The Tracking the Field program highlights connections between environmental and global philanthropy and the relationship between inclusiveness and effective environmental philanthropy.
Tracking the Field (TTF) is a research program at the Environmental Grantmakers Association. TTF's purpose is to deepen understanding of trends, challenges, and critical needs in environmental philanthropy. Started in 2007, TTF now covers over 180,000 grants totaling $22 billion in giving dollars. All this data, maintained in a secure searchable online database, provides in-depth, historical analyses of environmental giving trends and helps funders see how their grantmaking fits into the larger ecosystem of funding. TTF supports dynamic coalitions by increasing data-driven partner identification and optimizing grant dollars for more strategic impact.
TTF offers data services at multiple levels, including the Searchable Database, Tracking the Field Reports, and Custom Data Analysis and Custom Databases at the request of members and partners.
Latest Data
The TTF research team produces a biennial report and summary that analyzes the most recent environmental giving data. EGA members are able to explore the Tracking the Field data down to the individual grant through a searchable database and interactive heatmap on the EGA website. These tools allow members to sort by EGA taxonomy across different time frames to see the trends and grants most relevant to their work. EGA also works with funders and affinity groups on custom research projects to expand learnings from the Tracking the Field data.
Demographic Data Transparency
In the last decade, there has been a heightened interest in developing norms of transparency for nonprofit organizations and foundations. The key to transparency is demographic data -- it allows the field to glean the sector's commitments on matters of equity, and provides the opportunity to uplift the work of BIPOC-led organizations and increase investment in groups that reflect the communities they serve. To address this issue, EGA is further operationalizing our Racial Equity Point of View by aligning our collection of demographic data with Demographics via Candid.
This campaign will create a central repository for this demographic data to reduce the burden of requests to nonprofits and avoid taking time away from their mission work. Demographic data submitted to Candid will be publicly available on Candid's GuideStar nonprofit profiles accessible by all funders, researchers, and field practitioners. EGA members can also access this data via the Tracking the Field database.
Custom Data Projects
EGA works with funders and affinity groups to support custom research projects which expand on the analysis of Tracking the Field. Tailored projects range from data runs (including some complimentary runs for EGA members), to customizable data visualization and presentations, to research briefing reports.
EGA has also worked with a number of affinity groups, including the Blue Sky Funders Forum and the Health & Environmental Funders Network, to help track their members' grantmaking. EGA helps these groups build their own custom searchable grants database linked to TTF, and produces analysis reports using this data. These projects help expand this research beyond the EGA membership and facilitate data sharing across affinity groups. EGA members also have full access to this data using the new custom fields added to TTF.
Contact Us
For members and non-members interested in learning more about the research offerings of Tracking the Field, contact trackingthefield@ega.org.