Crossposted from my blog

I am very fortunate to have my job in many ways – I get to talk to, learn from, and give money to amazing people and nonprofits all around the world. I get to allocate a modest amount of resources to incredible organisations that I think are doing some of the best work to improve the world. I don’t have to fundraise for my or my team's salaries anymore. However, there are some things I’ve learned since becoming a philanthropic grantmaker that were either surprising or affected me more strongly than I expected.

I will outline some of these below. These are not meant to invoke feelings of “oh poor grantmakers who have access to money and influence” but rather “oh, I never considered things from that perspective”. Hopefully, they will also lead to more productive working relationships between funders and advocacy groups.

Here, I discuss:

• How challenging the trade-offs are that funders face
• The extremely poor feedback mechanisms that nonprofits have
• How people treat you differently once you have access to funding, and how that changes you
• The weight of saying no to good groups
• Some things that make me feel cynical

Trade-offs [...]

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Outline:

(01:18) Trade-offs are hard and money is scarce

(06:35) Nonprofits have bad feedback mechanisms

(13:00) How people treat you differently (and how that changes you)

(14:52) Its hard to say no to people

(16:08) Its easy to become cynical

(19:38) Wrapping up

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.