Category Archives: Fundraising

Raising Money v. Moving Money

February 24, 2010 – 8:18 am

This is a guest post from Steve Goldberg. Steve is a consultant to Charity Navigator and the author of Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets:  Why Philanthropy Doesn’t Advance Social Progress.

By Steve Goldberg

Steve GoldbergI’m struck by the inherent futility of fundraising. Like Sisyphus endlessly rolling that rock up the mountain, a fundraiser’s job is never done. Every day they face the same implicit question: “What have you done for us lately?” Although some organizations have supplementary funding sources, for most nonprofits most of the time, it comes down to fundraising.

For the more than 90% of nonprofits that raise less than $1 million each year, fundraising is essential just to maintain baseline operations. And no matter how great the need or effective the nonprofit, program growth isn’t possible without increased fundraising. As we think about moving the needle of social change, it seems short-sighted to expect fundraising heroics to bear most of the burden.

An insightful article in the MIT journal, Innovations, by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, authors of Philanthrocapitalism, offers “a fundamental rethinking” about “how to finance the growth of a good idea into a world-changing social innovation.” In “The Capital Curve for a Better World,” Bishop and Green make a persuasive case that “the next frontier in raising the efficiency of social innovation has to be the capital markets for good,” and that “a concerted effort is now needed to design an effective and efficient capital curve for social innovation.”

The authors envision “a productivity miracle in the social/citizen sector,” that could enable effective nonprofits to become more than “islands of excellence,” and break through the limits of “successful, but not successful enough, organizations”:

The non-profit/philanthropic sector has a decent record of funding innovative ideas in the early stages of putting them into practice. However, non-profits have tended to remain small and inefficient …. They often have little choice but to rely overwhelmingly on short-term funding, which tends to be extremely expensive to raise (especially when it is in small amounts from the general public). Large-scale philanthropy has the potential to provide the long-term, high-risk capital that social innovation often needs, but too often is risk-averse and uses short-term project financing rather than providing innovative start-ups with philanthropic equity.

The challenge is (1) “to figure out which forms of money—grants, debt, equity, government funds, for-profit funds, paying customer—are most effective at which stage along the journey from good idea to having massive social impact,” and then (2) “to … put in place [the systems] to ensure that the resources that exist are available to the most promising ventures at different critical junctures.”

This framework suggests an emerging discipline of “moving money” that holds out hope for reducing our over-reliance on fundraising. Fundraising relies on building relationships with prospective donors and telling engaging stories about the nonprofit’s work.  It represents the personal connection of philanthropy, one that’s inherently time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moving money is data-driven: it depends on creating new value from market intelligence.

Fundraising is useful for even small donations, but spending time and effort to move money around only makes sense for sizable, usually aggregated funding looking for investment opportunities that individual donors can’t find on their own. If nonprofit capital markets became more adept at moving money, it could reduce the need to repeatedly raise new money in small amounts.

Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest advanced the idea in 2007 that “information about an organization’s performance can usefully guide investment decisions.” A 2008 Keystone Accountability study explored how online markets “can serve as not just a convenient way of donating money but also a means of encouraging effectiveness by directing money to the highest-achieving organizations.” But a 2009 Hewlett-funded analysis of 55 online platforms concludes that “the limited evaluative analysis that has been developed is not reaching, or failing to influence, a large proportion of donors.”

An ecosystem of money-movers is still evolving, comprising intermediaries (SeaChange Capital Partners, Global Philanthropy Network), analysts (New Philanthropy Capital, Root Cause), rating organizations (Charity Navigator, GreatNonprofits), sector leaders (Alliance for Effective Social Investing, Social Capital Markets), and advisors (Tactical Philanthropy), to name a few.

More than $300 billion in private philanthropy doesn’t raise itself every year, and fundraising doesn’t have unlimited capacity to increase the amount of money to fund nonprofits. As the social sector looks increasingly to “scaling what works,” the state-of-the-art of moving money must keep advancing, too.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Capital Market Philanthropy, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Social Capital Markets | Comments (6)

Social Impact Exchange

December 4, 2009 – 7:39 am

The Social Impact Exchange is a new effort from Growth Philanthropy Network and Duke University with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Exchange is designed as a focal point for studying, funding and implementing large expansions of proven social purpose organizations. To that end the Exchange offers an “investment clearinghouse” (free registration needed) of top-performing nonprofits that are actively implementing growth strategies (read the full press release here).

