Giving Compass' Take:

• This Medium post from museum and nonprofit consultant Bob Beatty discusses the importance of building a long-term strategy in grantmaking.

• How can we embed Beatty's advice into our regular work? In what ways should funders push to give more than the average to organizations' operating costs?

• Here's how to take a product approach for sustainable impact.

Much of my earliest museum/public history training was school of hard knocks. That includes fundraising, which was primarily through the art and science of grant application requests. I directed the education department at the History Center in Orlando, and at some point said to my boss, “We need to stop pursuing program grants.” I had grown tired of creating programs out of whole cloth so that we could ask for money to pay for those programs, but being unable to build sustainability in our programming or operations.

At the time, I didn’t realize that this was a systematic, nationwide problem with philanthropy as a whole. Fast-forward a few years and I published “The Kykuit II Summit: The Sustainability of Historic Sites” as editor of AASLH’s History News magazine. In it, Jay D. Vogt shared a series of recommendations from summit attendees. Among them were two that directly related to funders/fundraising:

  1. Foundations and granting agencies should refocus their philanthropy away from short-term program support to grants that assist sites in building their capacity to sustain themselves for the long term, including GOS and endowment.
  2. Foundations should be supported in their efforts to terminate repeated “drip support” to historic sites to focus their support on sites taking positive steps to achieve long-term sustainability.

Read the full article about philanthropy and building long-term sustainability by Bob Beatty at The Lyndhurst Group, via medium.com.