One of the most unexpected twists in my career was becoming the first-ever head of technology at the Walmart Foundation in 2013, thanks to a chance encounter with its president. She was looking for someone to lead the IT team, and I was looking to contribute to society on a deeper, more meaningful level than my role leading the software testing of merchandising and logistics applications. New to the world of private and corporate grantmakers and philanthropy, I dove into the complexities of grants management, logic models, and theories of change.

I worked with an array of practitioners—grants managers, program officers, finance experts, and others—and learned everything I could about corporate social impact. So, when the opportunity arose for me to become CIO at the Walton Family Foundation, one of the world’s largest private grantmakers, I was thrilled but cautious. Why? I expected to have to learn about private philanthropy from scratch, as I had with corporate philanthropy. But to my surprise, the two worlds were strikingly similar. Then I wondered: Why do private and corporate grantmakers continue to operate in separate silos? What might we achieve if we worked together?

There’s No Reason for Separate Silos for Private and Corporate Grantmakers

It’s easy to assume that private and corporate grantmakers are fundamentally different. Corporate grantmakers typically align their giving with business goals, often reinforcing their company’s mission or bolstering their brand reputation. Private foundations, by contrast, are perceived as aiming to solve social challenges and drive positive outcomes in the world.

While these distinctions can be valid, in terms of work processes and technology, the two types of grantmakers are strikingly alike. They both have grant programs aligned with an overarching mission and overseen by program officers and grants administrators. The staff mostly use the same tech tools and rely on the same data to inform their grantmaking. Some private and corporate grantmakers use the same grants management systems, and many platforms designed for each type of organization are very similar. And both private and corporate funders use grants data and nonprofit profiles—to vet prospective grantees, to perform due diligence, and to discover organizational details like staff demographics.

Read the full article about private and corporate grantmakers by Sam Caplan at Candid.