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.

Victoria Vrana, GlobalGiving

AM: Tell me first of all about GlobalGiving. You were at the Gates Foundation, weren’t you, when they decided to start funding GlobalGiving?

VV: I was. I was at the Gates Foundation for 11 years until December of 2022 and actually the team I joined at Gates in the beginning was called the Charitable Sector Support team, so it was all about infrastructure. It later merged into the Philanthropic Partnerships Team which is where I became Deputy Director. For the last year and a half, I’ve been the CEO of GlobalGiving, and GlobalGiving is a non-profit that connects donors around the world to causes and organisations they care about. We have an online giving platform where anyone can go and find projects and organisations. We also facilitate a lot of grantmaking and vetting of organisations behind the scenes for corporate philanthropists, and increasingly high-net-worth donors. We have an organisation in the UK called GlobalGiving UK, and they serve donors based in the UK and also they’re expanding into Europe because they have Transnational Giving Network Europe status. GlobalGiving focuses on local organisations. It’s tough for donors to find local community-based organisations, and so that’s our emphasis and we have about 6,000 organisations in our community, and we also work a lot in times of crisis. At any time, we’re running 20 to 40 disaster funds, and those funds are very focused on getting help to the local organisations that are responding to whatever is going on in their own backyards.

From the Gates’ point of view, what was the thinking behind supporting infrastructure organisations. And why GlobalGiving particularly?

It’s fine when a funder comes in and drops money on you and disappears and you never talk to them again, but a productive, healthy relationship between a funder and a grantee or an infrastructure organisation can go so far.

The Philanthropic Partnership Team at Gates’ mission is to ‘inspire and enable more information and intentional generosity by all”’. That includes the Giving Pledge and it included infrastructure. Funders have many different definitions of “sector infrastructure” as I found out from the Infrastructure Funders Group. For some funders, it’s about leadership, for others, it’s capacity, and that’s part of the challenge – there’s no one solid, concrete, resonating definition. Gates funded organisations that were advancing the use of data in the sector, organisations that were helping donors have more data to make better decisions, and for non-profits to have more data to be able to pursue more funding. We also funded a lot of research on giving and giving behaviour and the sector itself. Another area of infrastructure I oversaw at Gates was was policy and really ensuring there’s a favourable policy and regulatory framework for giving. The third area my portfoliofocused on was supporting research and innovation in the everyday giving space, because everyday giving has been declining in the US. We also funded a small portfolio about building up norms around giving and narratives for people giving, and that was where our grant to Giving Tuesday fell. We were significant funders of Giving Tuesday for many years and Gates continues to be

What was the thinking behind the portfolio in the first place? What do you see as the main value of infrastructure organisations?

For Gates, the point was the whole team was focused on increasing giving around the world by individuals, and so in order to do that you need to be investing in systems-level organisations to advance giving and increase giving and strengthen giving, so interventions like policy and data and research and narratives, those are all big infrastructure efforts that can move the needle for tens of thousands of donors. It’s really about leverage. You can make these grants and investments in certain organisations and they have enormous leverage because that kind of work supports so many different types of organisations and so many individuals.

Was GlobalGiving filling some market niche that Gates identified and decided to fund? Or did GlobalGiving come about independently and then you decided that they were the one to support?

Gates’ grant to GlobalGiving was part of a portfolio that was investing in experimentation to try and encourage everyday donors. We were funding different platforms and GlobalGiving was one of them. We also did experimentation with DonorsChoose and a few other digital giving platforms, because digital giving platforms can do experiments and A/B testing with messaging and features and things that could really move the needle for everyday donors. Gates was interested in working with GlobalGiving in part too because of the global reach and because GlobalGiving works with so many organisations that are pursuing the SDGs, so there’s a nice kind of mission overlap. There was one grant in particular that I loved that was a partnership between a platform called Lightful, which is a British platform that trains non-profits to fundraise using social media, and GlobalGiving (https://lightful.com/globalgiving-and-lightful-partnership). Basically, we wanted to do a randomised control trial to see if helping non-profits fundraise better would help them raise more money. I think the trial showed that the organisations in the trial raised 67 per cent more money than the control group. It was a very, very rigorous and very successful and very strong evidence that if you helped non-profits fundraise better, they’ll end up raising more money.

Infrastructure organisations really need that steady, long-term investment to be able to make the kind of change. Systems change is not a quick thing. It’s not like executing a programme.

Is that the flagship intervention for you, the one one you talk about as the most successful intervention in infrastructure support?

