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Gorilla Philanthropy

As I mentioned here on the blog a couple of weeks ago, a growing number of us on the HBG team are reading David Callahan’s latest book, The Givers; Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age, and we meet weekly to talk about the latest chapter we’ve read.

Our discussions start with the book but we usually veer into the news of the day, pulling in observations from relevant and related articles from the New York Times, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, HistPhil, and more.

Last week we talked about chapter three, titled “Grandmasters” which seems particularly appropriate for these times. Callahan talks about billionaire investor-donors and their interests and motivations for giving, from their personal interests to their political giving on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum.

It was timely because, the week previously you will remember is the week that we as a nation withdrew from the Paris Agreement. It was also the week that there was an announcement that 14 new individuals and couples had signed onto The Giving Pledge. Some of the Pledgers were also covered in this chapter, so our discussion swirled around the Pledge, these philanthropic “Grandmasters,” and their response to the Paris withdrawal.

In case you haven’t been following it, the Giving Pledge (GP) is much more than just a nice letter sent from a billionaire philanthropist to Bill and Melinda Gates, although it does include that. They’re fascinating reading for those of us in fundraising. Each of the Pledgers’ letters tells a personal story of their commitment to philanthropy and how they came to the decision to give away at least half of their fortunes. Many of the letters talk about their philanthropic priorities and why those causes are important to them. Some of them detail the individual or couple’s entire personal or career biography.

But The Giving Pledge is much more than that.

The Pledge is an ante on the felt to join the most elite – and most powerful – multinational wealth-based club in the world. These are the nearly 500 billion pound dollar gorillas: in business, in society and political circles, and in their philanthropy. Their leverage is massive, and it’s growing.

With these 14 new signers the club now has 169 members from 21 countries with a combined net worth of over $840 billion.

So if you halve that $840B number you have $420 billion that they’ve said they will give away.

[And just for fun context, that’s slightly more than the GDP of Norway, and those people are sitting on free oil. It’s also 38 times the amount of the Ford Foundation endowment. The Ford Foundation.]

The GP isn’t just a virtual promise – it’s an in-person conference and more

In addition to informal meetings throughout the year that the Pledgers may have, Bill and Melinda Gates also host an organized annual two-day conference that brings all of the Pledge signers together, where they discuss wealth, philanthropy, and potential philanthropic opportunities.

According to a press release posted last month, this year’s conference provided Pledgers “with the opportunity to hear from outside experts and learn from each other about how to give effectively across a range of issues. Topics discussed at this year’s annual gathering included criminal justice reform, early childhood education, refugee aid, public health, and poverty alleviation.”

One could do an awful lot with that $420 billion to spend. 169 separate Pledgers with their own separate giving agendas? Well, still a lot.

But not as much as they could do as one.

What if, as a gradual result of these gatherings, this group of $420 billion giving gorillas decides to troop together to solve the big issues that they all do agree on, one by one?

That is exactly the kind of thing that makes The Givers author David Callahan very nervous. He straddles a very wobbly fence between delight that the world’s needs are being addressed by wealthy people who care, and fear that those same philanthropists wield too much power over the causes they choose (and I mean that both ways – by their choice of cause and by the power they potentially wield over the implementation and direction of their largesse).

I wonder if a question like this one has been floated at a GP conference:

“Just how much would it cost to figure out how to deliver cheap and reliable clean energy solutions to everyone on the planet?”

What if the Pledgers decided to pool their half-fortunes to solve the world’s most intractable problems? What if they became the world’s largest collaborative giving circle?

Do you think they’ve thought about it?

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501(c)(what?)

Harbor seal at Magdalen fjord by AWeith (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 You’ve probably heard of 501(c)(3)s or (4)s because you work or volunteer for one. But did you know that there are actually almost 30 different types of entities under the 501(c) section of the Internal Revenue Code? And there are 501(d)s, (e)s, (f)s and (k)s, as well as 521(a)s, too. There are a lot more nonprofit types than I ever dreamed of when I started this rabbit hole project. [Read more…]

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That work book

You honestly do want to read it. You spent the money on it. It’s just sitting on your desk or your shelf.

Very innocently. But making you feel guilty.

That work-book you bought.

I’ve got a few books like that on my office shelf. Some that I’ve started and abandoned after an interested afternoon, and others that I haven’t even cracked open yet. (but I will! I swear!)

