Giving with Impact - The Complexity of Charitable Impact

BARBARA WHEELER-BRIDE:  Welcome back to another season of Giving With Impact, an original podcast series from Stanford Social Innovation Review, developed with the support of DAFGiving360™. I’m your host, Barbara Wheeler-Bride, an editor at SSIR. In this series, we bring together voices from across the philanthropic ecosystem to have a conversation about what’s at the heart of achieving more effective philanthropy. This season, we’re going to talk with non-profit leaders and philanthropists on the front lines of making a difference in their communities. You’ll also hear from experts who can provide guidance for creating charitable plans and investing for impact. Each episode will help donors think differently about giving and introduce new frameworks for considering their own charitable impact.  

In today’s episode, we’ll discuss social impact, from defining what impact means to the how and why behind it. Joining me to share their perspectives are Stephanie Gillis, Director of the Impact-Driven Philanthropy Initiative at Rakes Foundation; Kimberly Pfeifer, Director of Knowledge for Impact at Oxfam America; and Fred Kaynor, Managing Director of DAFGiving360.  

Fred, could you say a little bit about what you hear from donors on the topic of impact?  

FRED KAYNOR:  Sure, Barbara, and thanks so much for having me. Impact is critical for all of our donors, as well as the financial advisors who support them. And they define impact in different ways, but ultimately, impact to them means taking the most strategic and thoughtful approach to how they give, what they give, when they give, and where, and ultimately, helping the charities and causes that they support to achieve maximum impact with their mission.  

So when a donor contributes, whatever they contribute—cash, non-cash assets that are appreciated, publicly-traded securities, real estate—they want to do it in a way where they achieve maximum impact with the resources that they’re contributing. So when they do it through a donor-advised fund like DAFGiving360, and it’s an appreciated asset that’s non-cash, they contribute the asset directly, they avoid potential capital gains associated with what they would incur if they otherwise sold the asset first and then donated the proceeds. So that means they’re already achieving impact by sometimes getting as much as 20% more to give to the charities and causes they support, as opposed to if they were to sell it themselves. So that’s the first level of impact.  

The second level of impact is once they’ve made the contribution to the account, they want to make sure… and it’s a wonderful quote from a donor I recently heard, where they want their charitable assets to achieve impact while they’re in the account as much as they do when they actually grant them to the charity themselves. What does that mean? That means they want to invest them for impact as much as they do when they distribute them to the charities. So embracing an investment strategy that aligns with their personal goals and objectives, another really important way that we’re seeing growing significantly among our donors to achieve impact with the assets while they’re still in the account and haven’t been granted out.  

And then finally, impact as it relates to trying to achieve maximum impact with how and where and what they give. So providing grant recommendations to organizations that are near and dear to their hearts, providing episodic grant recommendations for relief and recovery efforts as disasters occur, such as, for example, what we’re seeing in LA, the floods in North Carolina, the hurricanes in Florida, and so forth. And giving in a way that helps those charities and causes really achieve maximum impact with their services. We saw, for example, this past fiscal year that 72% of total grants were provided on a non-restricted basis. And what does that mean? That means they’re not giving it to a specific program or a specific initiative, but they’re giving it simply to the charity where the need is greatest, and leaving it to the charity to determine how to distribute those in a way that’s going to help them achieve their impact.  

So to answer your question, Barbara, there’s a lot of dimensions to impact among our advisors and the donors that utilize our platform, and those are just three very specific ways of how they hope to achieve it.  

BARBARA:  Thanks, Fred.  Stephanie and Kimberly, the word ‘impact’ is in both of your titles. So how do you think about impact in the work that you do? What are the core tenets of impact, and how do you approach capturing it in your work? Kimberly, let’s start with you and your work at Oxfam.  