I think that would have to be Giving Tuesday, which grew to be raising three billion dollars a year, so the investments that Gates made over the years in Giving Tuesday had an incredible reach across the world and still does. Therewere a lot of different investments that were really successful. We invested about USD150,000 a year for 10 years in the Aspen Institute, and the Aspen Institute convened all these different partners in the sector who cared about non-profit data, and they basically advocated for years and years and years, to open up public data, the 990, the 501c3 data in the US. It took forever, but it was a very small investment and once it was successful, that unlocked enormous amounts of data for the sector. That was an example of the need to stick with it, and that is the thing with infrastructure, especially with policy grants. You have to stay with it for more than one year, two years, three years, these are things that can take a decade or more to change, and infrastructure organisations really need that steady, long-term investment to be able to make the kind of change. Systems change is not a quick thing. It’s not like executing a programme.

You’ve talked about the need for long-term funding, but does not necessarily have to be big funding? Is there a misperception that infrastructure organisations are money pits?

It always depends on what the intervention is. For policy and advocacy, the sector’s woefully underfunded. The money we spend on advocacy for non-profits and philanthropy is a little tiny rain drop in an ocean in the US compared to what other industries are spending. When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act happened in 2017[1], everyone in the world was advocating to get their thing in, and the sector was, again, this tiny little drop in an ocean trying to get its perspective out there, and so we lost and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has really harmed giving in the US over the last seven years. There’s some new research that’s just come out that’s very definitively pointing to a decline, so advocacy needs more money. On the other hand, you know, the data grant I was talking about involved a regulatory change that wasn’t controversial, so you could put a little bit of money into that because it was about running a coalition and getting the coalition to do the work. So, in some cases infrastructure work does take funding and needs more funding than it has. A lot of infrastructure organisations are challenged to develop any kind of business model or revenue model too, and if they’re fully funded by philanthropy and there’s only three funders who fund that stuff or care about it, it can get really tough if those grants are super tiny.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be big money that’s needed, but these organisations often don’t have huge fundraising arms, so to piecemeal together USD25,000 in grants gets pretty tough.

One of the problems you’ve flagged for infrastructure organisations is the demonstration of results. There was the randomised control trial you mentioned in the Lightful initiative, but do you routinely measure what your return on investment is?

We tried very, very hard at Gates because Gates really likes to measure impact and your bosses are always going to really want to know what kind of impact you’re making. I found that working with my grantees ahead of time and telling them what we needed, how we needed to be able to show an impact and asking for their help to show the difference being made was the best way to go. So we very creatively looked for ways to quantify what the impact was. You think it’s impossible to measure policy and advocacy, but it’s really not, and there’s some great frameworks for measuring proxies and things like that for advocacy efforts. We did one project for three years where I gave each of my grantees access to an evaluation firm that specialised in measuring advocacy and advances in policy, and they worked with each grantee to develop a framework that fit their efforts to be able to measure and report on what they were doing. The thing is, often organisations just don’t have the capacity or the know-how to do the measurement because that’s the kind of thing funders don’t like to fund. They see it as overhead so they don’t fund it and then they want organisations to show measurement and results. I tried wherever possible to help invest in the capacity of my grantees to do that kind of measurement but it’s often indirect impact, and it’s often contribution not attribution. You can see how the organisation contributed to something happening, but you can’t always say organisation X made Y happen, and funders like that very concrete, very direct ‘I changed this many lives’. Infrastructure organisations aren’t usually changing lives directly, they’re the glue, the amplifier, that multiplier we’re talking about. The organisations that I worked with were helping other non-profits. You think of infrastructure like a highway network upon which all the other organisations did their work, but that’s a long way from direct impact on people or to forests or the oceans.

As you say, the work of support organisations tends to be less visible than say frontline NGOs’ work or grantmakers’ work. What do you think they need to get the message across of the work they do more forcefully? Because funding for this is limited how do you get more funders to take this on?

I wish I knew. I spent so much time when I was at Gates both trying to convince Gates to do more funding in this space, and also to convince others including through the Infrastructure Funders Group. Some have said we need to change our metaphors. Sara Lomelin of Philanthropy Together has a great video describing infrastructure as the ecosystem for the sector and trying to make the metaphor more resonant, to tell the story better of infrastructure organisations to really show how they lift up so many other organisations. Having more clear measurement helps. Often, it takes funders who have run into roadblocks to want to fund this stuff. Charity Navigator, for example, was created by a donor who started giving and was really frustrated because they couldn’t tell if an organisation was quality or not. It often takes funders who are system thinkers and it takes a while to get to that systems thinking and to be able to understand why those investments can leverage others. Sometimes you can make a case to funders if you help them think about their own grantees; so let’s say you’re funding in New York state, and you’re working with 100 non-profits and they all have the same issue. If there’s an infrastructure organisation you can fund that’s really going to help those 100 non-profits, that can help a funder wrap their mind around it if you show them that their own grantees will be helped by this thing. So trying to use different metaphors, trying to work directly, tell the story better of the impact, trying to show funders how they help their own grantees, and then really trying to go after funders who are more system thinkers. Something that was effective with Gates was what you might call good neighbour grants; so if you’re part of a sector it’s part of your job to help keep it healthy by paying membership dues, and funding some of these core sector infrastructure orbs. But, again, it’s not the most exciting case.

