(Illustration by Peter Grant)
Collaborative giving has surged over the past 10 years. Indeed, nearly half of the 300-plus collaborative funds—entities that pool or channel resources from multiple donors to nonprofits—that responded to Bridgespan’s annual survey of collaboratives were founded in the last decade. There’s a good reason for this increase: Executed well, philanthropic collaboratives offer donors the chance to multiply the impact of their giving. Collaboratives are often guided by leaders with strong knowledge of the topic at hand, and are structured in a way that effectively and efficiently channels resources.
Many donors we talk to and work with are bullish on the impact potential of collaboratives, which vary widely in their aims. (Blue Meridian Partners, for example, focuses on economic and social mobility in the United States, and the Equality Fund supports women’s rights organizations and feminist movements worldwide.) But these same donors also have hesitations. They seek tighter strategic alignment with their own goals and greater clarity about how best to evaluate a collaborative’s impact. In fact, because interest in forming collaboratives is high and barriers to starting them are low, some donors and fund leaders wonder if their supply exceeds demand. Such a bubble could duplicate existing social change efforts and reduce their overall impact.
Based on Bridgespan research, and our experience supporting dozens of collaboratives through launch and growth, we’ve identified several ways fund leaders and donors can work to help ensure that their collaboratives achieve the impact they seek.
What Is Spurring Growth?
Three donor trends, particularly in the United States, are spurring the growth of collaboratives. First, the wealthiest donors are moving toward leaner giving models. For example, only a handful of the nearly 200 US Giving Pledge signatories have giving organizations (foundations or otherwise) with more than 50 staff. Meanwhile, wealthy donors are open to multiple means of giving; three quarters of the people on the “Forbes Top-25 Givers” list use a range of giving mechanisms, which may include collaboratives, rather than relying on a single private endowed foundation.
Second, endowed foundations are increasingly fundraising from other donors so that they can mobilize more funding to advance their sophisticated strategies—a method philanthropy advisors Valerie Conn and Sofia Michelakis described in a recent SSIR article as “funders fundraising.” While this approach can be distinct from funder collaboratives, in our experience, the lines can blur. Foundations often build collaboratives to mobilize resources for a specific social issue; it can be compelling for donors (especially those seeking to do more with less staff) to join forces and leverage existing foundation staff capacity in the form of collaboratives.
And third, funders are more aware of the principles of trust-based philanthropy and the importance of putting resources into the hands of people with deep connections to the issues they work on and populations they serve, for example, leaders of color in the United States who understand the racialized experiences of their communities. This opens the door for collaboratives, experienced intermediary funds, and regrantors, all of which often have close ties to movement leaders in marginalized communities, know the issues communities face, and understand grantmaking processes that can shift power to those communities, like participatory grantmaking.
How Are Structures Evolving?
Across the globe, we see collaborative structures evolving differently. In Africa, where collaborative giving has risen dramatically, most collaboratives engage organizations in multiple sectors rather than only philanthropic donors. They typically draw government, business, and NGOs into their operations, often with the goal of scaling and sustaining change. Many African collaboratives also primarily give within an individual country and tend to be smaller than collaboratives that work across multiple regions. Collaborative giving has also increased in India, with a nearly sevenfold increase in capital investment between 2020 and 2023. Many collaboratives in both Africa and India rely on capital from outside their regions.
Patterns in Southeast Asia are similar. As in Africa, collaboratives in this region operate on a smaller scale compared with global counterparts; are increasing in number; and often include a mix of private, corporate, and state-linked funders.
Across all geographies, there is tremendous potential for collaboratives to channel much more of the funding currently on the sidelines into achieving the impact they seek in fields such as climate, education, and economic justice. Yet donors and fund leaders are hungry for more clarity about the market and have questions about how collaboratives can better align with their giving strategies and reflect the needs of nonprofit leaders on the ground.
An Emerging Typology
While philanthropic collaboratives work in different ways, they tend to fall into three broad types. Each offers a different value proposition to donors and their fields, with different opportunities and challenges. By better understanding the type of collaboratives they are creating or investing in, fund leaders and donors can get a clearer idea of their role and their contribution to the overall landscape.