KIMBERLY PFEIFER:  Sure. Thank you, Barbara. I will start by keeping it simple. Impact for us is a positive change in behavior of an actor or a group, or a change in the reality of an actor or group brought about by human effort. So very simple, right? But over time, what we’ve realized is that seeing and getting to impact is complex and complicated. As our work at Oxfam has evolved over time to focus on achieving structural and systemic change and impact, so too has our approach to monitoring, evaluation, and learning. And as we continue to report on outputs of our work and outcomes from our efforts, we place greater emphasis on reflection and learning, so that adaptations and improvements can be made given the long-term nature of systems change.  

BARBARA:  Stephanie, can you tell us a little bit about your role at Rakes Foundation?  

STEPHANIE GILLIS:  Sure. The Rakes Foundation, for those who don’t know us, we are committed to building a thriving democracy that puts the American dream within reach of everyone, regardless of race, gender, income, or zip code. And we focus on young people with most of our resources, and we partner with grantees to work on education, housing stability for youth, but we also support democracy and philanthropy because we want to create a future where all can prosper. So I lead our philanthropy strategy, and our trustees wanted to help other people give their money away in ways that were more likely to make a difference. And fundamentally, we think donors who want to get to impact should be thinking about three core things. They should be thinking about equity, effectiveness, and systems change.  

And the word ‘equity’ is very loaded, especially now, but the way we’re thinking about it is fairly fundamental. We encourage donors to learn enough about the issues and the places that they’re hoping to help to know who is being least well-served. You know, in technology, you wouldn’t design or build or deliver a product without engaging the end user and understanding their needs, and we do that all the time in philanthropy. In philanthropy, if you care about education in the US, like we do, you want to know that public schools are teaching roughly 90% of the 55 million school-aged children in our country. So who is thriving and who isn’t? That’s kind of your core grounding.  

Secondly, effectiveness, the organizations that you support should be able to share with you why what they’re doing will lead to impact. It doesn’t mean they all have to have an RCT control trial strategy themselves, but they should be able to point to evidence that what they’re doing is connected to positive outcomes. And they should be measuring something. Even grassroots organizations, if they’re actually working directly with people, at the very least they should be collecting that feedback from their core constituents. Are they capturing feedback from those they’re aspiring to help? But donors… it’s who is the lens on, right? Donors also have to be effective. I love what Fred said about the flexible general support that your donors are allocating, giving multi-year support, volunteering to see what’s happening on the ground. Those are part of the effectiveness tenet.  

And then systems change. I mean, we can all and should all be supporting charity, I hope. For example, I personally have a soft spot for foster children and families, and I give to support them all the time. But for those who have more resources, can we move some of those dollars upstream to preventing bad things from happening? So I do also support organizations that help young people who have been in foster care to advocate and change the system so that it works better.  

So that’s our definition.  

BARBARA:  Thanks, Stephanie. And thank you, both, for those really multilayered definitions of impact because I think it really helps to lay the groundwork for my next question, which is what are some common misconceptions among donors about impact measurement that you would like to change?  

STEPHANIE:  I think I’m going first on this one because I think it’s really important for donors to think about who gets to decide what impact is and how it gets measured. In most cases, that decision should be in the hands of those who are doing the work and are closest to the work, but oftentimes it’s imposed upon organizations, and that can lead to all kinds of challenges. What about you, Kimberly?  

KIMBERLY:  Yeah, I totally agree with that. And when you lay that out in that way, then it means how you go about doing both your design of the effort that you’re going to make to bring about the change, and then how to evaluate it matters, right? And then how are you going to decide what success looks like? It really does emphasize then that the reporting of outputs and outcomes that has traditionally been part of accountability to donors doesn’t necessarily get us to understanding impact. So just reporting that output and that outcome may not give you any necessary sense of what impact looks like.  

STEPHANIE:  I was thinking about just the other conception that I hear a lot about, which is this kind of tension between breadth and depth, scale, that impact can only happen at scale, and everything should scale. And I think about that a lot because I worked in a youth development organization in a region in California where one of our programs literally changed the lives of roughly 10 participants each year but life-changing like deep, fundamental, huge amount of resources, but also huge amount of change.  

