Consulting

Whether you’re writing a grantmaking strategy for the first time, or updating an old strategy that’s served its purpose, we can help.

Unlike some non-specialist strategy consultants we won’t ‘write the strategy for you’ – instead we’ll guide you through the process, sharing the burden and helping you to develop the skills to run future strategy processes in-house. 

We have deep experience in helping oversee and guide strategy reviews, from quick and informal to more intensive processes lasting several months.In our book we devoted an entire chapter to funder strategy reviews. We’re here to help you foresee the challenges that will arise, and to help you overcome them successfully.

Whether you are looking to improve one area of your skills as a grantmaker, or whether you want support for whatever surprises grantmaking life throws up, we can tailor a coaching offer around your needs.

Our coaching can be online or in person, and entails regular conversations over a period of months to listen to your challenges, and offer information, advice and guidance tailored to your specific needs. The topics can be pre-agreed in advance, or focus on whatever challenge you are facing on the day that we speak.

During these coaching sessions we will listen to your perspectives on key opportunities and challenges. We will then provide both practical advice (‘try this’) and constructive challenge (‘how will you handle that?’) in a safe, friendly, confidential environment.

Virtually every funder launches new funding programmes from time to time. It can be difficult to successfully design these so that they reflect your own values, meet your own impact goals and meet the needs of prospective grantees.

We have considerable experience of designing funding programmes that we previously ran ourselves, and helping others to design funding programmes as clients. Our specialism is helping you to balance all your values and ambitions while still delivering a programme that is practical to administer. We do this through bringing the latest design techniques that help keep complex programmes focused on the needs of people, communities and the environment.

Every grantmaking organisation has systems and processes that let it make grants. This can be as simple as a single individual with a chequebook and a pen, through to a complex digital system with many users.

We can help you to review what’s working well (and not so well) in your own grantmaking systems. We bring extensive experience of building and rebuilding grantmaking systems, and of designing funding programmes that work. We are very familiar with both the technological and the human sides of such systems.

We listen carefully and respectfully, and provide useful, appropriate next steps to help your organisation create better, smoother, more equitable systems.

Funding organisations often face tricky choices – especially in board and trustee meetings – with multiple stakeholders encouraging them to pursue different goals in different ways. This means that key decision-making meetings can be sensitive and sometimes prone to avoiding tough choices.

We specialise in helping groups of people – whether staff or board members – discuss, analyse and ultimately make clear decisions on difficult choices.

Our facilitation can help your key decision-makers to agree whether to fund specific projects, as well as tough strategic questions like whether a foundation should decide to spend-down or not, or whether to move an endowment to a new more socially and environmentally beneficial investment.

We can help groups and individuals who are right at the start of setting up new philanthropic foundations. We are familiar with a wide-range of issues relating to the governance, structure and purpose of foundations, and we can provide support from the first “What should I do?” questions through to challenges like incorporating legal vehicles and hiring dedicated foundation team members.

So if you’re thinking of starting something new, and want to make sure you avoid some of the mistakes that challenge other funders, we’d love to talk.

Funding organisations are only as good as the people who work or volunteer within them. Getting the right people is critical but not always easy.

We bring extensive experience of hiring over a hundred people into grantmaking institutions. Our book also contains advice from numerous other grantmakers we interviewed, and we can bring this together to better support you.

Whether you are hiring for chair of the board, for a junior role, or building an entirely new team, we can help  make sure you hire for the right values, skills and experience, while living up to your own equity, diversity and inclusion goals.

If you want someone to run a grantmaking programme for you, including all the administration, we can provide this too. We are happy to not just help design programmes but also deliver them, writing rules and criteria, building systems and then using those systems to accept and process grant proposals.