Five Best Practices Of Extraordinary Grantmakers

Giving Compass’ Take:

• Kris Putnam-Walkerly, writing for Forbes, discusses the most effective practices for grantmakers to adopt at their organizations. 

• One of the practices is to “embrace the mindset” of inward investment in operations and relationships within organizations. What would be a successful example of grantmakers doing this?

• Read more about how to cultivate an effective vision for grantmakers.  

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I love to read about best practices — within and outside the field of philanthropy — and to gather examples from my work with foundations. Over the years, I have seen “ordinary” grantmakers raise their impact to extraordinary levels, just by following a few good habits. Learn 5 best practices your organization can adopt to elevate your own outcomes:

1.Create a culture of innovation: Extraordinary funders cultivate conditions necessary to support innovation in organizations , and they follow a four-step process to help that innovation flourish.

2. Embrace the mindset: Funders who embrace an abundance mentality believe that internal investment is important, and that the more they put into their operation and relationships, the more they get out of them.

3. Streamline operations: Extraordinary grantmakers regularly review their internal processes to identify blockages and inefficiencies.

4. Intentionally learn and improve: Extraordinary grantmakers regularly check in on their own activities and experiences to monitor lessons learned in real time, and they make the large and small course corrections that increase the effectiveness of their projects.

5. Collaborate with other funders for impact: Extraordinary funders understand that collaborations happen in many different ways, but that all collaborations leverage the strengths of each collaborative partner to achieve a common goals.

Read the full article about the best practices of grantmakers by Kris Putnam-Walkerly at Forbes.