A community that gets philanthropists to give
The best way to get philanthropists in the Bay Area to give locally is not through facts or figures.
This is Community #3 from my exploration of Communities That Work.
When Justin and I first moved to Redwood City, I had no idea that we had picked a place that was obsessed with community building. When June rolled around, event boards and flyers popped up all across town. There was Music in the Square, Music in the Park, Pop-up Art Fairs, Pub in the Park, Movies in the Square - the events were endless. I had found the community building jackpot.
After attending multiple gatherings, I started paying attention to the sponsors that helped these events happen — The Park & Arts Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Meta. I couldn’t help but wonder, what was in it for them? Why did they care to support these local events?
The power of philanthropy
It turns out that these organizations were either philanthropies or were companies that had a philanthropic branch. It was through my subsequent research that I learned about the role that philanthropy plays in our society. When it comes to addressing community issues, there are three major players. You have government, which can pass wide-sweeping policies to address problems, but does so at a snail’s pace. You have non-profits, which serve the people directly, but often struggle to secure funding. And that’s where the third group comes in: the philanthropists. Philanthropists uplift new solutions by providing much-needed short term funds until the government is able to step in and provide a more permanent solution. Philanthropists make band-aid solutions and fast change possible.
In the Bay Area, philanthropy has been on the rise as the wealth of the region has skyrocketed. But there was a problem. Demand for social services was also up, and even though the region’s wealth and donation numbers had increased, the money being given locally had not budged.
Why local giving remains stagnant
To understand this phenomena further, I was advised to read The Giving Code, a study that looks into the lack of giving in the Bay. The biggest hurdle they found? Philanthropists and local non-profits no longer understand each other.
This is because philanthropists in the Bay look different than before. They don’t come from families with generational wealth who already have a legacy of philanthropic obligation. They’re not even all originally from the Bay Area. Their wealth was created more recently through the explosion of the tech industry. So how does this affect local philanthropy?
This quote sums it up nicely:
Ultimately, among the most successful in Silicon Valley, there is little sense of shared destiny with the wide range of people who happen to live in this region, and thus little sense of shared prosperity, shared responsibility, or shared efforts to enhance the region’s vitality.
Source: Magnify Community
These philanthropists and non-profits didn’t have the same attachment to the area. In fact, they hardly ever crossed paths because they often didn’t live in the same parts of the Bay. As a result, they had entirely different views around what the problems are, the severity of these issues, and how to effectively solve them. And if philanthropists don’t see eye to eye with local non-profits, they’re definitely not going to give.
Finding the best way to bridge the gap
The Giving Code told us why local giving wasn’t happening. Magnify Community set out to find a solution. Magnify Community was a 3 year pilot program who set out to determine what would bridge the gap between local non-profits and philanthropists so that local giving would happen more. Their work was fascinating to follow - and luckily for me, they documented their whole process online.
In 3 years, they tested a whole slew of solutions, including:
Providing curated, pre-vetted lists of non-profits to donate to
Creating a “bigger bets” list, which outlines opportunities for philanthropists to give a lot of money and see big change
A searchable database of local non-profits
Timely non-profit recommendations related to current events (ex. COVID relief, wildfires, remote learning issues)
Facilitating learning conversations between non-profit leaders and philanthropists
Building a donor community that pledges to give more
Many philanthropists had told Magnify that they needed a database or strategy report to give more, but in practice, the team found that these solutions did not work. The most effective way to encourage more local giving was actually not data related at all. It was to build a donor community with learning conversations.
Introducing the Pledgers Community
The Magnify team discovered that when it came time to writing checks, donors most often gave to causes to which they felt personally connected. So The Pledgers Community set out to create more personal connection. They brought together Bay Area philanthropists who were all interested in giving more to local causes and gave them more chances to interact with each other and with local non-profit leaders. By having the opportunity to build relationships, philanthropists were more likely to have personal connections to local causes, which would hopefully translate to more donated dollars.
Community Fast Facts
Type: Online, Local
Size: between 20-50
Who’s in it: Philanthropists in the Bay Area
The shared goal: Give more money back to the local community
Why it works: Being in a group makes members feel supported in the learning process and motivated to meet their donation pledge.
The community’s secret sauce
So how did the Magnify team build this community from nothing? I scoured their blog and talked to Alisa Tantraphol, a former member of the Magnify team, to get more information about the experiment. Here is a summary of the team’s main community building tactics.
1) They made sure everyone had the same goal
Everyone in the group had to come in with the same intention - which was to learn and give together. The team knew that a shared purpose would give the group a sense of shared identity - so they took it one step further. To officially join the Pledgers Community, each person had to sign a pledge stating that they would give a certain amount by the end of the year. This made sure that everyone had a similar concrete goal that they could work towards together.
2) They proactively created connections
A strong community is comprised of many relationships. To build that network, people need to know who else is in it. Magnify did this in two ways. First, they highlighted people in the pledger group via a newsletter. Second, they connected Pledgers with similar interests so they could swap experiences and learn from each other.
Not only did they encourage connections in the giving circle, but they also facilitated relationships between members and local non-profit leaders through small-scale monthly briefings. While fundraisers in the past were typically held in a philanthropist’s fancy home up in the hills, these briefings were held online. This gave everyone had an equal opportunity to attend, the same amount of screen real estate, and the same amount of presence (and influence) in the “room”. In this learning-first environment, all parties could shared ideas, ask questions, and speak as equals. These sessions helped people build the trust and mutual respect needed to build strong personal connections.
3) They clarified their role as organizer of the community
Philanthropists can be distrustful of those that organize giving circles, especially if they sense an ulterior purpose. That’s why the Magnify team made it clear from the beginning that their only intention was to help the Pledgers achieve their pledge goals. They held no desire to influence where specifically the money should go, and that helped build trust in the community.
Will the community continue to succeed?
The Magnify Community pilot has since come to a close, but before it ended, they did everything to ensure that the Pledgers community would live on. The community has since followed Alisa to The Philanthropy Workshop, a non-profit that also believes that building community is the best way to move money from those that want to give to those that need it. The Pledgers community has since been renamed the Silicon Valley Action Lab, and it will continue to help philanthropists learn from non-profit leaders and each other about how to give most effectively.
While The Pledgers Community did increase local giving among its members, Alisa wants to grow the group’s impact. The best way to do so is by growing membership - but that is no easy task. Many new wealth holders aren’t considering philanthropy because they don’t think they donate enough to qualify, they don’t believe that donating to local organizations is impactful, or they just don’t have the time or interest. Even if the group did get tremendous interest, Alisa is also mindful of growing membership too quickly because they could lose the close-knit, supportive vibes that make the group effective in the first place. I’m curious to see if Alisa can find the right balance between impact and community, but honestly, I’m just excited to see that community building is part of the solution in the first place.