Alliance in collaboration with WINGS has been commissioned by Propel Philanthropy to conduct a 10-part interview series on the work of Social Impact Infrastructure Organisations and the benefits they bring to the sector. This interview series is aiming to collectively galvanize a significant change in how funders and others think and feel about building infrastructure, unlocking global resources, and establishing robust ecosystems.

Over the course of the coming weeks, these interviews will be published here. In this instalment of the series of conversations with the representatives of social impact infrastructure organisations (SIIOs), Andrew Milner talks to Dave Biemesderfer at United Philanthropy Forum.

AM: Can we start off by talking about what United Philanthropy Forum does and how you describe yourself?

Dave Biemesderfer, United Philanthropy Forum

DB: We describe ourselves as a nationwide network of regional and national philanthropy associations and networks. Sometimes, I say we’re a network of networks, or an association of associations, and our vision is a courageous philanthropic sector that catalyses a just and equitable society where all can participate and prosper. Everything we do is working towards that vision. We work to lead, connect, convene, mobilise and inform our members. We are now 95 regional and national philanthropy associations and networks, or philanthropy-serving organisations, who collectively represent over seven thousand funders across the United States. We work in two ways; to help our members be the best organisations they can be individually and support them in that very vital role they play in the philanthropy sector and we also work to help them have an impact in the sector collectively. We try to provide opportunities for our members to work together to drive change in the field in ways we think will increase philanthropy’s impact.

We leveraged about $300,000 in philanthropic investment compared to more than $250 million in government and philanthropic investment in the 2010 census that could be attributed directly to the work of our initiative.

And how do you do that? 

Part of our work is the more traditional kind of helping our members connect with their peers who are doing work like them to learn and share with each other about what works well. We collect data every year about our members in terms of their compensation, their benefits, the key metrics to help them shape their work, and provide a wide range of resources and information about the work of running a PSO. But we also have special initiatives. We identify key strategic areas where we want to help our members work together for greater impact. Our first big initiative, begun in 2016, was to engage philanthropy around the 2020 census. We have an initiative to advance racial equity in philanthropy. We have a rural equity initiative to help lead to more and more effective philanthropic investment in rural communities in the United States. We’ve had several special initiatives to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic collectively. So we’re always working on these in addition to providing ongoing support to our members.

Where does the idea for these initiatives come from in the first place? Is there a membership poll or some kind of formal mechanism for deciding?

It’s through a decision by the staff and board, informed by our membership. There are a number of things we look at: where are there gaps in the field, what are critical issues for the sector based on our own assessment, how does an initiative touch the work of a lot of our members? Our network is very diverse. About half of our 95 members are bringing funders together around place, so we have Philanthropy Missouri, Southern California Grantmakers, Philanthropy New York, for example, and then the other half of our members bring funders together nationally based on issue areas such as Grantmakers in the Arts, or based on identities such as Hispanics in Philanthropy. Each of our members has a different slice of the sector, so our strength is bringing them all together and we have to determine which issues are cross-cutting and that a lot of our members have an interest in.

Is that quite a difficult balance to find something that works across the board?

It can be a challenge, but we’ve had success in picking some good issues over the years. We are very member-driven, so any initiative is driven by members, not just not by staff. For example, in the racial equity initiative I mentioned, there’s a working group of 15 of our members that represent a broad spectrum of our network providing strategic guidance for that work, so that ensures we have member buy-in on the issues and that helps to make them successful.

I guess convening is your main thing. Do you get involved in other things like research?

We have four main pillars. One is policy and advocacy. We have a programme to help our members have a voice in policy, and that’s twofold: we work to promote a strong non-profit and philanthropic sector in the United States, and we also work on policy issues that lead to vital and equitable communities. We provide a variety of resources, education, information, events. platforms, messaging, etc to help our members advocate and engage in public policy. Second, we have a PSO and philanthropic practice pillar to help members to advance their own practice as PSOs and also to help work with their foundation members to advance their practice. Racial equity, diversity and inclusion is its own pillar. We work to help our members advance racial equity in their own organisations and to help their foundation members do the same. The fourth pillar is knowledge management. We have a technology platform which about a third of our members are on and it’s designed specifically for PSOs to combine customer relationship management systems with content management. It provides back-end support for our members.

So there are elements that help philanthropy institutions do their jobs better, and others that are more outward-facing, helping them with what they do externally. Are there areas where you’re doing what nobody else is doing

In a couple ways. Number one, we are a unique network in the philanthropic space in the United States. Although our 95 members’ members and constituents are funders, our members are philanthropy-serving organisations and we created United Philanthropy Forum because the PSOs in the US needed to have a network where they don’t just learn with and from each other, but also have space to partner and collaborate. We really believe in the power of PSOs to lead change and increase impact in the sector. In our strategic framework, four of our five levers of change involve working through PSOs. There’s no other organisation looking at the role of PSOs in the sector in the way that we are.

