After nearly two decades in philanthropy (and as I approach the end of my term-limited tenure at the Ford Foundation), a number of key learnings are taking shape in my head. One of the most salient lessons centers around the challenges of creating strategy and evaluating impact in institutionalized philanthropy. And it is important to acknowledge how much this is a challenge.
Over the years, I have found myself speaking regularly in the abstract about strategy and evaluation as though these can be done in “ideal” ways – with explicit priorities, choicemaking, rigor, analysis, and implementation. At each stage of strategy development, implementation, and evaluation, I have suggested that we ask hard questions and make difficult choices, are open to being wrong, adjust according to evidence, and implement even better work – all of which, in theory, leads to durable impact.
And this is not untrue, but it’s also not exactly the full story.
Increasingly, we must recognize that delivering on impact has less to do with the strategies alone and more to do with the complexity of implementing them in the real-world dynamics of foundations and their people.
Two factors in particular have real-world consequences for how powerful a strategy will be in reality. One, the commitment of leadership to make hard choices and two, the appetite of program staff for committing to those choices and shifting the work as evidence suggests is necessary.
Commitment of Leadership
First, and most important, is the willingness of executive leadership to make hard choices about strategic priorities for the foundation. This means not just deciding what to work on but putting guardrails in place to ensure strategies are limited in number and scope, are not overly ambitious or abstract, and are committed to evidence-based decision making. Without that discipline from leadership, strategies are likely to be too big or diffuse to ever have much impact.
I have seen excellent examples of hard choices. For example, not long after I came to Ford, we reviewed dozens of initiatives. We reduced them to a third, focusing where we believed we had comparative advantage. Over time, that number of investments increased as individual initiatives were added, one by one, to meet specific moments and demands. No matter how good many of those individual investments were, program dollars and staff time were increasingly spread thin, making impact in any one area harder to achieve.
Staff Support
Second, no matter how good the strategy—choice making and guardrails in place—impact comes down to the people implementing the work. In my experience, no one is more influential than the program director. I have witnessed instances where directors have made unpopular decisions to reduce the breadth of a strategy, asked hard questions about whether the evidence supported program officers’ theories of change and pushed back on grants that do not seem to squarely fit in strategy. Most recently, I watched the director of Ford’s climate justice program make uncomfortable decisions to reduce the geographic scope of the program, even as some program officers understandably wanted to stay in hard-hit regions.
At the same time, I have also seen program directors successfully advocate working on too many issues, or in too many places, or using too many approaches. Combined, this has made it difficult to show impact in a meaningful way. Program officers, too, have found ways to include grants that by most measures, were out of strategy. On the other hand, I have seen some program officers get excited about using strategy as a decision-making tool.
Ultimately, strategic impact relies on program staff being willing to change course if the evidence suggests it is necessary. In one example, I saw program officers invest differently after Proposition 8 passed in 2008 in California, banning same-sex marriage. I also saw program staff shift to local work in eliminating cash bail when formally incarcerated people successfully advocated that state-level work was ignoring one of the biggest determinants in incarceration. Program officers’ openness to shift on the basis of stark evidence is not as common as one might expect. Even in the face of significant political losses since 2016, many funders have doubled down on existing approaches to funding rather than considering that new ways of engagement and coalition building were necessary to address the changing environment.
From Ideas to Impact
So what does this all mean?
It means that if we care about making lasting change, we need to ask hard questions not just about strength of strategy but about what enables (or hinders) impact.
We must pay attention to leadership’s commitment to making hard choices and creating the conditions for strategic discipline and learning. And we need to recognize that, ultimately, program staff are critical factors to whether a strategy is impactful or not. Without explicit recognition that these other factors matter at least as much, we ignore some of our strongest levers for change.
By making these factors explicit, and wherever possible addressing them, we can move away from idealizing strategy and instead move toward greater impact.
Bess Rothenberg is the Deputy Vice President of Strategy and Impact at the Ford Foundation, where she has led strategy development, evaluation, cross-programmatic learning, and grantmaking effectiveness for 10 years.