By William Foster, Gail Perreault, Alison Powell, & Chris Addy
When Don Fisher stepped down as chief executive
of the Gap in the late 1990s, he and
his wife, Doris, decided that they wanted to
tackle one of the most difficult social challenges
in the United States: improving public
education. Through an expert advisor, they learned about the
Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which at the time consisted
of just two charter middle schools—one in Houston and one in
New York City. And after lengthy due diligence, the Fishers committed
to giving $15 million over three years (roughly three times
the organization’s annual revenue at the time) to bring KIPP’s results-
oriented methods to many more communities and students.
The Fishers bet big, and they bet smart. KIPP schools make a real
difference in the lives of their students: the majority of fifth graders
enter KIPP with skills below grade level, but they move into high
school with above-grade-level skills. KIPP alumni are graduating
from college at rates that exceed the national average in all income
groups and at more than four times the rate of the average student
from a low-income community. In fact, KIPP’s success has been a
large factor in pushing forward the charter school movement. “Their
gift gave us permission to think big,” says KIPP CEO Richard Barth.
“We would not have 183 schools today if Don hadn’t encouraged
that kind of thinking.”
Many of today’s largest donors admire the Fishers’ bold commitment
and the results it has helped produce. They say that they
want to follow suit. A review of the public statements of US donors
who have committed to the Giving Pledge and those listed in Forbes
50 Top Givers reveals that 60 percent articulate a powerful social change
goal as their dominant philanthropic objective—eliminating
disparities in health care, for example, or providing better educational
opportunities for people in need. Nearly 80 percent state that
such a goal is one of their two or three top priorities.
Yet our research found that only a modest proportion of the biggest
philanthropic gifts is actually focused on these types of social change. Between 2000 and 2012, the total dollar volume of all announced
philanthropic big bets (those of $10 million or more) by
US donors averaged $8 billion a year. Nonprofits addressing social
change received roughly 65 identifiable big bets annually, with a total
value of approximately $1.6 billion a year. In other words, just 20
percent of big bets, by dollar value, went to the areas we categorize
as social change giving. (See “Big Bets Methodology” below.) This
proportion was roughly constant across the period of the analysis.
(These figures do not include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
because its size and its focus on big bets for social change would
distort the results. See “The Biggest Bettor of All” below.)
The other 80 percent of big bets fall into what is best described
as institutional giving—primarily to universities, hospitals, and cultural
institutions. These entities are hugely important to society, but
they are often already richly funded, with ample capacity to continue
securing major gifts. (See “Big Bets by Year” below.)
Clearly, nonprofits and initiatives addressing social change have a
fairly low market share of big bets. Their share is even lower among
“giving-while-living” donors: Just 16 percent of big bet dollars from
this set of engaged donors (either as individuals or through foundations
they actively guide) went to social change, compared to 28
percent of those from other kinds of foundations and institutions.
Donors feel this “aspiration gap” in their philanthropy. For the
last 16 years, The Bridgespan Group has counseled more than 50
of the world’s most generous and ambitious philanthropists. Many
have said some version of “I can’t find enough opportunities to put
large amounts of my money to work on the issues I really want to
change.” They’ve spent years searching for such defining opportunities;
they’re deeply frustrated; and they’re worried that they’re
not making nearly the difference they could. Is their frustration
warranted? Would more big bets really make a big difference? If the
answer is “Yes” to both questions, then what are the barriers holding
donors back, and how might those barriers be defeated?
BIG BETS METHODOLOGY
Researching the frequency and impact of large philanthropic grants on social change organizations
requires one to make choices. What constitutes a large grant? What type
of organization is involved in social change, and what type isn’t? Below are answers to
some of the most frequently asked questions about the methodology behind our work.
How did you define “big bet”? We targeted
philanthropic commitments of $10
million or more to an organization or a defined
initiative, such as reducing smoking.
The donors could be either individuals or
foundations, but not corporate foundations.
The commitments could span multiple years
and multiple named recipients. Our goal was
to capture the point at which donors ceded
control of the money, so we excluded gifts to
donors’ own foundations or donor-advised
funds, but included gifts to independent
foundations as well as intermediaries that
act as aggregators.