But now, a solution.

Last week, some of my HBG colleagues and I – independent of each other – watched a vidcast of David Callahan and Emmett Carson in a fascinating, spirited, and sometimes provocative debate sponsored by Philanthropy New York. Callahan is the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, and author of the new book The Givers; Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age. Carson is president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in the world, with $8 billion+ in assets. [Read more…]

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How much is a good prospect researcher worth?

About $750,000 by my estimate.

You may think that’s an outrageous amount (and it is) but I’m saying it anyway. Let me explain why.

First of all, many professionals in the world have one main job. They repair things in a human body or in an automobile. They speak in front of cameras and explain what a company means to do, or what a politician did do. They deliver mail, or babies. They build houses or computer programs. [Read more…]

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Wealth events – a primer

“J. L. Thompson & Sons Ltd, shipbuilders” from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Wealth events are the most significant financial occasions that can happen to a person in their life. They’re pretty interesting for prospect development pros, too, because they allow us to sharpen our pencils and get down to the math, create beautiful family trees, or follow really interesting stories in the press.

Most of the time, we won’t be able to find out the whole story. Sometimes, we’ll only be able to report that an event has happened in our prospective donor’s life, but without much more detail than that. Occasionally, the wealth event news we’re discovering won’t be positive, such as a bankruptcy. In rare golden moments, we’ll have a news report or transaction filing that shares everything we want to know.

So what are wealth events, anyway? [Read more…]

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Giving Collaboratives – a podcast

Have you been following the emergence and exponential growth of giving collaboratives? Giving collaboratives can be individuals, foundations, NGOs, and others that join forces (and their finances) around a particular cause or toward a shared goal.

Angie Stapleton

Elizabeth Roma

This is an emerging phenomenon in philanthropy that caught the attention of two HBG team members, Elizabeth Roma and Angie Stapleton, who deeply researched and presented on the topic at the 2017 Apra Regional Conference (ARC). Part of their presentation included an 18-page companion guide to Giving Collaboratives, now available in the Learning Media Library here on our website.

I sat down with Elizabeth and Angie yesterday to ask them to tell me more about Giving Collaboratives and the resource they compiled, and recorded our conversation in this podcast so that you can hear as well:

 Whatever it is that you are looking to fund…there is a group of people out there who are looking to fund it” – Elizabeth Roma

Elizabeth and Angie will also lead an Apra Best Practice Webcast on the topic called “Collective Giving: Philanthropy as a Team Sport” on Monday May 15th at 1:00 PM ET. If you can’t make that day and time, look for the recording on the Apra website under Apra University.

For further reading: 

One of the resources Elizabeth and Angie mention in the podcast is The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers and their report More Giving Together.

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Doing Your Due Diligence

By Silke Remmery (Newspaper) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re a major donor to a nonprofit organization in the UK or Europe, chances are good that someone has done background research on you to make sure you’re not an arms dealer or drug kingpin.

This is called due diligence research and it’s essential to protecting the reputation of the nonprofit. What the organization is doing is ensuring that there are no legal reasons why the gift may be contested or clawed back later. Or worse.

A nonprofit’s reputation is obviously important – if an organization becomes allied with …a despot, say, it risks years of damage and decreased support of every kind. They become that scarlet-lettered nonprofit that everyone remembers for being the de facto money-launderer for the drug ring. Not too many volunteer and trustee types (or donors)(or talented employees) want to be affiliated with that kind of organization.

Most organizations in the UK and Europe have a policy to do due diligence research at a relatively modest level (at least by major donor giving progam standards). The amount under consideration can be as low as £1,000 or €1,000.

Of course, we do due diligence research on this side of the Atlantic, too, but we are more likely to back into it. By that I mean that we’re not usually specifically looking for negative information to see if we want to be allied with a donor from the get-go. Many times the person or company or foundation has already been a donor at a certain level for many years, but now is interested in making a very large or transformational gift of some sort.

Sometimes the news just falls in our lap in the course of our usual prospect research. Like the time I discovered…well, never mind. Suffice it to say it was a yikes-bullet-dodged moment and the organization I worked for decided to let that relationship gently fade away into the night.

But let’s say you do need to do reputational research on a prospective donor. Where are the best places for you to go?

Some organizations decide to hire an outside firm that specializes in due diligence research. It can be expensive, but of course the avoidance of reputational damage is frequently worth the money.

