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by Harriet Williams
Much is written about the professionalisation of philanthropy, a brave new world where legions of learned advisors, steeped in everything from charitable law to impact assessment, steer grants into the body politic with surgical precision.
By and large, this revolution has not yet gathered pace. As this column has previously explored, grants are often fired into the ether in the manner of a scattergun rather than a guided missile.
For the growing ranks of philanthropic advisors, the take-it-or-leave-it attitude among their client base must perplex and frustrate. In a manifesto published ahead of next month’s election, New Philanthropy Capital concedes that the paucity of information and advice on effective philanthropy is partly due “to a lack of interest among some philanthropists in the impact of their giving”.
Impact is of course inseparable from strategy. And strategy is nothing without context. Yet grant-making often takes place in ignoble isolation, without reference to what is going on around it.
A report on financing for sustainability, climate and environmental protection by Berlin-based consultancy Conatix describes this conundrum well. “Impact cannot be assessed only in the context of a project’s goals. Doing a great deal of one thing effectively may be strategic, or may not, depending on what other needs are not being addressed, and the overall level of activity in areas that are being addressed.”
Reporting on the spread of philanthropic effort across different categories of sustainability interventions, Conatix finds that the majority accrues to site-specific projects on a short- to medium-term time horizon, with gaps in longer-term or globally-oriented action. This echoes Environmental Funders Network (EFN) research, which reports a poor match between grants by UK trusts and system-wide environmental challenges such as climate change.
The NPC manifesto sees a connected set of risks in another aspect of context-setting, namely the collection and use of evidence on what makes for effective charity and philanthropy. Without this, it warns that philanthropic money “will be wasted on schemes that do not work”. It adds that talk of allocating funds according to “outcomes” and “results” is meaningless without frameworks to evaluate and compare.
At heart, the NPC manifesto and the Conatix report are calls for a stronger knowledge base to underpin funding decisions.
David Lehrer, Conatix’s founder, has plans for a comprehensive database that tracks investments from all sources into different segments of sustainability, including climate, conservation, energy and water.
Lehrer points out this type of trends analysis is only the equivalent of what “any serious” investor would expect within the commercial sector. Understanding and mapping out context can be expensive, but no company would dream of launching a new product line without exhaustive market research.
Philanthropists need access to similarly sophisticated resources if they are to figure out how to move the needle on complex environmental problems, or even develop the confidence to try. But who will invest in these sorts of tool?
The NPC manifesto suggests that the next government should shoulder some of the cost via a fund that helps charities measure impact. Non-government funders and charities are partly excused from this task on the basis they may lack the “time, experience or skills to analyse evidence and use the information”. The manifesto also notes that what evidence does get collected is all too often “not shared beyond the funder that requested it”.
While the NPC manifesto focuses on evidence collection and use as it applies to human welfare issues, its analysis strikes a chord in the world of environmental grant-making too.
Measuring outcomes, sharing evidence, and designing effective change strategies should be of interest to all philanthropists, and arguably they should make a better job of it than government. Free of commercial secrecy, they should also find such analyses easier to undertake collaboratively than the business sector, reducing costs.
A commitment to analyse the grant-making landscape should become an integral component of what counts as ‘effective’ philanthropy. This could be achieved via informal collaboration between grant-makers or through a networking structure like the EFN. Financial support could come from a handful of individual foundations, or more ambitiously through a pooled fund between many grant-makers.
Such mechanisms would allow the development of tools that guide the more surgical delivery of grants. Doing so can only strengthen green giving and the causes its supports.
Harriet Williams helps coordinate the Environmental Funders Network. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the of the network.