Why did you set the threshold at $10
million? We selected $10 million as the
threshold for a big bet because it is low
enough to capture major gifts in fields where
organizations and initiatives tend to be
smaller, yet high enough that gifts would
have the potential to fuel significant change.
We also wanted to have a manageable number
of gifts to analyze. That’s not to say that
$10 million is a magical giving level. In some
fields and with some goals it could be that $5
million, or $100 million, is a more appropriate
fit to the donor’s aspirations.
How did you define “social change”?
We aimed for inclusivity and opted for a
broad definition of social change, including
all gifts to human services, the environment,
and international development, save for a
small minority that, upon individual review,
clearly fell outside the social change realm
(e.g., amusement parks). We did not include
gifts to arts institutions, higher education
institutions, medical institutions, or private
K-12 schools unless donors stipulated the
gift for anti-poverty initiatives or underfunded
diseases that disproportionately
affect low-income people. We included gifts
to religious organizations only when the
goal was human services or international
development.
Why did you exclude the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation? We did not include the
Gates Foundation because its sheer size
(it’s the largest grantmaking foundation in
the United States by a factor of three), and
its slant to both big bets and social-change
causes would have distorted the trends in
the broader dataset. For the same reason,
we omitted Warren Buffett’s gifts to the
Gates Foundation.
What sources of data did you use? Our
primary data source was Indiana University’s
Million Dollar List, which tracks all publicly announced
gifts of at least $1 million. We also
relied on the Foundation Center’s dataset of
gifts from the top 1,000 foundations and the
Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual “Philanthropy
50” list of top gifts by individuals.
Have you captured all big bets made
over the 2000 to 2012 study period? We
believe this research is the most comprehensive
of its kind to date and that we’ve
captured a majority of the big bets on social
change. We have not, however, captured every
single one. The absence of reporting requirements
for individual giving means that
we will have missed big bets that donors
chose not to announce publicly. In addition,
a multiyear big bet commitment (e.g., a $10
million gift spread over five years in $2 million
increments) could slip below our radar if a
donor were to announce the annual amounts
rather than the overall tally. The same could
be true of a big bet made to multiple organizations
but not announced as a single initiative.
If you know of gifts we may have omitted
or improperly recorded, please let us know.
Our goal is to continually build the comprehensiveness
of this important data set.
Big Bets Matter
Intuitively, spreading donations around—“peanut butter philanthropy”—
does not seem like the best path to change the world. At
the same time, though, bigger is not always better. So before diving
into the challenges facing donors who aspire to place big bets on social
change efforts, it’s worth asking: How do we know that spurring more
big bets on social change would make a correspondingly big difference?
Scientifically speaking, we don’t. There isn’t any definitive database
of “success” in the social sector that would enable a comprehensive
study of the correlation with philanthropic big bets.
Nonetheless, the evidence we do have suggests that they matter a
great deal. Gifts of $10 million or more are exceptionally rare; between
2000 and 2012, only 2 percent of even the largest US human
services agencies (those with more than $10 million in annual revenue)
received one. Yet such big bets seem to be behind a remarkable
proportion of society’s most effective nonprofits and social
movements. Consider the following broad evidence:
The book Forces for Good is based on a rigorous
and respected assessment of the most successful
nonprofit organizations. The authors screened
hundreds of nonprofits to identify a dozen standouts.
Their “winners” were groups like the Environmental
Defense Fund, City Year, and Share Our
Strength. Of these dozen, 11, or more than 90 percent,
received a critical big bet.
Of the $10 million-plus organizations on the Social
Impact Exchange’s 100 top nonprofits, 30 percent
received a big bet.
Big bets have also helped fuel social movements.
Bridgespan assembled a list of 14 widely regarded
social movement successes in recent decades—
including, in the United States, the rejuvenation
of conservatism in the 1970s and ’80s, LGBT
rights in the last decade, and globally, the Green
Revolution of the 1940s–’60s. More than 70 percent
received at least one pivotal big bet.1
So why are big bets so powerful? They can radically
change the organizations or movements they support—
from acquiring critical tracts of land containing
endangered species, to scaling up proven programs to
new geographies, to launching advocacy campaigns.They can create a leap in their recipients’ abilities or long-term ambitions.