Others ask their prospect research department (or HBG) to take a first crack at it to see if any immediate red flags appear. They can then decide how to move forward if worrisome details start to emerge, by either running the request up the flag to a due diligence firm or by deciding not to ask for the donation to begin with.

If you want to tackle the due diligence research yourself, here is a list of a few of our team’s favorite sources:

You’ll find tons more resources on our HBG Research Links page. What are some of your favorite sources for due diligence research?

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Research Pride and Beyond!

As we bid a fond farewell to another terrific #ResearchPride month, I encourage you (if you haven’t already) to take a look at all of the great blogs, signs, and other activities that happened during this month of celebration, see here and here for the wrap up.

If you were one of those people who contributed a post, a sign, or a cake (!) I want you to know that you are awesome, and it’s not just me saying that. Your colleagues all think you are awesome, too. Thank you so much!

Of course, it doesn’t end here. We celebrate our pride all year; this is just our special festive season.

But now, I’d like to ask you to consider doing more than blogging, tweeting, liking and sharing.

Consider this your gentle but firm nudge to become a more active part of your community. Your Apra chapter could really use your help. From volunteering two hours at a conference, to speaking on a panel, to serving on a chapter task force or board…your ideas, your hands, your voice, and your skills are a precious gift and are truly needed. [Read more…]

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Pride is results-based

One of the questions that we ask people who are applying for a job at The Helen Brown Group is this:

What single project or task would you consider your most significant career accomplishment to date? Walk me through the plan, how you managed it, how you measured its success, and what the biggest mistakes you made were.

It’s not an out-of-the ordinary question but I love the results.

You can always tell the candidates who are proud of something they’ve done. Regardless if they achieved a relatively small task like redesigning a profile format, or if they completely reorganized a prospect development shop, you can see them sit up taller in their seat. They visibly brighten. Some get right to describing it from the very beginning, and others get tongue-tied because they’re so excited to talk about it.

It is impossible to miss their pride.

Their excitement pretty much amps up the wattage in the room. When I hear people walking me through the steps describing their proudest accomplishments, I have to say that it has an infectious element to it – I can’t help but feel pride, too. Pride for them, as well as a general personal joy in how cool our profession is.

Pride comes from doing something that makes life better for having done it. For our profession, it usually comes from dreaming up a project, mapping out the plan, executing it, quantifying success and documenting the trouble spots to avoid next time. Pride is results-based. You have to put in the time.

Fortunately, progress in prospect development is pretty easy to quantify. We can plan and manage new projects that will move fundraising forward. We can measure how many prospects were identified. How many of those prospects went on to make major gifts. How many profiles we’ve written. How many new prospects were rated and assigned. And on and on.

We can look at what we’ve done over the past year or the past five, or the past campaign, and decide what worked and what didn’t. What we’d do better or differently.

Research Pride month is a celebration of all of those individual and collective projects that move our department, our profession – and our organizations – forward. It’s kind of hard to feel a sense of pride if you haven’t really accomplished anything. Or don’t feel as if you have.

I can tell you from personal experience, the room always goes a little dimmer when a candidate can’t come up with something that they’ve done that has made them proud. I doubt it’s that they really haven’t actually accomplished something worthy of pride – it’s more likely that they just haven’t taken the time to document a project’s steps and success. Or at least, I always hope so.

Pride is results-based

Documenting your achievements is important, for yourself and your career advancement, to help give you a sense of accomplishment. But it’s also important because it’s a way to show others what is possible. We prospect development pros share our achievements with each other and help our colleagues avoid our mistakes.

As Angie said last week, our collaboration begets innovation.

When we share our professional knowledge, it has an illuminating effect across our whole profession. And that pride is impossible to miss.

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Better Together

This week we welcome HBG Research Associate Angie Stapleton to share her thoughts during #ResearchPride month. In preparation for her presentation next week at ARC in Atlanta with teammate Elizabeth Roma, Angie has been giving a lot of thought to the macro view of philanthropy and how prospect development plays a key part in it. Here she shares a glimpse into some of the ways that philanthropists are collaborating and re-shaping what philanthropy looks like around our world.

In honor of #ResearchPride month, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the work I do every day. It didn’t take long to pinpoint what I love most about this work I have the pleasure of doing day-in and day-out – quite simply, it is that I get to see all the good going on in our world. [Read more…]

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