The Clearinghouse is interesting because of the way it offers some of the attributes of a stock exchange. There has been a lot of talk in philanthropy about social stock exchanges, but I’ve often found the implementation of this concept of little interest. This is because when most people think of a stock exchange, they think of the prices of stocks moving up and down as the primary characteristic. A social stock exchange which attempts to mimic the pricing elements of a stock exchange is interesting, but I’ve yet to see an implementation that is particularly exciting. Instead, stock exchanges are valuable not only because they publicly reveal prices, but because they have certain requirements for organizations to be listed and ongoing requirements to stay listed.

Once an organization is listed on a stock exchange, it must adhere to higher levels of public disclosure than a non-listed company. Being listed on a stock exchange is called “going public” and a listed company is a “public company” as opposed to a non-listed or “privately held” company.

This all matters to philanthropy because the organizations listed on the new Social Impact Exchange are offering public access to documents such as due diligence reports, business plans and the results of independent evaluations (it appears that currently there are not standard documents that all listed organizations must have, but see the documents listed for the nonprofit Ways to Work as examples).

My friend George Overholser, has often pushed back on my urging for nonprofits to share more information about themselves publicly. George’s point is that most nonprofits are the equivalent of privately held companies, who may be damaged if they share too much of their internal issues with the public. While I’ve generally thought that nonprofits should have a higher required level of transparency than privately held companies, George’s point has always resonated with me. With the advent of the Social Impact Exchange, we have the beginning of a mechanism whereby a nonprofit that is ready to “go public” can list their organization and in exchange gain access to a wider range of philanthropic investors.

In addition, the Exchange plans to only list organizations who have demonstrated extremely high levels of impact and scale readiness or have demonstrated a significant level of effectiveness, and are increasing their capacity for scale readiness (groups qualifying under each standard are identified separately). This means that if the Exchange can establish credibility for their vetting process, 1) organizations who get listed will gain a marketing advantage due to their “making the grade” and 2) donors can have an increased level of confidence in Exchange listed organizations.

The Social Impact Exchange is more than just a list of nonprofits. It also hopes to be a hub for related research, publishing, education and training as well as an annual conference, business plan competition and regional meetings.

While this effort is still in its infancy, I think the organizers have gotten some key elements right. With the high profile funding from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the involvement of Duke University, the Social Impact Exchange is one to watch.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Capital Market Philanthropy, Effective Giving, Information Sharing, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropic Equity, Philanthropy, Transparency | Comments (2)

Social Innovation Fast Pitch

November 9, 2009 – 12:15 am

For-profit markets have mechanisms where groups of potential investment opportunities are vetted and then presented to potential investors. The success of this model, is that the potential investors come to the table looking for potential investments. This is radically different from most nonprofit fundraising interactions where the potential “investee” approaches the potential “investor” without having been vetted in anyway. This leads to donor/investors generally having their guard up during the initial interaction.

A different sort of model is playing out in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The Social Innovation Fast Pitch event being held at the University of Southern California, features nonprofits that have been vetted by USC, Social Venture Partners-Los Angeles and the Social Enterprise Institute.

The Social Innovation Fast Pitch is not just an event where 10 nonprofit leaders give their 3-minute elevator pitch to compete for $20,000 grants in front of an audience of 350 people. It’s really a professional development program for social entrepreneurs that builds skills they’ll use every day. It teaches them how to talk to people about their organization in a much clearer, more compelling way. What we’ve observed is that too often, the message gets stale, and people tend to use too much jargon. They may not be clear about their “ask”, or may put themselves in a box by focusing their “ask” only on money or on assumptions they make about their audience. In addition, they just don’t get the feedback from listeners about what they like and connect with – or don’t like. These organizations are doing amazing, innovating and impactful things, but from some of the applications, you’d never know it!

The program addresses these ineffective communication habits head on. This year, 22 nonprofits were selected from a pool of 65 nominations to go through the 2-month training program. We recruit dozens of volunteers from the business community to provide group coaching in multiple practice sessions, and also pair each nonprofit leader with 1 or 2 of the coaches to mentor them between sessions. Of course, what often happens is that the feedback prompts them to look at bigger, strategic questions about the organization. The difference over a short period of time is truly amazing! Program participants tell us that – based on what they’ve learned – they change the way they talk about their organization in almost every setting: to people they just meet, to the media, to their boards, and to funders.

