Category Archives: Giving Blogs

Chronicle of Philanthropy/Tactical Philanthropy Interactivity

February 12, 2009 – 8:03 am

When I first launched my column with the Financial Times, I planned on creating some linkages between the column and this blog. For instance, when I wrote a column about giving circles I had hoped to link back to my blog where I would publish a list of similarities between giving circles and investment clubs that the head of a giving circle had sent to me. But that concept never really played out.

With my new Chronicle of Philanthropy column, I think I can build in more interactivity. For instance, I might refer in my column to a video hosted here at Tactical Philanthropy. Or I could source column ideas (as I started to yesterday) here on the blog. Or maybe we get really creative and crowdsource a column via a collaborative writing process.

Many of my readers are a lot more creative than me when it comes to understanding how to push the boundaries with social media tools. How do you think I should take advantage of the dual print/online media combination? And don’t forget that the Chronicle of Philanthropy has their own website where they’ve been hosting live chats and doing other interactive events. I’m sure they’ll be open to experimenting with new ideas as well.

How can we make this more than just another newspaper column?

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Chronicle of Philanthropy Column, Media, Philanthropy, Social Media, nptech | Comments (0)

Reimagining CSR

February 4, 2009 – 12:58 pm

Warning: Shameless, but well deserved plug ahead.

Most people don’t know this, but my younger sister Jessica Stannard-Friel gave me my first big break in philanthropy. Before I started Tactical Philanthropy, I wrote an essay called The Evolution of the Tactical Philanthropist for the book Mapping The New World of American Philanthropy. The book was edited by my sister’s bosses Susan Raymond and Mary Beth Martin at the philanthropy advising firm Changing Our World. Jessica worked there after finishing her undergraduate degree at Harvard and then returned to Harvard to enter the MBA program in 2007. She’s always been the over-achiever in our family!

Now she has launched a new blog called Reimagining CSR. From her first post:

This blog will explore innovations and trends in corporate social responsibility, with an emphasis on initiatives that serve both a social impact motive and a profit motive. For instance, I’m very interested in the overlapping worlds of creative capitalism, business at the base of the pyramid, cause marketing, for-profit social enterprise, and so on.

…I hope that this blog will become a dialogue. In my posts, I plan to draw on sources including conversations with practitioners, books, articles, and conferences, but I think your comments and feedback could be the richest source of learning for me. Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on these issues or your ideas for this blog by commenting or emailing me.

Jessica’s blog is part of her course work at Harvard and she’s using it to explore CSR and learn as much as she shares. But she’s not simply a student, she really knows her stuff. From her bio:

Jessica Stannard-Friel is a second-year MBA student at Harvard Business School and Co-President of the school’s Social Enterprise Club. Prior to graduate school, Jessica worked as a corporate philanthropy consultant at Changing Our World, where she advised companies on strategic community engagement. While at Changing Our World, she also served as Corporate Philanthropy Editor for onPhilanthropy.com and co-founded the blog Future Leaders in Philanthropy. Last summer, Jessica interned at a corporate foundation, where she worked on the company’s international grantmaking strategy. She serves on the National Advisory Board of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy.

So go check out her blog. She’s got a lot to say and she’d love to hear your thoughts.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (1)

“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, Fundraising, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropic Equity, Philanthropy | Comments (1)

New Way To Rate Charities Sought

November 24, 2008 – 9:13 am

The Washington Post, who named Megan Greenwell to their “philanthropy beat” last week, has written a story in today’s paper about the Effective Social Investing working group that I attended last week:

New Way To Rate Charities Sought
An alliance of prominent philanthropists and entrepreneurs is developing a rating system that they hope will radically alter the way donors evaluate whether a charity is worth their money.

The Social Investing Rating Tool would assess not only how nonprofit groups spend their money but also whether their work is making a difference. The goal is to encourage donors to think more like investors — to consider their charitable donations social investments, complete with risks and responsibilities.

