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Recently someone asked me if I had ideas on how he might shake up his giving to be “different from other major donors.” We’ve known each other for almost 20 years, and he’s done the “normal good donor steps” like developing a strategy, increasing his giving thoughtfully, engaging community partners, and giving more multi-year and unrestricted support, but he’s the type of person who always wants to do better. While he’s done more political giving to respond to this crisis moment, he said his giving otherwise felt less inspiring than it used to, and he was trying to shake up his own approach. Three ideas bubbled up from our chat that have stayed with me as possible experiments anyone could try on to push the edges of their normal giving behaviors:
1. Fund the “unglamorous infrastructure” that movements actually run on.
Most big donors chase programs and campaigns.They want to “fund the impact” and ask thoughtful questions about metrics… and sometimes unhelpfully never fund the essential overhead that makes programmatic or campaign work possible. As a result, there has been a long history of donor education encouraging people to give unrestricted support, fund overhead, make multi-year gifts, etc.
But there is a step you can take beyond just funding the overhead of the groups you believe in: funding the connective tissue — shared back-office services, legal defense funds for grassroots leaders, translation and accessibility infrastructure, coalition and collaboration management, fiscal sponsorship orgs, and more. This connective tissue exists for work on almost any issues, for example, take a look at some of our democracy funding recommendations from our recent Democracy Learning Community program. This infrastructure is chronically underfunded and quietly determines whether movements can sustain. The unexpected move: ask your grantees what they wish someone would fund that they’d never ask you for. The answers are usually unglamorous and essential.
2. Give to organizations that disagree with you.
Not opponents — but organizations whose strategy or framing you’d push back on in a meeting. Sustained progressive power requires ideological pluralism within the broad left tent. Donors who only fund orgs that match their own political theory of change risk inadvertently narrowing the ecosystem. The discipline of giving across strategic disagreements signals trust in movements to work out their own tensions, and builds the kind of broad coalition infrastructure that actually wins. Think about which groups might be one or two steps away from your north star and ask whether there are any places of alignment or opportunity that might bring you to support them. For example, the High Desert Partnership brings ranchers, workers, environmentalists, and others together to solve water and land use issues and has exposed climate donors to conversations with ranchers that they have reported the previously saw only as opponents.
3. Treat your exits as giving decisions.
Bigger donors often focus on entry — where to give — but not exit. When you stop funding an org, what happens? An intentional exit strategy (multi-year runway, transition funding, connection to other funders, public endorsement on the way out) can do as much good as the original grant. Almost no one does this deliberately. It’s a high-leverage move hiding in plain sight.
The throughline across all three: the biggest leverage for larger donors is often in how they give — the terms, the trust, the timeline — more than just the amounts or the targets. If you try one of these experiments (or have another you’d suggest), I’d love to hear from you.
