Mapping Your Philanthropic Decision-Making Process

One really useful way to get a handle on all the issues related to who is involved in your giving is to map out your decision-making process.   Whatever role others play in your giving right now, chances are this will evolve over time.  The chart below shows a key set of decision-making areas across the top row and a range of people who might be involved in these decisions. The chart is filled in using the following codes for the role that a given person plays in a particular decision-making arena. Download your own copy here

Propose: The person is responsible for bringing forward a proposed course of action.

Decide: This person makes decisions.  

• D=formal authority as ultimate decision-maker
• d=one vote among a larger group, majority rules  
• D=informal authority as ultimate decision-maker whatever the rules formally say

Consult: This person is asked for input about a decision before it is made....

Build Your Team to Complement Your Own Level of Passion, Proximity, and Perspective

A great team is greater than the sum of its parts.  If you've decided to get help as you gear up your giving this post will help you look more deeply at what it takes to put together a winning team.  How well does that team complement your strengths?  How well does it help you learn and grow in areas where you have are not as strong? 

Know Yourself: The Foundation for Building Your Team

If you are strongly drawn to focus your giving on our toughest challenges it's important to recognize that it takes certain personal qualities to engage effectively in complex systems change.  You don't need to possess all these in equal measure yourself, but if you want to maximize your impact you do need to make sure that you build a team that brings all these characteristics to bear:

1. Sustained passion for social contribution 
2. Practical proximity to the issue at hand
3. ...

Staffing Up: Four Kinds of Help for Donors

If you've made the decision to get some help as you gear up your giving, this post will help you decide what kind of help might be the best fit for you. 

Hired Help: They follow your direct instructions to paint inside the lines under your ongoing supervision. These are people who show up as having an E for “execute” on your decision-making chart.    Think of administrative staff tasked to support the distribution of funds from your family foundation as part of their broader duties within your family office.

Faithful Steward: These people protect your interests while carrying out your decisions. They make sure the paint stays inside the lines while you are away. These are people who show up on your decision-making chart as having an E (execute) and also an I (inform). This means you need to inform your steward about decisions after the fact so they can effectively represent and advance your interests while you are...

Do You Need to Bring on Staff and Advisors?

If making decisions jointly with family members and other close associates is one potential barrier to gearing up giving, another is getting the kind of outside help that truly makes sense for you and the issues you care about. Adding advisors or other staff to your philanthropic decision-making is a big step. While it may solve and streamline some processes, this also introduces principal-agent dynamics that ultimately make your giving process more complex. So, let’s be sure that adding staff or advisors makes sense for you before you go down this road. 

6 Options for DIY Giving

Below are a series of options for how you could proceed with little to no help from paid staff or advisors.  As you go through this list, take note of how you react to each. Are any of these off the table for sure—if so, why? Do any of these options seem like appealing paths forward? Could some combination of these approaches be a good...

Decision making friction is one of the biggest drags on donors looking to gear up their giving. 

That's why the 9th design principle for donors is all about figuring WHO is involved in your giving. 

All things being equal, the more people you share authority with the more energy it takes to make decisions.  But going it alone has major drawbacks too.  First, you may not have time to make all the decisions needed to keep things running smoothly.  Second, you may not have the passion, proximity or expertise to make the best possible decisions on any number of issues.  This is why it’s so important to carefully consider who else should be involved and what role others will play in the decision-making process. 

In this post we'll start by looking at sharing authority over your giving with family members, business partners and other close associates.   In an upcoming post we'll look at the questions around bringing on advisors and...

One of the greatest points of leverage you can have in your giving is to positively influence the people around you.

What might happen if you used your giving to encourage and support others who are engaged in the field, whether they are fellow funders, social entrepreneurs, leaders, and community members?

Getting behind others’ proximity and passion for the issues that matter most is one of the most meaningful things you can do with your money.  This post explores  four ways to make the most of this opportunity. 

4 Transformative Ways to Build the Field by Building Up Others

1. Engage your fellow philanthropists as a generous presence and a trusted advisor

This is all about showing up for others to help them have more impact and experience greater personal fulfillment. You can help them get more out of their giving journey by asking two questions. First, what would make for extraordinary impact and fulfillment in your giving? And second, what is...

Far too often donors approach their giving purely as charitable grant-making.

Why not harness the power of markets as part of your change-making strategy?  This post explores three ways to pursue outsize impact with your giving by leveraging the power of markets.

For example, let’s say you have a private foundation, and you distribute the required 5% of the corpus each year as grants to charitable entities. What about the other 95%? It doesn’t have to just sit there in traditional investments. Think about how much more leverage you can get from investing those charitable assets in ways that are aligned with your values and your change-making goals. These days, many donors are finding that mission-aligned investing is not concessionary. What this means is you don’t give up a market rate of return to align your charitable asset investment strategy with your vision for a better world. 

Three Key Pathways for Harnessing the Power of Markets to Increase the...

 Outsize Impact Idea #3: Engage in Advocacy (and Politics) to Influence the Flow of Public Resources

If you are looking for outsize impact in your giving, don't overlook the opportunities that come with giving to support advocacy or even elections and political reform.   This post and video that goes with share some ideas about how to go about this kind of giving, and reviews some of the most common concerns that donors have about focusing their giving in this way.

As a starting point, it's worth remembering that many issues that matter a great deal take massive amounts of resources to address. Public education and affordable housing are two examples. One of the most leveraged ways for philanthropists to engage on these issues is by influencing how public dollars are allocated. 

Three key pathways for influencing public policy

1. Influence policymakers’ choices through lobbying and other forms of advocacy.
2. Influence who is actually in office by...

 Outsize Impact Idea #2:. Explore the Unknown and Expand the Base of Human Knowledge

A second big idea for having outsize impact with your giving is explore the unknown--to expand the base of human knowledge,  Once a discovery is made it's a permanent expansion to the stock of human knowledge.  That's a potential benefit for everyone, and great leverage for philanthropists who back these discoveries. 

Some of the clearest examples involve medical research on curable diseases. 

 Take the "ice bucket challenge," for example.

This  was a crowd sourced craze in 2014 on the internet.  It raised $115 million to support ALS research in only 6 weeks. Those resources funded two breakthrough discoveries on previously unknown sources of the disease.

Another example is the  Gates Foundation's support to develop a vaccine against malaria. It has been a long haul since Gates first announced $168m to support this effort in 2008. A billion dollars...

 Sometimes donors get stuck because the impact they believe they can have with their giving doesn’t feel big enough.

One of the most common concerns we hear from donors looking to gear up their giving goes something like this:

“Our family doesn’t have tens of billions of dollars like the biggest foundations and philanthropists. We want to know that our dollars are actually making a difference in the world. We want to feel like our giving really matters. How do we make an impact we can hang our hats on, one that makes our family feel like we’re making a genuine difference?” 

No matter which particular issues you focus on, there’s value in “thinking big” with your giving. This post is the first in a series that here's to help you think big about your giving whatever level of resources you’re bringing to the table. 

Idea #1. Transcend Hyper-Partisanship and Polarization

In the United States and across many countries...