As More Social Change Funders Embrace General Support, How Are They Assessing Impact?

Fifteen years ago, longtime progressive nonprofit leader Gary Bass was trying to convince a room full of foundation leaders to make a big change. Bass and other grantees in the room felt they would be better served by more flexible, general support funds, rather than the narrowly tailored and often short-term project and program grants that many nonprofits labored to piece together each year. It was a divisive conversation, Bass told Inside Philanthropy in a recent interview, with the funders “hemming and hawing” that general support grants lacked straightforward assessment metrics, making evaluation impossible.

Eventually, one of the funders in the room noticed that Bill Schambra, the room’s lone conservative and longtime program director at the Bradley Foundation, had been quiet for the entire discussion, and asked for his input. Schambra, Bass recalled, told the room he didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. 

He and other funders on the right simply gave money to the organizations that they trusted and knew were pulling their weight, developing an array of institutionally strong think tanks, advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations. But the idea of a more holistic evaluation and funding process didn’t seem to compute with the assessment and evaluation-driven funders in the room, who quickly returned to their highly technical discussion.

“Funders have made a huge investment in this word ‘evaluation,’” said Bass, now executive director of the Bauman Family Foundation, which gives mostly in the form of general support grants. “At the same token, when you’re talking about social change, it doesn’t occur in grant cycles. Social change is a long-term process.”

In recent years, more progressive funders have begun finally taking the advice of Bass and others clamoring for more general support grants and less short-term thinking. The funders changing their style of giving include the massive Ford Foundation, which has made $1 billion and counting in five-year, general support grants to hundreds of vital social justice nonprofits through its BUILD initiative. That effort seeks to catalyze the kind of systemic changes that can only happen with years of well-funded organizing and institution building.

“The big shift has been understanding that if you’re working with an organization and giving them a grant every year, at some point you want to say, ‘Are we getting the best bang for our buck when they’re going through these hoops every year?’” said Bess Rothenberg, senior director of strategy and learning at Ford. “We want them to plan multiple years out, because we plan multiple years out.”

But with this new style of grantmaking comes a new set of challenges for progressive foundations about how to assess impact and make sure that philanthropic dollars invested in social change work—still a sliver of charitable giving overall—are being used in the best possible way.  

A rethink of the funder’s role

Funders on the left who are embracing long-term impact funding don’t exactly have to start from scratch. Along with trying to mimic the practice of conservative foundations, both new and established progressive funders can look to some of their peers for examples. Grantmakers such as the San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation and the Bauman Family Foundation, the latter of which is now led by Bass, have long been focused on multi-year, general support grantmaking. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy—which works with many funders on the left and has argued for decades that more general support is essential to advancing social change—offers a range of resources to help funders put this approach into practice. There’s also a growing body of lessons from more newly established groups like Propel Capital, which eschewed many traditional, overly complex evaluation and funding methods in response to the 2016 election.

The grantmaking practices of these progressive funders are not exactly rocket science. “To drive social change, environmental change, you’ve got to be, first of all, willing to take risks and look for organizations that are doing advocacy and building movements,” said Leslie Crutchfield, a professor at Georgetown University and author of “Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits” and “How Change Happens: Why Some Movements Succeed While Others Don’t.”

Identifying which groups to invest in at the outset is by far the most important step in the process.

“The first thing we do when we’re going into a state is, we do a good deal of research. We talk to other funders in the state, other organizations in the state, really do an in-depth study on who are the organizations doing the work, who makes up the network, who has been successful in collaborating,” said Page Gleason, who works on NEO Philanthropy’s State Infrastructure Fund (SIF).

Gleason described the selection method at SIF, a donor collaborative focused on civic engagement and voting rights for underrepresented communities, as putting together the best “constellation” of organizations to fund. A big part of their process also involves surveying leaders and funders in the state about the rootedness of an organization’s leadership, weeding out those who are “parachuting” or taking an extractive position. Other strategically minded funders are similarly focused on an organization’s collaboration and place within a wider movement, seeing it as the only realistic way to achieve real change.

“We need a broad coalition—that’s what the future holds for this country,” said Sarah Williams, co-founder and CEO of Propel Capital. “People who aren’t thinking strongly about how they can be part of a bigger coalition and be collaborative, it’s just going to use up energy that’s not constructive for the movement.”

As an early-stage funder, an organization like Propel is making bets on young nonprofits and their leaders, often giving funds to groups that couldn’t be evaluated under previous standards. This rose out of the earth-shattering defeat of 2016, Williams said, when she and a group of other funders and leaders wanted to get money into the hands of organizers as soon as possible.

