power dynamics

My Observations About Good Deeds Done Well

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By Henry Berman, Exponent Philanthropy

I spent a lot of time in and out of the hospital last fall. I wasn’t the patient, although in countless hours beside my wife’s bedside, I had considerable time to think, observe, and learn. Thankfully, with much credit to her doctors and medical team, all signs are now positive.

What became evident to me early in our ordeal is the incredible parallel between philanthropy and the delivery of medical care. Doctors, nurses, and support staff of all types were regular visitors to my wife’s bedside. Some came with urgency, whereas others had the luxury of accommodating her, as when the physical therapist offered to return later upon arriving to find my wife sleeping. Each brought a desire to help her improve, just as we each in philanthropy share a desire to bring about change or sustain progress.

Whereas many aspects of our hospital stays were the same, the variations provided a window into how people deliver care under varying circumstances. Over time I watched as different nurses brought an important daily injection. Most came in with a smile and a reminder of the medical purpose. They would engage in conversation and offer a choice of arm or leg for receiving the shot. Others (only a few, thankfully) came in, barely said a word, and, in a matter-of-fact manner, administered the injection before leaving. The injection’s effect on the body was the same, yet its impact on the mind was considerably different.

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Philanthropy Lessons: The Power Dynamic

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By Jenna Wachtmann, Ball Brothers Foundation

Today Exponent Philanthropy releases “Philanthropy Lessons: The Power Dynamic,” the latest video in its 9-part Philanthropy Lessons series:

It explores the dynamics of grantor/grantee relationships, and I encourage you to weigh in with your thoughts and practical ideas about managing these dynamics. You can share your comments and ideas below, at www.philanthropylessons.org, or via social media: #MyPhilLesson. I’d love to learn from you, and I know others would too!

I’ll always remember one of my first visits to a private foundation. At the time, I was working for an inner-city nonprofit organization where I juggled grantwriting, individual donor fundraising, marketing, and a variety of other responsibilities. I was already nervous about the foundation visit, and, by the time I was escorted into the foundation’s gleaming conference room with its dark wood paneling, I was really on edge. But the program officer I met with immediately set me at ease with her friendly demeanor, well-researched and thoughtful questions, and sincere interest in the organization that I represented and the people we served.

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The Attitude, and What We Can Learn From Funders Who Possess It

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By Mark Larimer, Foundant Technologies

one-plus-oneAt Foundant, we are fortunate to work with many grantmakers of different geographies, sizes, areas of interest, and grantmaking styles. Yet, the vast majority share a similar trait. They view their responsibility as maximizing the impact their philanthropic assets will have today and in the future. This perspective fuels their passion, and it is tangible. Around our office, we call it “The Attitude,” and we purposely search out these types of organizations as clients.

Here’s some of what we mean by “The Attitude” and what we can all learn from the funders who possess it.

Focus on collaboration, not directives.

Foundant, in general, does not work with the world’s biggest grantmakers. Instead, most of our clients are constrained by their staff size and rely heavily on grantees and nonprofits as the experts within their communities or focus areas. Due to this reliance, our clients end up fostering a more collaborative relationship with their grantees. They rely on them for resources, information, and expertise. Our clients tend to consider their grantees as partners, in the truest sense of the word. The resulting relationships end up being stronger than the traditional funder–nonprofit relationship, and typical power dynamics are less of an issue. The payback is more truthful, collaborative interactions with their grantees.

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‘Opting out’ is OK in this funder-nonprofit dynamic

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By , The Patterson Foundation 

Originally appeared in a July 6, 2015 post to The Patterson Foundation’s blog

opt-outYou have a good idea for your organization. You have the opportunity to receive free consulting to help implement that idea. However, you aren’t sure your organization has the capacity to execute on that idea. What do you do? Do you take the valuable, free consulting or not?

Most would view this scenario from the fund recipient’s perspective. In other words, we believe it should be the recipient’s decision whether or not to take the help. We would hope that they would say, “No,” unless they were sure they had the ability to execute. This is logical.

But, alas, decisions involving money aren’t always logical. In the nonprofit space, if a funder is willing to make an investment, the nonprofit organization would be hard-pressed to say, “No.” Financial resources are limited, so when the opportunity to receive something of considerable value presents itself, the nonprofit leader is almost required to accept it. Not doing so might prevent future opportunities. The money creates the imbalance in power between the funder and fundee involved, and this often forces the fundee to accept money/resources it can’t optimally deploy.

