by Nadia Roumani and Paul Brest and housed at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), explores the potential for integrating human centered design into a foundation’s strategic planning process.

Strategic planning and HCD reflect two different methods of inquiry and ways of thinking. The former is cognitive, analytical, and rationalistic, while HCD draws on the emotional experiences of beneficiaries and is intended to stimulate creativity.

This project is based on the belief that some aspects of HCD, together with systems thinking and insights from behavioral science, can be integrated into foundations’ strategic planning processes to improve their understanding of the problems they are trying to solve and increase their creativity in developing solutions.

Although this work focuses on the use of HCD by foundations, many of the same processes can also be used by their grantee organizations.

During the 2014-15 academic year, the researchers conducted research, developed case studies, and directly engaged in some HCD-informed strategy work with foundations.

Documenting the Landscape: The researchers learned about existing efforts to incorporate HCD into philanthropy, including documenting examples where foundations and nonprofits were applying HCD to develop strategies.

Meetings: The researchers brought a group of foundations that were applying, or interested in applying, design thinking to their work to share their experiences and insights.

Engagements in HCD-informed strategic planning: The researchers worked with several foundations to incorporate HCD into their strategic planning processes to produce implementable and testable strategies. They also worked with researchers to track the impact of integrating HCD into the foundation’s process.

Findings

Read Problem Solving, Human-Centered Design, and Strategic Processes.