Crystal Hayling, executive director of the Libra Foundation—another relatively new backer of progressive causes that provides multi-year general support—has said that it seeks out new groups to fund by asking existing grantees “Who could you not do your work without? Who are the other organizations that we should be paying attention to?”

At Ford’s BUILD program, program officers ask grantees to show how more flexible funding would allow them to seize opportunities they otherwise could not. Another key part of BUILD is that grantees all had existing relationships with Ford, meaning a certain level of trust is baked in from the start. 

The famously diligent Sandler Foundation, which gives exclusively in the form of unsolicited general support grants, has been known to go to the ends of the Earth in vetting organizations and their leaders. The foundation will hear pitches and interview dozens of experts in a given field, investigating their potential grantees until they feel completely satisfied. The process can sometimes take years.

A different meaning of “evaluation”

Long-term impact funding requires a different approach to ongoing evaluation. With project support, a funder can track whether grantees are producing key deliverables and hitting promised milestones. But backing organizations over a period of years with general support means grappling with the amorphous concept of “impact.”

“There’s not an easy metric to measure that, in my knowledge,” said Crutchfield, stressing the challenge of funding social movements.

For any quantifiable progressive win—like passing or blocking legislation, or electoral victories—any number of organizations and leaders could reasonably be seen as contributing.

“It requires kind of an old-school evaluation approach. You’ve really got to pick up the phone and talk to people, and talk to the leaders in the field themselves,” said Crutchfield. “You can’t have an organization self-report on that; each organization is going to try to position its own efforts as them winning the day.”

For his part, Bass continues to see evaluation more like his counterparts on the right, using it as a tool for learning and improving rather than simply deciding whether or not to give money. Even in losses, Bass says, there’s a potential for strong institution and movement-building, something that could pay off long-term, even if a particular fight has been lost in the interim.

“Is it a failure if a group has a goal to pass [Democratic voting rights bill] H.R. 1 and it fails? Is that a bad grant?” asked Bass. “Maybe along the way of fighting for H.R. 1, they expanded their base, or improved their communications systems. Maybe it was a huge success. We have to be very careful about chalking things up in black and white when there are shades of gray.”

Trust over metrics

The growing shift to long-term impact funding by progressive funders is part of a broader movement among grantmakers toward trust-based philanthropy. More funders have begun questioning the burden they place on grantees in the vetting, evaluation and grant proposal process. Last year, in the early days of the pandemic, some 800 foundations publicly pledged to streamline their giving to move money out the door more quickly, with fewer strings attached. 

Funders like NEO Philanthropy have long worked to make life easier for the groups they support. Gleason and other NEO officers coordinate with other funders to perform site visits together, saving time for grantees; they’ve also moved from requiring a full-fledged interim grant report to a phone call. The Sandler Foundation doesn’t ask its grantees for proposals, and further discourages organizations from wasting time on personalized reports, instead asking to see the same documents that the organizations use to assess themselves.

Meanwhile, a growing number of funders are connecting up the work of evaluation with larger questions about how they exercise their power. Kat Athanasiades, a senior associate at the Center for Evaluation Innovation, advocates for an evaluation process that pushes funders to engage in the difficult conversations of their own role in the systems they’re hoping to change, citing the framework developed by the Equitable Evaluation Initiative (EEI). Much of EEI’s framework challenges funders to rethink their definitions of objectivity, rigor, bias and equity. “I think doing equitable evaluation is a whole approach, a whole way of thinking,” said Athanasiades. 

Many funders are also putting a renewed focus on evaluating diversity, equity and inclusion in more meaningful ways. “Sometimes, we reduce complex issues to metrics, and that becomes silly. You don’t want to reduce things to a quota of people of color on a board or in an organization,” said Bass. “You need to think about broader questions, like questions around who’s making the decisions for the organization.”

Progressive philanthropy after Trump

While the past year’s reckoning over racism has pushed many funders in this direction, the durability of long-term impact funding and equitable evaluation may be just as tenuous as any other framework. The increasing entrance of new, politically minded philanthropists from the tech world, where evaluation is data-driven and dictated by the industry’s mostly white and male leadership, could lead to entirely new (or in some cases, not-so-new) evaluative frameworks that prize efficiency and results over institution-building.

But what will likely be even more impactful for the future of progressive giving is the political landscape that develops without the clear, shared goal of opposing President Donald Trump’s agenda and removing him from office. The left is still racing to catch up with conservatives when it comes to building state and local power, along with the networks and funds necessary to pounce when opportunity comes knocking. 

Progressive funders and organizations alike used their resources and ideas to get their hands back on the wheel in 2020. The question now is: Where will they choose to drive?