Outsized Impact

A Powerful Kind of Call and Response

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A community funder on the power of seeking grantee feedback and being responsive

This past summer, Exponent Philanthropy released Outsized Impact 2015, which centers around the stories of 7 inspiring funders, including the one below. Download the full Outsized Impact report >>

Newaygo County, MI, home to Fremont Area Community Foundation

The bucolic backdrop of Newaygo County, Michigan, looks like a living, breathing postcard. More than 350 miles of waterways glisten with natural splendor, and trees topped withjewel-colored leaves stretch for acres. Its beauty makes it an attraction for outdoorsy tourists and a point of pride for people who call it home.

Inside that picturesque wealth, Fremont Area Community Foundation serves Newaygo County’s network of five rural towns and 50,000 residents.

Preserving the county’s natural resources is one of the foundation’s five primary focuses, along with community and economic development, education, nonprofit sustainability, and poverty reduction. The challenge for the community foundation, one of the largest per capita in the country, is to avoid overextending any of its limited resources in the process of doing the work in those areas. It’s an often complicated science of weighing priorities against funding and support.

“When you’re working in that space, you can have the ‘S.T.P.’—the same ten people—and you find yourself tapping the same individuals for multiple things,” says program officer Wes Miller. “Grassroots organizations have limited capacity, so we have to be cognizant of how often we’re engaging them and making sure we’re doing that in a strategic fashion.”

The importance of actively listening to grantees is something he’s learned in his four years with the foundation. Findings from a grantee perception report prompted broad, empowering conversations about what the foundation is doing right and what it could be doing better.

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Relationships That Run Deep

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This past summer, Exponent Philanthropy released the report Outsized Impact 2015, which centers around the stories of 7 inspiring funders, including the story below. Download the full Outsized Impact report >>

Sasha_headshotSasha Rabsey woke up unusually early on a Tuesday morning when her dog barked out of the blue. Still bleary-eyed, she logged onto email to check in with her grant partners in Nepal on their recovery progress. It was then she saw the news: Another earthquake had hit. The second in a week.

“I’m sorry I’m not on top of my game this morning,” she says, clearly shaken by the news. It’s no wonder this hits her personally. Sasha has deep relationships with her grant partners in Nepal as well as other parts of the world. “My philanthropy is about women and about depths of relationship.”

As founder and director of The HOW Fund, a donor advised fund she established 8 years ago, Sasha has supported mentorship programs for women and girls worldwide, and she has been on the ground with partners in many of these countries. She also co-founded the Present Purpose Network, a group of highly engaged women funders in the United States and Europe making grassroots grants through a collective action fund.

Her passion for philanthropy was born in the bush of Africa.

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What Does It Mean to Truly Connect?

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2015 CONNECT | Chandler, AZHundreds 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.

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Pioneering a Unique Kind of Changemaking

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By Andy Carroll, Exponent Philanthropy

When philanthropists are at work—even if meeting with nonprofits, bringing together people in the community, or speaking out on important issues—it is their potential to bestow grants that draws our attention. Everything philanthropists do, whether or not it involves the transfer of dollars, is called grantmaking.

In a society where money consumes our attention, several dozen small-staffed foundations have been quietly experimenting with a kind of philanthropy that counts money as only one of several assets put to use—and sometimes the least important. These funders are achieving impact way beyond the size of their assets, staff, and boards.

Exponent Philanthropy believes these foundations are creating and refining, without fanfare, a kind of philanthropy that is influencing the practice of making social impact and change. These funders are setting trends—under the radar. I want to describe for you their unique, dynamic work, and the uncommon mindset of their leaders.

Very Little to Do With Making Grants

What first caught my attention was the outsized impact these small-staffed foundations were achieving in their towns, cities, and states. Then, as I interviewed their leaders, I realized that much or most of their time had nothing to do with making grants.

What are these catalytic funders achieving?

  • A small family foundation in California is building a network to engage parents in decision making about the public school system’s budget. The network is making the school system more accountable to the needs of students and families—in part by getting parents elected to the school board.
  • A small public foundation in Kansas spearheaded a campaign to pass a state smoking ban, long supported by the public but blocked by powerful interests. The foundation commissioned a public poll documenting citizen support and developed innovative ways to deliver the results to legislators.
  • A group of foundations in Texas—including several small-staffed foundations—worked together to advocate the state legislature to restore $4 billion in cuts to public education. The coalition commissioned research to document specific impacts of the proposed $5.4 billion in cuts; got the results into the hands of influential individuals and groups; engaged more than 80 foundations throughout the state; and published a report specially for state legislators, framing the impact from the perspective of parents.

Letting the Work and Issue Guide You

I believe two qualities set these philanthropists apart: a willingness to let the work guide you, and the courage to venture where the path leads—wherever it goes.

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Mark #GivingTuesday by Marking the Many Ways to Give

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By Henry Berman, Exponent Philanthropy

#GivingTuesday 2014Today is #GivingTuesday.

In 2012, New York’s 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation led the charge to create #GivingTuesday, the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, to inspire generosity on the heels of two days dedicated to spending: Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Hundreds of organizations from Sony to Skype signed on as partners, and thousands of nonprofits, schools, and cities launched #GivingTuesday campaigns to draw attention to their stories and their impact. 

