The instances where philanthropic capital has built public infrastructure and civic spaces, advocated for and achieved new legislation, or provided services not offered by the state do not always spring readily to mind, but they are vital to the vibrancy and effectiveness of a civil society and third sector we all rely on. This interviews series, in partnership with WINGS and Propel Philanthropy celebrates the funders who are the often unsung heroes of this equitable social impact ecosystem, and looks to those of tomorrow.
We showcase funders who have had the far-reaching vision to invest and achieve success in some of our critical issues: from data infrastructure to building local resources, from disaster preparedness to the advocacy we need for a stronger future, and we invite curious funders new to this type of social investment to take their first steps towards funding more and better social impact infrastructure.
Stephanie Gillis, the Raikes Foundation
SG: Before we jump into which specific organisations we are funding, I should start with the frame of where we’re focused. We started this strategy about seven years ago. At the time the Raikes Foundation before that had supported many SIIOs as members as places for staff to learn etcetera, but this strategy was launched to recognise that the question Jeff and Tricia [Raikes] wanted to solve was: how do they support more ultra high net wealth individuals who are now increasingly providing really significant philanthropic resources, small staffed and unstaffed, to direct those dollars effectively and to not recreate what has been learned by the field of philanthropy. We were recognising that in the US anyway – and I’m less familiar with global data – we had built all this infrastructure over the last 30 to 40 years to support staff like me who do this 24/7 for a living and I have places to go to learn, for instance, about social justice philanthropy, social change philanthropy, we have identity-based groups and then beyond that we have meta networks like United Philanthropy Forum that bring all those folks together. But all that is for staff and seventy to eighty per cent of philanthropic dollars are directed by individuals who are increasingly small staffed and unstaffed and are giving through donor advised funds and have very little support from people who have spent time doing that learning I’ve described.
AM: So you’re looking at individual, rather than institutional donors?
SG: Individual trustees and principals. I was working in Silicon Valley at the time and I had the family office manager of one of the wealthiest people in the world come into our offices and he said to me, ‘I had no idea we could get help like this. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a philanthropy advisor.’ Granted this was 10 years ago, but I thought ‘if you don’t know about us, you certainly don’t know about National Centre for Family Philanthropy or Solidaire or Resource Generation or all the things that did exist for high net worth individuals to learn and get better at directing dollars.’ That was also what Jeff and Tricia were struggling with, that he had left the Gates Foundation, had seen the birth of the [Giving] Pledge, had come back to work with Tricia at the Raikes Foundation and all of their Microsoft friends were coming to them and saying ‘How do we get better at this? What should we be doing differently?’ And they realised that people don’t know where to go to get any help. What exists to support people now and why is it not visible and accessible? That was what underlay our entire theory here. So in 2017, we began doing a couple of things. First of all, we began convening and bringing together people who see different parts of the ultra high-net-wealth donor ‘elephant’, so to speak – people who are wealth advisors and tax and estate counsel, but also people who are consultants and philanthropy advisors, people who work in Fidelity Charitable, people who work in community foundations, all the people who touch these folks and saying: ‘what are the gaps? What would we want to do to catalyse this side of the infrastructure to support more of these individuals?’ And one of the first things they said was: ‘those of us who actually are doing donor education, donor organising, there’s no place where we connect. We might find each other in the hallway at some other philanthropy conference, but very rarely.’ So we began convening in that space. We have a community of practice of about 45 to 50 donor education and organising groups just in the US but everything from the NCFP and Resource Generation, Solidaire to Founders’ Pledge and Generation Pledge and First Principles Forum and Social Venture Partners and all those groups.
For foundations, there is a whole ecosystem of support.
What was your role there? Were you supporting those groups or did you convene them all?
We convene them and we also make investments in some of them, and I’ll also explain our investment strategy, too. But the basis of our convening was really that, if our theory of change is that if we want these people who are small staffed and unstaffed, to get better faster, then fundamentally we were saying what we need is an ecosystem that’s aligned and has a vision and a common definition of what better philanthropy looks, and then to make it more visible and accessible to donors and get more donors to connect to it. And it took a couple of years to get that aligned vision with everyone. We believe that for donors to really be effective in their work they have to have a deeper understanding of who’s being least well served by the systems and be grounded in what centring the views of the people who are experiencing the most harm means. They have to think about effectiveness and what’s been learned already about what works and what doesn’t and then we’d like to move some of the dollars from that donor population in particular, the high net wealth owners, upstream to preventing bad things from happening and to root causes. Not all of them but some of them. So the idea is to shift the ecosystem to centre those core tenets, get more donors to connect to it, then those who are connected will get better faster than those who don’t. That’s it in a nutshell.