There was a big research project done by the Infrastructure Funders Group, in an effort to talk about sector infrastructure, how to get more funding for it, to describe it, to map it. That’s helpful background.

Presumably, the Infrastructure Funders Group came out of this recognition of the need for funders to put their heads together and to improve the messaging better about the need to fund infrastructure? 

It was started, I believe, by the Mott Foundation, Gates and Hewlett, and it was before my time at Gates. It was funders who were funding similar things and wanted to be able to trade notes and better make the case internally. So many of the infrastructure funders are one person, they’re often in the president’s office of a foundation, they’re a special pet project, they don’t have their own funding, or they’re a very small team, sometimes it’s half of a person’s job so they’re not well-resourced even within foundations, and so the IFG was really started to help programme officers help each other make the case internally, let alone evangelise externally.

So IFG is more inward-facing than outward-facing in some ways?

It started to grow in my last five years there. I was the co-chair for two years during the pandemic, and we had started to bring on some new funders including some corporate funders, Fidelity Charitable. Fidelity Charitable is one of the bigger infrastructure funders in the US actually. I did a lot of co-grants with Fidelity Charitable. We brought Google into the group and I did some co-funding with them. But it ebbs and flows. That’s the other thing that’s tough about infrastructure funding. I mean it’s like this with all foundations and cause areas, but it’s not always a consistent commitment.

From the experience, do you see any signs of that changing? 

If anything, I saw it declining in my last few years which is not a fun thing. So I’m hoping it’ll swing back.

Are there misconceptions about SIIOs that prevent them from supporting them?

I’d say not really understanding how these organisations operate and how much impact they can have. There’s a perception. that’s sometimes fair perception, that it can be a fragmented space with a lot of organisations seeming to do the same thing. There’s often been a big interest in infrastructure organisations collaborating better and coordinating better. That comes up a lot and I’ve seen more coordination and collaboration in the last year in different places, but it’s something that the infrastructure space itself could do a better job at.

Funders can use their voice so much in ways that are powerful

You’ve seen both sides of the coin as a funder and as head of an infrastructure organisation. Is there something you wish funders better understood about infrastructure organisations?

Just that impact is huge. The leverage on that investment can be enormous. For GlobalGiving, we helped raise a hundred million dollars last year for thousands and thousands of organisations, and so an investment in us lifts many, many boats. I think that’s true for so many networks and associations. It’s very true for Giving Tuesday. So you get a huge bang for your buck by a grant to an infrastructure or an ecosystem organisation. We’re rebuilding all of our technology and we’ve started this with our own funding because it has to happen, and we’re looking to raise a little bit more funding. Rebuilding our technology for raising money helps thousands of organisations around the world. It’s instantly going to have this maximum reach, so the main thing I wish funders understood better is, actually, these investments go very, very far.

As we said in the framing of this project, what we’re interested in is success stories from infrastructure funding, of which kind of Giving Tuesday is one. Can just talk about that for a moment. Was it an obvious choice for Gates to fund? How did it come about? 

Multi-year general operating dollars. It’s some of the most powerful, powerful money and capital that non-profits can get.

Gates had been involved in Giving Tuesday from the very beginning. They knew somebody who knew somebody who got Bill to tweet on the very first Giving Tuesday, and part of the magic of Giving Tuesday is that it’s so neutral. It’s really just about giving, to any cause, any organisation, anywhere. You can give time, you can give a coffee cup, you could give money. And Henry Timms’ whole idea of letting go of control and letting others take Giving Tuesday on and spreading it was very magical. Asha Curran then took GivingTuesday global and built it into the transformative movement it is today. So, there was nothing controversial about Giving Tuesday, it was all for giving. Gates first got involved using its voice, and we had made one or two tiny grants by the time I started there and took over the relationship. I remember one of the things my boss asked me to check out was their idea of going global, which we weren’t sure about. Giving Tuesday was the Tuesday after Black Friday, which unfortunately started in the US and is all about shopping, shopping, shopping and Giving Tuesday was the thing to make you feel better about that rampant consumerism, so we really weren’t sure whether this concept would work in another country. I remember going to the first global summit and there were eight people there, but they were from eight different countries so I had the incredible privilege and fortune of watching Giving Tuesday spread like wildfire across the world, and every year new countries and communities would come on board. There would be Giving Zoo Day, there would be Giving Blue Day for Michigan… so many people made Giving Tuesday their own and joined in, and I’ve seen over the years so much creativity and just joy and impact. Giving Tuesday was very smart early on in that it wanted to count how much money was raised so it went to the platforms because digital platforms were the ones who knew instantly how much money was given. At GlobalGiving for instance, we have a big Giving Tuesday campaign, and I think we raised a little over three million dollars last year. You know how the giving data lags by two years, so the only way they could know if they were making an impact is by asking all these digital platforms for their data and they were very disciplined about getting that data early on and doing that counting, and I think that is part of their success in getting funding. They’ve invested a lot in their data and it’s become an incredible asset, and really an alternative to some of the other sector data sources out there. They have now built up a robust data insights capacity and programme, tools and products. It’s really a side effect from Giving Tuesday, but it feeds Giving Tuesday because the more you know about giving and the more you know about fundraising, the more money can be raised.

