When P150, a network of advisors to ultra-wealthy donors, polled its 423 members on their clients’ 2024 giving, the number was staggering: $60 billion and counting. That’s about 9 percent of philanthropy.
And in a 2024 survey of 258 U.S.-based philanthropy advisors, respondents reported they facilitated another notable dollar amount: an average of $50 million over the last year.
Advisors to the ultra-wealthy are on the front lines of philanthropy, and their influence is growing. Their services range from high-level help with strategic focus and overall spending targets, to fine-grain tactical help with legal filings or evaluating possible grantees. As wealth concentrates and more donors look for help starting or expanding their giving, a wide range of advisors — including wealth managers or legal experts — are benefiting.
But this growth field is raising concerns that the people who market themselves as philanthropy advisors don’t always have the necessary expertise.
“The capacity and expertise of those advisors to effectively guide their clients’ philanthropy is a bigger issue in the field than it has ever been before,” says Michael Moody, professor of philanthropic studies at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, who says that over the last 20 years the advising industry has ballooned in response to growing demand from elite donors.
In one sign of how much money is set aside for philanthropy, donor-advised funds now hold at least $250 billion earmarked for charitable use. Private foundation assets hit $1.5 trillion last year. The advising field is growing on the promise it can help clients give bigger, better, and faster.
“The engine that’s running it all is more and more money is being infused into the nonprofit world,” says Rick Peck, an independent philanthropy advisor and board president of the International Association of Advisors in Philanthropy.
Donors have long relied on informal advisers to guide their giving — the philanthropic uncle or the friend who serves on a dozen boards. But as a professional field, it’s only a couple decades old.
Firms like Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Arabella Advisors, and the Bridgespan Group launched in the 2000s and helped pioneer this function in the nonprofit sector. Bridgespan currently has hundreds of staff, more than $200 million in assets, and has been enlisted by the likes of MacKenzie Scott to help give away her fortune.
Though it’s hard to get a sense of just how many people do this job and who they are, nearly 2,000 U.S. LinkedIn members identify themselves as “philanthropy advisors.”
A Fragmented Field
The field is fragmented. Big retail banks, boutique wealth management firms, and family offices that work with ultra-wealthy families are staffing up with more people who can provide philanthropy expertise. In addition to the big advising firms, a whole crop of independent advisors has entered the fray. Foundations and donors wanting to spin up a climate giving strategy, for example, can turn to advisory firms with subject matter expertise.
“Advisors play this critical role that has been really under-leveraged and under-appreciated,” says Katarina Czarniak, who leads P150, the network of professional advisors launched with seed funding from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Schmidt Futures philanthropy and backed by the Gates, Ford, and Gordon & Betty Moore foundations, among others. But at the same time, Czarniak says, “Anyone can really call themselves a philanthropy advisor.”
And not all advisors have the same incentives.
When there’s crossover between wealth management and philanthropic functions, there’s little incentive to see money move rapidly to nonprofits, says Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. When business models are built on maintaining assets under management, “their interests are diametrically against the interests of taxpayers and charities,” he says. “They would like to see money parked in intermediaries and continue to take wealth management fees.”
Meanwhile, advisors strictly focused on philanthropy may be able to put together a portfolio of grantees that lead to more and better-spent money going to charities, Collins says.
Wealthy people tend to give differently and give to different types of organizations — often big organizations like universities, hospitals, museums — that have teams of development officers whose job it is to woo donors, Collins says. A good advisor can help the time-crunched wealthy person identify small effective charities without a high profile.
“There might be a value of having an intermediary person who’s not going to have their head turned by all the benefits of a big institution,” he says.
And then there’s the issue of fees. Hiring an advisor “could cost you more than other ways to get the work done,” says Katherina Rosqueta, who leads the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy. But advising business models vary. Some operate on retainer, others charge by project.
A recent survey from Daylight Advisors found wide variation in philanthropic advisors’ annual incomes: 16 percent said they earn $100,000 to $124,999, 13 percent reported earning $150,000 to $174,999, 10 percent make less than $75,000, and 6 percent said they make at least $300,000.
