A couple of weeks back, something beautiful happened to me on Facebook. A long-ago “friend” who was really only an acquaintance through my very-ex-husband reached out privately. “I’ve been reading what you write over the last two years and your writing has been meaningful to me,” she messaged. “I’d like some help on how to plan my donations.” I mean! Can you imagine how touched and honored I am by this?

It’s been inspiring to start developing a friendship with her – and it’s also been interesting to try and jot down some 101-level advice on developing a philanthropic strategy at any dollar level. Thought I’d share it here, in case it’s useful to anyone else as we approach the Season of Giving?

1. Looking beyond overhead costs

My new old friend usually makes year-end gifts to local places like food pantries and global/national name-brands like Doctors Without Borders. And those are great! I’d never say they don’t deserve support. And yet, she wants to know how she can make sure her gifts have real impact – so one of her primary criteria is whether an organization has low overhead costs. That’s a very common starting point… but unfortunately, if you’ve worked in the nonprofit sector, you know that oftentimes keeping admin costs low is the *opposite* of impactful. So I went back and looked for some of the resources that have been helpful for me in learning about why “full-cost funding” is important:

There’s a big website for the Full Cost Project which was created by the highly respected Nonprofit Finance Fund (in partnership to some extent with my old org SoCal Grantmakers); that one’s a bit dense though, really geared towards professional institutional philanthropy folks. So, here are a few more accessible articles that I really like from reputable sources: (Mis)Understanding Overhead from Council of Nonprofits, The Overhead Myth from Candid, and Overhead Costs: The Obsession Must Stop from Stanford Social Innovation Review. (That last one is a throwback to 2013, one of the original articles that really kicked off the discussion about funding overhead.)

2. Better shortcuts for evaluating impact

OK, so if we’re not gauging effectiveness based on low overhead, what then? By looking at impact, of course… but that’s easier said than done, sigh. We’re all super busy with limited time to research our giving – and nonprofit staffs are super busy too, which means they don’t have as much time as they’d want for evaluating their own impact and making it easy for us to understand their results.

These shortcuts aren’t perfect, but two options you might want to use are charitynavigator.org and guidestar.org. CN bases its ratings on a lot of different factors including financial efficiency, so it incorporates that question of overhead but within a more comprehensive context. Guidestar’s rating is just about how “transparent” the org is, aka how much info it shares about its programs, impact, and finances on the Guidestar site – so theoretically an org with a Guidestar seal of approval is one that you’ll be able to quickly get a sense of by scanning their profile on GS. Definitely worth creating a free GS account for yourself so you can make the most of that platform, I use it alllll the time.

3. Giving through trusted intermediaries

But… for me, it’s still difficult and time-consuming to even figure out which organizations to research. And hell, I’m not an expert on homelessness, or food insecurity, or climate resilience, or grassroots organizing to save democracy, or any of these things that my new old friend and I both care so much about! And if you care about how important it is to fund solutions that are led by the people closest to the problems… that ain’t me. I don’t fully trust my own ability to evaluate organizations’ strategies around issues I haven’t experienced.

But! Fortunately! There are intermediary organizations that I do feel able to trust, and they DO have the leadership with lived experience and the expertise to choose excellent organizations as their grantees, and to support them with more than just funding which makes the funding go further. And we can support those intermediaries, yay! Yes, they have their own costs too, so our funding doesn’t go 100% to the grassroots orgs they choose – but I think that’s a plus, not a minus. I want to fund an effective *ecosystem*, because I want the change we make to be as big as possible. Bigger than my small donation, bigger than a single nonprofit.

Community foundations are generally strong intermediaries – they’re good at knowing the nonprofit landscape and the needs of a community, and they aggregate everyone’s giving to make impact on specific issues. There are also national intermediaries that are often more explicitly progressive than CFs tend to be. For example, I appreciate the powerful leadership voices of Solidaire Network, Groundswell Fund, Women Donors Network, Center for Popular Democracy, and Tides.

4. My personal list, FWIW

For what it’s worth, here are the organizations I’m personally planning to support again this year in my small way:

• OCCORD, where I’m still on the board from my SoCal days
• Lowell Parks & Conservation Trust, which owns most of my beloved coffeewalk and where I’m currently consulting (full disclosure 😉
• Colony Retirement Homes where I’m on the board
• My local NPR station WGBH
• My local NAACP chapter where I’m a lifetime member
• YW Boston where I’m trying to help a bit as a volunteer on the fundraising committee because I love their mission of “eliminating racism and empowering women”
• Small gifts to a handful of local orgs that focus on homelessness/housing, food, etc. because they’re an important part of the fabric of my community here in Lowell MA
• I may also donate this year to ACLU of Missouri because a very trusted friend is a big donor of theirs, very involved in their strategy to uphold abortion rights in the state, and she says they’re doing super-smart, super-impactful work.

That’s all I’ve got so far! Please let me know if this sparks anything for you? May we all find joy and fulfillment in whatever ways we use our resources, this holiday season and always!