Strategy

12 Tools to Achieve Big Impact

Often in the world of philanthropy, the problems we wish to address seem overwhelmingly large and complex. And if you’re a small foundation, the scant assets you have to wage against the world of need can seem almost pointless. But as with any complex problem, the key is to break it down and examine its parts to discover that pivotal point where your action can begin to fuel a solution.

One way to achieve big impact is by engaging in research and development (R&D) philanthropy. R&D philanthropy is planned, creative work aimed at discovering new knowledge or developing new and significantly improved goods and services to address an identified need. The ways in which foundations can engage in R&D philanthropy are limitless, but here are a dozen of the most common practices. Note that many of them overlap or complement one another, which is indeed the nature of ongoing research and development in any field.

1. Fund research. This is R&D philanthropy at its most basic. By supporting research, you add to the available knowledge about a specific need or a potential solution. Research does not have to be conducted nationally to be important.

2. Conduct a needs assessment. Technically, a needs assessment is a form of research, but it deserves special attention because of its specific focus on determining community need. Research that helps clearly define needs is absolutely essential to developing effective solutions.

3. Scan for solutions. Sometimes the best answers are already out there, creating change in similar communities in a neighboring county or on the other side of the world. Conducting a field scan for best practices or a local scan for assets to apply to a problem are both forms of research that foundations can fund with relatively little expense.

4. Convene. No organization is better suited to bringing people together than foundations – especially around thorny issues. Foundations provide a natural “safe space” for open discussion that can lead to better understanding of problems and solutions.

5. Generate innovations. “Innovation” is a big word with many connotations, ranging from creating a tangible new product to significantly improving an existing service. Simply stated, innovation means “applied creativity.” Foundations can fund innovations, as well as be part of the process of coming up with them.

6. Seed a great idea. Providing “seed funds” to get a new program, organization, product, or service off the ground is a great point of leverage. By making several grants to a number of different organizations with different ideas, you can see which grow and become ripe for further investment.

7. Support piloting or testing. Piloting or testing an idea before undertaking a full-fledged launch is a valuable step in the R&D process. In addition to proving (or disproving) the viability of an idea, it also provides an opportunity for tweaking and refining in real time.

8. Evaluate effectiveness. Funding evaluations may not seem as sexy as generating innovations. However, it is every bit as important to making sure that ideas that work are recognized, or to pointing out ideas that aren’t working and how they need to change.

9. Document success. Once you’ve researched and developed a program, you can help others replicate or expand it by documenting how it works, the resources required, the potential challenges, and the steps to take from A to Z. This will let others take your idea to scale more rapidly and efficiently.

10. Disseminate everything. Funders often miss the obvious step of sharing information themselves. At the most basic level, you can disseminate the good ideas that cross your path through your own newsletters, blogs, or presentations.

11. Advocate. Think advocacy isn’t really part of a research and development strategy? Think again. Advocacy is absolutely key to informing and developing research-based public policies that have a huge impact on issues ranging from public health to public education.

12. Take it to scale. If there’s a program or organization that is effectively meeting a need, it may be time to invest in its further development by helping it expand its reach – either by increasing the number of people served, increasing the number of locations that use the program, or helping to build a greater uptake of the ideas or principles that make the program successful.

There are many ways to approach R&D philanthropy, and many potential benefits that can accrue to your foundation, your grantees, and your community. While R&D may not be for the faint of heart, it most certainly isn’t limited to larger institutions. As a small foundation, you can have significant impact if you find your strength and play your role wisely. Want to learn more? Download our free white paper “Asking ‘What If?’ Using Research and Development as a Strategy to Achieve Dramatic Impact.”

February 28, 2017 3,517 comments

Strategy

Streamling Is Simple. Start Small.

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

There are many reasons why philanthropy should streamline – excessively long strategic planning processes, grant proposals that take 8 months to be funded, board meeting dockets that measure 3 inches high – and the task can seem daunting. However, there is a way to quickly streamline…by starting small. Let me give you an example:

I recently stayed at the Marriot Marquis in Washington, DC and ordered room service. You know the routine: Order food, wait, hotel staff brings it in your room, they hand you a bill, you sign it while they stand around, and they leave. Not anymore. The Marriott has eliminated futzing with the bill! Instead they deliver you the food, and promptly walk out the door. No more awkward moments for hotel guests wishing they had worn better pajamas. No more awkward moments for hotel staff trying to make small talk while wondering how someone who can afford a 4-star hotel can’t afford better pajamas.