(See “The Biggest Bets on Social Change” below.)
Consider the difference that Robert W. Wilson’s big-bet gift to The
Nature Conservancy (TNC) made for that organization. (Wilson, a
hedge-fund manager who died in 2013, was a serial big bettor—making
other large gifts to the Environmental Defense Fund, the Wildlife
Conservation Society, and the World Monuments Fund.) In the late
1990s, TNC was already large, with a mission to advance conservation
around the world and a strong network of domestic donors. The
challenge it faced was that some of the highest-impact work to be done
was outside the United States, whereas its donor network centered on
TNC’s state chapters. Wilson initiated a challenge to change that. Beginning
in 1997 with a $10 million commitment, which ultimately grew
to a total of $100 million over the next decade, Wilson matched any
US donor’s international gift with a gift to the donor’s state chapter.
TNC raised $150 million from other donors as part of this challenge,
enabling the organization to expand its global work dramatically—
and transforming its US donors into champions of global
conservation. A second challenge grant followed. And even though
the challenge grants are over, the beneficial effect on TNC’s international
fundraising endures. TNC’s annual international fundraising grew from $12 million in 1997 to more than $140 million in 2014. “Bob
was maybe the best donor ever,” says Mark Tercek, TNC’s current
CEO. “He was looking for bold ideas, and he had confidence in the
organization’s leadership—the kind of confidence private sector
investors usually need before they’ll invest big in a company.”
In our work with donors, we sometimes find great near-term
opportunities to make big bets. Other times, modest pilots are the
best path forward, to give organizations time to hone their programs
and begin to demonstrate the results that would support something
bigger. Ultimately, though, it takes a lot to do a lot. Philanthropic
gifts need to be right-sized to the problems they address. Even $10
million, which is an enormous sum for anyone to earn or to have the
generosity to give away, could be modest in comparison to many of
the goals donors embrace, such as radically increasing the graduation
rate of children in a community, slowing climate change, or
ending human trafficking. Part of the power of philanthropy is that
it can catalyze awareness and additional funding. But at the end of
the day, big problems generally require big bets.
Why the Large Aspiration Gap?
If roughly 80 percent of the largest donors publicly aspire to social change, and there’s evidence that big bets can be a powerful tool
to make a difference on the issues they care about, why are only 20
percent of all big bets going to social change? This question is not
easily subjected to research, as it is most pertinent to a very limited
number of people who, understandably, tend to be intensely private
about their philanthropy. Bridgespan’s close counsel with a number
of them—some of today’s most significant big bettors and a number
more with the aspiration and capacity to become a big bettor—has
given us a distinctive window into their motivations and actions.
We consistently see two types of barriers: one related to finding and
structuring deals, and the other to how donors, their peers, and the
media think about big bets on social change.
Deal-Making Challenges | Placing a thoughtful big bet on a complex
social-change issue is hard. Markets do not exist for nonprofit investments in the way they do for commercial ones, and information
on impact can be hard to come by. We found three significant
challenges to finding and structuring a big-bet deal.
Limited “shovel-ready” opportunities. Rare is the prospective donor to
a university or hospital who has trouble finding an institution with
the ability to make use of a big gift. But a capacity problem can be a
real barrier for big bets on social change, where organizations that
are effective enough and large enough to make good use of a big
investment may, in some fields and some geographic areas, be few
and far between. “There’s a relatively small number of organizations
that can effectively metabolize seven- and eight-figure checks,” says
James Jensen of the Jenesis Group. The Fishers wanted to invest in
charter schools as a way to boost student achievement, but at the
time there was no high-quality charter school operator that was big
enough. So they helped KIPP scale up. But many donors don’t want
to spend that kind of time and energy on nurturing an organization.
Prospective donors themselves can contribute to this problem if
they so narrowly define their area of interest—by geography and issue—
that they end up with few organizations or initiatives on which
they can sensibly make a big bet. “Our capital aggregation work is about working with philanthropists to make bigger bets than any of
us could do alone,” says Edna McConnell Clark Foundation president
and CEO Nancy Roob. “As we’ve increased the ambition of the work,
we’ve needed our partners’ help to expand what we’re willing to consider,
deepen the thoroughness of our sourcing and due diligence, as
well as extend the depth of support we provide—so we could collectively
discover opportunities that would lead to even greater impact.”
