The Bridgespan Group’s research in recent years has highlighted the great promise held by funder collaboratives to unlock more philanthropy and deploy it to advance social change:
- Collaboratives are one of four compelling pathways to increase philanthropic contributions among high-net-worth individuals.1
- When executed well, they can produce significant impact.2
- They offer substantial benefits for donors looking to engage on various issues and to give efficiently and effectively.3
- The majority have charted a course that differs from traditional philanthropy: they tilt toward equity and justice, field and movement building, and leaders of color.4
- They have unique opportunities and challenges regarding measurement, evaluation, and learning—with some promising frameworks others can learn from.5
- Donors can engage with collaboratives in issue-specific ways6(e.g., in democracy, gender equity, racial equity, or climate) and regional ways (e.g., in India,7 in Africa,8 or more broadly across the Global South)9 ; to illustrate this, our database of philanthropic collaboratives has grown to over 300 funds.10
This publication extends our research characterizing the state of the field. This year’s landscape provides a robust snapshot that aggregates three years of survey data (from 2021, 2022, and 2023).
For this research, we defined collaboratives as entities that either pool or channel resources from multiple donors to nonprofits. We call them “collaboratives,” “funds,” and “platforms” interchangeably in this report. We reached out to over 500 such funds globally over the past three years, and 280 unique collaboratives responded at least once to our survey. (See the “Research Methodology” section below for more on our approach). While this is a strong response rate, we acknowledge there are many initiatives and organizations whose input we didn’t capture. We also convened survey respondents each year to discuss the findings and gather more insights.
Key Characteristics of Philanthropic Collaboratives
The field is growing
The number of funder collaboratives is surging; more than half of the collaboratives responding to our survey were founded after 2010. They have become significant actors in the philanthropic landscape: our survey respondents collectively deploy $4 billion to $7 billion per year. That’s a lot of money. Still, it’s relatively small compared to the $103.5 billion in US foundation giving in 2023, according to estimates from Giving USA 2024: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2023.11
Giving through these platforms is highly concentrated. The 35 collaboratives in our sample that each deployed more than $25 million per year collectively accounted for over 75 percent of overall funding.
When asked which types of donors accounted for most of their funding, 41 percent of the funds in our survey cited institutional foundations. Only 13 percent indicated individual donors. Larger funds were more likely to rely on individual donors. Twenty percent of collaboratives that gave over $25 million annually reported individual donors as their primary source compared to 11 percent for smaller funds.
Collaboratives have the potential to do more. The collaboratives that responded to our survey reported they could deploy two to four times the resources they currently direct annually—as much as $17 billion in the coming year—were fundraising not a constraint.
But fundraising is a constraint, according to our research. Collaborative leaders cited insufficient awareness among donors of the value of collaborative funds and donors’ preference for giving directly to organizations as funding barriers. Collaboratives also indicated that their own capacity to fundraise is a constraining factor, given the resources needed to cultivate and maintain a larger donor base.
Collaboratives are active around the world—and on a range of issues
Collaboratives are active globally—with approximately 50 percent of survey respondents working outside of North America. There is growing momentum behind philanthropic collaboratives in India12, in Africa13, and more broadly across the Global South.14
Collectively, funds advance a wide array of impact goals, and their primary issue areas span some two dozen, with some notable concentrations. Similar to prior data, 18 percent cited gender equity15 as their primary issue area, 13 percent named climate change or environment/energy,16 and 9 percent named racial and ethnic justice17 in our surveys between 2021 and 2023.
Collaboratives with a primary focus on equity and justice were less well represented among the larger funds, suggesting they face steeper fundraising barriers than collaboratives with other primary issue areas. More specifically, among the 35 funds we surveyed that give more than $25 million annually, only two named gender equity and only one named racial and ethnic justice as their primary issue areas.