I don’t know why the Marriott has switched to this approach. Maybe they did time studies and discovered that by eliminating those extra few minutes waiting for guests to sign the bill they saved 346,203 hours of employee time worldwide. Maybe they conducted focus groups with customers on ways to improve room service. Whatever the reason, I was glad they did it and the woman delivering me pizza seemed relieved too!

The point is that they streamlined the room service function by starting small. They took one aspect of it that everyone assumed was sacrosanct – signing the check – and eliminated it.

What might happen if you did the same thing?

What is one activity in your operation that you never question?

Weekly staff meetings?
Full day board retreats?
Staff writing 2 sentence summaries of proposals for board dockets?
More background information in board dockets than board members actually want to review?
Complex grant applications?
Cumbersome internal forms or reports?
Requiring three consultants to submit proposals each time you want to hire one?

Now, think about what you could do to eliminate them, or cut them in half. Instead of weekly staff meetings hold them bi-weekly. Shorten them by eliminating round robin “report outs” and instead focus on results. Ask grantees to incorporate those two-sentence descriptions as part of their proposals. Review documenting and reporting practices to eliminate needless steps.

Sometimes, just one small change can kick-start an entire wave of streamlining activities that can save your staff, board, partners and grantees hours of time and headaches. Need help? I’m happy to get you started with my new 6 Hour Streamline service to create immediate solutions to help you streamline, speed up, and improve your grantmaking and operations.

Let’s get started!

February 21, 2017 3,319 comments

Industry Strategy

Strategic, Responsive, or Both?

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about funders weighing the options between strategic grantmaking and responsive grantmaking. The general angst seems to come from a sense that all funding must be strategic in order to make a difference. While it’s true that strategic philanthropy (as described below) can lead to broader or deeper outcomes, there is a time and a place for both. Let’s take a look at each:

Responsive grantmaking is being open to receiving proposals and ideas from any nonprofit, and allowing the nonprofits to drive the agenda. Requests are initiated by the nonprofit, rather than by a funder seeking them out. This doesn’t mean that a foundation doesn’t have core areas of focus, but that within those areas is wishes to be responsive to the needs nonprofits feel most keenly. For example, a funder may focus on substance abuse, but be open to supporting a wide range of prevention and treatment programs, as well as programs serving youth and families to address multi-generational factors that lead to abuse.

From a positive perspective, responsive grantmaking:

Allows new ideas to come into the foundation
Allows for rapid response to new needs
Can support a wider range of issues
Helps a foundation learn about its community
Is easier in some ways, because it does not require a lot of planning or effort
Provides greater opportunities for funding for nonprofits

The cons of responsive grantmaking are that it:

Is less likely to make a deep impact in a specific area, because funding is widely dispersed
Makes it more difficult to assess and describe what a funder has accomplished with its portfolio
Is more likely that a funder will have to respond to a greater number of proposals

In general, responsive grantmaking makes sense when a funder is just getting started – either as a new foundation or as an established foundation that is wading into a new issue area. Responsive grantmaking also can be a way to show support to the community when a funder is not yet ready or able to put the required effort and resources into a strategic approach. And for some foundations, responsive grantmaking is simply the best fit for their missions – particularly those whose missions are very broad and highly localized.

Strategic grantmaking (also called proactive grantmaking) is grantmaking with more focused goals, and a defined set of strategies for how a foundation wants to accomplish those goals. The funder drives the agenda rather than the grantees, although it is best to include grantees in the creation of the goals and strategies. Strategic funders typically see themselves as accountable for successful outcomes. For example, using the substance abuse example from above, a strategic grantmaker may decide to focus on reducing the stigma of substance abuse, and deploy strategies that include a statewide communications campaign, increased support for AA and Alanon, and policy advocacy to health insurance providers to cover treatment.

