What grantmakers can learn from expert’s new book

Genevieve Timmons has published a revised edition of her book Savvy Giving, a decade after it first forged paths for a generation of philanthropists and grantmakers.

Speaking with Grants Management Intelligence at the official launch of the book at the Australian Community Foundation’s Community of Giving headquarters in Melbourne, Ms Timmons highlighted three trends in the book that that will affect grantmakers:

• the maturation of grantmaking as a profession
• a massive influx of philanthropic funding and the creation of large grantmaking teams
• a major reassessment of the power dynamics of funding.

Helping grants professionals

While Ms Timmons’ book is largely aimed at explaining the world of philanthropic giving, it holds lessons for every grantmaker, she said.

She said the book’s audience comprised at least two kinds grantmakers: “One is the well-seasoned staff person, and the other is the staff person who's been given the job and is trying to make sense of it.

“I'm keen for everybody who's got the role to do a double check and ask, ‘Is what's in Savvy already clear to me, or are there areas where I could do more of a ‘I don't know what I don't know’ and think about it.”

Grantmakers should examine the “questions, challenges and issues” raised in the book while accepting the constraints they faced from their boards, their bosses, and their place in the grantmaking ecosystem, she said.

Whether readers were new entrants to the field or had been grants practitioners for 20 years, they would learn about their areas of strength and weakness, while newer grantmakers would gain information about important basics such as grantmaking agreements and pathways.

The SmartyGrants team has provided access to its grants management software to students to help them to create realistic funding programs, and has also made its staff available to deliver guest lectures in the developing field of outcomes measurement.

The work with Centre for Social Impact graduate students is part of SmartyGrants’ larger commitment to boosting recognition and training for grantmakers.

The Centre for Social Impact (CSI) is a collaboration between four Australian universities focused on education and research in social change, including Swinburne University in Melbourne.

Melbourne’s CSI operates from Swinburne University’s business, law and entrepreneurship school, and since 2014 has been pulling together the threads of social enterprise, tech, research and education.

SmartyGrants began offering students access to its system soon after the school was established, and has offered expert lectures to students since then.

The Swinburne school teaches graduate certificate and PhD students about social impact, with courses designed to appeal to professionals looking to advance in the areas of philanthropy, the not-for-profit sector, social enterprise, social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Grantmaking is scaling up

Ms Timmons said a major change since the first edition was the size of the philanthropic grantmaking sector, which entailed greater professionalism.

“There's big money coming into philanthropy now,” Ms Timmons said.

Whereas in the past philanthropic giving was managed by individuals or families, with a handful of staff, now larger foundations boasted teams of up to 80 people.

Ms Timmons said funders – whether in philanthropy, government, or elsewhere – still needed to apply four fundamental lenses to ensure effective giving:

• practical management
• creativity
• values and alignment
• learning loops.

“Anyone giving money, whether they're a government or corporate private charity, your philanthropic trust, everybody needs to balance those four pieces of the work.

“What they look like in detail will vary enormously, but you can't just be good at all the practical. You can't just be good at the creative. You can't just have values. And if learning loops are not in place, there's a big risk that you don't know what you're doing.”

“We have to know the fundamentals, otherwise we're risking wasting money and sometimes doing damage.”

Future philanthropy needs to devolve power

Ms Timmons said that in traditional philanthropy “a few wealthy individuals” made all the key decisions, but that was changing with the devolution of decisions to larger grantmaking teams, diverse giving structures and “new narratives” relating to power dynamics, including First Nations issues.

Ms Timmons has dedicated one chapter to “relationships at the heart of philanthropy”.

“Ten years ago, people were interested in the mechanics, like ‘How do we do this? Where do we go?’ Now there are discussions around power,” she said.

“Who comes to the table to make the decisions? Do we have a lot of people who ‘look like us’… or do we actually harness specialist knowledge?”

First Nations philanthropy was “a great gift to us to be recognising and thinking about”, she said.

Ms Timmons warned that “organised giving is not for the faint hearted” but said she hoped her book would inspire anyone “with money in their pocket” and anyone who wanted to learn about philanthropy. She also aimed to help experienced philanthropists to understand where they sat on the philanthropic continuum.

More information

Read this exclusive extract from the book

Savvy Giving is published by the Australian Community Foundation

Fiona Waugh from the SmartyGrants managed services team, who helps grantmakers to develop better funding programs, recently delivered a lecture to CSI strategic philanthropy students about impact measurement and evaluation in grantmaking. Other SmartyGrants staff have taught students how to make the most of the SmartyGrants platform. Waugh said the presentation “was a chance to get them thinking about our approach”, and she used her talk to reveal the internal workings of SmartyGrants, its “Outcomes Engine” and the SmartyGrants Grantmaking Toolkit’s nine-stage grantmaking lifecycle.

Course director Susan Pizzati, principal industry fellow at Swinburne’s CSI, said the SmartyGrants relationship was a “fantastic example of how practical and industry-engaged all of our courses and units are”.

“We go to great pains to ensure that the work that we're doing with our students is really merging those aspects of academic research and practical real-world experience.”

Pizzatti said students came from not-for-profits, philanthropy, social enterprise and government at all levels, and that measurement was essential in social impact work, withinterest in the area “increasing exponential across many sectors”.

Swinburne CSI is currently offering several $5,000 part-scholarships to students wishing to undertake graduate training in social impact.