Finding Your Focus

The following two activities are meant to be completed together. Activity A provides reflection questions to help clarify the motivations driving your giving as well as the values underlying it. Activity B uses Value Cards to help you identify the values that are most important to you.

The simplest way to organize your philanthropy is to focus on several specific issues, rather than giving across many issues. While your philanthropic budget certainly can allow room for reactive and emergency giving (see Section 4: Structuring Your Giving), narrowing your focus areas for proactive giving helps prioritize your resources.

This is true even if your philanthropy is concerned with a particular community—for you cannot give to every possible cause. It is also true for donors who are motivated by the philosophy of effective altruism, which is concerned with alleviating the conditions of abject poverty and avoiding global catastrophes (seeeffectivealtruism.org for more information).

We have developed two activities to help you narrow your focus areas. Both activities help you reflect on issue areas and select a few to integrate into your initial giving plan.

1. LOOK BACK AT YOUR GIVING HISTORY. Activity C is for donors who have a significant history of giving. This activity will help you take stock of your past giving and determine trends and themes. From there, you can understand which issues you are most passionate about, assess how you have supported them in the past, and decide whether you would like to make adjustments.
2. BEGIN WITH A CLEAN SLATE AND SELECT ISSUES WITHOUT RELYING ON PRECEDENT. If you wish to start with a clean slate, Activity D will help you explore a range of potential issues and select those that align with your values and motivations.

We also developed a deck of Issue Cards located on the following pages and in the card deck at the back of this toolkit. The full set includes the issues listed below, plus some blank cards for any other issues you want to highlight. Potential focus areas are included on the back of each Issue Card.

Finally, effective philanthropists often narrow their focus even further by identifying a target population and location for each issue. For example, a philanthropist who selected “education” as an issue might narrow her focus area to adolescent girls’ math education on the South Side of Chicago. Activity E guides you through narrowing your focus to target populations and locations.

The Issue Card categories were selected from the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities, developed by the IRS and the National Center for Charitable Statistics to classify nonprofit organizations. nccs.urban.org/classification/national-taxonomy-exempt-entities

When considering levels of donor engagement, you may have heard of the “4 T’s”—Treasure, Time, Talent, and Ties. In this context, treasure is shorthand for financial contributions, time reflects the hours you are able to give, talent refers to your specific skillsets, and ties relate to your social and professional networks.

It is up to you to consider how to balance and deploy these “4 T’s” in your philanthropic endeavors at different periods in your life. There may be intervals when you don’t have much time but are happy to make significant financial donations. There may be other times when you cannot give the lead gift on a campaign but are able to consistently volunteer and make introductions to key people in your social network. Regardless of how you balance your “4 T’s,” there are many organizations that will be delighted to have you involved.

We address financial contributions in Section 4: Structuring Your Giving and Section 6: Making Gifts and Tracking Your Giving. In this section we focus on the other three T’s: Time, Talent, and Ties.

You might consider deepening your philanthropy by contributing your time and talent through volunteering. Volunteering can be an excellent way to learn more about your focus areas and get to know an organization. You can volunteer with organizations you support financially as well as other organizations. Nonprofit organizations sometimes post information about volunteer positions on their websites. Volunteer commitments can be short-term and focused around a specific event or short-term business goal, or they can be long-term and connected to a series of events, an on-going program, or extended strategic initiatives.

Another way to contribute at a leadership level is to serve on the board of a nonprofit organization. Often, an organization’s senior leadership identifies prospective board candidates based on the skills and expertise they can contribute and extends an invitation to join the board. Organizations often ask board members to be “ambassadors” for the organization, willing to tap into their social and professional networks to help the organization more effectively meet its various goals. While board service can be extremely meaningful, it can also be a significant time commitment depending on the organization’s needs and the skills and resources other board members bring to the table.

If you are considering volunteering or serving on a board, work through Activity F.

For more information on board service, refer to BoardSource in Additional Resources: Section 1 at the end of the Toolkit.