Lean Philanthropy or More Gatekeepers?
The boom in advising is also driven by a reluctance among some major donors to create large organizations, like the Gates Foundation or Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
“There’s something appealing to folks who want to have big results in their giving but don’t want to spend their time and energy on building the infrastructure themselves,” says Alex Johnston, founding partner of the advising firm Building Impact Partners. “The highest-capacity donors increasingly do not want to create large staffed entities.”
It’s part of a broader trend of big donors giving through pooled funds and intermediaries that promise to deploy large amounts of money effectively. Instead of building up a program staff of subject matter experts, these funds give donors confidence that they can outsource those functions to an intermediary while saving on overhead and administrative costs. (To be sure, these intermediaries have their own staffs and fees.) These kinds of donor collaboratives are on the rise, according to research from Bridgespan.
“Private family offices that have just a handful of philanthropy staff, who have hundreds of millions and billions of dollars to move, love these funds,” says Alexa Cortés Culwell, who spent nearly 15 years leading a philanthropy advisory firm serving major donors.
ICONIQ Capital, a multifamily office known to have worked with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sheryl Sandberg, has created its own pooled funds for donors to support causes like ocean conservation and maternal health.
“We’ve now advised on about $750 million in grants out the door in just five years,” says Matti Navellou, who has led the firm’s philanthropic advising arm since 2019.
Advisors say the biggest challenge holding their clients back from giving more is donors’ time. That’s one reason why wealth management firms are making philanthropy guidance a part of their value proposition.
“The one thing that you often hear is an overwhelming desire for things to be simpler,” says Debra Wetherby, an advisor with expertise in impact investing and whose firm Laird Norton Wetherby serves around 1,000 wealthy families. “When you have multigenerational wealth, it’s really hard for things to be truly simple. But to the extent that they can accomplish something like giving in a less complicated way, that is super attractive for people.”
The wealth management firm Jasper Ridge Partners counts some of the nation’s richest families among its clientele. Of its more than $40 billion under management, nearly half sits in foundations, trusts, and donor-advised funds earmarked for charitable purposes.
But over the last year, it has built a team of three philanthropy advisors led by April Chou, a veteran of the education reform movement with years of independent philanthropy consulting experience.
“Our goal really is to enable people to get started on their philanthropy much earlier than would typically be the case,” says Chou.
Training Needed
As the industry expands, some professionals are concerned that it suffers from a lack of standardization and coordination.
“Right now a lot of people can hang a shingle out and say, ‘I’m an independent philanthropic advisor,’ or ‘I am a family office and I have a philanthropic advisory group,’” says Peck, the board president of the International Association of Advisors in Philanthropy. In some cases, he says, “I don’t think there’s much meat on the bone.”
Rosqueta, with the Center for High Impact Philanthropy, has similar concerns.
“It’s still a bit of a Wild West,” Rosqueta says. Donors express frustration that the professionals they hire to help them with their philanthropy aren’t helping them enough. “What makes for a great service, and how do we understand the value of that service? We don’t have those benchmarks.”
Both the Center for High Impact Philanthropy and the Lilly Family School plan to launch new training programs for advisors later this year.
While many training programs for philanthropic advisors focus on hard skills, like legal, tax, and accounting basics, others emphasize soft skills like understanding intergenerational family dynamics.
21/64, a consulting firm that advises young donors, has provided training for nearly 3,000 philanthropic advisors since 2008. “We spend a lot of time training on active listening, not just telling the donors what they should be funding,” says Sharna Goldseker, founder of 21/64.
About 40 people have gone through an Advisor’s Accelerator training program run by Building Impact Partners that focuses on psychology and communications in interactions with donors.
“Our society has been trying this strategy of shaming to try to get more giving, and it’s manifestly not working,” says Johnston, the firm’s founder. “In a world where there can be so much frustration and even antipathy towards ultra-wealthy individuals, we actually need to come into advising with deep empathy for the experience and perspective of donors.”