Each respondent reported a median of six secondary issue areas, reflecting how these funds often work across issues. Working in this crosscutting way can create a barrier to funding—many funds highlighted the challenge of not fitting cleanly into issue-focused funders’ strategies.
In our past research, we’ve highlighted that how collaboratives go about achieving change (their “investment thesis”) is as critical to their operations as what issue they work on.18 For funder collaboratives, the how is often through supporting multi-stakeholder efforts, instead of primarily focusing on regranting dollars to individual organizations. Sixty-six percent of the collaboratives we surveyed support a range of efforts and organizations working on a shared goal—for example, resourcing community-driven change or cross-sector coalitions, fields, and/or movements. That’s more than five times the number of collaboratives that primarily prioritize supporting individual organizations or place-based change.
Collaboratives prioritize equity and diverse leadership
“Collaborative funds fill a clear gap,” said one fund leader. “They resource and build the capacity of organizations advocating for and organizing underserved constituencies.” Indeed, more than 80 percent of respondents describe racial and ethnic equity and about 70 percent describe gender equity as a “core” or an “intentional” focus of their work. This focus manifests in a variety of ways, from the funds’ primary issue areas—the concentration of funds focusing on either gender equity or racial and ethnic justice noted above—to their leadership, their grantees’ leadership, and their grantmaking methods.
Collaboratives are far more likely to be led by people of color and/or women than traditional philanthropy. Women lead or co-lead nearly three-quarters of the funds we researched (73 percent). Gender-nonbinary individuals lead 4 percent of the funds in our survey. Sixty-two percent reported that their senior-most leader—or, for collaborative funds with a co-leadership model, at least one of their co-leaders—identifies as a person of color. In comparison, 62 percent of US foundation CEOs are women and 14 percent are people of color, according to 2022 research by the Council on Foundations.19
We also examined the responses by leader, as opposed to by fund, so that we could disaggregate by race and ethnicity while accommodating multiple co-leaders and leaders who identify with multiple races/ethnicities.
Collaboratives shift power and strengthen grantees
Forty percent of collaboratives use participatory processes for grantmaking decisions—handing decision-making power to nonprofit leaders and community groups on the receiving end of grantmaking. Such practices are less common among foundations. A 2020 Inside Philanthropy survey of foundation staff found that less than 20 percent of foundations employ “grantee or end beneficiary committees with decision-making authority for grants.”20
More than half of the collaboratives we surveyed provide unrestricted support. By comparison, the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s analysis of its Grantee Perception Reports notes that for the decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, only 21 percent of all grants came in the form of general operating support.21
Nearly all the collaboratives we surveyed (95 percent) indicated that they offer some form of nonfinancial support to grantees. Donor introductions, technical assistance, coaching, and leadership development are the most common.
Collaboratives have a wide variety of cost structures
Funder collaboratives invest varying resources in operations. Our survey respondents have a median staff size of 13 full-time equivalents (FTEs). A collaborative’s scale of grantmaking and its programmatic approach (for example, the depth and breadth of its sourcing and diligence, along with the nonfinancial support it provides to grantees and the broader field) influence both its staff size and cost structure.
Staffing. Collaboratives that direct $25 million or more per year typically have more staff, a median of 43 FTEs compared to 12 FTEs for those directing under $25 million. Funds larger than $25 million also allocate a lower proportion of their budgets to internal operations—three percentage points less than the smaller funds.
In our 2023 survey, we gathered new information on collaboratives’ founding stories, their operations, and their structures.22
Founding stories. Nearly half of collaboratives were founded by funders. Another 28 percent were founded by field leaders/practitioners, and the remainder involved a mix of funders and field leaders.
Operating cost structure. Given the many questions collaboratives ask us about pathways to fully fund their costs, the 2023 survey dug into this topic. Most responding collaboratives reported that their initial operating costs were covered for their first three to five years—over 75 percent had such expenses at least partially covered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, larger funds—those that have grown to over $25 million in annual grantmaking—were even more likely (89 percent) to have had their initial operating costs at least partially covered.