“There are commonly accepted metrics to be able to say this is a good corporation or a good restaurant or a good movie, but there are none of those metrics for the nonprofit sector, and there have to be,” said Robert Egger, president of D.C. Central Kitchen, who participated last week in the first meeting of the Working Group on Effective Social Investing.

Most people, when thinking of making donations, research charities on such Web sites as http://charitynavigator.org and http://charitywatch.org, if they check on them at all. But those sources limit ratings to financial considerations — the percentage of donations spent on overhead costs is one key criteria — which experts say fail to take into account the most important factor: whether the charity is doing any good…

…”The fact is that we’re in a massive financial crisis, so it’s more important than ever that people are giving their money to organizations that are successful,” said Sean Stannard-Stockton, a Working Group member who runs a capital management firm in California and writes a blog about philanthropy. “Donors have no good way to distinguish between an organization that does work they’re interested in and a great organization that accomplishes results they’re interested in.”…

…Members of the Working Group include heads of two of the nation’s largest philanthropic organizations — Brian Gallagher, chief executive of United Way of America, and Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation — and leaders of direct-service organizations, academic institutions and corporations. All told, almost two dozen people from across the country met last week in Washington to begin discussing how to shape the new rating system…

…Ultimately, members of the working group hope that Charity Navigator or another independent group will analyze charities using the new rating tool and make results public through the Web. Information on which charities are underperforming, combined with the economic slump, is likely to result in the demise of many of those groups, members acknowledge — and some say that’s not a bad thing.

“America is still incredibly generous, but I see a saturated market with 2 million efforts all over the map,” Egger said. “The question is, how do we get to a point where we’re using all our assets with ingenuity and real purpose?”

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Effective Giving, Evaluation, Foundations, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Transparency | Comments (2)

Blogging About Philanthropy

November 21, 2008 – 12:27 pm

Most blogs written by foundation employees do not actually talk about the field of philanthropy. Instead they talk about what they foundation is doing and are often little more than frequently updated online newsletters (Gara LaMarche, the CEO of The Atlantic Philanthropies, writes a personal blog about music, politics and all sorts of interesting things, but rarely talks about philanthropy).

Lucy Bernholz, myself and the many other people who write about philanthropy tend to do the reverse. Neither I nor Lucy write much about the firms we run, instead we talk about philanthropy more generally. So that’s why I’ve been so pleased to see that in his first two posts, Paul Brest has begun to stake out a personal blog about philanthropy. He’s even decided to follow the classic model of most bloggers (but not most foundation blogs) of commenting on other people’s blogs, writing about what other blogs say on his own blog and (this is critical) disagreeing with the other bloggers!

Why do I care about the disagreeing part? At the Forum on Wednesday, I encouraged Paul and Bill Somerville to really engage on the issues and not just agree that both approaches were needed. Frankly, they came out swinging (the video will be up in about a week) and were willing to pointedly explain where they thought the other person was wrong. I was amused by the audience reaction. My partner at Ensemble Capital, a man who’s spent his entire 40-year+ career in wealth management, told me that he thought the Forum was great but that Bill and Paul had been pretty tame during the debate. I also got an email from a life long philanthropy professional who told me “that was the most combative debate I’ve ever seen at a philanthropy event!”

Wealth management is a world where combative arguments are par for the course. If you are not prepared to accept constructive criticism and to layout why you disagree with another person, this isn’t the industry isn’t for you. Realize that for any trade to occur in the market a person who thinks an investment should be bought must find someone who wants to sell. In other words, every transaction in a financial market is the manifestation of two opposing beliefs.

But philanthropy is different. One of the audience questions I got at the Forum read, “Although Sean might be looking for a fight, I wonder if there is a happy medium here…”

Anyone who knows me personally knows that I never yell, I rarely get angry, I don’t pick fights and I’m just not the kind of person who enjoys criticizing people. But I DO like to figure out which idea is best, which strategy is most likely to work, whose point of view is most valid.

