Monday Morning Checklist:
Am I Getting Better?
The questions posed on this website aren’t the kind you ask, and answer, once and for all. On the contrary, the odds are that you’ll find yourself coming back to one or more of them at various points (and in various combinations) throughout your philanthropic journey. And yet, you can’t ask questions forever; sooner or later you must make decisions. So how can you tell whether you’ve wrestled with a question sufficiently to move on? In our experience, each of these questions has some relatively clear indicators of progress. If you can check many of these markers off your Monday morning to-do list, then you’re probably well on your way to giving smart!
- You can judge (even if you can’t measure) whether you, and your grantees, are making progress toward your goals.
- You cast a wide net externally for information relevant to your fields of interest.
- Your grantees would say that as a donor you help them get better.
- You periodically seek feedback from your grantees about your own performance, including in ways that ensure their anonymity.
- You can name one (or more) grants that didn’t work out as hoped and have shared the lessons you learned with others.
- You’re in regular contact with at least a few people who challenge your thinking.
- Over time, your philanthropy generates real results on society’s behalf: the people and/or the issues that you and your grantees seek to serve are clearly better off.