Another program delivered really light touch assemblies in schools that touched thousands of children each year, but very lightly. Who gets to decide what matters more? Personally, I was really drawn to the very deep power of that intensive intervention that delivered a lot of change eventually over time for a lot of young people, right? If you’re doing 10 each year, it gets there, but if they had tried to grow that to touch a hundred children, it wouldn’t have been able to happen.  

KIMBERLY:  That makes me also think about the nature of what impact looks like. It can sometimes actually look like avoiding regression, or maintaining the status quo in the scenario, trying to hold back a negative change from happening. And we don’t always think about impact in that way, but it’s actually important. I think it’s becoming increasingly important as the complex challenges of today look the way they do.  

STEPHANIE:  And I guess another one, which you touched on earlier, not every organization needs a random control trial to demonstrate impact. And I often refer to mentoring, for example. In the world, there was an incredibly deep and high quality RCT trial study of examining Big Brothers Big Sisters, and how they delivered mentoring programs and able to show that certain practices lead to certain outcomes. Once that exists in a space, then other organizations should simply be able to say, ‘There’s evidence that if we do these things, then we will get to these outcomes, and we’re measuring how well we do these things.’  

KIMBERLY:  Yeah, in saying that, it makes me think of, also, just the interpretation of those results too, and who gets to interpret what those findings mean. As Oxfam, we used to do a lot of work with farmers and Fair Trade, and we had a large project across three countries, Mexico, and Honduras and Guatemala in Central America. And we were working with farmers with the idea of farmer cooperatives getting Fair Trade certified, and with that Fair Trade certification, farmers’ income would increase. What they did with that income was then the next interesting part too, because there are assumptions about that made when you build a program like this. And so the idea was that farmers would be better off as farmers. And we saw farmers in Fair Trade programs migrating to cities after their income increased. And there was a questioning of was this a failed project? We had to ask ourselves, ‘Well, from a farmer’s standpoint, is it a failed project or is it a success?’ It gave them greater choice over their lives and decisions, and what they wanted to do.  

STEPHANIE:  I think a lot about timeframe, too. The timeframe in which you’re measuring can capture different things at different moments. And I spent a lot of time in early childhood spaces, for example, and in that field, there was really rigorous high-quality research showing the impact of Head Start programs on young people, on children, and the positive outcomes. While then there was a study that was done, were those outcomes sustained in third grade? Did those children do better in third grade on reading and other academic outcomes and life outcomes? And lo and behold, not really. The evidence was mixed there. It showed kind of that the outcomes tailed off in third grade. But early childhood educators and researchers knew that those programs actually made a huge difference in people’s lives. When they looked at adults who had had high quality early childhood education experiences, they were able to show that there were really significant difference in their life outcomes, and in their employment, and all those other things. So where you’re taking your snapshot may or may not capture impact, and you have to think about that too.  

KIMBERLY:  Maybe I can just add one last thought on this is around learning, and that learning may be something different to assessing impact or understanding impact, but learning is both important to evaluation and to impact. What people and communities learn in their efforts to bring about a positive change or improvement is critical to the effort to try to sustain that change.  

STEPHANIE:  You can’t learn if you’re only looking at quantitative data, right? Metrics-driven evaluation, looking at numbers only doesn’t help you answer the how and the why did those things make a difference? And to learn, you need to understand those things. So it’s that tension between proving and improving.  

FRED:  I might just add, if I may, that again, impact is not necessarily community-based, but how do you give with impact? What vehicles do you select in order to give with maximum impact based on what your philanthropic goals are? When do you give? How do you give? Where do you give? So there’s, again, multiple dimensions to the word and to the definition, and it’s really interesting to look at it holistically here.  

BARBARA:  Thanks to you, all, for those insights.  

I want to dig just a little bit into the idea of learning. Kimberly, you kind of touched on this, I think, in your original definition of impact, and then just now we started talking about the idea of learning. I wonder if each of you could maybe give us an example, or talk more about the importance of learning from evaluation, and understanding impact, so that we just have a little more of an idea of what learning efforts look like when we’re talking about impact. Kimberly, you want to go ahead?  