The most common “primary” source of operational support was philanthropy, although a third of collaboratives funded operations through fees as a primary or secondary source of revenue. Very few collaboratives reported having an endowment or a board that covers operating costs. This raises questions about sustainability—if founding donors intend to pare back their operating support over time in the hopes that a collaborative finds other means of support, then the collaborative that had its initial costs covered will need to identify a sustainable funding model. Collaboratives that do not have early backers may struggle to communicate to donors the importance of funding their true costs.
Organizational status. More than half of responding collaboratives are public charities. Thirty percent are fiscally sponsored or hosted organizations. Approximately 16 percent reported changing their structure at some point.
Collaboratives would like to invest more in measurement and learning
Collaborative leaders regularly tell us that they would like to invest more in measurement, evaluation, and learning. This reflection was borne out in the survey: when asked how they would use additional funding to improve their capacity, nearly 70 percent of collaboratives flagged measurement and learning as a critical area for investment—second only to strengthening their teams. Given this need in the field, we decided to probe a bit deeper in our 2023 survey.
We also published an article in 2024 to highlight promising practices for how philanthropic collaboratives can effectively measure, evaluate, and learn in the pursuit of greater impact.23 Collaboratives operate in a unique context—sitting at the intersection of donors, grantees, and systems. While grantmaking is often core to a collaborative’s strategy, a collaborative’s impact is ideally greater than the sum of its grants and grantees. Collaboratives therefore often seek to understand their impact on both grantees and donors. For many, their measurement approach also considers the system or field level.
Directions Forward
We discussed the survey results with over 100 sector leaders. As they spoke about priorities for the field going forward, a few themes surfaced consistently.
Increasing awareness. Leaders of funds consistently point to the need to better communicate the value of their work to current and prospective funders. Among the ideas offered for increasing awareness and understanding:
- Developing more accessible lists of funds (such as this philanthropic collaborations database on Bridgespan.org and resources hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
- Advancing donor norms around incorporating collaborative funds in sourcing and diligence processes
- Holding more philanthropy convenings to showcase collaborative funds
- Conducting more applied studies to better understand these vehicles
Breaking down identity-based barriers to capital. Similar to the well-documented disparities in funding for nonprofits led by people of color24 and African-led nongovernmental organizations25 (with more recent data suggesting change is slowly afoot), funds led by people with historically marginalized identities (including racial, ethnic, gender, and other forms of identity) face additional barriers as they seek to get connected to funders, build rapport with them, and secure sustainable funding over time. Removing those barriers requires intentional effort by funders to identify ways to source a broad range of funds, such as:
- Incorporating an equity lens in defining the goals of their portfolios
- Counteracting biases at each stage of the process
- Seeking feedback from equity-oriented leaders to ensure they can learn and improve over time
Strengthening collaboratives’ capacity to learn from their work and measure their impact.26 Funds that focus on multi-stakeholder efforts seek measurement, evaluation, and learning approaches that extend beyond grantee-level data collection. “We are open and excited to learn about new approaches to measurement, evaluation, and learning that align with our belief in investing in grassroots, community-led efforts and hence give longer time frames to grantees for achieving their goals, don’t place unnecessary burden on the grantee, and allow us to learn together with our grantees,” one leader shared.
Increasing understanding of funds’ operating model choices. In our research, conversations, and advisory work with collaborative leaders, we hear significant interest in understanding how funds organize their work and operate their teams. Collaboratives would benefit from a better understanding of:
- Capabilities that are consistent across their peers
- Capabilities and operating models that vary according to strategic choices and types of work
- Practices for communicating related costs to donors
We hope these findings are valuable to leaders of current collaboratives, leaders of potential collaboratives, and donors who are interested in learning more about how collaboratives operate. We look forward to continuing this conversation and highlighting additional research from the field as it becomes available, all in service of unlocking much more capital for social change.
