Philanthropy is a deeply personal journey. Its pace can vary. It’s rarely linear. And every step taken along the way is unique to the funder or family.

Yet, after a decade of advising more than 40 families on their philanthropy, The Bridgespan Group has discovered patterns in their journeys, which we are mapping out to help others. Take, for example, funders who have felt “stuck” at different points in their journeys. We learned that they reach points of inertia when the organizational or support structures for their giving do not support their increasing aspirations for impact.

One family we’ve worked with over the years found that its aspirations outgrew its informal, relational style of grantmaking. As assets increased and the family’s focus areas expanded, family members could no longer rely on volunteer time and consensus decision making for their grantmaking. “Doing” philanthropy increasingly felt like a burden: they needed a reset.

This article is for donors like them, who want to accelerate progress on their philanthropic ambitions—increasing both their giving and their impact—while maintaining a lean operational structure and ensuring they feel joy in the work.

In our experience, to get unstuck, donors have sought clarity on how they go about giving just as much as what they want to give to by asking, “Am I starting up, scaling up, or tuning up?” By “start up,” we mean a moment when a donor or family decides to move into a more focused approach to giving. By “scale up,” we mean a moment when a donor or family decides to lean in and do significantly more. By “tune up,” we mean a critical moment to reflect and identify opportunities to correct course. Each of these moments is an inflection point that comes with specific operational challenges, questions to answer, and decisions to make, in service of a donor’s giving goals.

These inflection points don’t always occur sequentially or at regular intervals. A donor may go through some more than once and might even experience aspects of more than one simultaneously. Still, the “start-up, scale-up, tune-up” framing has helped some donors tackle head-on the strategic questions, operational challenges, and decisions to make, at each inflection point. We’ve found that when donors can better locate where they are in their journeys, it unlocks new possibilities for impact and increases their sense of purpose and meaning.

Start Up: Aiming for Impact

Most donors do not start from zero. They’ve been giving to the institutions and causes with which they have personal connections for years—alma maters, local schools, hospitals, and causes important to friends and family. What we call the “start-up moment” is when a donor decides to go beyond this sort of personal giving and proactively directs resources toward specific impact goals.

The shift evokes a key strategic question: How do I go from supporting good work to seeking results? This question is shaped by other considerations, such as how much a donor plans to give and over how many years and balancing a focus on existing areas of interest with exploring new things. These strategic considerations tend to be followed by more practical operational questions such as:

• What balance of time do I want to spend on my giving and impact investing?
• What role do I want to play as I evolve my approach to giving?
• How much anonymity, flexibility, and control do I need?

Answers to these questions inform a set of start-up decisions. It’s important, for example, to specify how much capital to deploy and over what period. Some may decide to utilize a different balance of financial vehicles for their giving—a foundation, a donor-advised fund, a limited liability company, or a 501(c)(4). Similarly, with a tighter focus on areas of giving and a clear time horizon, funders may consider building teams, engaging consultants, or partnering with others to support grantmaking. That could mean seeking out subject matter specialists, management generalists, or some combination thereof.

Consider a recent example from our work. After 25 years of personal philanthropy, a family found itself giving over $15 million annually and personally managing a portfolio of more than 200 grantees. While the family members were incredibly proud of the work they had supported over the years, they wanted to move from a mostly reactive approach of responding to opportunities toward an increasingly intentional approach of seeking out opportunities aligned with areas of particular interest and passion for the family. In this case, the family decided to focus a portion of its giving on providing basic resources (e.g., housing, food, health care) to improve the well-being of underserved youth in a nearby community. It also wanted a better sense of how all its giving added up. This was the family’s start-up moment.

Given the scale and pace of their giving, the family’s impulse was to hire someone to help manage the growing complexity. While this can often seem like the natural next step, families at an inflection point may be better off engaging first in a “look back, look forward” exercise to reflect on how they got to where they are—what inspired their current focus areas and whether their giving to date has aligned with that intent. It’s helpful for donors to first take stock of the results of their giving, what has and hasn’t worked operationally, and what has generated the most joy and fulfillment.

With these insights, donors will gain a clearer understanding of what they are building on, where to aim the next phase of giving, and what type of support or expertise will be most needed. This exercise can help a donor refine the skills needed in a first hire. Expert or generalist? Chief of staff or CEO? In short, the donor will be better equipped to figure out who will work best within the family’s understanding of where it has been and where it hopes to go next.

Scale Up: Expanding for Impact

At this inflection point, donors find themselves increasingly seeking out new opportunities. They have more year-over-year grantees, some multiyear commitments, and strong relationships in the field. They have typically settled on the best financial vehicles for their giving and have often identified a few anchor grantees to invest in more deeply with both time and resources. They’re now curious about making step change increases in their giving, either motivated by personal commitments or changes in their wealth.