When you started on this road, were there missing pieces of the puzzle or were they already there but they just weren’t connected?
Mostly they’re there but this part of the learning world is under-developed relative to that for staff, so they weren’t connected, they didn’t have a lot of collaboration, there was a lot of competition, each was very different. We believe a healthy ecosystem should have some duplication. Organisations can come and go and it doesn’t mean everybody has to be completely unique, but they should be more visible and donors should be able to find them. So the other part that was missing was creating demand for this. The biggest challenge with high-net-wealth folks is time, and they often don’t know what they don’t know. I know that that was a joke when Cheney said it but it is a legitimate principle of behavioural science that when we as human beings enter a new domain of knowledge, we start off saying ‘I know nothing and I know I know nothing’, and then we learn a little and we say, ‘okay now I know what I need to know.’ but actually real expertise is way out here. The only thing that can get you to move is to be constantly exposed to new learning and new thinking and to question whether there’s something else you should know. Generating demand among this population of donors was the principle underlying Giving Compass which was the platform that we launched to aggregate content from the ecosystem that was tailored to this audience, which means it’s not in philanthro-speak but that it’s accessible, it’s shorter, and to get it to the eyeballs of those people where they are. So, with Giving Compass, we wanted to be a kind of marketing engine for the sector, and bring that aggregated content through APIs and other tools to the Donor Advised Fund providers where these people are thinking about their giving. And once we’ve exposed them to some of that knowledge, get them to question what they know and they don’t know, and get them to connect to this ecosystem. That’s been the strategy. Our investments, our grant-making has been focused on people and organisations in this ecosystem who are either developing research or new things that need to be learned, or who are innovating in ways that are going to accelerate progress towards those three core tenets of equity, effectiveness and systems change.
How do you identify those?
We were early in on Donors of Colour Network, for example, that was filling a critical gap over here. There was no place where high net wealth donors of colour in the US felt welcome and included. They wanted their own space and so we helped underwrite the launch of that effort and the creation of its C4. We also invested in Hispanics in Philanthropy to launch its Transform Philanthropy Centre, and Thousand Currents to expand their philanthropy education practice. We’ve supported the creation of new curricula that centre those core tenets of equity, effectiveness and systems change, so Freedom School for Philanthropy which Radiant Strategies developed for this audience, and particularly for women, is more of a feminist curriculum. We invested in a curriculum for Philanthropy Together, which is a hub for giving circles and collaborative funds to orient donors and giving circles to more of a social justice direction. We invested in the research that Centre for Effective Philanthropy has been doing on the Mackenzie Scott giving because we think it will have lessons for these folks.
So basically you identify where gaps are and the critical areas of philanthropy that people need to give to but weren’t because they didn’t know about them or how to go about it. And presumably that maps onto the general strategy of your four areas of grantmaking?
Yes.
Talk me through the Giving Compass story. How did that come about?
Jeff and Tricia were thinking about building a platform before I got here in 2016, and it was based on those conversations that they were having with their friends about how they could learn to give better. Because they came out of software, they began to explore if there was something that technology could do to scale up their own informal efforts. Then, we also supported research with about 120 ultra high net wealth individuals to ask them what they needed, what they wanted to learn, and what were the barriers and challenges when they were trying to find those resources. They said ‘we don’t know where to get help, and when we find things online, we don’t know if it’s trustworthy. If you ask Google should I start a foundation, if you get something from Foundation Source it says yes, you get something from Fidelity, it says no you should start a DAF, it’s much easier.’ So when we launched Giving Compass, we wanted to aggregate resources that would help donors, and we wanted to prime their hunger to connect to this ecosystem and to connect with peer networks and with advisors that can support them along the way.
What’s been the result so far of Giving Compass, have you got a way of measuring what the return on your investment is, so to speak?
