I’m grateful for these thoughtful and provocative comments, and will discuss them in two broad groups—the first involving donors who are not particularly motivated to achieve social outcomes, and the second concerning the limitations of strategic philanthropy for donors who are so motivated.

Two sorts of donations fall in the “not particularly motivated to achieve social outcomes” group: those that are primarily intended to benefit the donors themselves or their friends, associates, and the organizations to which they have personal loyalties; and gifts intended to have social impact but where the donors have no good reason to believe that they actually do. These categories sometimes overlap.

Mark Kramer observes that many charitable gifts are motivated by a desire to “support the community and honor the relationship, and those goals are accomplished by the mere act of giving, regardless of the ultimate social impact achieved.” Rob Reich and Francie Ostrower similarly talk of philanthropy intended to support “personal relationships” or “honor someone else’s memory,” with Reich rightly remarking that strategic philanthropy is only a subset of “instrumental rationality” and that donors can be instrumentally rational in achieving personal objectives such as these.

As Peter Frumkin has written elsewhere, there is a radical distinction between giving for personal, expressive reasons and giving aimed at achieving social outcomes. It’s no more wrong to give to organizations for personal purposes than it is to buy consumer products for oneself. But like Reich, I wonder why taxpayers at large should subsidize those expenditures—as we do through the extremely generous tax deduction. Ostrower suggests that donors believe that their personal involvement gives them insights into the organizations’ actual impact. Would that evaluating outcomes were so simple!

All things considered, one might say: “It’s their money, so just leave them alone.” But one might also be concerned about the billions of dollars of tax-advantaged charitable donations that provide scant social benefit. And this might lead one to try to influence donors to practice more socially impactful philanthropy.

One indication that there is plenty of room for improvement is Hope Consulting’s excellent 2010 survey of donor behaviors, Money for Good, which reports that only 3 percent of donors give to organizations based on their relative performance. (The firm will soon release an updated report, which shows no significant increase.)

When I was president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, I supported an unsuccessful initiative aimed at helping donors make more impactful decisions.¹ In retrospect, we erred by designing a one-size-fits-all strategy for the wide range of donors. If I were to do it again, I would focus on high net worth individuals, who are more likely to have the leisure to be strategic than less wealthy donors, and who also are more likely to itemize their charitable deductions to take advantage of the tax subsidy.²

Phil Buchanan’s, Caroline Fiennes’, Francie Ostrower’s, Mark Speich’s, and Fay Twersky’s comments suggest that the technocratic language and business-like practices of strategic philanthropy create barriers to engaging these high net worth donors. Implicit in Twersky’s comment is the strategy of luring them into strategic philanthropy with stories that appropriately arouse their passions, to which I would add Fiennes’ suggestion of drawing on the emerging insights of behavioral economics to “nudge” them. But one shouldn’t underestimate the awesome psychological forces that militate against evidenced-based philanthropy, including the emotional power of poignant images of teary-eyed children and of polar bears stranded on ice flows, and what Tom Tierney of the Bridgespan Group has aptly described as the well-oiled “asking machines” of university development offices.

Before turning to the criticisms of strategic philanthropy, let me respond to Reich’s assertion that the same instrumental rationality that underlies its practice can be deployed to assess which social goals are most worthy of philanthropic support. Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Peter Singer have endeavored to employ rational analysis to derive moral principles—including, in Singer’s case, specifying the proper objects of philanthropy. The mere fact that philosophers have reached enormously different normative conclusions does not prove the enterprise wrong. But determining what are morally appropriate ends is a radically different inquiry from the largely technocratic enterprise of figuring out how to achieve them.

The gist of the criticisms of strategic philanthropy is that the world it’s trying to change is complex, highly unpredictable, and characterized by irrational behavior. With the possible exception of Bruce Sievers, none of the commentators denies the possibility of rationally understanding irrational behavior; after all, that’s the mission of psychology, behavioral economics, and other social sciences. But they emphasize the limitations of strategy in addressing social problems.

Conventional strategy actually does a pretty good job in guiding organizations that deliver social services, such as improving employment, educational, and health outcomes for disadvantaged youth. Absent large (and usually noticeable) economic and social changes, a well-evaluated service delivery strategy based on a deep understanding of the beneficiaries’ lives is likely to deliver the same positive results next year as it did last year. But as one tackles more complex problems through approaches like collective impact and policy advocacy, the results become exponentially less predictable.

I’ll readily accept Mark Kramer’s correction that the implementation of strategies in these interventions is more akin to a balloon ride, subject to winds beyond one’s control, than to the flight of a 747, and Buchanan’s suggestion that much philanthropy has no equivalent of air traffic control. Far from making strategy irrelevant, however, the balloonist who wishes to reach a destination rather than float wherever the winds may take her must engage in very careful planning, with continuous feedback, and course corrections; so too must the outcome-oriented philanthropist. Helmut Anheier and Dianna Leat suggest that philanthropists engaged in such ventures are prey to over-optimism. Perhaps so, but taking risks to achieve great potential benefits is consistent with an entirely sober expected return analysis.³

Peter Frumkin rightly observes that strategic philanthropy has had grand failures as well as some successes, and that one can’t prove that it’s better than the alternative. Bruce Sievers goes much further to criticize the very premises of the practice on the grounds that social interactions are extremely complex, protean, and reflexive and not amenable to drawing the causal connections essential to any strategy. In my view, Sievers exaggerates indeterminacy as much as adherents to rigid, mechanistic logic models over-estimate the predictability of human interactions. 

The implicit alternative to rational decision-making is to rely solely on intuition, uncorrected by analysis or science. This may describe the work of some early stage social entrepreneurs, but I can’t think of any examples of mature, successful organizations that follow such an approach. The wise strategic philanthropist understands the limits of predicting social outcomes—that’s why the likelihood of success in the expected return equation is often quite low—and seeks feedback for continual course correction. Johannes Meier’s description of the European Climate Foundation and Bernhard Lorenz’s description of the Mercator Foundation provide actual examples of strategic practices in Europe.

All of this said, I share Siever’s concerns about metrics crowding out critically important non-quantifiable objectives. While looking for quantifiable indicators is a useful corrective to funders’ pervasive indifference to metrics, a philanthropist must take care not to ignore important values that cannot be quantified. The wise philanthropist pays constant attention to the interaction between metrics and intuition. Strategy is not a substitute for good judgment.

Finally, to return to matters of emotion and language, while the motivation for any form of philanthropy comes from the heart, implementation is a rigorously analytic process. An airline can attract passengers with pleasurable slogans and—if only for their high net worth passengers— can provide amenities to make the journey reasonably comfortable and anxiety-free. By contrast, the cockpit is Spartan and all about business. While I hope that my pilot feels a deep emotional responsibility to his passengers, I also hope that he focuses on the instruments and controls while flying the plane. In the belief that it’s not a choice between one and the other, I’ll conclude by saying that I  expected return.

Read the rest of the responses.