These families ask questions around how to reach their full philanthropic potential, particularly the key strategic question: How do I scale my giving without significantly increasing the size of my team or the managerial burden? We have seen donors approach answering this in a range of ways—from thinking about new avenues to giving high-impact grants without conducting extensive research to exploring giving to new kinds of social impact, such as policy advocacy or research.

These considerations lead to a set of operational questions that, when answered, help determine the right type of support to scale giving and impact:

• Does my team have the right knowledge and skills to manage increased giving?
• Do my impact goals require me to partner with others?
• Are there technical or training supports I should offer grantees?
• What kind of measurement, evaluation, or field relationships might I consider to further my goals?

Answers to these questions lead to several decisions, including whether and how to invest in building a team, either in-house or outsourced. Some find that partnering with intermediaries or funder collaboratives that offer both financial and capacity-building support for grantees is attractive. Others might decide to set up entirely new grantmaking channels that enable a much broader sourcing of opportunities.

For the families we’ve supported facing this “scale-up moment,” an external event, such as selling a business or inheriting wealth, often motivates their interest in accelerating the pace of their giving. In some cases, a family has taken a body of work as far as it can go within its current operational structure and is looking for other options. For example, one family foundation we worked with launched and incubated a new program focused on improving early childhood education in its community. Once the program had a strong record of results and was ready to scale across the region, the family spun out the program as its own 501(c)(3) with an independent board that could more effectively raise funds from other donors to fuel its growth.

For those who seek to give most or nearly all of their wealth in their lifetime—signatories of the Giving Pledge, for example—a significant increase in assets requires a step change in the pace of giving to stay on track with their goals.¹ One family met the scale-up moment by increasing annual giving from $10 million to $150 million and expanding from two to six portfolios over the past decade. At the same time, it added policy, research, and field building to a long-standing commitment to scale high-impact direct-service grantees. To manage this ambitious expansion, the family hired a foundation president, grew the staff to nine, and delegated certain portfolio and operational decisions to outside vendors and consultants.

Tune Up: Redesigning for Impact

Sometimes moments of reflection and change are less obvious, but no less important. Donors at this inflection point may have coalesced around a set of issue areas and have clearly identified goals and budgets. They may have tested ways to increase “leverage”—hired trusted staff, partnered with collaborative funds, or engaged consultants. In many ways, nothing is wrong, and nothing happened externally to necessitate immediate change.

Still, a donor might find compelling new issue areas to give to, but might not know how to make portfolio trade-offs or might wonder where to double down and what else to explore. The donor begins to ask different strategic questions: Am I satisfied with my philanthropy? Am I focusing on the right problems and getting results? Do I find my work as a philanthropist rewarding? 

This “tune-up moment” leads to another set of operational questions:

• How do I ensure I’ve carved out a role I have time for and enjoy?
• How do I delegate more without giving up control?
• How do I engage my family?
• Do our processes ensure high-quality sourcing and diligence of grants aligned with my goals?

Answers to these questions lead to several decisions. Some funders start by clarifying decision roles among themselves, their families, and their teams to ensure clarity on the goals and directions for each of their areas of giving. Others focus on updating their governance models to make room for family members to engage in the topics they’re passionate about, or they may create leadership positions to help the next generation of leaders build their confidence and expertise in philanthropy.

We’ve also seen funders decide at this point to expand to multiple issue areas or wind down some initiatives while building up others. And in other cases, the decisions are around exploring new processes to clarify the criteria expected for different grant sizes or to pilot new sourcing and diligence processes.

For example, one multigenerational family board looked to refresh its strategy and operating model as the next generation began to play a larger role. The “tune-up moment” involved a strategy refresh and easing the board away from making grant decisions. This empowered the foundation staff to present grant recommendations aligned with a set of criteria, allowing the board to focus on strategy, not research. Another family in a tune-up moment initiated a process to separate second-generation giving from first-generation giving. This allowed for adjusting decision-making time frames, staffing models, and issue areas that all served to strengthen family relationships and the joy of their philanthropy.

Deeper reflection can make donors aware that they’ve outgrown several of their original operating principles. We’ve found that when donors remain clear-eyed about shifts in impact aspirations and their evolving roles, they’re better equipped to adjust their supporting operating structures to reach full giving potential.

Stepping Into Full Philanthropic Potential

Of course, not every donor will immediately recognize themselves as at one of these three inflection points. We’re always learning alongside our peers and the donors we advise, and we’re eager to explore the many nuances that exist. And this dialogue, around how funders can get unstuck, is timely. The Walton Personal Philanthropy Group’s research on the technical challenges of structuring giving and the National Center for Family Philanthropy’s recent research on overcoming psychological barriers to giving both point to the need for more practical guidance on how to move from intentions to impact.

Working through these inflection points matters when it comes to meeting a family foundation’s impact aspirations. When donors step back and take stock of where they are in their giving journeys and answer these key strategic and operational questions, they can move further and faster toward their giving goals.

While we’ve found that there is no one right way to do philanthropy, recognizing these inflection points and learning from the experiences of others can help donors scale their impact—and joy—in their philanthropic work.