I think that whole story illustrates two principal points, one of which is obviously the importance of data and demonstrating impact to funders. The other is Bill’s tweet because endorsement can be important, too. Funders have got influence as well as the money that they can put in.

We did that a lot at Gates. There was a thing called #mygivingstory that Gates funded Giving Tuesday to run for a few years. You would tell your giving story and it was a competition and people won prizes, but we also got both Bill and Melinda to share their giving stories on Giving Tuesday, and that was a huge moment. And then what was also fun that nobody really saw behind the scenes is that inside Gates, we ran the same campaign, and we had everybody share their giving stories and people learned so much about their colleagues, what they gave to and why and what they were passionate about. There were some really amazing, powerful stories that we shared internally. So Gates got very involved in Giving Tuesday in lots of different ways. We also gave matches on Giving Tuesday, we did one with GlobalGiving, one with DonorsChoose, and match funding is another thing that can really go far.

Again that demonstrates the importance of storytelling – not just the facts and figures but the personal dimension of it.

Exactly, and getting people to promote things. Funders can use their voice so much in ways that are powerful, and you’re right, the convening power is also amazing. We had a couple convenings for Giving Tuesday because that was another thing Gates would do for grantees. We also did data dives, two of them for Giving Tuesday, one in partnership with Facebook, where we had 150 data scientists come together for a weekend and Giving Tuesday provided data and people. It was a fabulous event. We had one at the foundation in Seattle and one at Facebook’s headquarters in New York, and they would be looking for insights about giving and creating different algorithms and tools and things like that. A lot of fun, fun projects. That was another way that didn’t actually take a lot of money.

If you look at the dividends the Giving Tuesday investment paid, they must be huge.

Ultimately the Gates’ grant ran into the millions, but when you look at three billion at least raised every year, it’s a no-brainer. I think the first grant was USD 25,000 so it was really a relationship that built over time. We got to know them and they also were growing over time and so the investment was right-sized and appropriate.

That emphasises the point you made earlier on about the need for constant support and involvement. 

And a relationship. It’s fine when a funder comes in and drops money on you and disappears and you never talk to them again, but a productive, healthy relationship between a funder and a grantee or an infrastructure organisation can go so far. You have to acknowledge the power imbalance, but you also have to try and push past it and have a genuine kind of two-way relationship.

From your dual perspective both as a funder and as part of infrastructure yourself, what kind of support do you see infrastructure organisations needing most? Obviously they need money, but they also need equally important things like capacity-building, publicisation of their work. Where does the centre of gravity lie do you think?

For policy organisations that are advocating for things that have an impact on philanthropy, having foundations voices at the table is huge, but a lot of foundations are very weary and wary to jump in and take a stand, even though they’re fully within their legal right to do so. On the data front, there’s enormous things that foundations could do by opening up their own data, requiring non-profits to share data in certain ways and certain formats, making it easier for non-profits by using common systems instead of having them all use 30 different systems, so there’s actions that funders can take if they listen to the infrastructure organisations that can be helpful, that partnership, that guidance, that advice from funders. GlobalGiving doesn’t have many institutional partners at all. We’re kind of a sustainable social enterprise, but we do have one or two funders and we were talking to one the other day and they offered to introduce us to another funder, and that’s like such a gift. Connections.

Capacity-building, yes. But I’d rather just have general operating support that I can use in the way I need to build my own capacity. So flexible dollars, multi-year commitments. For any organisation, that’s key. I’m a big fan of MYGOD support, I think Stephanie [Gillis] calls it – multi-year general operating dollars. It’s some of the most powerful, powerful money and capital that non-profits can get. Gates has a rather large travel budget as you can imagine, and now that I’m at a non-profit infrastructure organisation, I miss that so much. There are things that I can’t go to because I don’t have the travel budget so funders who hold convenings and pay for travel, that’s such a gift because taking that space out, connecting with others, learning, elevating, that is not something you get to do as often as you should be able to at non-profits. And if you want more collaboration and coordination among infrastructure groups and non-profits in general, you have to create the space for that and bring groups together in order to be able to do that work.

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.