This year’s event runs from 4:00 – 7:30 pm on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at USC. In addition to the 10 presenters, the program features Andy Rappaport, a venture capitalist and social entrepreneur, who will share his views on social change and risk-seeking philanthropy. The program is co-hosted by Los Angeles Social Venture Partners, the Social Enterprise Institute, and the University of Southern California.

For more information or to register for the event click here.

I’m particularly intrigued by the concept, because it mirrors the way I speculated that nonprofit funding might occur in the future in a column I wrote for the Financial Times in early 2008.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Capital Market Philanthropy, Innovation, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropy | Comments (2)

Emotions & Logic in Philanthropy

May 13, 2009 – 7:28 am

Today I randomly ran across a two year old comment I left on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog. Katya Andresen’s colleague Jono Smith had written a post arguing for nonprofit fundraisers to appeal to “the heart, not the head” when approaching donors.

Smith wrote:

Feelings, not analytical thinking, drive donations. According to a new study (PDF link) conducted by Deborah Small, a Wharton marketing professor, and colleagues George Loewenstein & Paul Slovic, if organizations want to raise money for a charitable cause, it is far better to appeal to the heart than to the head.

From Knowledge@Wharton

One pitch for charity described the needs of Rokia, a young girl in Africa who is desperately poor and faces starvation. Another pitch talks about food shortages affecting more than three million children, many of whom are homeless. Which pitch is more effective? Not surprisingly, it’s the first.

That people would want to give money to identifiable victims like Rokia rather than unnamed famine victims may not seem all that surprising. But Small and her colleagues, in a series of field experiments, delved deeper into the issue of sympathy and how it relates to charitable giving. The researchers found that if people are presented with a personal case of an identifiable victim along with statistical data about similar victims caught up in a larger pattern of illness, hunger or neglect, overall donations actually decline. In addition, they found that if people are told about the inconsistent levels of sympathy evoked by identifiable and statistical victims—the “identifiable victim effect,” in the words of the researchers—people reduce their giving to identifiable victims but do not increase their giving to statistical victims.

This study is also highlighted in the book I’m reading right now titled “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Die”. The book explains that when the analytical part of our brain is activated, even by unrelated math problems, our empathy/altruism declines. Essentially the authors argue that the analytical part of the brain is separate from the emotional part of the brain and when analytics are activated the intensity of our emotional reactions decline.

But this doesn’t mean that money is best raised by offering donors empty emotional calls to action! The authors of Made to Stick are focused on what makes ideas have an impact on people and stay with them (from urban legends to Jared the Subway Diet Guy to The Girl Effect Video). Their point is not that people are best manipulated by emotions, it is that humans are better at absorbing and preserving certain types of information better than others.

One of the best ways that humans process information is when it is presented in a story format. Good stories offer compelling evidence for their underlying truth. But not by bombarding the listener with statistics. Instead good stories use narrative to build a convincing case.

This idea is often summed up in the philanthropy world as “No Stories Without Numbers and No Numbers Without Stories” (I’ve said this myself in the past). But I think this is actually wrong. Numbers are not the key. In fact the evidence suggests numbers may be the wrong way to go in this case. I think instead it is No Stories Without Truth and No Truth Without Stories.

The reason the Rokia Study bothers some people is it seems to imply that we should just feed donors tear jerker stories to get them to open their wallet. Instead, I think the message is that when you are trying to convince someone of the importance of a philanthropic effort, you should figure out how to present the truthful core of your message in a story format. It is only authentic stories that hold real truths about the world that “stick” over time. These kinds of stories are like wonderful, filling meals compared to the artificially flavored “candy” of the tear jerker that is just meant to extract money from donors.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Philanthropy, Spreading Ideas, Storytelling | Comments (5)

The FORGE Story & The Wall Street Journal

April 24, 2009 – 11:16 am

The FORGE story dominated many of my blog posts from December of last year. It was the first time that the Tactical Philanthropy Community came together around a specific nonprofit. From the hours of pro bono consulting of Tactical Philanthropy reader Curtis Chang to the many, many comments from readers offering advice and constructive criticism to FORGE to the $50,000 anonymous grant from a Tactical Philanthropy reader that closed FORGE’s funding gap and helped set them on the path to restructuring their fundraising program, I’m still in awe over the generosity of the Tactical Philanthropy Community.

