By Alison Powell

I spent last Monday at a workshop with a great group of Boston-area based foundation leaders and staff. The Lynch Foundation hosted Tom Tierney, co-author of Give Smart: Philanthropy that Gets Results, and others from Bridgespan for this workshop to discuss philanthropic strategy and execution. As part of the session, we asked the attendants, who were seated at small tables, to discuss and share stories about strategies that had been successful, and ones that had not quite hit the mark they were aiming for.

The responses were candid and enlightening. One leader of a local family foundation, Mary Walachy of the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, shared that she and her trustees had recently embarked on a new strategy, termed READ. The goal of READ is to ensure all children in Springfield, Mass., read proficiently by the end of the third grade. Inspired by materials from Grantmakers for Education, the Davis Foundation developed a multi-tiered strategy that included not just directly investing in organizations, but also educating the community through bringing experts to speak, pursuing an advocacy agenda, and, now, building an explicit donor collective to work together on the problem. In fact, she said that the money they have invested was probably the least important thing that they did. Her story reflects a pattern we have seen in successful philanthropy; often times, when you have a clear and focused goal (which Walachy and the Davis Foundation do), and a path to reach it, time and influence can be more important than the dollars you are giving away.

One of the interesting tensions Walachy shared was that the donors with whom she works, out of humility, had historically been reticent to be too public about their giving. When they realized that attaching their name to their cause could marshal more resources and, perhaps more importantly, a joint and sustained effort around solving a pressing problem, they made the hard decision to go more public with their work. The result? Significant progress towards their goals. Somewhat surprisingly, Walachy reported that despite the donors’ fear that going public would result in an increase in grant requests, they found the opposite. By being extremely explicit about their focus and goals, they forestalled a deluge in requests.

Of course, this is only one story, but it made me think about some material we have been working on to help donors think through how public they want to be about their giving. While many think that it is a binary decision—to give anonymously or not—as this foundation discovered, it is in reality much more of a spectrum. There is certainly no right answer, and there are powerful arguments for being more or less public. And, it may not be a unilateral decision: You may choose to be “under the radar” in some areas, and be extremely outspoken supporters in others.

This document (see “Should I Give Anonymously or Publicly”) shares some of the pros and cons to both sides, and offers a set of questions to ask yourself as you sort through the decision. So what do you think? What has helped you decide how public to be about your giving?

Alison Powell is Bridgespan’s Philanthropy Knowledge Manager. Follow her on Twitter @abp615.

By Alison Powell

One of the most common challenges donors face is deciding which nonprofits to invest their scarce resources in. This challenge unites donors large and small—whether a friend has asked you to make a small donation to an organization she is passionate about or you are launching a multi-million dollar giving initiative. Either way, you will have to decide whether or not to write that check.

A few months ago, to help with this process, we launched the “Donor Decision Tool”—a guide to aid donors in alighting on a research path that feels right to them, depending on the situation at hand. The tool asks a set of 10 questions, and then provides a personalized plan based on your specific needs.

Our tool outlines four overarching principles to guide your research:

• Above all, do no harm. Be aware of the enormous power imbalance between donors and grantees and all that comes with it.
• Be rigorous, but don’t overdo it. Pursue your research only to the extent that you need it to make a decision.
• Be realistic. Expect that nonprofits will have weaknesses as well as strengths. Nonprofits in different stages will likely face different hurdles.
• Be forward thinking. As you discover weaknesses, ask “what can I do to help?”

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about different pieces of content that we have created for this tool. I welcome thoughts and feedback about what we’re missing, and what we could do to improve on these materials.

Today, I’d like to highlight something that picks up on our second principle—balancing rigor with reason. By designing your process around the information most necessary to make a decision, and thinking of deficits not only as red flags, but also as opportunities for you to help, you can even get a head start on how you might work together with the nonprofit.

See here for a summary document you can use as a crib sheet for a set of questions you may want to ask, or that may spur yet more. It also provides a page for you to jot down your findings and any open questions.

What principles help guide your research into potential grantees?


Alison Powell is Bridgespan’s Philanthropy Knowledge Manager. Follow her on Twitter @abp615.