One of the challenges was that we wanted to be additive and not competitive in that space. We do not, for example, get in between donors and the organisations we recommend, we are not a transaction platform. We push donors off to all of these places because our goal was to get them to the ecosystem. So if they read a piece of content from National Centre for Family Philanthropy, for example, they will get pushed to NCFP’s site and they will then find the rest of it. We don’t know once they leave our platform if they actually give or not. We are just in the experimental stage of research to look at that, but what we do know is that on average 100,000 people come each month to avail themselves of the resources that we offer, that people have increased their engagement – the time on page and the time that they spend with us – has increased every year. We know that, with the tools that we’ve developed, the NPS scores – the typical measure in an online environment of customer satisfaction – are really high, so we’re all really hungry to better understand the impact with this experiment that we’re launching with Dr Sara Kontrath from Indiana University’s Lilly School of Philanthropy.
So in a sense you’re part inventing an ecosystem and part mapping it?
I think of our role as a field catalyst. We want this ecosystem to be visible, accessible, healthy, and we want it to be more inclusive and equitable than it has been historically. And we’ve been able to measure changes in the ecosystem, we’ve been able to document outcomes like shifts in programming toward the core tenets, what donors are exposed to and what they’re learning. These networks have significantly shifted since 2017 and we don’t try to get attribution. There’s a whole bunch of things that have influenced that and we’ve just been part of it. But we can also see that more donors, for example, are connecting to this ecosystem and they’re growing and there’s been much more collaboration than there ever was during the 30 years I’ve been working in philanthropy and in this space, so those are the kinds of outcomes we’ve been able to document on the field-building side. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of good data about the giving of this population of donors, because it is happening in public charities and we can’t see into individual account level data, so it’s difficult to know how that theory of change is evolving. If the ecosystem is more accessible, equitable and connected and more donors connect to it then they will get better faster. That’s the part we’re focused on now and the only way we can understand that is if this ecosystem is collecting better data from its own constituencies. So, we are working in our collaborative to see if we can design a donor data tool, that each of the networks could use with their membership to capture where donors are giving and how that giving evolves over time.
Are there any particular interventions or investments that you would point to and think that’s really been a success or that’s the one that’s paid most dividends?
I get happy highs from many of them. I would say that Donors of Colour Network is a highlight. Not that we were the only funder, but we were very early in and we lifted it up to others to make sure that that gap in the ecosystem was filled and it’s still early days for them, they’re an emergent network but super important in the landscape of the future. I take pride in Freedom School for Philanthropy and the curriculum that Radiant built, has really demonstrated incredible outcomes with women donors and moving money in a way that’s joyful and different from the experiences of a lot of the paradigms of how people were doing it before. Social Venture Partners we helped navigate a really critical transition in leadership and also to shift its culture to have a more inclusive approach to philanthropy. Like all grantmaking, you could never say 100 per cent, and especially in this type of space that this was because of our investment, but we have anecdotal and qualitative data from those folks that says ‘but for this investment at this moment in time’ and who knows.
As donors, if you’re directing billions of dollars, you have a responsibility to have a learning mindset and to be getting better and be making sure that what you’re doing is best practice, and there’s nowhere else to go than here.
How do those grantee partners communicate their needs to you? Is there a process you go through so you know exactly that you’re giving them what they most need?
I don’t have a large grantmaking portfolio, so one of my biggest contributions can be partnership time and advocacy with and for my grantees. So we are in pretty deep relationship with the majority of the folks that we have funded, and they’re all part of the Destination Impact Community where we convene and spend time together. Four of them are in our collaborative, so I think a lot of it is just having a strong connection and understanding and relationship to be able to be honest and open and try to lower the power differential, while being aware that that’s always there. It’s about being a good listener.
Do they have other needs apart from money and are there things you can’t supply? What are some of the limitations of your ability to support SIIOs?
If I don’t have resources, part of what I can do is help them find other funders. Unfortunately it’s a relatively short list of folks that invest in this space, especially on this side of the ecosystem, but I do my best to be an advocate for every organisation that is looking for funding, that has a strong case because that’s part of what I can do.
You invest in these organisations but you also bring them together in networks. Is that equally important or even more important than actually funding them?