Even if a social-change organization exists that matches a donor’s
interests, a shovel-ready opportunity may not. Well-developed
norms and widely understood approaches exist for big gifts to
higher education, hospitals, medical research, and the arts: building
campaigns, endowed chairs, research centers, and the like. And
these large institutions usually have large, highly professional development
teams to tailor and market big gift opportunities, using
time-tested techniques.
For social-change nonprofits, donors or their agents often have
to roll up their sleeves and dive deep into the design of something
that can achieve big results and is meaningful. That puts a premium
on genuine collaboration between donor
and nonprofit—something that is
difficult when the balance of power is
so much in the donor’s favor. The Edna
McConnell Clark Foundation, Good
Ventures, and the Sandler Foundation
are among donors who regularly manage
this dilemma by asking (and often
supporting) the leaders of their most
promising grantees to develop their
own strategic plans for the use of significant
new resources.
The lack of personal relationships.
Whether in the nonprofit world or in
business, significant deals hinge on the
personal relationships and trust between
the two parties. Almost all major
donors talk about the supreme importance
of their belief in a nonprofit organization’s
leader. For institutional gifts,
there is often a built-in personal connection:
the donor or a family member
went to that university, was a patient
at that hospital, or attends concerts
or exhibits at that cultural institution.
Professional development officers and
organizational leaders know how to
nurture those relationships into big
gifts and how to speak the language
of major donors. On the social-change
side, there may well be a strong preexisting
connection by the prospective
donor to the issue—preventing hunger,
protecting wildlife, or helping kids succeed
in school—but much less often
to the organization itself or its leader.
Barbara Picower, who created the
JPB Foundation, has spoken about getting
to know promising leaders over
several years before she bets big on
their work. A major supporter of the
Harlem Children’s Zone, she recalled
meeting its leader, Geoffrey Canada,
in a small office, and sharing a lunch of
sandwiches and chips, when the organization
was still called the Rheedlen
Centers for Children and Families.
Not surprisingly, the nonprofit leaders who have
most successfully secured big bets have typically
found ways to build strong personal and trusted
relationships with donors. This is true of the relationship
between Canada and legendary investor
Stan Druckenmiller (Harlem Children’s Zone’s board chair and anchor
donor), as well as for the leaders of Teach for America, KIPP, City Year,
and their major donors, to cite just a few examples. And some leaders
have found ways not only to build a network of relationships but
also to develop an ability to interact with potential donors as peers.
Youth Villages, which serves youths in the foster care system, has
received multiple big bets from multiple donors. As a young leader,
Patrick Lawler, Youth Villages’ CEO, aggressively courted mentors
from the business world. He later became the first nonprofit leader
inducted into the prestigious Society of Entrepreneurs in Memphis.
The difficulties of measuring social change. With institutional gifts, results
are often easy to see: a new wing is completed, a concert hall
opens, or the donors get to shake hands with the distinguished
professor whose chair they endowed. But defining what a big-bet,
social-change gift is supposed to achieve, and then assessing “success,”
can be challenging. It often takes years, if not decades, to see
a gift’s full effects. Even then, attribution is difficult, given the multitude
of factors that contribute to social change. There are some
exceptions—nonprofit organizations such as Harlem Children’s Zone
and Teach for America—that have invested deeply in measurement.
But by and large, social-change results are far murkier.
This inherent uncertainty can be enough to give even the most
risk-tolerant donors pause. And it ups the stakes on investing deeply
(both time and money) in getting clarity about the ultimate goals and
establishing a process for assessing progress. For some donors, having
scientifically proven results is a must. But many donors seeking
to support social change efforts are willing to compromise, as long
as they have a meaningful and audacious goal, with a straightforward
and believable way to achieve it, that rests on a relevant track
record, coupled with measurable milestones. “We care a great deal
about results, and it has taken a lot to get clear on the effects of our
poverty-fighting investments,” says Picower. “We have frequently
made additional grants above our programmatic ones to support
measurement and evaluation of these programs, as we did with the
Harlem Children’s Zone’s Healthy Living Initiative.”
