Beginning Our Philanthropic Journey
Hello Clients and Friends. We are celebrating my firm’s tenth anniversary not just with a discussion with you on strategic philanthropy but also with a demonstration of how you might do it—and so, my colleagues and I are setting off on a five-month journey to experience and demonstrate some best practices of strategic philanthropy! We’ll post a monthly update of what we did, how it went, where we’ve been, and where we are going, and we invite you to join us by reading along and sharing your comments and questions. Our itinerary is as follows:
February: Clarify core values among our family (ok, our colleagues) that will identify common ground and drive our philanthropic decisions.
March: Narrow the focus areas that philanthropy will support and create a definition of desired impact.
April and May: Find and vet focus-aligned nonprofit organizations and fellow donors with whom we might collaborate.
June: Make gift(s) to selected nonprofit organizations and develop a plan to track impact.
Follow-up: From the four “philanthropic currencies” that we can offer nonprofits—Treasure, Time, Talent, and Ties to the Community, how might we provide more support to our grantee(s)
Follow-up: Stay connected to grantee(s) to assess ongoing needs and impact of giving.
Here’s what we did in February. From our Zoom presentation we learned:
Effective philanthropy is about aligning values to causes—it’s a marriage that requires both partners.
Identifying values can be done alone or in a group, with family or not, better with multi-generations invited to participate and speak up, with controlling family members taking a step back to watch others shine. Values clarification exercises are available from facilitators or online; facilitators can come from your local community foundation, independent philanthropic advisors, even your wealth advisors, and sometimes your legal advisors.
Identifying causes starts with quantitative data and qualitative stories. Finding data takes a bit of research (you can do it, your children and grandchildren can do it, and facilitators who do it can bring it to you).
Check out Impact Essex County for one example of data available to you. Its landing page says it best: “This project spans 100 indicators tracking the quality of life in Essex County, spotlighting where the county shines and where it struggles. The data and analysis serves as the foundation for the community’s needs assessment and is used to drive collaborative planning, priority-setting and action toward a strong future for the 789,000 residents of our community.”
Other communities have their own community foundation—look at the Council on Foundation’s Community Foundation Locator: Community Foundation Locator.
For qualitative stories—read your local newspapers, talk to the organizations you most admire, pay a site visit to local organizations—attend some of the many programs that they keep inviting you to!
A very cool place to visit: the website for the Center for Effective Philanthropy. And take a look at their study 5 Things Nonprofits Want You to Know.
A “systems philanthropy” approach implemented by community foundations (where you can join as a partner) starts with (i) data and then (ii) the convening of cross-sector leaders from community nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, and government officials, along with citizens and especially citizen consumers, to discuss services available and not available to them, then (iii) discussion of scalable solutions, collaborations and partnerships, then (iv) fundraising and funding with a reasonable amount of risk—this requires the appetite to try, pilot, test, learn, and iterate (try again). Don’t wait until a solution is perfect before trying it.
Plan your evaluation before you start so that the grant is more targeted to the outcomes you desire. Evaluate yourself, or bring in an outside evaluator, by asking: How did the money change lives? What were the barriers? What did not go well and what do we wish was different? I love this one: Was there community engagement?
And, this month the six of us at the law firm (four lawyers and our Estate Manager and our Financial Manager) sat with our wonderful facilitator—Stacey Landry from Essex County Community Foundation, and she took us through an examination of our individual values and where we could find common ground (we actually found some!). We individually reflected on our motivations and values:
What do you hope to gain from your giving?
What do you want to sustain or keep the same in the world?
What do you want to change in the world?
What issues interest you most, and why?
What life experiences have shaped the way you look at the world?
What values have your family and other role models passed on to you?
We each then studied a list of 57 values (from “accountability” to “unity”) to choose our respective top ten; then we whittled our list to five and then three; then we stood and shared with each other our top three, and explained. It was fantastic. I’ve known my colleagues for years, but I had no idea. There was overlap among our value words, and even more so as we consolidated them into four broad categories
Community, Connection, Family, Collaboration.
Dignity, Love, Kindness, Empathy.
Equity, Empowerment, Accessibility, Growth.
Justice.
We are so looking forwarding to next month where we will be translating our values into causes that we want to support. We’re open to suggestions where you see that our values are a good foundation!
Best,
Bob