I think that’s critically important. Before 2017, a lot of what we heard was ‘we’re each a unicorn. There’s nobody who really understands what we do,’ and ‘I feel like I’m on my own,’ so a lot of our theory has been network-based, bringing them together in places where they can connect with others who are grappling with similar challenges. At our gathering in December of 2023, for example, we brought together that community of 45 networks in the US and conversations were wide-ranging. They were talking about how they each were navigating the challenges of Gaza and Palestine in their networks, with their donors. There was a conversation about how they were spreading this new curriculum that they wanted to share with donors around a different approach to philanthropy. There were numerous conversations around leadership transition and turnover in this ecosystem and what we need to do to stay abreast of that and make sure that, especially as we’ve made so much progress in diversifying who’s in the room in this ecosystem, we hold on to that talent, that we support them, and what that would look like collectively. Those are the kinds of things that they don’t have anywhere else to talk about.
Just to go back to your frontline grantmaking work, your foundation has four areas of support – housing stability for youth, education, democracy, etc – where does funding of infrastructure sit within that? Do you see it as something separate or informing the whole? Is it more important? Is it equally important?
This work I see creating the context and conditions for our other areas of work to thrive. If we can shift mindsets and behaviours among this base of donors, resources will flow more effectively to the things that work. And for donors who are not building foundations, hiring teams with a mix of public, private and nonprofit experience, lived expertise in the issues, etc. then this ecosystem can help them direct resources effectively.
I don’t see any other way for the primary givers in this country to share knowledge, spread best practices, get better at what they do than through this infrastructure.
As a proportion of your giving, how much goes to sort of infrastructure, to field-building?
Grantmaking has fluctuated very dramatically year by year. 2020 was the biggest year of grantmaking because the sector and the space really needed some dollars to stay focused in 2020 and 2021. I track our funding in three categories; there’s the field building work, the direct support of innovation and research, and then the Giving Compass support because Giving Compass was something we were instrumental in spinning out and therefore want to support to get to a sustainable business model. If I were doing a percentage allocation, Giving Compass has been a big percentage historically. Between the field-building and grant-making, I would say it’s probably been 70 per cent on the field-building and 30 per cent direct investment, though it’s hard to assess, because the grantmaking is probably time-wise 30 per cent of my time historically, and the field-building work has been 70 per cent, but we have consulting resources and others that support the field-building work. And we do it collectively. We have co-funders in the field-building work and we work through a collaborative with Kellogg and Ford and Fidelity Charitable.
Infrastructure organisations, networks and other SIIOs tend to be less visible than frontline grantmakers, if I can put it that way. How do you think they can get their message across more forcibly than they have been doing? How can they get more donors to think ‘yes. that’s worth investing in’?
You tell me! For me, a big part of making the case to other funders, is that it’s really important that we have better data. I don’t mean data about what they’re doing but data about how donor behaviour shifts and what can we learn about that. There are some of these networks that are moving huge dollars. In the last four years, Women Donors Network has moved something like $80 million dollars. It’s dramatically accelerated its role as both a learning and networking and connecting resource, but also a mobilisation resource for women donors. Some other networks focus on donor education. They don’t have a mechanism to move collective dollars, nor would that fit in their culture, but then how do they know if they’re affecting any change in how donors behave and what they do with their dollars? We have as a field to explore whether there’s some common tool that we can use to understand how donors giving behaviours are shifting that will help us all.
We all need partners. No foundation these days says ‘we ourselves can solve this problem’.
There’s a momentum effect, too, isn’t there? It’s not just a case of working together, it’s being known and being seen, so that others start to be influenced by what they’re doing. If you talk to other funders about this how do you make the case to them?
