Once you’ve identified the motivations that will drive your philanthropy, the next step is to narrow your focus and set your goals. This will require you to think more deeply about the issues that interest you. The fields of education or social justice, for example, are vast.

Where do you start when thinking about how to focus your efforts? Knowing the different frames of reference for philanthropic approaches and understanding the landscape are core to this process.

Understanding how to frame issues will help you in preparing funding program criteria and guidelines. This will help you and other decision-makers clarify how you approach your selected issue areas. There are several concrete steps you can take to start this process.

  • Get an Overview of the Issue Area(s): For many donors the question is whether to focus on one or many issues. This decision can be complicated where there is more than one decision-maker – a couple, a set of siblings, a parent with adult children, even grandparents with adult children and teenage grandchildren, and board members. Multiple decision-makers often decide upon multiple issue areas and that means a team effort is required to find a clear philanthropic focus.
  • Consider Potential Lenses There are a variety of ways philanthropists can address a particular challenge. You can take a broad or narrow view, work through policy channels or direct service, engage with specific communities or groups of people, or focus your initiatives on a particular geographic area. Each of these overlapping lenses is explored below.
  • Specific Challenges Some philanthropists choose to operate on a big, broad level, while others are more comfortable focusing on something specific that they may later develop into a broader program.
  • People Another possible lens is looking at the types of people you wish to support. Some examples of these groups include children, women, the elderly, youth, artists, refugees, and innovators. The point here is to focus on people who fit a particular set of criteria and then work with that group on their selfdetermined opportunities or issues
  • Places The definition of place can be anything from a continent or region to a village or neighborhood. After examining motivations and values, some donors realize they’d like to tether their philanthropic efforts to a physical place and may fund many "subject" areas in that place. If you happen to live in your place of focus, you may find joy through learning about your community from a different perspective.
  • Institutions Funders who focus on “institution building” seek to achieve their philanthropic goals by supporting a certain kind of organization and the role it plays in the world. The institutions in this category can include policy and advocacy organizations, museums, ballets, orchestras, charter schools, or colleges.
  • Policy Just about any challenge that philanthropy can address has a policy influence behind it. A policy challenge in education, for example, is that public school funding in many parts of the United States is largely dependent on local taxes, which are tied to the value of real estate in that local area. A policy approach to this issue might be to work to change the way funds are allocated.
  • Systems Change Changing the systems that have created the current policies or circumstances is yet another lens through which you can view their engagement.
  • Conduct Research Once you have decided on a focus area, the next step is to investigate it further by conducting a landscape scan. Landscape scans can be either quite broad or very focused. These scans can identify potential gaps, overlaps and trends. Moreover, they can provide information about particular initiatives or projects that you can learn from, collaborate with or join.

Read the full PDF from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.