The Patterson Foundation’s Theory About This Dynamic

To avoid this, we believe it is the funder’s responsibility to rebalance this dynamic so that the best decision can be made – even if it means the nonprofit does not accept the money/resources at this time. The Patterson Foundation (TPF) recently tested this theory with our latest initiative: Margin & Mission Ignition.TPF engaged No Margin, No Mission to lead nonprofit organizations through three educational labs, 14 weeks of business planning coaching, and 14 weeks of implementation — all followed by a year of support for developing an earned-income revenue stream.

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Smarter Site Visits

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By Samantha Alarie-Leca, The West Foundation

This post originally appeared on GrantCraft’s blog (May 6, 2015). Author Samantha Alarie-Leca, program officer with The West Foundation in Indianapolis, IN, is an Exponent Philanthropy member and alumna of our Next Gen Fellows Program. Learn more about the 2015 Next Gen Fellows Program starting May 18 in Washington, DC

A former colleague and friend at a small education nonprofit recently called to pick my brain about the role of site visits from a foundation perspective.  She was in the midst of planning a visit with a local program officer. A $10,000 grant was on the line, and she wanted everything to go off without a hitch. Her thoughtfully prepared agenda for a daylong visit included stops at staff offices as well as program facilities, viewing education programs in action, and hearing directly from several beneficiaries. Key program and development staff were also well-prepped on talking points regarding the grant request.

“Should I be doing more?” she asked.

I was a bit taken aback; her plan sounded great, but between the preparation and the actual visit, it also seemed to be a very time-intensive endeavor for her small team, especially considering the modest grant size. This conversation was an excellent reminder that most site visits are highly planned by nonprofits and can take significant effort, staff time, and resources for organizations to implement. For small organizations in particular, that might actually mean time away from directing programs or operations.

As a program officer at a small, private foundation, I strive to make site visits an efficient and productive platform for mutual learning and relationship-building. But, I began to wonder, were grantees putting in overtime to prepare for meetings with me? If so, were there simple steps I could take to minimize unnecessary stress or work on their behalf?

While I feel a firm responsibility to conduct thorough diligence and hold myself and grantees to high standards, I also want to respect their limited time and resources. In this spirit, I had a candid discussion with grantee Steve Schwartz, the co-founder of Upaya Social Ventures, to explore the benefits and challenges of funder visits from the nonprofit perspective. During my conversation with Steve, and through my own site visit experiences, four practices emerged as critical for effective site visits:

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Strengthen Your People Powers

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By Janice Simsohn Shaw, Exponent Philanthropy

Philanthropy, from the Greek word for “to love humanity,” is inherently a human enterprise.

In this business of helping to solve complicated social problems, we’re bound by the opportunities and challenges of working with other people to do so. It can be emotional work, and it’s work that involves very diverse people who span different generations, politics, cultures, genders, educational and professional backgrounds, and the list goes on.

Whether you’re managing asset growth, tackling generational succession, refining your mission, or simply doing the work at hand to serve your philanthropic goals, being attentive to the human elements can strengthen your philanthropy and make it more pleasurable.

At Exponent Philanthropy, we look at a number of skills and approaches that can help you develop the “people powers” necessary to work sensitively and effectively with those around you. Some call these topics soft skills, but we think that name downplays their importance in guiding your philanthropy through moments of change as well as its status quo. We call them effectiveness skills instead, and explore topics such as:

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How Do Funders Navigate the Power of the Purse?

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By Elaine Gast Fawcett, Four Winds Writing, Inc.

Too often, grantees do the asking, reporting, and proving, while donors sit in positions to say yes or no, how much, when, and what’s required. Navigating the complex grantee–grantor relationship takes more than just good intentions—it takes flexibility, finesse, and a sincere desire to balance the power dynamics at play.

Katherine Lorenz, president of the Cynthia & George Mitchell Foundation, knows about the dynamics between funders and grantees. Before becoming a funder, Lorenz spent years as a fundraiser and grantee. In 2003, she cofounded a nonprofit in Mexico to advance food sovereignty in rural Oaxaca. That experience gave her perspective on the challenges grantees face.

As a fundraiser, Lorenz always felt “like we were asking for a favor: ‘Would you mind’ or ‘Would you maybe consider giving to us?’ ” In addition, she found that many funders were opaque in what they wanted; it was never that clear how to get in the door. “Every funder had different rules and requirements, how they wanted the proposal and budget to be,” she says. Especially with small funders, the process seemed impossible to navigate.

