What Are Your Funders Thinking?

There’s a predictability to conferences that makes the more intimate ones a privilege. My role at the Clinton Global Initiative is a particular privilege: to ask, listen, and write.

The leaders I heard in sessions and interviews hailed from the Ford, Surdna, Open Society, and Kellogg foundations, among others. They are remaking their organizations for a new era.

What do these leaders want you to know? How can you work within their existing systems? How can you effect philanthropic change within the current structure?

“Sometimes in philanthropy, we are unreasonable.”

Funders have a keen awareness that their application and reporting guidelines are untenable for many. They restrict their awards. They shy away from sustained support. Need we mention expectations once you receive a grant? This is the “unreasonable” system that has dominated throughout my career.

It’s like a dysfunctional family. You know it’s broken, and yet you can’t break away from it.

The foundation leaders I heard from have begun to pivot—or at least challenge—philanthropy’s traditional culture.

However, not all funders are following this trend. If your prospecting practices exhaust you, consider limiting your prospect list to foundations with which you can reasonably engage.

Yes, most will have some angle that frustrates you. If you’ve been at this work long enough, you can distinguish between requirements that trigger an eyeroll and those that create a major hurdle for you or your colleagues.

Back to that dysfunctional family: It might be annoying, but will it keep you from attending Thanksgiving?

“Foundations align themselves in lanes of grantmaking that are not aligned with the way people live their lives.”

This admission is becoming increasingly obvious to grantseekers: The more intertwined our social drivers become, the harder it is to fit nonprofits’ work into the narrow lanes that funders draw.

What foundations consider unrelated issues—climate, equity, public health, economic development—you may know to be interrelated.

Some influential foundations are pulling away from traditional lanes. Take JPB Foundation’s recent job description for an executive of “movement infrastructure and exploration.” I expect to see more in the way of broad interest areas.

Foundation leaders admit that their funding strategies have been influenced by conversations with grantees and non-grantees alike. Help your funder understand the connection between overlapping issues. Do so away from the crush of a foundation’s application deadline and you may well seed a new way of thinking.

“Systems have the greatest potential for change.”

This was the most talked-about theme I’ve heard from funders recently. Maybe you don’t see your nonprofit in the “systems change” space.

Consider this range of strategies, as defined by Alison Badgett, as you consider whether your organization can speak to funders from a systems change angle:

• Policy: This is our sector’s default way of talking about change at scale, via institutions.
• Programs: Individual-level change happens in response to your organization’s services.
• Public awareness: Shifts in perception are the hallmark of societal or cultural change.

Unless a prospective funder specifies policy as the preferred change agent, don’t count your nonprofit out if advocacy isn’t on your agenda. Consider framing your issue by making a powerful case for systems change of another sort.

“Everybody wants to do their own things their own way.”

Talk about the need for systems change! I’m waiting for AI or some miracle of nature to bring us the streamlined funder application process our sector needs.

If only we had a database of nonprofits with a little AI magic sprinkled on top, funders could tap a few keys and come up with an ideal list of prospects.

As serious as this issue is to our human resources, it seems quaint when you consider what some prominent philanthropists endure these days….

“People want to do philanthropy to do good and don’t want to risk their lives doing it.”

These words came from Alex Soros. As the chair of Open Society Foundations, he went straight at an issue that other leaders avoid: There is real risk in taking on some of society’s most pressing issues.

The son of longtime foundation head George Soros, Alex knows more than anyone the risk that philanthropies take these days. His father was a leading figure on so many fronts. By putting his name behind formerly honorable ideas like democracy and human rights, he has become a leading target of forces opposed to those principles.

We on the grantseeking side tend to think funder risk translates to mundane decisions, such as whether to fund general operating support. I heard from multiple foundation heads that their peers mostly shudder at the idea of supporting groups that stage marches or otherwise upset the cultural norm.

In earlier eras, leaders’ risk-taking might have only gone so far as to expose them to scrutiny from their boards. Few experience threats as serious as the Soros family, but many do get criticized mightily, and that can quickly escalate in our current environment.

For that and so many other reasons, I admire Alex Soros, Darren Walker, and the many other leaders in philanthropy who do take big risks.

“Big bets” in philanthropy are not all measured in dollars.

We can hold up our end of the trust-based philanthropy equation by acknowledging the risks and challenges our funders face.

In the end, we are all in this together.