Stage 2: Experimenting
With some experience under your belt, you may have decided on one, or a few, target areas in which to focus your philanthropy, or at least delve further. Alternatively, you may simply have honed your thinking by learning what you don’t want to do again. Either way, you have sharpened your priorities. It’s likely that you also know something about the kinds of results you can realistically expect to achieve through your philanthropy. You may also have identified the role you are best suited to play to make change happen. For example, a goal to increase economic empowerment for poor populations may have spurred early investments in micro-lending, but through these pilots, you may have realized that basic healthcare is a bigger impediment to the people you’re trying to support.
Now is the time to put a stake in the ground about where to focus your efforts. Being explicit about your funding choices—and then having the discipline to say no to other things—is a prerequisite if you want to move from exploring to making a long-term, measureable difference.
You are in this stage if…
- You have learned about your areas of interest and explored with some grants or pilots.
- You are ready to make some choices about the role of your philanthropy, and how that role drives your funding priorities.
Questions to ask
- What is in and what is out going forward?
- What difference will, specifically, my personal contribution make (or what results can I imagine holding myself accountable for)?
- What resources am I willing to invest?
- How do I imagine I will work with grantees?
- What interventions seem likely to yield better results, given my resources?
Things to do
- Continue to solicit input from experts and practitioners in the field.
- Conduct due diligence on potential grantees so that you will fund organizations that are aligned with the results that you want to help achieve.
- Transition away from any activities that you’ve placed on your "do not pursue" list.
Your goals for this stage
- Develop a strategy, or theory of change, for how you and other people in your field (grantees, other funders, among others) will, together, achieve the results you seek.
- Identify the specific role your philanthropy will play within that strategy, including a few targets against which you’ll hold yourself accountable.
Traps
At this stage, you are starting to define your strategy. One critical piece of strategy is, of course, defining what your goal is. One trap is to become overly wedded to too many metrics. This may be challenging for the organizations you are supporting to manage. Instead, work closely with your grantees to identify the few indicators that really matter, and use the data gathered to inform your decisions about how to get better.
Another trap getting so wrapped up in a highly-engineered grant selection process—complete with criteria, checklists, and all the rest—that you miss the big picture. You want to ensure your grants really do add up to your greater vision of success. To avoid this, make sure you consistently ask "how does this fit into my greater objectives?"
A third trap is to be overconfident and fly solo. In the quest to aim high, some philanthropists become overly optimistic about what their resources can realistically accomplish. As a result, they set unrealistic expectations for grantees, and sow the seeds for poor grantor-grantee relationships, where the grantee can feel continually overwhelmed, and the grantor continually unsatisfied. In addition, you risk missing out on great work being done by others in the field—other funders, fantastic organizations, and government programs—that you can learn from and also build off of to drive the change you collectively seek.