To mark this day of giving, I encourage you to celebrate the many ways you can—and do—give. I particularly challenge you to think carefully about opportunities to give beyond financial gifts. Bringing nondollar assets to the table (alone or in combination with grants) is perhaps one of the most powerful ways we see our members lead.

Wrote Exponent Philanthropy Senior Program Director Andy Carroll earlier this year, “…some foundations and donors are quietly pushing the boundaries of philanthropic practice, with a type of philanthropy that hasn’t even been named yet. By combining grants with research, technical assistance, convening, connecting, advocacy, mobilization, and other kinds of direct action, philanthropists are changing, and sometimes completely transforming, their philanthropy.”

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The Way Forward: Find, Fund, and Support Social Entrepreneurs

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By Bill Draper, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation

In this open letter to philanthropists working with few or no staff, venture capitalist turned venture philanthropist Bill Draper outlines an approach to address today’s social issues. Just as the best venture capitalists achieve enormous, outsized impact in their chosen for-profit investments, each of us, as investors in the nonprofit arena, can strive for the same returns. Draper, one of the first to transfer his venture approach to philanthropy, offers a 3-step model and examples of successful investments.

At the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, we have one singular belief that drives everything we do. We believe that, with early funding and rigorous support, exceptional social entrepreneurs tackling some of society’s most complex problems can make the world a better place. It’s that simple.

We’ve taken this one singular belief, borrowed from our venture capital legacy, and created a unique model, proven over a decade, for working with world-class social entrepreneurs. We find, fund, and support leaders with exceptional promise and impactful ideas that have the potential to scale.

A time-tested three-step process

It’s hard work to be sure, but over the past 12 years, we have seen these organizations materially impact the lives of millions.

  • Find—Through exhaustive due diligence on hundreds of potential portfolio opportunities, working in close contact with partners, networks, and institutions crossing the public, private, and non-profit sector, we narrow our focus on a select group of exceptional leaders and organizations.
  • Fund—Early on, we recognized two things that drive our funding model: 1) unrestricted capital is the most precious capital that our portfolio companies need to build out their organizations; and 2) multiyear funding, as opposed to a one-time grant, is a critical success factor in helping these great organizations achieve scale.
  • Support—We also have learned that just giving early stage organizations money and checking in periodically isn’t enough. Our approach is materially different. We partner with the leaders of these organizations and provide rigorous and unrelenting ongoing support. We take a board seat for 3 years, often serving as the first outside board member. We work day and night with our grantees, opening our networks and contacts to each of these select organizations, facilitating meetings, convening critical resources, and working side by side with each leader to help all reach their full potential and build their organizations to scale.

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Doing More by Working Together

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By Diana Aviv, Independent Sector

The commentary below appeared in Exponent Philanthropy’s recent publication Outsized Impact, a report on philanthropy with few or no staff and the trends shaping its impact.

Reading up on philanthropy, I recently was reminded that the ancient Greeks so often got many things right. “To give away money,” said Aristotle, “is an easy matter and in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter.”

Philanthropy, done effectively, is hard work, with quite a due diligence checklist. As donors consider in what arena they want to see needle-moving change, top of mind is likely to be the vehicles—most often, the nonprofit grantees—through which they do their work. It is through these organizations that many funders are able to realize their goals and, in some cases, accomplish even more than they had hoped.

Bringing different resources to the relationship

Donors potentially bring to the table a lot more than financial resources. Donors have the potential advantage of a broad understanding of a given field, knowledge of the various groups working on particular sets of issues, and of the different approaches they use. The most experienced donors have shared that some of the best ways to learn about the work in a given field is to connect directly with the people working on the ground: the doers.

Donors and doers alike inhabit the same broad environment. Doers typically toil in the trenches and that brings them close to the issues, needs, and realities of the challenge they are trying to meet. Donors have perspective, gained from talking to many people and seeing the problem and what needs to be done from many angles. Doers often have the community networks, the experience with what works, and the ability to collaborate in partnership with others. Each brings to the relationship a set of distinctive assets and potential skills that can only make an active partnership between them more powerful. This interdependence is the heart of highly effective work with a combination of vision, perspective, grit experience, and shared passion that brings the parties together even before any formal relationship has been affirmed.

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Horizontal Is the New Vertical

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By Henry Berman, Exponent Philanthropy

The article below is featured in Exponent Philanthropy’s just released e-publication Outsized Impact, a first-of-its-kind report on trends shaping philanthropy with few or no staff. As practiced by small-staffed foundations, donor advised funds, giving circles, and individuals who choose to give big while keeping operations lean, this unique style of philanthropy is popular, powerful, and on the rise. In the report, more than a dozen thought leaders share their insights on how these philanthropists are achieving outsized impact across the country and around the world. Download the report

Historically philanthropy has, for the most part, operated in a vertical mode. At the top were the institutions and individuals holding the most money—and often operating with the most infrastructure. Below them was everyone else, including smaller organizations and individuals, and those seeking funding. The hierarchy, for those at the top, meant it was easy to be less connected to the communities and causes they supported. For funders at the bottom, it meant being less visible and less understood, working in the shadows of those at the top.

But no more.

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