The only way to learn and get better is to have your beliefs tested and to modify them if they don’t stand up to the heat. I’ve been writing this blog for over two years now. One of the reasons I started it was to learn from other people. To put my ideas out there to be tested. I’ve changed some of my thoughts on how philanthropy should be practiced. If my readers and other bloggers had all just said “good thinking Sean!” instead of hammering me on the points they didn’t agree with, I never would have learned.

I love what Paul is doing with his blog and I hope we see more of it. We all have a lot to learn.

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

Paul Brest Has a Blog

November 13, 2008 – 5:24 pm

A year ago I wrote a blog post for the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled “Paul Brest Needs a Blog” (Paul is the president of the Hewlett Foundation). So you can imagine my pleasure when I sat down to lunch with Paul today and he told me he had just this morning written his first blog post!

Paul is now writing on The Huffington Post. His first post is titled Strategic Philanthropy:

I’ve just participated in a vigorous debate about at a meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable. My critic was William Schambra, a distinguished thought leader in philanthropy, who directs the Bradley Center on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C….

…Mr. Schambra’s second objection is that a strategic philanthropist requires an applicant to describe his or her own goals and strategies before funding the organization — a process he sees as inconsistent with what might be called the “wisdom of communities” (my term, not his). In his view, community organizations are close to the ground and know how to meet the needs of their constituents better than any philanthropist does. He regards a funder’s requirement that an applicant describe goals, strategies, and the like as meddlesome.

Sure, most applicants would prefer to take the money with no questions asked. But among organizations doing the same kinds of work, some are more effective than others. Achieving social change requires philanthropists to direct money to the organizations that use it most effectively. Whether an organization is housing and feeding the poor or improving educational outcomes or advocating for or against gay marriage, a philanthropist has every reason to ask whether it has a sound strategy and a good track record as well as good leadership. The alternative is to sow hundreds of seeds without ever finding out which take root and flourish.

I’ve left a comment on the post. If you care about foundations engaging in the online conversation, I hope you go leave Paul a comment keep reading his blog.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Information Sharing, Philanthropy, Transparency | Comments (0)

Phil Cubeta Joins The American College

October 21, 2008 – 9:50 am

I missed this news from a month ago and wanted to mention it now. Phil Cubeta, who blogs at Gift Hub, has been named the new Sallie B. and William B. Wallace Chair in Philanthropy at The American College.

The purpose of the chair is to raise the overall level of charitable giving by educating professional fundraisers serving the more than 1 million nonprofit organizations throughout the United States, in particular though the establishment of the Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy certificate program. The program will cover the technical aspects of estate planning, trusts, and charitable giving, as well as the nontechnical aspects of fundraising, including communication and motivation.

The Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy program is the leading certification program for philanthropy advisors. It is offered by The American College, a financial services certification organization, which also offers the very well established Certified Financial Planning (CFP) program (which has become a must have credential in the field). I hold the CAP designation and think that a certification process is an important element to the expansion of the Second Great Wave of Philanthropy.

In 2006, I wrote a chapter titled “The Evolution of the Tactical Philanthropist” for a book called Mapping the New World of American Philanthropy in which I wrote:

As awareness of philanthropic vehicles continues to rise, advisors from many different disciplines must prepare to serve the needs of the new breed of Tactical Philanthropists. Just as falling costs and increasing wealth attracted a flood of new investors into the financial markets during the 1990’s, the falling costs and increase in philanthropic capital will spur on the rising tide of donors who want to structure their giving in the most efficient way. New technology will allow some donors to achieve their goals without much professional guidance, but unprecedented demand will exist for advisors who can help clients navigate the complex world of charitable giving.

Donors now consult with a broad array of advisors such as lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, and nonprofit planned giving officers. Unfortunately it is difficult to judge the quality of advice they receive because professional philanthropic credentials for such advisors are still being developed. Accountants must earn a CPA designation, lawyers must pass the bar, and doctors must get a medical degree, but there is no “must-have” credential for philanthropic advisors. In response, the American College, which administers the well-regarded Certified Financial Planning program for financial advisors, launched the Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy program in 2003. As of this writing fewer than 200 individuals across the country have completed the program, but it is a substantial first step toward creating a new generation of advisors to give tomorrow’s Tactical Philanthropist the advice they need to make sense of the complex world of philanthropy.