We’ve also learned a lot about how PSOs can partner and collaborate effectively. There are key ingredients to any initiative we do that we’ve learned through work and practice.

What are the ingredients? Are they common across all the initiatives you do?

They need a common North Star, they need data and information about the work they’re doing, they need information resources they can give to their foundation members, they need financial resources, so every initiative we do has an element of re-granting to support their capacity for that issue.  They need support in communicating the issue through their network, they need ongoing programming support to learn about how to do this issue well, they need ongoing networking with their peers to learn what’s working and what’s not in different PSOs, and they need metrics to assess their own success. There needs to be some kind of PSO working group or task force that’s leading the work, and, as I said, that has to be driven by our members.

We’re all of us facing some very pressing problems, like climate change, inequalities within and between societies. How do you support your members to address those problems?

I can give one example. I mentioned we’ve been working to advance racial equity in philanthropy since 2016 and there are a lot of different ways we support our members in that work. One is through cohort learning. We have a racial equity learning and action cohort where a group of our members are learning together how to advance this work. We developed a racial equity capacity assessment specifically for PSOs where our members can assess how they’re doing in advancing that work and can compare themselves to their PSO peers. Out of that, we produced our second report on how that work is moving or not in the network. Every year at our conference, we have a specific racial equity track that brings up the pressing issues around doing the racial equity work. We have racial equity programming throughout the year and webinars to bring in experts on how to do this work better. And we bring a racial equity lens to all of our peer community groups. So we drive the work in lots of different ways throughout the year.

There needs to be more funders who understand that core to them trying to achieve their own foundation missions is the leadership and the partnership of different PSOs in the sector.

Which one of your initiatives do you see as the most successful?

One that was really successful was our very first initiative between 2016 and 2020. We engaged philanthropy in ensuring a fair and accurate census count here in the US – we have a census every 10 years – and it’s very important to get that count right, because often marginalised communities, communities of colour are undercounted and that leads to an inequitable allocation of government resources which are based on numbers from the census. So we worked through our network to engage philanthropy more in the census than it ever had ever been before. We really had two goals; number one, for philanthropy to invest more in ensuring a fair and accurate census count, and, two, for philanthropy to advocate for a fair and accurate census count. We were able to track both of those things. We leveraged about 300,000 dollars in philanthropic investment compared to more than 250 million in government and philanthropic investment in the 2010 census that could be attributed directly to the work of our initiative. That was our first goal and was obviously successful. We were also able to show a huge increase in advocacy for a fair and accurate census count tied directly to our initiative. Almost all of our regional PSO members, 96 per cent, engaged in advocacy around the 2020 census, and nearly all of them attributed that increase in advocacy to the work of our initiative. Probably the pinnacle of that success was a petition we filed with the supreme court along with a number of our members to ensure that the citizenship question was not put on to the census, because it was supposed to be for everybody living in the US, whether or not they’re a citizen. We were successful in keeping that off. So we saw that initiative as one that was clearly successful in using the power of our network to engage philanthropy in a certain action.

Just turning that question around, have any of your initiatives been what you’d consider unsuccessful? Are there any disappointments?

I don’t know that we’ve had anything I would say is a disappointment. There’s always more work to do. The racial equity work is ongoing, so there’s always ups and downs with doing that. Philanthropy’s slow to change so you don’t see the impact overnight and I’m hoping that over the next year or two of that initiative, we will be able to show some more direct impact.

Thinking about five years down the road, where would you like United Philanthropy Forum to be and what would you need to get there?

I’d like us to be using the power of our network to drive additional issues in the field. We have a unique model that’s sometimes hard for funders to understand and it takes time to help them see how working through this network of networks can really drive impact and lead to change because it’s not a top-down approach, it’s a networked approach. It’s about them understanding the power, and the important role that infrastructure groups play to lead this work, which not all funders immediately get and we need a broader base of funders than exists right now to understand that.

When you talk to funders, what do you pass on from your experience to help them, understand the kind of impact you have?

We show them what we’ve been doing so far. We have lots of great stories about the impact we’ve had and telling those stories is the best way to help them understand the importance of the work that we do and that our members do.

Like the census work?

Exactly. I think that is a great story about how we used our network to engage philanthropy more on an issue.

How difficult is it for you to maintain the level of commitment you have with current resources? Are you stretched in terms of staffing, for instance?