So I was thrilled to see that the Wall Street Journal included the FORGE story yesterday in a special section on how for-profits and nonprofits are working to survive the financial crisis. In the article titled Helping Themselves, Wall Street Journal reporter Shelly Banjo profiled a number of nonprofits that are thinking creatively in an effort to survive:

It isn’t just the economy that’s battering nonprofits. Many have been victims of recent financial scandals, and several have had to shut their doors as a result.

That has eroded trust among donors, and the only way to regain that trust is for nonprofits to be open about their finances, operations and policies, says Sean Stannard-Stockton, principal and director of tactical philanthropy at Ensemble Capital Management LLC of Burlingame, Calif.

Mr. Stannard-Stockton points to Forge, a nonprofit that implements community-development projects — such as building libraries and schools, running job-training programs and facilitating microloans to farmers — for refugees in Africa.

Forge hasn’t been caught up in the recent financial scandals, but it encountered other difficulties. Forge started out sending students, each of whom committed to raise $5,000, to work with the refugees. But in 2007, the organization eliminated the volunteers and instead employed the refugees themselves to design and lead the projects. That also eliminated a chunk of the organization’s revenue stream just as Forge was losing other donations amid the economic downturn, leaving it to face a $100,000 budget shortfall for 2008.

In response, Forge founder Kjerstin Erickson began blogging about her mistakes and Forge’s situation on socialedge.org, an online community for entrepreneurs, nonprofit professionals and philanthropists to discuss approaches and solutions to social problems. She began by telling her story and unveiling her financial records to the public, down to details including staff salaries and budgets.

Within days, bloggers, nonprofit consultants, foundations and donors caught wind of the story and began asking more questions and offering suggestions. Some readers stepped up to offer Ms. Erickson free consulting help, and a foundation followed with a $50,000 donation. Eventually, increased donations erased Forge’s budget gap.

"Public confidence goes up, not down, when people quickly and honestly admit their mistakes and explain how they are going to move forward," says Mr. Stannard-Stockton, who picked up Forge’s story on his own blog.

Philanthropy experts warn that nonprofits can’t rely on transparency to bail them out of a financial crisis. "Transparency isn’t a tactic you use to fund-raise, it’s a value for your organization to adopt," Mr. Stannard-Stockton says. But it does build trust and understanding among donors, making them more likely to continue giving.

You can read the full article, which profiles a number of efforts, here.

Thanks to all of you that helped FORGE help themselves!

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Philanthropy, Transparency, nonprofits | Comments (1)

Building Individual Fundraising Capacity

April 8, 2009 – 8:34 am

Last year, consultant Curtis Chang of Consulting Within Reach offered his services pro bono to FORGE during their radical transparency experiment. Looking back on the FORGE story, Curtis told me:

My takeaway from the FORGE case is that there is tremendous strategic leverage when foundations, influential individuals and nonprofits work together for the good of the sector.

Curtis is a man of action and so he has taken it upon himself to organize a gathering of people from the sector to talk about how nonprofits can improve their capacity to fundraise from individual donors. Curtis rightly recognizes that fundraising revenue from individuals is more sustainable than revenue from institutional funders.

Describing the event (which I will be a part of and will be held at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation on May 11), Curtis writes:

The nonprofit sector is sustained by four main sources of funding: 1) state contracts; 2) foundations; 3) corporate giving; and 4) individuals. The first three will all be certainly cut in the near future: state funding due to the budget crisis; foundations due to heavy endowment losses in the stock market; corporate giving due to a deep recession.

If nonprofits are to thrive amidst this climate, they must expand their individual donor base. And yet, some of the most outstanding nonprofits have relied heavily on those first three sources and have under invested in their capacity to reach individuals. If donors wish to multiply the impact of their own (often shrinking) dollars, helping nonprofits build this capacity is one highly leveraged response to the current financial crisis.

Curtis has brought together a great group of people including:

  • Bill Somerville, Philanthropic Ventures Foundation
  • Mauricio Palmas, Silicon Valley Community Foundation
  • Loretta Gallegos, Packard Foundation
  • Anne Marie Burgoyne, Draper Richards Foundation
  • Dave Peery, Peery Foundation
  • Sean Stannard-Stockton, Tactical Philanthropy
  • Lindsay Austin Louie and Lance Fors, SV2

He’s also assembling a group of individual donors. The key group of course is the outstanding nonprofits that he’s bringing to the table. The three groups will spend the day talking about how the nonprofits can increase their capacity to fundraise from individuals.

