Family Philanthropy Playbook for Community Foundations

Unit 6: Strategic Granting, Leadership, and Impact Investing

Family philanthropy services can include helping donor families define larger impact strategies and lead through use of their financial, social, human, and intellectual capitals. In this unit, you will find guides and examples for helping families make an impact.

READ (45 minutes): Balancing Responsive, Discretionary, and Strategic Grants

Over time, generous families often end up creating budgets or grant rounds for different type of purposes.

There are four common purposes or categories:

Discretionary – each family member, couple, or family branch can recommend grants based on their individual interests.
Legacy – a small set of organizations receives annual grants (often with little paperwork) because of their importance to the founders or family’s heritage.
Responsive – responding to ideas from the community.
Strategic – grants made with more focused intention or impact goals.

Here are good starting points for families interested in learning more:

Discretionary Grants (NCFP): a Knowledge Center Featured Search of key stories and guides
Strategic, Responsive, or Both (Kris Putnam-Walkerly, 2016): a blog post about the pros and cons of each approach
Finding Your Focus in Philanthropy (Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, 2014): help on choosing a focus for giving. There are additional RPA resources in the Knowledge Center on Launching Your Own Major Project and Assessing Impact.
Strategic Philanthropy: Maximizing Family Engagement and Social Impact (NCFP, 2008): an Issue Brief featuring tips and examples of families transitioning to strategic giving based on family members’ common interests and values.
Legacy Grantmaking: What Granddad Would Have Wanted (NCFP, 2006): transcript from a webinar led by NCFP President Ginny Esposito.

TUNE-IN (60 minutes): Spark Session— Partnerships Between Family Donors and Community Foundations Beyond the Advised Fund

In this Spark Session webinar, staff from The Philanthropic Initiative and Foundation for the Carolinas explore the ways community foundations and donors work together to lead and influence greater community change.

READ (60 minutes): Search for Synergy

In 2015, The Philanthropic Initiative released “Foundation and Donor Priorities: A Search for Synergy in Community Foundations,” a report on the intersections of donor leadership and community foundation leadership. The report sparked a meeting of community foundation in Houston in 2016. This folder contains the original report, results of a survey of the practices of community foundations over $200M in assets, and notes and slides from the meeting. It also contains case studies from community foundations in Atlanta, Boston, and Houston.

READ (60 minutes): Strategic Giving and Impact Frameworks

Staff from the Greater Houston Community Foundation and Seattle Foundation led a peer group conversation about helping families develop strategic giving and impact frameworks.

TUNE-IN (60 minutes): Topical Call—Impact Investing with Donors [members only]

In this 2018 topical call, the Marin Community Foundation kicked off a discussion about involving donors in impact investing.

BORROW AND ADAPT: Impact Investing [members only]

Community foundations in Marin and Oregon shared materials on their impact investing work and Mission Investors Exchange shared the results of a late 2017 survey of community foundations.