Navigating Family Philanthropy: Choosing Your Social Impact Strategies
Video Transcript
Family philanthropy has the power to transform our communities. Creating an effective social impact strategy is key to your success.
A Social Impact Strategy is a roadmap for how you use your resources to achieve impact. It has five components:
- Identifying your goals and aspirations
- Understanding the context in which you’re operating
- Defining the role you want to play within that context
- Creating and implementing processes for achieving your goals
- And conducting ongoing monitoring, learning, and improvement
Designing Your Social Impact Strategy
Identifying
So how do you design your social impact strategy? Begin with goals and aspirations. Setting goals helps you focus your resources. Your goal is your vision for success. It identifies the changes you want to see within a specific population, place, or issues you will support.
Things to consider:
- What’s your vision of progress or success?
- How does this goal connect with your values and principles?
Understanding
Next, you will need to learn more about context, the ecosystem of approaches, trends, and potential partners in the area which you’re operating.
Things to consider:
- Where are there inequities or gaps in the system, population, or issue your strategy focuses on?
- What progress and success measures are most important to track? What are the trends in that data?
- Which approaches are working? What measures have we taken to solicit feedback from the community and other stakeholders?
- How can I be most helpful, given my resources? What are the opportunities for me to make a difference?
Defining
Next, you will need to determine the role you’ll play among the partners working towards your social impact goal. With your existing resources, you won’t be able to address all needs or engage in the entire ecosystem of approaches. Defining a preferred niche helps you focus your time, and clarify your role.
Things to consider:
- How will I add value in the ecosystem of my social impact goal?
- How can I best help my partners succeed?
Often, families determine their role using a Social Impact Toolkit. Your social impact toolkit contains the range of tools and strategies available to deploy your resources. This includes tools for impact, influence, leverage, and learning.
Something to consider:
- What tools will I use to contribute to progress in my social impact goal?
Creating and Implementing
Now that you’ve identified your role by selecting various tools from your social impact toolkit, you’ll need to create a process for implementing your social impact strategies.
A process is how you’ll get your resources into the hands of people doing great work.
Defining a process helps you be more fair and effective in your decision making.
A process includes creating a pipeline of potential partners, screening for who’s the best fit, defining how decisions will get made, and figuring out how implementation will happen.
Conducting
And finally, it is important to identify how you will assess progress towards your goals. The most effective donors make time to reflect on their process and how they can improve.
We encourage you to treat your strategy as a living document, stay curious, and remain willing to adapt.
For additional resources on social impact strategies, visit The National Center for Family Philanthropy.