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Five Ways for Individual Donors to Give Better

Arabella Advisors
This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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Impact Philanthropy
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Giving Compass’ Take:

• Here are five considerations for donors to remember when facing challenges reaching their giving goals.

• How are you staying engaged with your philanthropic strategy? Are you focused on specific goals?

• Here are tips for personal philanthropy.


While most recognize that grant making is a privilege, there are many times when the role can be awkward, such as when one has to say no to prospective grantees, family, friends, and worthy causes. To avoid these encounters, some donors keep their philanthropy private. However, doing so can sometimes diminish impact and rob a funder of rewarding interactions with grantees, stakeholders, and peer funders.

There are ways to overcome these challenges, freeing donors to put their energies into the aspects of philanthropy they find most satisfying while advancing their philanthropic goals:

  1. Define a clear philanthropic focus, strategy, and goals.
  2. Create a buffer by hiring staff, advisors, or outsourced management support.
  3. Build a network of peers.
  4. Give with others.
  5. Use various giving vehicles.

The longer philanthropists are passionately engaged in their work, the greater impact they can have in both the short and long term. We frequently draw upon the strategies above to help our clients sustain their work and increase their impact.

Read the full article about individual donors by Betsy Erickson at Arabella Advisors.

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Interested in learning more about Nonprofit Sector? Other readers at Giving Compass found the following articles helpful for impact giving related to Nonprofit Sector.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    Striving for Transparent and Responsive Communication

    Giving Compass' Take: • Philip Li shares lessons in transparent and responsive communication from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. • Are your communications with grantees made with them in mind? Are you collecting feedback to understand where miscommunications are occurring?  • Learn more about being a grantee-centric giver.  Being clear in sharing what we’re doing and the whywe are doing it is important for all foundations, and even more so for us because our trust-based approach is somewhat uncommon. Recently we have had some reminders of what we need to get better at — being transparent by framing and setting context in order to bring about better understanding. As we’ve written about before, we accept grant proposals that have been submitted to other funders. We do that because most, if not all, of the information we want to know is already captured in other applications. Our desire is for grantseekers to focus more time on their important work rather than spending hours writing to educate us. We think it is our responsibility to get to know them. Interestingly and somewhat paradoxically we’ve gotten some comments that we’ve made the process harder by not being specific enough in what we’re asking. Development Directors have looked at our website and wondered, ‘what are they really looking for?’ For us, the application is the beginning of the process, not the complete set of information from which a decision is made–and we realized that if we were extra clear about that upfront, applicants might feel less anxious. We read that first submission, and if there’s a possible match, we talk with the nonprofit to get a better understanding of its work, and then if there’s continued interest, we go see their leadership program in action. We need, and want, to be better communicators — to help others understand our approach and rationale and what’s in our heads. Read the full article about transparent and responsive communication by Philip Li of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation at Medium.


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