Developing Program Strategy for Foundations

Whether your foundation has one or several programmatic areas of interest, you need a clear strategy for achieving the impact you desire in each area. We can help you refresh existing and develop new issue-specific strategies aligned to your foundation’s vision and values.

How We Help Your Foundation Develop Program Strategy

  • Developing a Shared Understanding of the Issue: We perform a wide-ranging analysis to help you, your team, partners, and stakeholders (as appropriate) develop an understanding of your issue—including as appropriate how the issue impacts communities of color differentially.
  • Identifying Pathways to Change: With a shared understanding of the issue and your organization’s possible role, we will help you develop possible pathways to pursue to make an impact.
  • Sourcing and Vetting: Once you have decided on a strategic pathway, we will help you (as needed) identify specific nonprofits, partners, and community leaders to work beside as you advance your shared goals, explicitly casting a broad net to identify leaders most proximate to the issues they seek to solve. We also screen grantmaking opportunities with mutually-agreed upon criteria, incorporating lessons from our work on racial disparities in philanthropy.
  • Evaluating Impact: We can help you identify clear milestones and design accountability measures to ensure you are progressing and learning as you go.

What the Raikes Foundation Has To Say About Working With Bridgespan

Tricia and Jeff Raikes“Bridgespan has been an invaluable partner in the Raikes Foundation’s work to foster environments that cultivate learning mindsets and skills for students—particularly those of color and from low-income families. With Bridgespan’s collaboration and expertise, we translated our aspirations into an actionable strategy that will work as well for us as for our grantees and partners.”

Jeff and Tricia Raikes
The Raikes Foundation

Foundations Bridgespan Has Helped with Program Strategy

We have had the privilege of working with many foundations on their program strategies and helping them to increase their social impact.
Philanthropy Foundation Strategy logo set

Bridgespan Publications About Foundation Strategy

Our insights have been published by Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. Our articles also are available on our website.

Audacious Philanthropy

Audacious social change is incredibly challenging. Yet history shows that it can succeed.

Bold Philanthropy in India: Insights from Eight Social Change Initiatives

Eight initiatives that illustrate how bold philanthropy can play a unique role in surmounting India’s social challenges.

Reimagining Institutional Philanthropy

Growth in wealth globally and new philanthropists threaten the relevance of institutional philanthropy—while creating new opportunities for impact.

Six Pathways to Enduring Results: Lessons from Spend-Down Foundations

Why an increasing number of philanthropists have elected to give away their money by a fixed date.

How Philanthropic Collaborations Succeed—and Why they Fail

When executed well, funder collaboratives can drive tremendous results greater than funders believe they could attain by working alone.

Bridgespan's Foundation and Program Strategy Experts