How We Do It

Earning Your Trust

Learn what guiding principles we follow, how we hold ourselves accountable, what we do to make our work transparent, how we guard against conflicts of interest and how we prize diversity.

Following the Money

Examine our financial status (including our annual audit and tax return), our investment policy and growing interest in mission-related investing, our asset allocation and who manages our corpus

Contributing to the Field

At every turn, MMT looks for ways beyond grantmaking to make contributions to the larger philanthropic and nonprofit sector and the community at large.

Creative Commons

We begin by licensing all our content under the Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike, Non-Commercial license. That means you are free to use any of our content as long as you attribute MMT as a source, don't sell it and share what you create from it under the same license.

connec+ipedia

When we created a "knowledge management" system for MMT, we built it for the whole field rather than limiting it to our staff, because we want to learn from others and to share what we know. Not only is it licensed in the same way as our website, it's a wiki that welcomes contributions from anyone who cares to take the time to contribute to our shared wisdom.

Open Source Software

MMT recognizes that Open Source Software (OSS) has enormous potential value as a cost effective and efficient tool for the nonprofit sector. That's why we use OSS in our own work, build and use software with open standards in development work and fund OSS projects that have promise of contributing to the field.

For example, connectipedia uses WagN, a free open source Ruby on Rails application.

MMT's website uses Drupal as a CMS (content management system). We are making the code and modules that we used, along with documentation, available to others who might want to adopt something we use on our website. More about our website here.

GrantIS, the grants application and management system we developed, is built using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We plan to make a generic version of GrantIS the will be free to other foundations. More about GrantIS here.

Convening events

MMT sometimes holds educational events for nonprofit organizations. For example, in 2008 we hosted a three-part series on new media: creating content, distributing content and social networking.

We also participate in events organized by others, including speaking at conferences and participating in panels of foundation representatives at workshops for nonprofits.

All MMT events and those with MMT staff participation are included on our event calendar and are announced in our email news alerts.