CEP’s new research, Bridging the Gap: Grantee Perspectives on Intermediary Funders, makes one very clear point: Grantee experiences with intermediary funders mirror their experiences with originating funders (those that are often supporting intermediaries).
As we’ve started to talk about these findings, one common reaction from originating funders is surprise — surprise that intermediaries don’t look more different from originating funders. This surprise is sometimes based on assumptions that intermediaries, given their structures and approaches, are a better philanthropic approach than traditional funders to get closer to community, create deeper relationships, offer deeper assistance, and more. But unfortunately, this surprise is often followed by a concern: maybe CEP’s research just doesn’t have the ‘right’ intermediaries included.
There are new intermediaries every day, and even the definition “intermediary” is still debated. So, our research definitely doesn’t claim representativeness. More research on intermediaries, their practices, and grantees’ experiences would be wonderful. But the 24 intermediaries whose 3,444 grantee experiences we examined span a range of small and large intermediaries. They include donor collaboratives and freestanding nonprofits that do regranting. They’re located all over the world. They work on important causes from reproductive rights, to education, to climate, to gender justice, to arts. The majority use language of equity and justice in their guiding visions and missions. So, even if they’re not representative of all intermediaries, the lessons from their grantees’ experiences can certainly teach us something important.
I think that what sometimes underlies the surprise that intermediaries aren’t more distinctive from originating funders is simply hope. It’s a hope that we just need to find the right new approach to philanthropy to make radically more progress. It’s a hope that working with intermediaries might have been that killer app for philanthropy. We are a diverse ecosystem of organizations, driven by missions to tackle the urgent social and environmental injustices of our time. We want action that creates real and rapid change. And we haven’t seen enough of it.
But as a sector we really need to avoid the continual temptation to assume that we’ve found a transformative new philanthropic approach, or even that there is a single one out there to find. That’s particularly true when that assumption becomes a distraction to the very hard work of understanding the performance of organizations using various approaches — new and old — and improving their implementation!
I’ve been around philanthropy long enough to have seen the “next great approach” emerge again and again. Think back to venture philanthropy, social impact investing, collective impact, giving while living, and, more recently, trust-based philanthropy. Each, at moments, has been touted as the “new” approach that could be used by every funder to increase their impact. Even though I think each did bring something fundamentally important to philanthropy, more nuance is required: these are tools that work better and worse depending on the goals and the context of change you’re after.
Regardless of approach, CEP’s work with grantees has made one thing very clear: The success of any approach relies on strong implementation. Even the most ingenious approach, if implemented without careful attention to performance, can quickly fail.
In fact, we can extend this focus on implementation to many other characteristics of funders that were thought likely to drive performance. When CEP first started surveying grantees about their experiences, folks thought we might find that some funders were inherently better or worse based on what I’ve come to call their structural characteristics — size, age, location, areas of focus, type of funder, involvement of a living donor, even explicit focus on equity.
It turns out those are not generally the characteristics that drive grantees’ experiences with funders. There are funders in each category that grantees think are doing great work … and those they think are not. And, even within a single institution, there are often some program officers who build great relationships and some who do not.
Based on analyses of tens of thousands of survey responses from hundreds of funders, we do know something about what many funders (and program officers) can do to drive better grantee experiences and stronger impact, at least as perceived by grantees. They can focus on centering grantees through: clear and consistent communication; ensuring staff are responsive and approachable; aligning approaches with communities by seeking understanding of grantees and the contexts in which grantees work; increasing transparency; utilizing selection processes that help strengthen ideas and organizations; putting in place appropriate, flexible grant structures; and mitigating undue pressure on grantees to modify their own goals to meet funders’ preferences.
There’s no reason to expect those fundamentals would be different for grantees of intermediaries than other kinds of funders — or that intermediaries would naturally be better at implementing these fundamentals with excellence. And, in fact, with funder-imposed restrictions on their own budgets or timeframes, intermediaries may face particular challenges in incorporating those essentials into their own approaches. And yet they do so at least as well as originating funders.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe intermediaries can – and often do – play a really important role in bringing into our sector new ideas, new experiences, localized efforts, inclusion of smaller nonprofits, efficiency in pooling resources, relief of funder capacity constraints, and much more. We’ve highlighted a couple intermediaries in this research that are excellent – and unusually excellent compared to any type of funder.
But it’s naïve to see intermediaries, or any particular funding structure or emergent practice, as a panacea. Funders working with and through intermediaries can make sense for a ton of reasons — when the context fits and implementation is strong. Let’s work together to test assumptions and do the hard work to ensure that important social sector organizations – originating funders, intermediaries, and nonprofits alike – have the resources and approaches they need to work with excellence.
Kevin Bolduc is vice president, Assessment and Advisory Services, at CEP. Find him on LinkedIn.
