Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2005
Again, GuideStar itself is an illuminating example. Its own Form 990 for 2003 shows that GuideStar president Robert G. Ottenhoff got paid $220,000 plus benefits. Vice president for sales and marketing Lee Glenn got $166,198. Tinsley C. Goad, senior vice president for finance and administration, got $122,941. And three other executives got nearly $90,000 each. Those numbers sound awfully high for a money-losing outfit that took in just $5.8 million that year.
Yet it is Ottenhoff and his team who offer GuideStar the best chance of surviving to carry out its worthwhile purpose. Cynthia Gibson, the Carnegie Corporation program officer who recommended funding GuideStar, says the 56-year-old Ottenhoff is now its biggest strength. “The list of accomplishments that Ottenhoff has achieved in less than two years is testament to hisability to lead this organization in the way it needs to go,” Gibson says. Ottenhoff has slashed expenses and paid down debt while reducing the organization’s dependence on the consortium of foundations that has kept it going during its first six years of existence. (In 2004, in addition to Carnegie Corporation, the consortium consisted of Atlantic Philanthropies and the David and Lucile Packard, Ford, William & Flora Hewlett, W.K. Kellogg, Surdna, Skoll, Omidyar and Charles Stewart Mott foundations.) At the same time, GuideStar under Ottenhoff has increased traffic to its web site by 50 percent and hugely expanded the revenue it gets from selling data and other services to paying customers. (In fact, Ottenhoff and the organization are so committed to the idea of encouraging electronic filing of nonprofits’ tax returns, for example—which would both provide easier access to a larger pool of data while at the same time increasing transparency in the nonprofit sector—that GuideStar is writing free computer code that it will donate to this effort.)
It’s important to note, in this context, that Ottenhoff didn’t start GuideStar. Like so many enterprises, whatever their intentions about profits, GuideStar was launched by a visionary founder, in this case Arthur “Buzz” Schmidt, who started it up in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he lived. The holder of an MBA from Stanford, Schmidt was a former executive at Cargill Inc. whose goal was to make it easier for people to donate to charities by giving them the information to make informed decisions. The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star quotes Schmidt as saying: “The theory was that by shining the light of day, we’ll help improve accountability, more accurate reporting, more effective operations—and along with that, more donor generosity.” In addition to pouring time and energy into GuideStar (its nonprofit parent is officially known as Philanthropic Research, Inc.), Schmidt has helped keep it going with his own money.
Schmidt’s vision of transparency in regard to nonprofits’ mission, finances and operations is one that Carnegie Corporation shares. The Corporation funded the establishment of the Foundation Center in 1956, with the goal of promoting information and understanding about philanthropy and about the work of foundations as well as to help better connect grantees with sources of funding. It has supported GuideStar in order to help extend the availability of information about the nonprofit sector to a wider public interested in information about charitable and voluntary organizations working on social, cultural, advocacy, health, civil rights, environmental and other issues.