Many grant makers seek to shift how government, business, or nonprofits tackle urgent problems such as climate change, poverty, or threats to democracy. And they also want to influence one another, persuading their peers to adopt an urgent cause or support a valued organization.
But today we’re seeing a rise in established foundations, high-net-worth donors, and impact investors trying to change the way philanthropy itself works, in pursuit of a more effective and equitable philanthropic world.
These changes are urgently needed, as critiques of philanthropy have made abundantly clear in recent years. A lot of us need to take new approaches or risk failing to advance our missions.
Important as this work is, we don’t know much about how or why it works — or doesn’t. To fill this gap, the Ford Foundation commissioned Milway Consulting to scrutinize 12 specific efforts aimed at influencing how grant makers and others engage in philanthropy, to better understand what causes change efforts to stall or gain widespread adoption.
One thing became clear — there are four keys to success, and skipping any of them derails efforts to influence change. Here’s what works.
Document the problem with hard data and define what success looks like.
The first step in any influence effort involves gathering hard, data-driven evidence of the problem and indicators of a path forward that are strong enough to draw others to the cause, while leaving room for those who join the cause to put their fingerprints on the strategy. This is different from a hunch that things are not as they should be, or amassing a collection of anecdotes that raise alarm. This process requires quantification: a pin in the map of the problem that says, “We are here” and an arrow that defines the arc of change, with a clear destination “We want to get there.” And it means tracking progress against that arc as the influence effort unfolds, to test whether the approach is working and change strategy where it isn’t.
This seems intuitive, but it’s remarkably hard to have the patience to define a problem this rigorously — and to agree on a shared definition of success when multiple players with competing agendas are joining forces. The simplest things can be the most necessary — and elusive.
For some efforts, the solution is to move the pin on the map. The Bridgespan Group, for example, in 2015 started promoting the idea of “Big Bets for Social Change” by noting that 80 percent of major donors flagged social change as part of their missions, yet only 20 percent of commitments of $10 million or more went to nonprofits focused on social change. At launch, the Big Bets “we are here” pin sat at 20 percent of publicly announced grants. But as Bridgespan officials grappled with defining success, they realized that tracking the hundreds of commitments of $10 million or more over years could prove difficult, so they shifted the indicator to the number of public commitments of $25 million or more. There were 48 such bets in 2015 from grant makers in the United States, and Bridgespan sought to see that number double to 100 by 2025. Since the launch, Bridgespan has tracked annual growth in such commitments: They jumped by a third in 2016 to 65, then crept up 6 percent the following year and just 1 percent in 2018. At the same time, major giving through donor-advised funds, which need not be made public, has surged, spurring Bridgespan to revisit how it tracks and promotes big bets. This discipline of tracking what is happening helps keep its strategy on course.
Sometimes a key step is to recognize that the map has changed and that it’s time to chart a new course. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s program called Philanthropy’s Promise sought to encourage foundations to pledge that they would award 50 percent or more of their grants to marginalized communities and 25 percent or more to efforts that advance social justice.
But finding current data to track progress proved a recurring challenge. On its map of change, NCRP decided its goal was to persuade foundations that represented 10 percent of overall giving to commit to making the promise. In five years, it galvanized 202 such commitments, which represented 9 percent of total foundation giving. But Jeanné Lewis, a top NCRP official, told us in an interview that it proved too difficult to gather accurate data to confirm follow-through, in part because federal disclosures of grant-making activity typically are filed two to three years after the money has been awarded.
Since then, NCRP has refined its focus to advance strategies in philanthropy that support social-movement building. One current effort, Power Moves, provides tools for grant makers to assess their ability to leverage their power in support of social-justice groups through grant making, sharing governance authority, and wielding political capital.
Recruit influential people to advance a new idea and give them the tools to be persuasive.
As with so many other things in philanthropy, who pitches an idea is almost as important as the idea itself.
The Giving Pledge’s Rob Rosen and its founding director, Olivia Leland, for example, said a key to success was the time co-chairs Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett dedicated to enlisting the founding 40 billionaires who would pledge half or more of their wealth to charity. This upfront work allowed the Gateses and Buffett to announce the idea with 40 billionaires already committed, a great way to demonstrate the strength of the idea.
Getting those early adopters was just the first step. The second was to persuade the billionaire pledgers to share their knowledge and draw in others. The Giving Pledge instituted learning sessions to help the billionaires who had committed share ideas on how to give more effectively and to impress the urgency of giving now. In many instances, groups of pledgers formed to advance specific causes, such as education and climate change and encouraged one another to give more.
Conversely, the D5 Coalition, which sought to influence foundations to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in their leadership, grant making, and investing, relied largely on its small staff to add coalition members. It ended up persuading many midlevel foundation officials to join the coalition, and they contributed ably to discussions but did not feel they had the authority to pledge action on behalf of their organizations. “Philanthropic leaders can best be persuaded by each other to change,” concluded Kelly Brown, D5 executive director, in an interview.
Show what it looks like to change.
Philanthropists like to see what others are doing before they decide whether it’s worthwhile to take a new approach.