The pros of strategic grantmaking can include:

Improved likelihood of having an impact on a specific issue
The ability to craft funding to utilize best practices or evidence based practices
Building deeper relationships and partnerships with grantees
Greater opportunities for partnerships, collaboration with other funders
Deeper learning about the target issue
More ease in communicating about progress and accomplishments
Signaling the importance of an issue
Enhanced reputation for the funder, or recognition for knowledge and impact in a particular issue area
Less time responding to proposals, since strategic funders often invite specific organizations to apply

On the con side, strategic grantmaking can:

Limit funding to specific areas, making a foundation less open to emerging needs or new ideas
Take time and resources to conduct research and develop strategies
Make it difficult to change direction

Strategic philanthropy usually makes sense after a foundation has been funding responsively for a while and has learned a lot about a specific issue it can address strategically. It also makes sense for funders that are very clear in their mission or intent to make a difference in a specific area. In either case, funders who engage in strategic philanthropy must be ready to commit to their strategy for the long haul.

Responsive and strategic philanthropy are not mutually exclusive. In fact, most funders employ a combination of both. For example, within a particular program area, a foundation may devote a portion of its portfolio to one strategic effort and the balance to responsive grants. For example, the Firelight Foundation, which is committed to support children with HIV in Africa, strategically invests in programs to increase HIV resources and knowledge, but reserves a portion of grants for grassroots nonprofits, because the Foundation believes that they know best what will work in their community.

Other funders may use responsive philanthropy to power a “learning phase” of its work, then use its accumulated knowledge to develop a strategic grantmaking initiative for “phase two.”

And even the most strategic of funders can use responsive philanthropy to help change course or undergird a strategic investment. For example, a natural disaster or economic hardship in a community requires funders to respond to immediate needs. And within a strategic initiative, unanticipated challenges may surface that require responsive grantmaking, such as an unexpected gap nonprofit capacity among organizations that are part of that initiative.

The bottom line? Strategic grantmaking vs. responsive grantmaking isn’t an “either/or” proposition. Both approaches have value, and funders should always explore both as options in achieving their goals.

December 27, 2016 3,244 comments

Industry Strategy

The Art of Streamlining

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

Much has been written about efforts to “streamline” foundation application processes – reducing the number of hoops applicants must jump through, right-sizing applications to the grant amounts, and asking questions in such a way that the answers are truly useful for funder decision making. But extraordinary grantmakers move beyond streamlining applications and grant reports to reviewing every aspect of their internal operations to identify opportunities to streamline. They audit their operations to find unnecessary blockages, duplication, wasted efforts, and barriers to impact.

Why? Consider what the following examples of inefficiency might do reduce productivity or effectiveness:

A foundation assigns six different staff members to review and edit a simple four-page case study.
A funder requires staff to issue RFPs every time they want to hire a consultant, regardless of whether they have already worked with a fantastic consultant who could start immediately.
Another funder insists that at least three consultants must submit proposals in order for staff to hire one. If only one or two outstanding consultants apply, they cannot be hired.
A funder requires that every RFP for grants be approved by five separate departments within the foundation before it can be issued.

In each of these examples, foundation leaders failed to apply basic common sense and examine their internal processes to identify blockages, barriers, and waste. While these might seem like minor examples, the collective impact of such inefficiency across many departments and operations of a foundation results in a tremendous amount of wasted staff time, wasted foundation dollars, and unnecessary delay.

Grantmakers who have mastered the art of streamlining regularly review their internal processes to identify blockages and inefficiencies. They make strategic internal investments to improve. They also hire great talent and trust them to do the job well.

Here are two examples of extraordinary grantmakers who have streamlined their operations:

In an effort to become more efficient, Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF) invested resources to track their internal grantmaking processes. As I wrote in the online journal GMNsight last year, BSCF found fairly substantial inefficiencies and redundancies, made a plan to address them, and are now significantly more efficient and effective – with both time and dollars – than they were before. By making an extra effort to explore their own inner workings, they now can accomplish their internal work with less effort and spend more time thinking, networking, and immersing themselves in the fields they serve.
When the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation needed to conduct 20 site visits across the country with a team of six staff, consultants, and advisory board members – within one month’s time – it quickly calculated the cost in time and travel expenses and realized it would be a burden on the team. It chose instead to streamline the site visit process and conduct them virtually. While not as ideal as in-person interaction, the virtual site visits were enormously helpful for informing funding decisions, and they likely saved the foundation tens of thousands of dollars.

Grantmaking can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be needlessly complex – especially if that complexity erodes efficiency and effectiveness. Sometimes it’s easy to mistake complexity for sophistication, but don’t fall prey to that mistake. When issues of complexity arise, remember that in grantmaking, as in almost any other undertaking, the simplest route almost always is the best.

