Creating A Database About The Trump Foundation

The Trump Foundation’s portfolio currently comprises 78 active grants, which operate to advance our strategy. These programs are at various stages of development, pilot testing and implementation, and serve diverse communities across the country. They include training and tutoring of new teachers, professional development of acting teachers, professional communities of practice, and many others. The foundation staff is keeping hands on relationship with the grantee organizations, in order to track the program’s milestones, and assist if difficulties arise. However at this phase of work, we believe we need additional data and a richer presentation of data, which will better serve emerging needs.

Additional data which is currently missing concentrates on the outputs of programs, for example, in which schools or areas our teacher communities operate or with which municipality the foundation programs formulated collaboration. Such data will enable us to map the geographic coverage of our programs and to focus on areas of need, as well as assist our grantees to collaborate with each other. It will also help us in collaborating with school districts, networks and municipalities, so they can effectively match between capacity and demand. This data should be simply updated so it presents a relevant picture, and it should be tagged to be easily searched. It should be presented and aggregated in table and list formats, as well as in graphic and geographic patterns.

The foundation team has prepared an initial draft RFP for such a system and has consulted with one of our partners, Social Finance Israel (SFI). SFI is a not for profit organization which excels in working with data and developed expertise in the area of mathematics and science education, as part of a joint program with the foundation. SFI has offered to assist us in this, and we may want to contract them to do so. They suggest a development process, over a period of 6 months, which includes:

• Defining the metrics and the architecture of the database in consultation with the foundation staff and the grantee organizations, to include three sources of information: the proposal submitted to the foundation; the operational programed milestones; ongoing progress reports and reporting.
• Building the database in according with the metrics, to include :
  1. Platform for entering of new data by the grantee organizations and the mechanism for quality assurance by the foundation staff.
  2. Search engine, metadata system and a user interfaces (table, list, graphic and geographic) to allow effective and efficient use. The interface should be built in a way which could be embedded in the foundation’s website.
• Collection of data from the three sources, filling the database with current information, conducting training workshops for the partners and grantee organizations, and launching the database.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 169