KIMBERLY:  Sure. Sure. I’m thinking about our humanitarian work generally, and a specific project in the Philippines that we call Be Ready. We know from data from emergency responses that cash transfers during the response are key for effective and dignified humanitarian assistance. And Be Ready is an innovation uniting meteorological forecast data and the wisdom of communities with digital financial inclusion to provide humanitarian assistance in that crucial window before a disaster strikes.  

So an interesting thing happened when we were working on this and rolling this out, and that’s that digital cash transfers eventually led to the financial inclusion of women. We used Visa cards for this project, and Visa cards are used and largely given to women to keep in the same place in Be Ready. And eventually what was interesting was that women would go on to use them beyond the emergency to save money, and especially women who did not already have access to a bank account. So we were able to contribute to addressing gender inequalities at the same time as we’re dealing in emergency preparedness and response. And then we also learned that developing a tool like this requires local government and community participation together from the beginning. And that takes time, it takes a lot of time to get in place, to build the trust to do that. So really important lessons to take, and then to replicate and expand a project like this.  

STEPHANIE:  My guidance to donors is to approach your giving like a 2-year-old because we need to keep asking why. I feel very fortunate, the trustees that I work with approach all of their philanthropy with such humility and recognize there’s so much we don’t know because they came into this space from business community, they wanted to learn and get better over time. And so really taking the time to learn and prioritize understanding how and why certain things work and for whom it’s the only way you can improve and get better.  

So for example, our trustees started their focus in education by supporting research on adolescence science, adolescence learning and development, and there was lots of good research that emerged. But that originally pointed to kids individually changing their mindsets and behaviors, adopting these kind of different mindsets. And the science then evolved to show that actually students who feel a sense of belonging in schools learn more and faster. And it’s really not the kids who need to change, it’s the environments that they’re in that need to shift. And so the strategy evolved again, and the focus now is really on the teachers in the classrooms and the schools as the unit have changed.  

BARBARA:  Those are great examples of, I think, how the definition of impact even changed, right? I mean, just kind of building on what you were learning and what you were seeing, and kind of having things evolve over time. 

Do you have any advice for donors who might at this point maybe feel a little overwhelmed when they start thinking about impact?  

STEPHANIE:  Well, first of all, I don’t blame you for feeling overwhelmed. It feels complicated. I sound like a broken record, but just get grounded, read about the issues and get grounded. Go to sources like Giving Compass, SSIR, to get suggestions, and kind of get your feet on the ground in the issues that you care about, and really think about them a little bit.  

But I also think it’s so helpful when donors start locally in places that they know. Consider volunteering and getting boots on the ground too. My advice varies really, depending on how much you’re planning to do and how much time you want to put in. Some donors will find a consultant or hire someone to guide them. Others can do really effective giving by just following the tips that we’ve already talked about. Find organizations that can tell you the story of how their work leads to change, and that are measuring something, and be a long-term committed partner with them.  

BARBARA:  Kimberly, do you have anything to add?  

KIMBERLY:  Yeah, as we’ve been also talking about, the world is a complex place, giving is complex, challenges are complex. And if you’re interested in thinking, how do I give and how do I invest in those more complex problems and addressing them, one of the things that we have found really helpful in our work is the work of Peter Senge and colleagues in the Water of Systems Change, and it’s really helped us for thinking about impact in terms of systems change, and impact that’s related to systems change. There are three kinds of systems change and conditions. There’s structural, like policies, and practices, and resource flows. And there’s relational, like social connections, and relationships, and power dynamics. And then there’s transformational change that is like mental models and social norms. So as we all know, systems are quite resilient and can be very effective at resisting and absorbing efforts to change them. They evolve. So to bring about those kind of positive systems change that has some sustainability or endurance, I think, Peter Senge and colleagues really helped to outline, you really need to be thinking about the change at these different levels. So just like Stephanie was saying, doing some reading, building on what others have really started to map out. But that’s a nice resource, I think, for getting started.  