Build Transparency and Trust

Lorenz says the greatest gift funders can give upfront is clarity about what they do and do not fund. “When you have a focused strategy,” she says, “it enhances the relationship with the people you say yes to, as well as the people you say no to. This kind of transparency helps ease the power dynamic.” To this end, one of the first things Lorenz did as president of her family’s foundation was create a website. “Even in the midst of transition, we’ve tried to be as transparent as we can about what we fund, the program areas we think we’re moving into, and the timing of it all.”

Although the Mitchell Foundation doesn’t tend to fund many unsolicited grantees, it nonetheless offers an online grantee portal, where any organization can engage with the foundation. “This is an entryway for organizations to apply and be seen by program staff, and it helps us, as funders, to know who’s out there.”

“There’s a lot of talk in the funder world about grantees being partners, but it does not feel like that in the grantee experience,” she says. “To be able to be honest with a funder and be treated as a true thought partner—that’s a rare and wonderful experience.”

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Inverting the Power Imbalance: Testing a New Grantmaking Program That Enables Nonprofits to Do Their Jobs

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By Suzanne Skees, Skees Family Foundation

Excerpted from the original post that appeared on Seeds of Hope, the Skees Family Foundation blog, on June 28

It sounds ludicrous—and it is: Often we donors throw roadblocks in front of the very programs we seek to support. Requiring reams of application pages, hours of preliminary meetings, and acrobatics of performance if and when we fund, is crazy-making for the social entrepreneurs and nonprofits we supposedly trust to solve our most entrenched environmental, financial, educational, and social problems.

This is not just theory. It’s not overworked, underpaid employees whining. We’ve gleaned an inside view of this reality through field visits with and story gathering for our partners, some of the world’s smallest grassroots organizations. Because our grants are tiny and our ambitions are mighty, we’ve always approached our work as if the time we give to partners’ communications, strategy, program development, and fundraising matters more than money. Our multifaceted style of partnership allows us to see a lot more than our partners’ websites, fundraising events, and annual reports. We try to work with them and for them, rather than the other way around.

No one engaged in grantmaking or impact investing wants to believe we’re thwarting our partners’ best intentions. I tried for years to convince myself that the power imbalance between the donor and recipient didn’t have to exist, if only we approached people with honesty and humility. But guess what? It does. To change that dynamic, we asked, could we change the structure of how we give?

Seeking Ways to Bring Greater Efficiency to Grantmaking

We wondered, when we undertook a landscape analysis of our own funding area (global access to education and jobs), if nonprofits could operate more effectively if they didn’t need to spend so much time, energy, and yes, even funding, on chasing down the next grant dollar. [Editor’s note: See Project Streamline’s Guide to Streamlining, a set of tools to help funders reduce the burden on grantees and themselves]

Our grantmaking committee and all-family board engaged in some wonderfully deep conversations about our intentions. Since we have such a small budget (~$150,000), we want to direct every dollar for maximum impact. We agreed on some core objectives:

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Creating Fair, Equitable Relationships in International Grantmaking

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By Rachel Humphrey, TCC Group

In her previous post, Rachel introduced us to The HOW Fund and the firsthand experiences that shaped its international grants. Here she discusses a key ingredient for success in international giving—and one that applies to domestic grantmaking as well: creating fair, equitable relationships.

The right question is not “What can I do for you?” It is “What can I do with you?”

When I worked at the Global Fund for Women (GFW), one of our mantras was, “How we do our work is as important as what we do.”

This resulted in a grantmaking program that very deliberately trusted and respected grantees’ expertise and decisions, including providing general operating support. We operated without deadlines and accepted unsolicited proposals in any language and any format.

On site visits in Kyrgyzstan and Morocco, I witnessed firsthand the impact of our approach on the relationships between GFW and its grantees. Grantees always set GFW apart from their other funders and described GFW’s support as “much more than money.” They also felt comfortable enough to provide candid feedback on GFW’s work, and often shared their programs’ failures and challenges as freely as their successes.

Although the funder–grantee power dynamic certainly did not disappear, the playing field for these grantees was a bit more level than with other funders.

What can small-staff philanthropy take from this example?

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Ask Your Way to Impact: Nonprofit Dialogue

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By Lindsay Matush, The Brown Sisters Foundation

How can a small foundation with a limited grantmaking budget leverage its resources to make an even greater impact? This second post in our 3-part series offers questions to ask nonprofit organizations as your foundation pursues impact. The first post shares questions to ask other funders; the third explores the value of foundation self-assessment.

When small foundation leaders meet with nonprofit organizations, it is important to ask great questions that get beyond the answers we can find in an annual report or theory of change. I approach nonprofit leaders not as organizations that need our resources to do their work, but as partners who are working toward the impact we both want to achieve. Continue reading →