Here’s where you come in: Curtis is looking for recommendations of nonprofits that should be invited. If you have someone in mind, shoot me an email and I’ll pass it along to Curtis. The criteria are:

  • pursues a mission with a relatively broad appeal
  • possesses some distinctive that makes it stand out
  • led by an individual that presents well
  • has a small individual donor base but is motivated to grow it
  • available to be in silicon valley on May 11

He’s looking for outstanding organizations. Who should be there?

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Philanthropy | Comments (1)

Dan Pallotta & Robert Egger Hash Things Out

December 30, 2008 – 9:12 am

In the comments section to my post about Dan Pallotta’s new book Uncharitable, Dan skewered Robert Egger for his quote in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that Dan “Strip-minded the cause” and for the negative treatment that Robert afforded Dan in his book Begging for Change.

Robert, the president of DC Central Kitchen and a member of the Nonprofit Times Power & Influence Top 50, has now come back with a response to Dan’s comments. Joining the mix as well is Sasha Dichter, the head of Business Development at Acumen Fund.

There is real tension and disagreement in this conversation. But I think it is a worthy conversation to be had. This isn’t controversy for the sake of spectacle, it is an opportunity to hash out real differences, kick in some rotten doors in our thinking, and hopefully come out the other side better for it.

You can catch up on the full comments here. You’ll find Dan’s comments regarding Robert here, Robert’s rebuttal here and Sasha’s take here.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropy | Comments (1)

Uncharitable

December 26, 2008 – 11:14 am

I totally let the New York Times beat me to the punch! Over the summer, Dan Pallotta, the author of the new book Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential , sent me a review copy of his book. He sent it to me after reading my Financial Times column arguing in favor of paying nonprofit employees a market rate salary. But I never got around to writing a review and so now the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof has beat me to it:

A new book, “Uncharitable,” seethes with indignation at public expectations that charities be prudent, nonprofit and saintly. The author, Dan Pallotta, argues that those expectations make them less effective, and he has a point.

…Mr. Pallotta argues powerfully that the aid world is stunted because groups are discouraged from using such standard business tools as advertising, risk-taking, competitive salaries and profits to lure capital.

“We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that will hurt the poor, but we want to crucify anyone who wants to make money helping them,” Mr. Pallotta says. “Want to make a million selling violent video games to kids? Go for it. Want to make a million helping cure kids of cancer? You’re labeled a parasite.”

…In the war on poverty, there is room for all kinds of organizations. Mr. Pallotta may be right that by frowning on aid groups that pay high salaries, advertise extensively and even turn a profit, we end up hurting the world’s neediest.

What Pallotta gets right in his book is his broad theme that the social benefit sector is hamstrung by a cultural belief that people who do good should do so in a sacrificial way. This belief confuses the act of doing good with the actual good that is achieved. Our cultural belief system implies that a person who goes to work for little pay, in a nonprofit organization that is barely surviving is more admirable then someone who is highly paid, working in a robust organization regardless of what good each person actually achieves.

Imagine for a moment an imaginary nonprofit that is working on homelessness in a major city. It is staffed by intelligent, hard working people who care deeply about alleviating human suffering. They work in a dingy office in a warehouse district and depend on donations and volunteers to help them survive. But year after year, the homeless problem gets worse.

Now imagine a new organization comes to town. It is a for-profit homeless relief agency! The group has devised a program that dramatically reduces homelessness, not by driving people out of town, but by putting into place the elements that actually get people out of the cycle of homelessness and into a stable living environment. The organization’s offices are in the penthouse of a downtown skyscraper and the CEO makes millions.

If you are like most people (including me) the first organization warms your heart and the second one makes you feel a little sick. But at the end of the day it is the second organization that actually relieves homelessness! Shouldn’t that warm our heart more, regardless of how it actually gets done and how much money the people doing the work make?

If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you know that I don’t believe there are a lot of profit opportunities in social problems. I don’t write much about for-profit business that are doing good. My focus in on traditional grantmaking to nonprofits. My point here is NOT to suggest that nonprofits should turn a profit. But to highlight the way that as a culture we embrace a certain way of achieving good at the expense of actually doing good in the world. The core of my column on nonprofit salaries was not an argument that nonprofit employees “deserved” more or that they “should” be paid more, but that doing so, or at least having it be morally acceptable to do so, would result in higher impact.