Mindset Challenges | Philanthropy is as much a communal activity
as an individual one. Mindset matters—and mindset in the media,
among peers, and by the donors themselves can make it harder to
bet big on social change.
More public risk, less public reward. One of the risks of making a big
bet on a social issue is that donors can be subject to negative press
if the bet does not meet its goal. Consider the pummeling that Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg took in the aftermath of his $100 million
gift to turn the Newark public school system into a “symbol of
educational excellence for the whole nation.” Just four years later,
media outlets sharply criticized the grant. Business Insider headlined
its story “Mark Zuckerberg Gave New Jersey $100 Million to
Fix Newark’s Schools, and It Looks Like It Was a Waste,” and a New
Yorker article described Zuckerberg as having been “schooled” by
his Newark experience. The actual results were more nuanced—
the funds brought significant additional dollars into the system and overwhelmingly supported core educational
activities (including teacher compensation), and
a recent study showed that the city’s charter
schools had the second highest gains in student
performance of any system in the country2—but
the negative verdict on this big bet is likely to be the one that sticks.
In contrast, funding a new building or a faculty chair typically
offers nothing but upside among peers and the general public. Naming
rights are a frequent benefit that connects a donor’s name to a
prestigious institution for generations. Peer esteem flows from the
institution’s own promotion of donor contributions. And the annual
articles published by major publications about top philanthropists—
such as Forbes, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and Bloomberg—identify
the leading donors almost entirely by how much they give, not what
they support or whether they make daring big bets on social change.
A higher bar for success. As the Newark example shows, big bets on
social change can be held to a higher standard than big institutional
gifts. “The expectations and motivations are simply different,” says
Joel Fleishman, who has been one of the leading fundraisers and donors
to both higher education and social-change organizations. “Donors
expect a level of outcomes from a gift to social change that they
simply do not in support of a cherished institution.” One executive
director who works for a driven, results-oriented donor mentioned
spending many months and dozens of phone calls refining a potential
five-figure grant to a promising yet scrappy social-change organization.
Yet at the same time as that extremely diligent effort neared
completion, a campaign was under way at the donor’s alma mater.
After one phone call, the donor decided to make a seven-figure contribution
to the campaign. Giving to institutions is important. And
high expectations are good. But should gifts to traditional institutions
always be risk-free, whereas gifts to social change carry jeopardy?
Underinvestment in securing deals. We all want philanthropy to fund
social change, not underwrite the costs of finding and structuring
the deals themselves. Yet this work takes time—either by the donors
themselves or their staffs or intermediaries. Donors need to
determine what issues are important to them, what leaders they
can trust, what organizations or initiatives are most effective, and
where their philanthropy can make a critical difference.
In a private equity firm, a partner can do well just by finding
one great deal every couple of years. Few donors, institutional or
otherwise, invest that much time finding and researching grants to
social change organizations. “Serious due diligence is one of the biggest
missing ingredients in philanthropy today,” says Herb Sandler,
who along with his wife Marion helped launch the nonprofit media
organization ProPublica. This problem is particularly profound for
philanthropies led by active donors, who often want lean teams but
have limited time themselves.
In an example remarkable for its rarity, Cari Tuna and her husband,
Dustin Moskovitz (who in their 20s became the youngest couple ever
to sign the Giving Pledge), spent three years meeting with hundreds
of people to refine their approach to philanthropy before becoming
significant backers (and users) of GiveWell, an organization focused
on identifying giving opportunities with the highest impact per dollar.
One result of this extensive due diligence process was their $25
million grant to GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that helps people in extreme
poverty by giving them unconditional cash transfers.