I think the CAP credential process is very good. My main criticism would be that the majority of the study material treated philanthropic planning as a type of tax planning. While tax planning is an important element of philanthropic planning, it should not be the tail that wags the dog. When I examine the “philanthropic planning” offered by most wealth management companies and look under the hood, I generally find nothing but an attempt to leverage the charitable tax code to maximize personal wealth. But philanthropic planning should be so much more than that! What about the mission of the client? Why are they giving and what are they trying to achieve?

Phil Cubeta and I don’t see eye to eye on everything. Long time readers of this blog know that he and I made it a habit to spar over various issues in some of the very earliest posts I ever wrote. But I can think of no better person to shape the future of the CAP program. We can absolutely count on Phil to shake things up, to demand better and to honor the deep human values that drive philanthropy.

Congratulations to The American College for having the guts to bring Phil on board. They’re lucky to have him.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Effective Giving, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Resources, Tactics | Comments (0)

Flashback: Carnivals, Podcasts & More

September 18, 2008 – 6:41 am

This week I’m reviewing the history of Tactical Philanthropy and digging through the archives. You can see Monday’s post for more background.

One of the reasons I started Tactical Philanthropy was to have a platform to talk about philanthropy with other people. As a wealth manager, my professional network was not (prior to launching the blog) filled with people who were passionate about philanthropy. But blogs and other social media tools allow people of common interests to gather.

My first attempt to really get a cross-disciplinary conversation going was my Giving Carnival series. The first one is found below (published on January 23, 2007) and you can read the background here. Over time I replaced the Giving Carnival with my podcast series. You can see the way this format encouraged back and forth by visiting the comments section of my interview with Bill Schambra (got people a little riled up I’ll say!). The podcast series came to a peak when the United Way pitched me to interview their CEO Brian Gallagher. I’ve been thinking about my next step in facilitating cross-disciplinary debates about philanthropy and I’m currently strategizing an off-line event that I’ll be sharing here first in the coming weeks.

The Giving Carnival: Edition One

Welcome to the first edition of The Giving Carnival. The topic of this edition is the debate surrounding the LA Times coverage of The Gates Foundation investment policy (you can read the two part article here and here).

First up we have Phil Cubeta channeling Marxist Leon Trotsky in his post “Leon Trotsky on Socially Responsible Investing”.

Allison Fine calls The Gates Foundation “cowardly” in her post “Outrageous Behavior by The Gates Foundation”.

Lucy Bernholz reviews the various points of view on the topic of socially responsible investing and brings us a reader poll in her post “Foundations and Investing”.

Paul Botts brings us his thoughts with “A Thoughtful Response from Gates” and “More on Foundation Investment Practices”.

Carol Kirshner points out that “being a leader can suck at times” in her post “GatesGate: Conscious Spending and Investing”.

Holden Karnofsky says “I’m basically fine with investing in evil” and then adds “More Thoughts on Responsible Investing” and finally “One More Thing”.

I weigh in with “Private Foundation Investment Strategy” and a post I wrote before the discussion hit firestorm status “The Gates Foundation”.

And finally Jed Emerson (who doesn’t update his blog with the manic frequency of the other Carnival participants) points us to his Op-Ed on the subject in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Maximizing Our Missions”.

Thanks to everyone for sending in your submissions. The response was so positive that I’d like to make The Giving Carnival a bi-weekly event. This is going to be a traveling carnival meaning that future editions will be hosted by other Giving Blogs in addition to being hosted here.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Information Sharing, Philanthropy, Social Media, The Giving Carnival | Comments (0)

Flashback: Giving Blogs

September 16, 2008 – 9:20 am

I’m reviewing some of the early posts on Tactical Philanthropy this week. You can catch Monday’s posts for a little background on the history of this blog. Today I want to revisit Giving Blogs, a post I wrote on November 27, 2006. In this post I looked at the giving blog landscape and noted how immature it was and how I thought it was poised for growth.