A great example of the power of visible examples came from Blue Meridian Partners, an investment platform that launched in 2016 to mobilize long-term growth capital for rigorously vetted nonprofits with multiyear plans to expand proven programs to curb poverty and spur economic mobility.
As Nancy Roob, head of Blue Meridian, asked philanthropists to commit at least $15 million each to join the effort, she could point to the impact of growth capital on Nurse-Family Partnership, which had received such funding from previous efforts led by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which incubated Blue Meridian.
Nurse-Family Partnership had expanded into a national organization from its origins as a Colorado home-visitation program to first-time, poor mothers and maintained its more than sixfold payback in societal savings for every $1 invested to help a mother raise a healthy baby and earn a living. Blue Meridian’s website profiles specific progress that came from the nurse visits — a 45 percent reduction in child deaths, a 48 percent reduction in child abuse, and an 82 percent increase in mothers’ employment — and it notes the challenges the nonprofit faces in its efforts to make even more progress. Blue Meridian similarly showcases the other organizations it supports, such as Upstream and Year Up. Such rigor and transparency have helped Blue Meridian attract more donors and more than double its investment fund to $1.7 billion in three years.
Meanwhile, Blue Meridian, itself a visible example of a pooled-investment platform, has influenced others. Roob observed in an interview, “I can see elements of Blue Meridian in up to 10 other aggregated-investment platforms that have since been launched, such as Co-Impact, the Audacious Project, Lever for Change, and the Collaborative Fund for Women’s Safety and Dignity.”
We also saw efforts suffer for lack of exemplars. The Full Cost Project, advanced by Philanthropy California, for example, seeks to spur foundations to adopt grant making that takes into account overhead expenses and all the other costs involved for a nonprofit to deliver on its mission and sustain its operations. Over the course of four years, the effort identified barriers to and benefits from paying full costs, created forums for grant makers and nonprofits to discuss them, and offered training for organizations that wanted to adopt a full-cost approach. Yet because the focus during the first four years was on changing cultures and helping organizations learn new skills, few examples stood out of foundations or nonprofits changing their ways. Surveys showed that the training efforts have helped increase knowledge about full costs but haven’t yet led to a major change in behavior. Philanthropy California plans to launch a third phase of the project in 2020 to promote changes in practice.
Eliminate obstacles to adopting a new idea.
Anything that requires people or organizations to do something extra, difficult, or outside their own organization, like building a database of evidence or spreading the word about a new approach, can torpedo even the best idea. Too often, grant makers think they can advance an idea with a little bit of a lot of people’s time. But the only efforts that succeeded were so well staffed that there were few undue time pressures on participants.
We found other ways to eliminate psychological and structural barriers that are worth considering. The Full Cost Project, for example, knew it could face a challenge from the power imbalance between grant makers and nonprofits, so it hired the Nonprofit Finance Fund, an organization well known for its work with both grant makers and nonprofits, to coach both kinds of organizations together in calculating the full cost of achieving a nonprofit’s aims. Meanwhile, the Giving Pledge got over a hurdle faced by billionaires who were unsure what society expected of them: It published their commitment letters online and at the Smithsonian, sending a clear message about what dozens of billionaires had set as a standard. And Big Bets landed on a clear success proxy — a commitment of $25 million toward social change — that any philanthropist could understand.
Still, most efforts to influence grant makers lacked centralized staffing and other resources that would have accelerated progress. For example, the Full Cost Project, which had an $800,000 budget, coordinated activities with one project manager plus portions of staff members’ time from three regional member associations of Philanthropy California, which proved a stretch. Similarly, D5, on an $8 million, five-year budget, built robust research studies and tools and fostered hundreds of discussions. But it lacked the central support to publicly activate a campaign it designed, Take 5, to encourage foundations to take and report five steps to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
An evaluation of D5’s work showed that the effort did raise foundations’ aspirations to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, but the data systems were not in place to track evidence of change in how philanthropy awarded grants, recruited talent, or otherwise changed their operations to advance these goals.
The Ford Foundation commissioned this research not just to help other foundations and donors learn to influence one another but also because we have a very specific goal in mind. We want to do all we can to encourage other foundations to provide large, long-term, flexible grants that truly strengthen institutions. We’ve made our own commitment to do just that through our Build program, but Build won’t make a transformational difference to the nonprofits we care about unless a broad range of foundations change their way of operating.
We recognize that we are playing catch-up because other grant makers have been on this path for years. We hope to use our platform to increase adoption of this practice, not least by celebrating the trailblazers, like the Trust-Based Philanthropy Initiative and the LEAP Ambassadors Community.
How can Ford and others make it easier to get rid of the obstacles that prevent foundations from making short-term, small commitments bound by rigid rules? What evidence will make the case? How can we create the readiness for change among foundation leaders and staff? We are asking those questions as we think through how to engage a coalition, equip it to help others adopt more effective grant-making practices, and build a showcase of examples to point the way to a better philanthropic norm.
We’ll be eager to share what we learn about what works — and what does not — as we all seek to ensure philanthropic dollars make a bigger difference in changing the world.