That’s what we need to care about. Not how hard we try, not how nice we are, not how much we sacrifice, but how much good we actually achieve. Anything else is downright selfish.

Readers of Uncharitable will find many things they disagree with. Pallotta’s past was in running a for-profit company that raised money for AIDS research. He created the hugely popular AIDS Rides before public outcry over his company’s profit forced him to close down (see Pallotta’s comment regarding why his company closed). My friend Robert Egger is quoted in a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy review of Uncharitable saying that “[Pallotta] strip-mined the cause. He did a tremendous disservice.” Another friend of mine who does charity evaluation work emailed me after reading Uncharitable (at my suggestion): “Oy vey!!!!!! I have gotten to page 10 and can not believe how much I disagree with the guy!”

I urge you to read Uncharitable not as a list of suggestions that I think you should agree with, but as a challenge to the assumptions you make about charity and social good. The benefit you should take from the book are not prescriptive actions but a cracking of dogmatic beliefs you don’t fully realize you hold.

Pallotta opens the book with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “All great truths begin as blasphemies,” and another from John Kenneth Galbraith, “All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.”

So go out and read Uncharitable. You’ll have some of the rotten doors in the way you think kicked in, but you’ll also hear some blasphemies!

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthrocapitalism, Philanthropy | Comments (46)

“Investing” & Philanthropy Part 2

December 18, 2008 – 11:42 am

Jeff Trexler who is a professor of social entrepreneurship at Pace University leaves a comment on my last post:

This is an important discussion. As we see with the way Obama and others have framed government expenditures on infrastructure, the investment metaphor can be an effective rhetorical tool for building support for public benefit activities. The same goes for what Sean describes in his answer to Leslie’s question.

However, handled less adeptly the language of investment can actually be self-defeating. One conspicuous example of this is the recent trend toward re-framing donor appeals as IPOs. Read certain “prospectuses” and you’ll find ROI variably described as self-esteem, smiles, feeling good and so forth.

This may seem clever, but if you’re trying to impress someone with a substantive background in securities it’s not a good way to go. It makes the IPO-and the charity–seem glib and superficial, more like children playing Wall Street than a serious engagement with social investment.

I wrote about the dangers of “nonprofit-IPOs” recently, but also highlighted the public interest in the concept. Donors are hungry for financially sophisticated philanthropy. But they do not yet understand what that means. Some people will profit by dressing up regular fundraising in financial market language. But donors will lose interest in that quickly. The challenge is going to be in offering real investment opportunities to donors before they get turned off to the slick language of imposters.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Capital Market Philanthropy, Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Giving Blogs, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropic Equity, Philanthropy | Comments (1)

Another Foundation Funds FORGE

December 12, 2008 – 10:44 am

The day after I laid out Why I’m Investing in FORGE, I received an email from an anonymous foundation asking me for additional commentary on my rationale. Today I was cc’d on this letter that they sent to FORGE. This is being reprinted with permission:

Dear Kjerstin, It was great to meet at your office today. Thank you for your time on such short notice.

Having considered the current challenges of FORGE as we’ve discussed today, the [deleted] Foundation is prepared to offer what we feel will help catalyze the kind of immediate funding you need, while also ensuring that FORGE can strengthen its work for the long-term. If you can raise another $20,000 between today and the end of February 2009, we will do two things: 1) we will match that with another $20,000 for core support, and 2) in addition, we will make a grant of $30,000 to be used for building internal capacity (as you described today) during 2009.

While this funding will help address FORGE’s immediate needs, the additional investment of $30,000 will be instrumental in 2009. As the current financial crisis is sure to affect non-profits significantly this coming year, it will be even more important for you and your staff to address the long-term sustainability of FORGE. This support for capacity will allow you to do just that.

I admire the work you are doing and the great sacrifices you and your team are making to do it. We hope this support will ultimately help FORGE to be successful in providing African refugees with the tools to lead and empower their communities.

This is a really well designed grant. It allows the foundation to not make the grant if FORGE is unable to raise enough to make this grant push them over the top to close their short term funding gap. It also begins to lay the groundwork for funding the restructuring of FORGE’s fundraising program next year.

This grant adds to the $27,000 already raised by FORGE as a direct result of their commitment to transparency. FORGE still needs to raise $20,000 to get this grant. If you want to help FORGE reach that goal, you can donate to them via this widget:

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Effective Giving, Evaluation, Foundations, Information Sharing, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Social Media, Transparency, nonprofits | Comments (6)