I talk about leverage. In our world, a lot of people have seen both the dramatic accumulation of wealth at the top and the increasing concentration of giving at the top and recognise that when that giving is primarily directed to alma maters, it doesn’t necessarily benefit the most pressing needs. For funders who care about that, this is an incredible lever that they can pull to try to have an influence on policy and there may well need to be policy change at some point. Billion-dollar giving used to only happen through transparent and accountable foundations, when there was full visibility and donors had to think about Jill and Joe Taxpayer sitting on their shoulder. That’s not the case any more and without that kind of accountability mechanism, what we have is persuasion and peer pressure and a lot of exposure to learning and knowledge. I believe that there’s fundamentally a lot of goodwill in this group of donors that want to do well, and it is not easy when your life has not been spent in the social sector, when you’ve been living in a totally different environment. As Jeff will tell you, if you’re going from Microsoft to The Gates Foundation, you have to enter with so much humility and be really, really open to learning and understanding or you’re just going to repeat mistakes that do real harm to real people. I think this ecosystem is one lever and policy change is another in the future that we’ll have to think about.
Do you have a summing up of the importance of supporting SIIOs ?
I don’t see any other way for the primary givers in this country to share knowledge, spread best practices, get better at what they do than through this infrastructure. To steal from Sara Lomelin, who leads Philanthropy Together, it is the coral – living, breathing coral that supports the ecosystem to thrive. We don’t question it in any other industry. The medical profession has always had gazillions of conferences that everybody has to go to, to top up their own professional development. As donors, if you’re directing billions of dollars, you have a responsibility to have a learning mindset and to be getting better and be making sure that what you’re doing is best practice, and there’s nowhere else to go than here.
For foundations, there is a whole ecosystem of support. I’m going to Philanthropy Northwest Conference in October to connect with my colleagues and peers. My colleagues and I went to Change Philanthropy last fall because we want to really understand what those at the forefront of shifting philanthropy’s culture and what we need to know to do it.
Do institutional philanthropists have a responsibility to encourage the individual philanthropist?
We all need partners. No foundation these days says ‘we ourselves can solve this problem.’ My colleagues, certainly in our education strategy, would very much like to engage those individual donors who really understand and are interested in shifting the system of education in our country to centre belonging and to make schools places where all children can thrive. How do you find those individuals who care about that? How do you connect with them? How do you engage them? There’s an art to that and this ecosystem has to exist in order for that to happen. So there’s some skill in finding your partners, to make sure that your partners are grounded and you can actually work together to support change in the world, and we’re going to have to get better in working across these two silos.
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.
Comments (3)
Firstly I have to say that I love Stephanie talking of her "happy highs". A great way to spread the joy of impact work. Next, for the curious - NPS= Net Promoter Score and is a simple, standard customer satisfaction metric. Primarily commercial in the beginning, it is starting to be used by some nonprofits to gauge donor loyalty and satisfaction. But the big thing in this interview, for me, is the aggregation and dissemination done by Giving Compass. This level of 'platformisation', or 'philanthropy as a service', is seldom seen in our sector, with the US well ahead of other countries around the world, I believe, and most likely due to its advances in infrastructure funding. The Giving Compass API is a small but mighty technology innovation. APIs make things interoperable, they can help create standards and share knowledge or data more equitably. I would love to learn who is taking advantage of the Giving Compass API so far, who really should be taking advantage of it, and how we can put this approach to knowledge essentials sharing on steroids.
Thank you for highlighting the importance of community and learning for donors and for supporting the organizations that create that eco-system Stephanie and Peter!. At NEID Global (www.neidonors.org) we see how powerful peer learning can be for donors in the international space. We also see how important it is to offer donors - many of which give out of DAFs and are giving $50,000 - 5 million dollars annually - a place to find each other and create partnerships. A place to learn and inspire each other. Alone or together these donors can make a HUGE difference in communities globally - supporting schools, building hospitals, helping to create pharmacy networks where there are none, supporting farmers, helping leaders in the field innovate - the list is endless. As stated above - creating this sort of community and space for donors is highly impactful and supports smart philanthropy.
I cannot think of a more powerful strategy for change than supporting ultra-wealthy people eager to have a social impact. I am not referring to those seeking to use their influence to dominate with an agenda. I am referring to humble, sincere people who want to use some of their wealth to make a meaningful difference. That is what Stephanie and the Raikes Foundations do through their GivingCompass platform. Achieving a big impact is a valuable aspiration. What the Raikes Foundation is doing is additive by creating a big, broad, regenerative, and sustainable impact. They are leveraging their knowledge and resources to reach far and wide so many people with the means who are covering a vast range of critical issues can do so more effectively. This type of approach exemplifies highly efficient smart philanthropy