If you are a part of a platform that you believe should be included in future research, please use the form at the bottom of this web page to let us know about your philanthropic collaborative.
Research Methodology
Between 2021 and 2023, we reached out to over 500 philanthropic collaboratives to complete our annual surveys and received responses from 280 unique collaboratives over this three-year period. Each year, we expanded the previous year’s outreach list with desk research, referrals from organizations and leaders in The Bridgespan Group’s broader network, and direct outreach from potential respondents. Our outreach approach (led out of Bridgespan’s US-based offices) yielded an overall survey sample favoring funds based in North America. Each year the respondents had six weeks to complete the online survey during the summers of 2021, 2022, and 2023. In cases where a collaborative or a leader responded to multiple surveys, we used only their most recent response in our data aggregation.
We also held follow-up group discussions in the third quarter of every year. Over 100 of the survey respondents attended these discussions in which they reviewed the survey data and provided further input. In addition, in the second year (2022), we spent a full day with leaders of 12 of the largest collaboratives to surface additional insights. And, in 2023, we attended the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Co-Lab meeting, where we had a chance to share insights and engage with many collaborative practitioners.
We defined philanthropic collaboratives broadly as entities that either pool or direct philanthropic giving from multiple donors to nonprofit organizations. Thus, our survey sample spans large capital aggregators; organizations that do not pool resources but instead provide a “platform” for donors to source options; and organizations, sometimes called public foundations, that depend on annual giving for their grants. In our search for examples, we sought to include funds with a racial or gender equity focus.
We did not include community foundations, writ large, because it is hard to determine the proportion of their giving that is donor-directed through donor-advised funds, as opposed to funds pooled or influenced by the foundations. We did, however, include a small number of special-purpose community foundation funds. We did not include COVID-19 funds or other time-limited disaster-relief efforts.
Acknowledgments
Bridgespan is grateful to the staff of the many collaborative funds that participated in the survey and shared their information with us to help deepen the collective knowledge base about these philanthropic platforms.
The Bridgespan team that developed this research and report included Wendy Castillo, Gayle Martin, Carole Matthews, and Alison Powell.
More on Philanthropic Collaboration
Bridgespan publications
- Releasing the Potential of Philanthropic Collaborations (results from our 2021 survey)
- Philanthropic Collaboratives in India: The Power of Many (2020)
- How Philanthropic Collaborations Succeed, and Why they Fail (SSIR.org, 2019)
- Are Funder Collaboratives Valuable? A Research Study (2019)
- Value of Collaboration Research Study: Literature Review on Funder Collaboration (2019)
- Collaborating Towards Kindergarten Readiness at Scale: A Funder Group Case Study (2018)
- Four Pathways to Greater Giving (discusses the potential for funder collaboration to unlock capital, 2018)
Additional resources
- Philanthropic Collaborations Database (non-exhaustive)
- Issue area briefs on gender inequality (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Shake the Table, and The Bridgespan Group, 2023) and the climate crisis (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Climate Leadership Initiative, 2022)
- Frontline-Serving Intermediaries: An Underutilized Tool for Philanthropy (Arabella Advisors, JPB Foundation, and Windward Fund, 2022)
- “To Go Far, Go Together”: How Donor Collaboratives Are Changing the World (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Philanthropic Partnerships)
- Climate Leadership Initiative
- A Toolkit for Creating More Inclusive Funder Collaboratives (Fund for Shared Insight, 2021)
- Collective Impact (SSIR.org, 2011)
- Issue Funds and Intermediaries, Giving Compass
- Funder Collaboratives: Why and How Funders Work Together (GrantCraft, 2009)
- Groundswell Fund
- The Libra Foundation
- Transforming Philanthropy event series, Resource Generation
- Funder Collaboratives: A Topic Brief for Donors (Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, 2021)
Let Us Know About Your Philanthropic Collaborative
Fill out the form below to let us know about a philanthropic collaborative that should be added to our list.
