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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

 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...

 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...

 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...

Getting good with your wealth is good for your giving.  This post is about how your relationship with your wealth connects with your approach to philanthropy.

Four Types of Giving: A Self Assessment

1. Have you ever engaged in giving that you knew wasn’t helping those in the...

When you think about gearing up your giving, whose ideas are you planning to  back?  Yours or someone else’s? 

Strategic philanthropy is what you do when you have your own theory of change, your own ideas about how best implement that theory, and you invest your resources...

 If you really want to change the world, begin by changing yourself.   This is wisdom that is held in common across a wide variety of faith and philosophical traditions.  

As someone with a calling to make the world a better place, deepening your understanding of your own...

Most of us with a calling to make the world a better place have a fairly easy time coming up with a daily to-do list.  But often we struggle much more to get clarity about how we really want to focus ourselves on a month to month basis.

This post is about a simple structure for taking as...

Many of us who have a vision to change the world have a complicated relationship with goals, strategic planning, metrics and milestones. 

On one hand, when you are going after complex systems change it doesn't always feel  credible to lay out a fully specified strategic plan years into...

For many, the start of a New Year is a time to make resolutions about what you want to do differently in the coming year.  

If those New Year's resolutions are working for you, go for it!  But for many people who feel a strong calling to contribute to a better world, it's actually...

The world has never been more in need of a new greatest generation of change agents.  This is not about heroes  going it alone against the challenges threatening our shared future.  What we need are people who have found new ways of growing themselves and collaborating with others...

One of the biggest challenges that we all struggle with is how to make the most of our time.  One of the best ways to meet this challenge is to create a set of practices for regularly connecting with your future self. 

In a previous post we looked at how to create a set of daily...

Challenging the thoughts that don't serve you is one of the most powerful pathways to having more joy and more impact across all the areas of your life. 

Upgrading your own internal dialogue is particularly important for all of us with a calling to make the world a better place.  In the...