Brigid Slipka

Increasingly, donors are realizing the ineffectiveness of spreading their philanthropy dollars too thin.  Give Smart, by Thomas Tierney and Joel Fleishman, is great tool for donors rethinking the strategy behind their gifts.  It guides folks step by step away from the chronic “underperformance” that plagues many good intentions.

This is helpful.  But “underperformance” is not philanthropy’s biggest problem.  It’s unfortunate when giving has no effect.  But far worse is when it has a very real effect, and that effect is to make things much worse.

A recap of recent examples (more here):

• PlayPumps: A merry-go-round style water pump ends up being too physically and mechanically wonky to use, causing recipients to have to travel further for clean water (gracious recognition of philanthropic failure here).
• Free rice:  Giving away free rice in Haiti ends up decimating the local economy, making recovery worse for Haitians.
• #SWEDOW (Stuff We Don’t Want) to Alabama: Donated clothes and toys to the tornado-hit region creates a “disaster within a disaster”.

The difference between these examples of actual harm and “underperformance” is who feels the weight of the failure.   Too often, philanthropy-gone-wrong is defined through the eyes of the donor: the donor hasn’t achieved the impact she wants, the donor hasn’t changed the world the way she said she would, the donor is embarrassed by her past support for muck-raked charity with “high overhead.”

This type of philanthropy-gone-wrong is all about the donor.  But philanthropy truly is disastrous when it fails its beneficiary.

Shifting the definition of failure from donor ineffectiveness to instead beneficiary harm will have fundamental changes on the field of philanthropy:

1. Leveraging partnerships.  When the emphasis is on the donor, things are done to make the donor look good.  This can spur competition to be the recognized expert in a funding area, to sit on valuable information, to implicitly agree not to encroach on another funder’s “territory.”  When the emphasis is on the beneficiary, things are done to make life better for them.  This can spur collaboration, shared information, and bandwagon-funding that supports the stuff that’s been proven to work for beneficiaries.

2.  Better feedback. It’s notoriously difficult for philanthropists to get feedback from the nonprofits that are cultivating the very same donors for future gifts.  Two-degrees-removed beneficiaries may not feel so beholden when they are the ones experiencing the harm.  Beneficiary-related info is also more likely to be publicly available (test scores, unemployment) and increasingly peer-reviewed, as opposed to nonprofits’ self-reports.  As conversation shifts to seeing what happens to the beneficiaries, more types of measurement will arise.

3.  Motivation.  When I’ve made a gift that went nowhere, I’ve been annoyed.  I’ll admit I also felt inclined to stop giving.  When I’ve made a gift that ended up making life worse for the recipient, I’ve been mortified.  And I also felt determined to be more thoughtful, more careful, and more generous the next time.

No one wants to “underperform,” and using this as measurement bar will lead to incremental improvement in effective giving.  But to be transformational, to actually get anything done, focusing on donor underperformance won’t cut it.  We have to set the bar high for ourselves by focusing always on the receipients of our gifts.

[Note: post inspired by a book discussion of Give Smart hosted by the Hudson Institute.  See the video here.]