December 23, 2016 2,975 comments

Strategy

Learning How to Learn

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

Most philanthropies seek to be strategic and have an impact. Yet few build their own internal capacity to be strategic grantmakers. In particular, most funders forget to intentionally learn from their initial piloting and testing of strategies so that they can make early modifications and course corrections.

Learning isn’t hard to do, but it must be intentional, documented, discussed within your team, and it must lead to decision making. It can’t simply exist inside a program officer’s head. One of our clients, the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, asks themselves, “What will make or break this grant?” when deciding whether to recommend a significant grant to their board. They are clear on the risks involved and what needs to happen to make the grant successful. The answer is documented in the staff summary of the grant. Six to nine months later, like clockwork, they revisit the grant during program team meetings to assess progress on that risk and identify ways they can help ensure success. That is intentional learning.

Chances are, you already have many kinds of information that can inform your learning: grantee reports; grantee convenings; evaluations conducted by grantees; dashboards; your understanding of changing conditions (staff turnover, local or federal policy changes, the economy, etc.); and the observations, knowledge, and instinct of your staff and consultants. You could also seek new insights at minimal cost: conduct an online survey, convene all your stakeholders, or solicit outside perspectives.

As you review information and have conversations, use “learning questions” to help guide you. For example:

What are the top three things we have learned about our strategy thus far?
If we could do it all over again, what would we do differently?
What has surprised us? What are we seeing that is different than what we originally expected?
What progress are we making on our strategy overall?
What progress have we made on each of our short-term and long-term outcomes?
What are some of the early accomplishments/wins?
What has been the most challenging?
Are there areas where we have not yet made much progress? Why?
What are the current conditions now compared to when the foundation launched this strategy, and how has/will that impact the work (e.g., policies, systems, other funding streams, staff changes, etc.)?
Have we made modifications or improvements to any aspect of our strategy, approach, or funding since this strategy was created (or since we started working at the foundation)? Has that helped?
At this time, do we anticipate making any modifications or improvements? If so, what are they? By when will we make that decision?
What opportunities do we see with this strategy going forward?
If we were board members, what would we want know about what has been learned/accomplished?

The Saint Luke’s Foundation used intentional learning to update their board and inform strategic planning. The staff asked themselves the questions above, summarized their key insights, discussed them within their team, and shared them with their board, all within a few months’ time. The board was thrilled – it provided them with timely information they needed to make decisions about strategy and direction.

Learning takes an investment of time – but it’s time well spent. Intentional learning also can feel as if you’re intentionally hunting for failures, so it’s important to keep an eye out for things done well in addition to areas for improvement. In either case, you’ll find opportunities that you can embrace in real time as your work progresses, rather than waiting for a post-mortem evaluation after everything is ended and it’s too late to increase your impact.

October 10, 2016 2,455 comments

Strategy

Five ways to avoid delusional altruism

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

Good businesses pride themselves on the good they do for others, both in terms of their products and services and in the way they give back to their communities. However, in my 16 years of experience advising corporate, institutional and individual philanthropists, I’ve found that many suffer from delusional altruism.

Delusional altruism is when you are genuinely trying to help people — but paying absolutely no attention to the operational inefficiency and waste that drains those you’re trying to help or your own company or corporate foundation of the human and financial capital necessary to accomplish these goals. Let me give you two common examples of delusional altruism in action:

A foundation gives itself five weeks to approve a Request for Proposals (RFP) that it has already written, but gives grantseekers only three weeks to apply. Five different departments within a large national foundation each had a week to modify — or simply sign off on — an RFP.
By contrast, each applicant had to decide whether to apply, decide whether to do so jointly with other invited applicants, develop the proposal concept (possibly in collaboration), write the proposal and get written commitments of matching funding – all within three weeks.

A corporate foundation pays a program officer $60 per hour to perform tasks that an administrative assistant could handle for $20 per hour. Countless organizations pride themselves on their low overhead and administrative costs. They insist that one program assistant support two to four senior leaders who each are responsible for allocating millions of dollars in funding annually.
What this really means is that program executives spend their time scheduling meetings, proofreading documents, collating binders, updating PPT decks, taking notes and filling out travel reimbursement forms. This is time not spent developing new relationships, identifying ways to leverage funding, sourcing new ideas, mitigating risk, thinking and planning.