By Alison Powell

By Alison Powell

In many of our materials, including the recently published Donor-Grantee Trap, we discuss the importance of a strong donor-grantee partnership to achieve results. One of the most frequent partnership challenges is the “cost of capital” that donors (often unwittingly) impose on their grantees. Recently, the Foundation Center turned a spotlight on its own grantseeking process to analyze where some of these costs come from. The Foundation Center itself is a nonprofit that each year completes more than 500 grant applications and a similar amount of reports back to funders. With sponsorship from the Ford Foundation, Foundation Center analyzed a random sample of online applications and reports it had prepared over the last two years to compare funder processes and highlight challenges.

What did the Foundation Center find? Essentially, that “the quantity and quality of instructional information and assistance for grantseekers was poor, and vast differences and inconsistencies in procedures, questions, and requirements presented challenges that increased the administrative demand placed on nonprofit staff.” What were some of these challenges specifically? Less than half (44 percent) of reports provided requirements and instructions at the outset, and only 22 percent provided any means of contacting the funder with questions. Sixty-six percent of the reports analyzed required nonprofits to submit foundation-specific budget templates for financial reporting, rather than allowing the nonprofits to submit their own budget numbers. See here for the full report.

The strength of the report to me was the firsthand perspective. Of course, all the organizations funding the Foundation Center want it to be successful in fulfilling its mission, and surely none of them are seeking to impose such burdens. Nonetheless, the felt experience seems to be death by a thousand (virtual) papercuts.

The answer? The Foundation Center proposes a “point of departure” of identifying some frequently asked variables that could perhaps be streamlined or put into universal templates, highlighting Project Streamline as a resource here. At a minimum, the Foundation Center proposes foundations pilot new forms through a test phase with anonymous feedback from grantees.

This week, we are publishing another of our “frequently asked question” guides focused on “How do I build strong relationships with grantees?” The above ideas from the Foundation Center are a great starting point, and you can read here for more thoughts on the topic.
 
Alison Powell is The Bridgespan Group’s Philanthropy Knowledge Manager.

By Alison Powell

Happy New Year! As you probably know, instead of ringing in the year with a spate of resolutions, we at Give Smart rang out the giving season and 2011 with the #30DayDonorChallenge. Each work day for six weeks, we offered small suggestions for things donors could try that might enhance their giving. Why? Because as we noted a few weeks ago, psychology (and my personal experience certainly fits with this) tells us that it’s often the specific, actionable, and small changes that stick and even build towards something big.

To see what might endure from our challenge, we wanted to highlight our last tweet— “What practice will I take away from the #30DayDonorChallenge?” Is there one thing that resonated with you that you might take into the new year to refine your philanthropy? If you haven’t had a chance to review all the tweets, and are still in search of your own resolution, they are all available here to review.

One of my own resolutions is in keeping with these ideas of reflection and taking small steps that build. It was inspired by this HBR blog post by Peter Bregman, published almost exactly a year ago. I hope to take his advice to set aside the last five minutes of the day to reflect on the successes and challenges, identify what I’ll do differently, and ask who I should thank or communicate with. Taking five minutes for such reflection may sound easy, but even in the early days of 2012, I’ve found prioritizing those five end-of-day minutes to be a challenge. But I’m committed to trying since nurturing daily learning and connection strikes me as particularly important.

In that vein, I would like to thank all those who participated in our #30DayDonorChallenge. Thanks to GOOD and to other exciting giving season challenges like the Case Foundation’s #Goodspotting for inspiration. Thanks to those who passed our ideas along like the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and Lucy Bernholz, among many others. Finally, thank you to those who offered ideas, provided great resources and/or hosted guest blogs, like Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), Bolder Giving, and the Million Dollar List. We couldn’t have shared these ideas without you—and we learned so much from you in the process.

For me that success reflects one of the most enduring pieces of this challenge: The connections made and the ideas exchanged. Now that’s a tradition I’m excited to continue into 2012.
 
Alison Powell is The Bridgespan Group’s Philanthropy Knowledge Manager.