The theme of this post is that all philanthropy related blogs were being grouped together, but that over time they would separate out into “fundraising blogs”, “nonprofit blogs”, “philanthropy blogs”, etc. This prediction has definitely come true and in fact the Chronicle of Philanthropy later launched Give & Take, their philanthropy blog summary service that lists well over 100 philanthropy blogs and breaks them into categories. On the day that Give & Take was launched I wrote about the “professionalization” of philanthropy blogging after my post on Social Media Tools for Philanthropy was one of the first posts featured. In the post I note how I separated my blogroll into my daily read and other blogs. With the launch of Give & Take I changed my blogroll to just display the blogs I read every day.

Giving Blogs

The new edition of Fast Company profiles three blogs from the Giving community. The article labels as “Best Blogs” Lucy Bernholz’s Philanthropy 2173, Jeff Brooks’ Donor Power Blog and Marc van Gurp’s Houtlust Nonprofit Advertising. I read Philanthropy 2173 and Donor Power Blog regularly. The funny thing is that the Fast Company article implies that 1) these are all “social entrepreneur” blogs and 2) that they are inside looks at nonprofits. I’m glad to see Giving blogs getting press attention, but none of these blogs cover what the article implies they do.

Philanthropy 2173 covers a broad range of philanthropic industry issues with special attention paid to the emerging “philanthropic capital markets” and the interface of internet technology and philanthropy. Donor Power Blog gives fundraising advice looks at fundraising trends, and Houtlust Nonprofit Advertising is really a blog about advertising that focuses on nonprofit advertising.

The “Giving blog” segment of the blogosphere is still relatively immature. Many of the blogs are relatively new and their numbers pale in comparison to political blogs, business blogs and tech blogs. At this point, blogs targeting a nonprofit employee readership are much more prevalent than blogs targeting donors as readers. Many blogs, like this one, cover a variety of topics and have readers from many different segments. My bet is that as the Giving blog community matures we’ll see particular niches begin to arise. Just as we use to have many “Investment Blogs”, we now have venture capital blogs, stock picking blogs, technology stock blogs, business blogs, economic blogs, etc. Over time, I expect the Giving blog community to fracture into fundraising blogs, social entrepreneurship blogs, donor blogs (with separate blogs addressing issues of Vision, Strategy and Tactics), nonprofit technology blogs, cause marketing blogs, Venture Philanthropy blogs, hybrid blogs addressing concepts like Good Capital, and philanthropy industry blogs.

I’ve tried to separate my own blog roll into Philanthropy Blogs and Nonprofits blogs. However, I’ve realized that at this point in the maturation process of our community, segmenting blogs in this way does more harm than good. So beginning today, you’ll notice that I’ve changed my blog roll into two areas: My Daily Read (Giving blogs I read religiously) and Giving Blogs (blogs that cover some segment of the Giving community). I’m always on the lookout for new or interesting voices, so let me know if you read a Giving blog that I don’t have on my list.

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Information Sharing, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Technology, Philanthropy, Social Media | Comments (3)

Tactical Philanthropy Guest Blogger: Jacob Harold

July 25, 2008 – 7:30 am

I’m going on vacation next week in the California wine country and the place my family is staying at only has dial-up web access. *Gasps of fear from the audience*. So while I’m gone, I’ll be handing over Tactical Philanthropy to Jacob Harold, a program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Jacob works in the Philanthropy program at Hewlett and is one of the most knowledgeable people I know on subjects related to philanthropy infrastructure (ie, how philanthropy works and/or is going to work in the future).

Jacob was a member of the Tactical Philanthropy Blog Team that covered the Council on Foundations Conference. During the conference he wrote this post about the role of philanthropic advisors.

I’ll be reading along next week and leaving my own comments, but it would be great if everyone could jump into the conversation with Jacob and keep him on his toes!

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By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (2)