If you suspect that delusional altruism is undermining your philanthropic effectiveness, here are five actions you can consider to course correct:

Examine your grantmaking processes. Spend some time examining all the people, paper, committees, handoffs, sign-offs, write-ups, etc., that are involved. (I once had a client who discovered more than 200 steps in their internal grants approval process).
Ask your staff for ideas. Allow these to be big ideas as well as small solutions, submitted anonymously if they prefer. Prioritize a few ideas, act on them, then discuss with staff what impact the changes had.
Talk to grantees. Ask them to identify times when they felt that your company wasn’t being realistic, or when the process seemed unfair. Ask them to help you identify solutions and give them the opportunity to do so anonymously via surveys or interviews conducted by a third-party consultant.
Do the math. Invest a little time quantifying the work your staff and managers do that could be off-loaded to a new support staffer. Then, quantify the value of the work your program staff could be doing once that administrative burden has shifted. Where is the greatest value?
Increase autonomy, transparency and accountability for team members. Empower them to make more decisions without waiting for multiple levels of approval and consider creating a culture in which staff ask for support instead of permission when making decisions.

I guarantee that if you can suspend your belief in your own pure altruism and examine ways you might be deluding yourself, you will be delighted with the dramatic improvements your corporate philanthropy can make on the issues and communities you so clearly care about.

September 26, 2016 6,262 comments

Strategy

4 Steps for Fostering Innovation

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

Too often foundations request “innovative ideas” from their grantees but fail to accomplish the same thing internally — or even define what “innovation” means to them. The implied assumption is that innovation “just happens.” Further, lack of clear definition has come to imply that innovation must be a dramatic, game-changing, disruptive new idea or practice: the iPhone of early childhood education, the Post-It note of economic development.

As a result, the expectations for innovation are both so high and so fuzzy that most people naturally feel intimidated, not realizing that they too can create innovations and that innovation is not the exclusive domain of those who are smarter or more creative. After reading a book called The Innovation Formula by business gurus Michel Robert and Alan Weiss, and I realized that the reality is the opposite. Most people, in a supportive environment and with proper supervision, can generate, vet, test, and implement innovative ideas. Here’s what I learned from that book, and how I’ve applied it for my philanthropy clients:

Supportive environments for innovation are created when:

Top leaders – especially the CEO – serve as champions for innovation.
The foundation believes that everyone can become innovative.
The foundation is willing to regularly identify, test, pilot, and implement innovative ideas.
The foundation adheres to prudent risk tolerance (not every innovative idea is a good one!).

Once these conditions are in place, there are four steps that your foundation can take to generate innovations on an ongoing basis. The four steps are:

1. Regularly search for innovative ideas. There are many sources of innovation that foundation staff and trustees can review and discuss to generate ideas. These could include unexpected successes or failures, unexpected events or changes in the industry, weaknesses in your grantmaking or other processes, or changes in demographics.

Search for changes that can produce opportunities. Feed group discussions with questions that help mine opportunities, such as: What has surprised us lately? What has changed in our environment or among our grantees?

Once you’ve generated some raw material, you can ask yourselves: What specific opportunities or ideas can we develop from these changes, challenges, and successes? What new approaches, products, or services can we create to take advantage of these opportunities or to address these needs?

2. Assess innovative ideas. Once you have identified possibilities for innovation, the next step is to assess them against four criteria:

Cost – investments of grants, staff, outside expertise, new technology, etc., as well as potential risks.
Benefits – that outweigh the risks, and will deliver results within an acceptable time frame
Strategic fit – with the foundation mission, values and overall strategy
Implementation – the processes and approaches needed to make the innovation work

By assessing the opportunities against these four criteria, you can determine your highest-potential opportunities.

3. Develop the innovation. Fully develop each innovation prior to implementing it. This not only helps you prepare, but also surfaces any additional challenges. Intentionally evaluate the opportunity, assess pros and cons, create best- and worst-case scenarios and the critical factors that lead to each, and identify risks and rewards. Once you have tested the innovative opportunity and agree it is worth pursuing, move on to implementation.

4. Implement the innovation. Formulate an implementation plan in which you identify the factors and actions that will support the implementation, as well as those that will work against it (and what you can do about them). You should also create a detailed action plan for implementation, which includes identifying activities, deadlines, and responsible parties.

Innovation can take many forms, depending on the community, the foundation, and the opportunities at hand. But perhaps the most inspiring aspect of innovation is that one innovative action often breeds another, and then another. In fact, the only limits to innovation are the ones we place on ourselves.