That challenge grows and it’s the same challenge that all our members face. We are very people-intensive organisations. More than half of my budget is salaries and benefits. So it requires investment and there’s always a challenge in getting enough resources to bring in the people you need and in this environment, for everyone in our network, with inflation, with staffing shortages, our challenges have been growing exponentially. I don’t know that enough funders understand that, even in the best of times, it’s a challenge and right now, it’s even more so – getting the team you want and need and retaining them, rewarding them effectively, figuring out the best ways to do that.  The other challenge for all of our members is what I would call the business model challenge, finding the right model to ensure you’re financially sustainable and can do the work you want to do. It’s like death by opportunity. There’s so much that our members have the power to do, but there’s limited capacity and figuring out how to prioritise your resources in the best possible way, then trying to get more resources to do more is an ongoing challenge. I think that the roles that PSOs play is much broader than some funders understand. Sometimes funders will just see philanthropy associations as putting on conferences or providing programmes and the work is so much more than that.

As you said, nobody’s doing what you do, but because there are a lot of infrastructure organisations in the US, do funders think, ‘oh no, not another one. We will pick and choose but we’re not going to fund this one’?

With some funders, there may be a perception that there’s too many infrastructure groups and that could perhaps lead to what you just said  – ‘I can’t fund them all,’  I don’t think that’s an accurate perception.  One reason United Philanthropy Forum was created was to help them all partner better together because, before we were created, they were often going their own way, figuring out who were their peers and where were the overlaps.  We provided a space to help them be effective and to avoid that.  Funders themselves have created these organisations, so they clearly see a need for it and each PSO has its unique role. The important thing is that we all understand what each other’s role is and find more effective ways to work together. That’s what we’re trying to do. I’ll also say just on the competition question, I’ve been working  for infrastructure groups in philanthropy for over 30 years and I would say United Philanthropy Forum couldn’t have been created 15 or 20 years ago. Among the PSOs themselves in the United States there was much more a sense of not seeing each other as partners, but as competitors. There’s been a shift from just serving members to trying to have an impact on, and a leadership role in, the field.  Twenty years ago, with the regional PSOs particularly, there was the sense that members pay their dues, we give them back services and that’s all we do. Now, there’s much more understanding that we have to have a voice, we have to have a point of view about what philanthropy can and should be doing and to be a leader in the field to make that happen. We can’t just exist to get more members and more dues. That doesn’t help, that doesn’t do anything. So PSOs have realised we aren’t in competition with each other, we’re all working together to make our field more effective and have greater impact. That change of mindset is why United Philanthropy Forum was able to be created.

But we need to continue to find the best ways for PSOs to partner and collaborate. We’ve made lots of strides but there’s much more we can do and that requires more resources.  Right now – and I’m not just speaking for the Forum, but for our members –  there are not enough funders who see themselves as supporters of the infrastructure space in philanthropy. There needs to be more funders who understand that core to them trying to achieve their own foundation missions is the leadership and the partnership of different PSOs in the sector.

There’s been some well-publicised criticism of the philanthropy sector in the last few years. Has that created the feeling in the sector that funders need to be seen to be getting more money out of the door to charities, rather than to their own associations?

That’s probably there, but, in my view, that’s nothing new. It’s always been around, and it’s comparing apples and oranges. Wondering whether to pay dues to a regional PSO or to fund a non-profit providing early childhood education is a false dichotomy, because, yeah, you can give a grant to a single non-profit, but what about investing in the PSO to bring together a network of education funders who can work together to advance early childhood education,  to change policies to make early childhood education better, and to assess what’s working or not? All that’s worked on through a PSO and that collectively can be much more impactful than spending the money on a grant.

What do you see as the Forum’s biggest achievement? Would it be the census initiative? 

I think just that we were created. As I mentioned, there was a gap in the sector where the infrastructure groups were not working together as well as they could or should be. From 1998 to 2016, the Forum was the network of 33 regional PSOs and we began to see we needed a much broader network to have more impact together. So we spent a year and a half trying to rethink and envision what the Forum could be, not knowing if it would work or not, so the fact that we got created and went from that network of 33 regional PSOs to now 95 regional and national PSOs that is now figuring out ways to use that network to work collectively to make a difference is itself a big achievement.

Any frustrations?

We’ve figured out how we can use this model of United Philanthropy Forum to have our members work together to drive issues, but we need to have a broader sense in the sector of how this model works. We need to begin to tell our story better, and some of that takes time and some of that takes resources.

Andrew Milner is Features Editor at Alliance.

This interview is being shared free-to-read as a part of the Propel Philanthropy interview project. In addition to this article series, Propel Philanthropy collects stories demonstrating that modest grants can drive but results. You can learn more here.