Hundreds of funders gathered in Chandler, AZ, this week for Exponent Philanthropy’s 2015 CONNECT Conference. Chief Marketing and Development Officer Jeanne Metzger closed the conference today with a message centered on these questions:
What does it mean to truly connect?
How can you make the most of those connections?
Connections can take shape in many forms. And the outcomes often are diverse and meaningful. We make connections through phone calls, electronically, through attending conferences and meetings, at gatherings with friends and family, and even through a walk in our neighborhood.
As funders, you have many important connections: with your board, your staff, your grant partners, your communities.
True connections mean getting to know the other person, being an active listener, and taking the steps to transform a connection into a relationship. The most meaningful relationships are long-lasting and mutually beneficial.
In our recently published Outsized Impact 2015 report, we call out four characteristics that put funders on a path to achieve outsized impact. Making connections and building meaningful relationships are essential to all these characteristics.
- A passion for—and deep connection to—a cause or community
- The ability to see, recognize, and seize opportunities, often resulting from close ties to a cause or a community
- A willingness to take risks—acting thoughtfully to seize opportunities and leveraging their gifts
- A responsiveness to grantees, whether with dollars or other support, which follows from trusting relationships built on open and honest communication
After five weeks spent with her daughter volunteering at an orphanage in Ghana, Sasha Rabsey of The HOW Fund—one funder profiled in Outsized Impact 2015—returned thinking, What am I doing with my life? The experience spurred her interest in becoming a funder, but not a passive one.
“I wanted to be more than just money to the people I partnered with,” she said. “I wanted to know, What can I do that will best serve them?”
Sasha started The HOW Fund and since then has worked hard to empower women and girls worldwide and mitigate the power dynamics between funders and grantees.
One way she does this is through the HOW Fellowship, a program that supports grassroots leaders working with young women around the world. Each year, the fellowship awards five women social entrepreneurs a professional development grant to attend Opportunity Collaboration, a conference on poverty alleviation in Mexico.
“As funders, said Sasha, “we go to conferences and talk about our grantees, but our grantees are rarely in the room. I felt the conversations were going nowhere. I realized I could bring a group of incredibly dynamic grassroots women leaders into this space, where they can spend five days engaging and talking with people from all over the globe.”
One important role for every funder is to foster connections among grantees.
Just a few years ago, The Coleman Foundation, a provider of support to organizations that serve individuals with developmental disabilities, started receiving a number of proposals related to autism. It was a new dynamic for the foundation, and a topic with which it had little familiarity. In response, it convened a group of ten organizations that had been its grantees, some long-time grantees and others brand new, to help the foundation understand what was happening in the field relating to autism.
Said grantee Susan Kaufman, “When Coleman brought together the original ten agencies for a listening session on autism, it was nothing that any of us had ever experienced before. It was a really unique experience, and we were all very intrigued to see what this day was going to entail, and every excited to come together.”
“I was in the back of the room listening to this,” said Coleman’s Senior Program Officer Clark McCain, “and asked one of my colleagues to come over, and said, ‘Gosh, listen to this. They’re all experiencing the same types of things. They’re all struggling with these same challenges. We need to find a way to take advantage of this, to help them come together and do this not as an individual organization but as a collective.’”
“I think the lesson is that there’s power in people,” said Susan. “If funders truly want their dollars, their very precious resources, to go toward a bigger impact in the work that they do, bringing people together, as happened with The Coleman Foundation, is the best way to do it.”
We talked with Clark and Susan as part of our grant from the Fund for Shared Insight to create a series of videos on funders’ lessons learned. Please keep an eye out for the videos early next year as part of a “Philanthropy Lessons” campaign. Help us spread the word, and respond to our call for you to share your lessons learned.
Our thanks to the hundreds of funders who joined us for 2015 CONNECT—and to all of you following the buzz from afar on Facebook and Twitter.
Mark your calendar for Exponent Philanthropy’s 2016 National Conference and 20th anniversary celebration, September 26-28 in Chicago.