September 12, 2016 2,491 comments

Strategy

Collaboration 101

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

Foundations often expect nonprofits to collaborate, yet they less frequently turn that expectation on themselves. There is tremendous opportunity to exponentially expand the impact of your grantmaking through funder collaboration. If you’re just getting started in exploring collaboration, or want a refresher, here’s a quick look at the basics:

What are the types of funder collaboration? Funder collaboration comes in all shapes and sizes, but in general there are three primary types:

Shared learning. Funders come together to learn about latest topics and share experiences in a particular area of interest.
Strategic alignment. Funders learn about and support various aspects of a shared agenda, such as a systemic change in a field or laying the groundwork for policy change, but each funder maintains its own separate funding activity.
Pooled funding. As the name suggests, collaborating foundations all contribute funds to a single fund for grantmaking.

With whom can funders collaborate? Foundations can collaborate with all types of funders: local, state, or national foundations; donor-advised funds; individual philanthropists; funder networks; government agencies; corporations; universities and school districts; and nonprofits, to name just a few.

What are the benefits of collaborating?

Learning. If you are exploring or just starting in a new funding area, collaboration with other funders gives you a seat at the table and an opportunity to learn from your colleagues, deeply and quickly.
Enhancing reputations. Foundations can benefit from the reputation of other funding partners, as well as their connections. For example, when a large national funder collaborates with a small place-based one, the small funder gets a boost in perceived importance while the larger one earns a local seal of approval.
Expanding funding. Foundations pooling their resources obviously can increase the total dollars available to support the specific effort. But this combined funding can also open the door to long-term, sustained funding from other public or private sources.
Signaling importance. When a group of funders get together to focus on a single issue, people take notice. For example, a joint investment in an up-and-coming program, a collective public statement, or jointly funded research all can raise awareness and attention for an emerging need or a promising solution.
Creating safety in numbers. When your goals involve risk taking, such as taking a stand on a controversial issue, advocating for policy change, or tackling an emerging need that doesn’t have a lot of best practices and playbooks to follow, it can help to have the cover of other foundations doing it with you.
Leveraging nonfinancial resources. Foundation collaborations bring more than money to the table, including staff talent, research, knowledge, contacts, relationships, administrative help, and physical space.
Building a better mousetrap. Various funders coming together to meet a community need ideally bring a variety of knowledge and connections that result in a whole effort far greater than the sum of its parts.
Deepening impact. Ultimately, your collective efforts should result in greater impact than if you funded alone, and the return on investment should be far more than if you had done the work alone. When the dust has settled, a good collaboration ends with deeper levels of engagement and support among community stakeholders and key institutions, a sustainable change in policy or practice, a more pervasive understanding of the issue at hand, and, most important, true and lasting change for the better.

What are the risks? From my perspective, the risks of funder collaboration boil down to loss of control (or a feeling of loss of control). You might need to come to mutual agreement with others about the priorities, how you will work together, funding commitments, time commitments, and so forth.

What can you do to ensure that your collaboration is a success? Here are four things:

Communicate early and often. Lack of communication can prevent your funding collaborative from getting off the ground, or send it off course. You need to clearly communicate the goals and strategy, but it also helps to have a plan for keeping each other in the loop, documenting decisions, and communicating with external partners.
Set clear expectations. Be clear about the shared purpose and distinct roles of the collaborators. Discuss these expectations at the beginning and throughout the partnership – roles may evolve as needed.
Don’t go off mission. partnerships with other funders should help you advance your mission, not take you off course. Take time to weigh the opportunity against your existing priorities to determine whether it’s the right fit.
Keep it simple. Funders seeking to collaborate should strive to make the complex simple, rather than the simple complex. Focus on the “why” at the partnership level, and leave the “how” up to individual partners as much as possible.

There are many different aspects of collaboration, and being a good collaborator is a skill funders develop over time. Don’t let uncertainty hold you back. Working together with other funders is one of the most effective ways to create impact – so get in there and collaborate!

August 15, 2016 7,202 comments

Summer daydreaming, reimagining philanthropy

Strategy

Summer Daydreaming is the Perfect Time to Re-Imagine Philanthropy

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

School’s out and summer is here! Time to pursue that great American pastime – the lazy summer vacation. Be it at the beach, in the mountains, or somewhere in between, there’s actually a great value in taking time off and letting your mind daydream for a bit.