STEPHANIE:  Giving money, financial resources, to (c)(3) non-profits we know has been going down. And at the same time, there has been a lot of wealth generated and built in our economy for some people. And so the question is… I think what I would like to say is don’t let the complexity of it stop you from getting started. You know, step in and learn while you’re doing. Take baby steps, like I said, to the volunteering part. But also there are networks and communities you can join locally to learn. There’s social venture partners, and all kinds of other places you can go to be with others who are learning. And have fun because it should bring you joy.  

FRED:  I agree, too. I think exactly what you said, Stephanie, learn as much as you can, experience from a volunteer perspective or a personal engagement perspective to help you sort of define areas of interest that really motivate you to give both of your time and your resources. Build a plan. We have a tool on the DAFGiving360 website called the Charitable Giving Guide, which is a tool that donors can use to really map out the approach that they want to take to achieving maximum impact with their philanthropy, the types of vehicles to choose, the types of charities to support, involving family members. It’s really a holistic approach to really being as thoughtful as possible, and as effective and impactful as possible with your charitable giving. So there’s that dimension to it as well, Barbara. 

STEPHANIE:  Super important. When we set goals, we’re more likely to get there, whether it’s the organizations we’re supporting or ourselves, right? 

FRED:  Exactly. Exactly.  

BARBARA:  Thanks you, all. That’s really great insight.  

So I have one final question. Thinking about the ways in which we see our world changing, how do you see impact changing? Kimberly, let’s start with you.  

KIMBERLY:  Yeah, that’s a big and good question. Thanks, Barbara. The big challenges in our complex world today include economic and social inequalities, rise of authoritarian leaders, and clamping down on civic space and democratic processes and institutions, and the challenging of multilateralism and global cooperation. And all these things have implications for things like food security, how we address climate change, how we respond to emergencies, how we use technologies, and how we can even build a better future. Shifting from working on problems and challenges at an individual level to big systems challenges like these means going from the more simplistic and easily measurable change in a single behavior or a single material condition of an individual to structural and then onto systems change, as we’ve been discussing. And with that, achieving impact requires coordinated efforts at different levels of change and conditions. It also means working in collaboration and networks, coalitions and alliances. And this makes evaluation more complex, requiring qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches, like Stephanie has shared with us and has told us multiple times now during this discussion, and understanding change in terms of complex contributions, worrying less about attribution.  

BARBARA:  Thanks, Kimberly. Stephanie?  

STEPHANIE:  Well, I guess I want to be an optimist. I think a lot about technology because our foundation was rooted in resources that came from technology. And I think that technology and AI, in particular, is changing what’s possible in both positive and negative ways. They’re shaping the actual work. So many great organizations are embracing GIS and AI technology to improve the quality of services and their impact. I love Direct Relief using it to allocate resources more effectively in the wake of disasters, Doctors Without Borders using it to analyze epidemiological data and predict outbreaks of diseases like malaria, so you can reduce death. You know, that’s impact. Human Rights Watch is using AI to analyze videos and images, and detect human rights abuses. So when used carefully, these technologies can really increase impact and efficiency when used responsibly. They’re also changing evaluation and what we can learn about impact, which I find really exciting. But these tools have to be trained really responsibly and used really responsibly because so much of our data historically has been biased, and that will show up in how they work.  

BARBARA:  Thanks, Stephanie.  

Thank you, Fred, Kimberly, and Stephanie for being with us today and sharing your insights on impact with our listeners. Thank you, all. This was a great conversation.  

FRED:  Thank you. Pleasure.  

STEPHANIE:  Thank you. My pleasure. 

KIMBERLY:  Thank you so much.  

BARBARA:  Thank you for listening. This conversation scratched the surface, but if you would like to do a deeper dive on measuring impact, learning from evaluation, or systems change, I encourage you to visit SSIR.org for articles from leaders across philanthropy and the social sector on these topics.  

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