Finding Big-Bet Ready Organizations
Fortunately, increasing the number of donors who make big bets on
social change is not dependent on available wealth, willingness to
give it away, or desire to support social change. Any of these would
be much harder to change. Mindsets around big bets can evolve—the
negative social media buzz around some recent huge gifts to universities
could be a harbinger of an emerging shift.3 And although
breaking through the barriers of finding and structuring deals will
require continued bold pioneering by donors and heightened understanding
of lessons learned from past big bets, the organizations in
our study that dominated our big-bet recipient list suggest some
promising avenues to explore. (We consider 28 of the organizations
in our study to be “frequent flyers” because they received four or
more big bets from at least two different donors during the period of
time we studied. See “Social Change Frequent Flyers” below.)
Aggregator intermediaries: Intermediary organizations that aggregate
and re-grant philanthropic funds make up 43 percent of the frequent
flyers. Strikingly, although these intermediaries received 23 percent
of social-change big-bet dollars, they represent only one percent of
institutional large gifts. United Way is a classic example of an aggregator.
A newer one is the Robin Hood Foundation, created in 1988
and today New York City’s largest poverty-fighting organization.
Unlike the Fishers, donors who bet big on the Robin Hood Foundation
don’t have to conduct an extensive search for an organization
that might be capable of using their gift effectively, figure out how a
deal might be structured, and create and track metrics that would
tell them if their gift was making a difference. This is precisely what
Robin Hood does for them. Hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones
and several partners founded Robin Hood because they wanted to
build an organization that would attract significant resources to
fight poverty at some level of scale, while also investing in research
to find the kind of solutions that might be hard for individual donors
to discover on their own. Robin Hood develops long-term strategies
to decrease poverty in New York City, finds effective nonprofits and
programs, and develops and tracks a set of metrics designed to ensure
that philanthropic money goes where it can do the most good
in fighting poverty. In 2014, Robin Hood invested $133 million in
its poverty-fighting efforts and was able to report evidence of success.
For example, 90 percent of formerly homeless participants
in the housing programs it funds don’t return to shelters, and the
high-quality pre-K programs it supports increase a child’s chances
of graduating from high school by 30 percent.
HOW TO LAND A BIG BET
Big bets clearly aren’t for every organization; many nonprofits are simply too small to be
able to use a large gift effectively. And in most cases, an organization needs to build a
track record of results before even considering going after a big bet. But if cultivating
one makes sense for your organization, here are some tips to help you succeed.
Working with both big bet donors and recipients has given Bridgespan a distinctive window
into how nonprofit leaders can best position their organizations for large grants. Our advice
is rooted in good practice for cultivating philanthropic gifts of any size. But when the asks are
among the biggest a particular donor has ever given or a grantee has ever received, the stakes
go up—way up—and things that may have been optional become absolutes. Topping the list
are the following six best practices.
A Relationship Based on Trust
Trust between a donor and a nonprofit leader
is almost always the most important currency
of a big bet. You need a donor who
knows you well and trusts you deeply. Building
this type of relationship takes a great deal
of time (measured in years, not months).
A Clear Investment Hypothesis
To attract a big bet you need an idea that is
clear and compelling, one that seems like an
investment that will take the organization to
a new level. Would the big bet allow your organization
to move from the local to the national
level, solve a problem at the scale of
the need, or introduce an ambitious new service
offering? You’ll also need a clear explanation
of how your organization, with philanthropic
support, can reach this new level and
why it is a compelling “arrival point.” Simpler
is almost always better. If the “how” requires
a leap of faith or is a double bank shot, it’s unlikely
to be appealing.
A “But For” Rationale
The idea should be something that can happen
only with the donor’s support. (“But for
your gift, we could not do this.”) If it has a
good chance of happening anyway or if another
donor is better positioned, you will have
a harder time making a compelling case.
A Natural Match
There has to be a natural match between
what matters to the donor and what’s important
for your organization. Donors are
unlikely to change what they care about or
how they believe change happens in the world. At the same time, the dangers of pulling
your organization off mission or away
from core strengths are clear, particularly at
the scale of a big bet. This places a premium
on finding a donor with interests and beliefs
that overlap with your organization’s goals
and methods.
A Healthy Dose of Co-creation
In almost every big bet we’ve seen, there has
been some level of joint exploration between
the donor and the grantee. Being able to help
shape the deal attracts donors who are looking
for defining grantmaking opportunities.