In fact, summer dreaming time is the perfect way to spark what could be a dramatic change in your philanthropy. All you need, really, is your own permission to do so.

While you’re miles away from the phone, co-workers, and day-to-day expectations, give yourself time and space to dream a little. Take a few deep breaths. Allow yourself to understand that any and all thoughts are welcome – even those that may feel unorthodox. Relax.

Now, pretend you’re starting with a completely blank slate. You’re taking the financial assets and the knowledge you’ve accumulated to date, and you’re starting from scratch.

Forget what you’ve learned about how philanthropy “should” be done. How will you go about it now? Here are a few questions to get your summer brainstorm started:

Would you make grants, or engage in something completely different?

Would you reorganize everything in your foundation, or would you even have a foundation at all? What other form could your philanthropy take?

Who would you most like to work with to make the world better? Why? What inspires you about that person? What do they do that you can’t? (And why can’t you?)

What’s holding you back? Why? How could a new approach move you past that obstacle?

What new developments or trends have you seen (inside or outside of the philanthropic sector) that have sparked your interest? How might those factor into your new approach?

As you may have surmised, the goal is to think big! Don’t worry about the details – there will be ways to work them out later. Instead, search for the new ideas that inspire and excite you. Jot them down or record them electronically. Then, when vacation time is over, go back to them. If they still inspire and excite you, chances are they will inspire and excite others, too. Use them to spark something new and different in your day-to-day world, and in the world your philanthropy serves!

Want more inspiration to spark your thinking? Purchase my new book, Confident Giving, now available on Amazon!

July 25, 2016 5,740 comments

Strategy

Speaking with One Voice: 5 Tips for Joint Public Statements

written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly

Once upon a time, it was unheard of for a foundation to engage in any kind of discourse involving public policy. Now, it’s becoming more and more commonplace, as foundations realize that in order to truly create positive change and address the various root causes of the issues they fund, policy must come into the picture.

Several of our clients have engaged in policy successfully in a variety of ways. Some work well in advance of legislative activity, bringing issues to light and convening experts to brainstorm potential policy solutions. Others work to support nonprofit organizations in their own advocacy efforts. Still others work after policies are enacted to help support their implementation.

Sometimes, foundations feel the need to speak out boldly and directly (within the limits of law) about existing policies that are detrimental to the communities they serve or to society as a whole. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen statements from the Kellogg Foundation and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation in response to HB2 in North Carolina, which has made national headlines for its discriminatory stance against transgendered people.

Speaking out about an existing law can be intimidating, and foundations may feel more comfortable by joining forces and sharing a voice. This provides cover, but it also means juggling multiple foundation missions, a range of board comfort levels with policy statements, as well as local or regional foundation relationships and politics. In other words, releasing a joint policy statement can be a tricky task.

Here are five key points to help simplify and smooth the process:

1) Agree on the frame of your message before you draft it. When the Reynolds foundations mentioned above released a joint statement in response to HB2, they agreed up front to frame the message in terms of how discrimination of any kind undermines their impact.

2) Know everyone’s “trigger words.” Some foundations will be more cautious than others, so you’ll need to err on the conservative side in crafting a message. Even words like “legislation” in a public statement may give some signers pause, and you’ll need to respect that to keep everyone on board.

3) Be clear up front about when and where your joint statement is to be released. While one media market or event may seem like the obvious choice to deliver the message to some foundations, others may have an entirely different agenda in mind. Agreeing ahead of time when and where you’ll release your joint statement helps keep your timeline moving and your text on point.

4) Agree on one attorney to vet the message for the group. This could be in-house counsel for the most conservative among you, or a respected foundation attorney from a firm that everyone trusts. Having one legal opinion saves time (and money) and can prevent your message from being overwhelmed by legalese.

5) Build in time for trustee approvals. Some foundations have a small group of trustees who are authorized to approve public statements and can do so rapidly. (In my opinion, this is a best practice that more foundations should adopt.) Others, depending on size, culture or circumstance, will need more time to send your draft statement through the vetting process. Give them a deadline, but be willing to be flexible. You may not want to drop a key name from your joint signers list just because they need two more days to approve the statement.

Creating a joint policy statement is rarely as simple as writing a draft and getting it signed and published. Be prepared for a constantly moving, dynamic process in which many different external and internal forces come into play as you drive for the final goal of releasing something meaningful and (hopefully) effective.

July 11, 2016 4,853 comments

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