1. Community-driven fund: This type of vehicle mobilizes resources and regrants funds from a wide range of donors that have a shared goal, often in concert with local stakeholders and communities. Strong partnerships and deep expertise allow these types of funds to identify and support organizations that individual donors might overlook. An example is the NDN Collective, a US Indigenous-led organization that combines organizing, activism, grantmaking, capacity-building, and narrative change to create sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms. Another example is the African Women’s Development Fund, a Pan-African fund that strengthens African women’s rights organizations through grantmaking, capacity-building support, and movement building.
We classified nearly 150 collaboratives into these three types and found that community-driven funds are the most common type of collaboratives, comprising over 60 percent of funds we analyzed. They are the most likely to use participatory grantmaking, to focus on gender and racial and ethnic justice, and to be led by a person of color. They also tend to make smaller grants than other types of collaboratives and report significant challenges fundraising, especially among high-net-worth (HNW) donors.
2. Strategy-aligned funder collaborative: This type of vehicle tends to focus on a specific social issue and is usually launched by one or more institutional foundations or other donors. Their goals often include scaling up existing strategies or interventions, engaging donors from across sectors (such as philanthropy, governments, and multilaterals), and enhancing capacity for the field in which they are working. One example is Clean Cooling Collaborative, a funder collaborative at ClimateWorks Foundation focused on transforming the cooling sector by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and increasing access to clean cooling for people who are most vulnerable to extreme heat. Another example is Anamaya, the Tribal Health Collaborative, a multi-stakeholder collaborative committed to ending preventable deaths among tribal and marginalized communities in India and whose core partners include the Piramal Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and USAID.
This type of collaborative tends to be much larger than community-driven funds and is more likely to have the first few years of operating costs covered by founding donors. But aligning the strategies of multiple funders—each of whom may start out with their own priorities and measures—can be challenging for collaborative leaders, especially if the initiative includes both institutional funders and HNW donors.
3. Giving platforms: With this type of vehicle, donors—particularly HNW individuals— typically pool or align investments in promising organizations and ideas that the collaborative has sourced. One example is The Audacious Project, which makes significant multi-year investments in bold solutions across issues such as climate, breakthrough science, and global health. Another example is Co-Impact, which aims to advance inclusive systems change, gender equality, and women’s leadership in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Our analysis indicates that giving platforms tend to direct more capital than community-driven funds and are the most likely form of collaborative to rely heavily on HNW givers. Almost half of the giving platforms we analyzed rely mainly on individual donors, compared to 5 percent of community-driven and 12 percent of strategy-aligned funder collaboratives. However, only a handful of giving platforms move really large amounts of money. In recent years, some promising platforms have failed to raise the capital they needed, in part because of the challenge of identifying and engaging HNW donors.
How Can Collaboratives Sharpen Their Strategies?
Unless collaboratives understand their distinct role and purpose, there is a danger that funders will create too many, fragmenting funding for the field and potentially crowding out more proximate organizations and leaders, while diluting the potential for large-scale impact. In light of these risks, Bridgespan has worked with many fund leaders in recent years to answer six questions:
- Is there a clear and compelling rationale for launching or maintaining the collaborative?
- How will the collaborative work with donors?
- How will it deploy financial and non-financial resources to achieve its aims?
- How will it measure, evaluate, and learn?
- How will it operate? (For example, what processes, systems, and staff do the collaborative need to execute the strategy?)
- How will it evolve over the years, and what might be its end game?
These questions can help a collaborative differentiate itself from other funding sources and clarify whether and how it will uniquely drive impact in the world. Answering them can inform the way a collaborative works, makes decisions, and sets parameters like minimum giving levels and timelines for impact.
As new collaboratives form and existing funds refresh their strategies, they have great opportunity to tap into a growing body of experience. The past decade demonstrated that collaboratives can be efficient and effective in a range of settings; in the decade ahead, we hope they can fulfill their potential to drive dramatically more impact around the world.
Read more stories by Alison Powell, Chris Addy & Gayle Martin.