That influence can also be advantageous to
your organization, allowing you to reap the
benefits of the donor’s experience and get
her to put greater skin in the game. Of course
this requires a delicate balance. The donor
can’t have so much say that she dominates
the process and draws your organization
away from its mission.
Good Housekeeping, Really
Donors want to make big bets only on an organization
that is run professionally. They
have to believe that you’re not a fly-by-the-seat-
of-your-pants operation, but rather
someone who will steward their money as
well as they have done. This means, for instance,
having sound financial reporting, professional-
looking materials, a strong board,
and a top-notch team.
Sometimes aggregator intermediaries are themselves
big bettors, re-granting funds via grants
of $10 million or more. In fact, these donors account
for 10 percent of the social-change big bets
in our database. Take the Edna McConnell Clark
Foundation, which in its growth capital aggregation
work made gifts that were bigger than any
of the individual contributions it received. Other
aggregators distribute funds in smaller amounts,
yet can still capture the benefits we associate with
big bets. The reason, as Robin Hood shows, is that
these intermediaries tend to give in a coordinated
fashion, thereby channeling large sums coherently
in a way that reflects donor intentions.
Social-change fields with institutional characteristics:
Among the frequent flyers, we also see many big
bets that bear a striking resemblance to institutional
gifts. Some social-change fields more naturally
mimic the characteristics that make universities,
hospitals, and the arts big-bet magnets. (See “How
to Land a Big Bet” below.) The environment
is one, with its ready giving vehicles (land gifts), a
natural connection with many donors (deep connections
to the outdoors that go back to childhood),
and measurable results (acres preserved). In fact, a disproportionate
number (nearly 30 percent) of the frequent flyers are environmental
organizations. TNC was the “most frequent” frequent flyer, with
20 documented big bets over our 12-year study period. Other asset-intensive
fields, such as child welfare, are similarly ripe for big bets.
There are also social-change wings within some traditional institutions.
Although we have categorized most big gifts to universities
as “institutional,” some universities have received multiple big bets
specifically focused on ambitious social change. Stanford University
stands out: of the 52 big bets it received, four were focused on ambitious
social-change purposes—including a gift to fund a new center
on urban poverty in the developing world as well as one to create
a center focused on restoring and protecting the world’s oceans.
Prior big-bet recipients: Obviously, one of the best ways to find an
organization capable of handling a big bet is to look for those that
have already received one. Leaders at the frequent flyers we interviewed
consistently told us that landing one big bet is one of the
best ways to attract more. In our broader big-bet database, nearly
a quarter of the social-change recipients received two or more during
the 2000 to 2012 timespan.
Building on Past Successes
Because of its exceptional wealth and generosity, the United States
is the world’s largest philanthropic market by an order of magnitude.
If donors could close the aspiration gap, billions of additional big-bet
dollars would flow to the world’s most challenging problems, and
millions of lives could change for the better for generations to come.
But if the social sector is to see more big bets go to the ambitious
types of social change that philanthropists aspire to pursue, we need
to build on the lessons that pioneering big-bet donors and recipients
have learned. Making big bets on social change is genuinely hard. We
must provide donors with a greater level of actual support. In parallel,
media coverage must also change its focus and tone, to begin to shift
the deeply entrenched mindsets that discourage big bets on risky social-
change goals towards mindsets that are more like those of Doris
and Don Fisher—willing to search for the right investment, willing
to envision the long term, and willing to structure an optimal gift
for the beneficiary organization(s), with the bigger picture in mind.
Each year for the first six years of the KIPP network that they
helped to create, the Fishers visited every new KIPP school. At the
time of Don Fisher’s death in 2009, KIPP CEO Richard Barth recalled:
“For KIPP staff who have been with KIPP more than a year or two,
there is a good chance they actually met Don… . He loved seeing our
new schools and was thrilled with the increasing reach of our network.”
KIPP and its schools, teachers and students were as tangible
to Don and Doris Fisher as any research institute or museum wing.
We need to continue to explore ways to help more donors and
nonprofits overcome the barriers that the Fishers and KIPP had to
overcome so that they, too, can bet big on social change and see
the bet pay off.
Read the related article, “Lessons from the Moore Foundation’s Largest and Longest Grants.”