Sourcing Your Team

 Even after you’ve figured out what kind of help you need to gear up your giving, finding the right people to fill those roles often feels like a significant barrier. This post is here to help you  source great people for these different levels of support.

Sourcing Hired Help

Finding hired help offers the lowest stakes. They are going to be operating under continuous supervision, whether under yours or that of a faithful steward. They might need to have certain technical expertise, but generally speaking, you don’t need any special sourcing to make these hires.   Even so, it can be helpful to have a system for sourcing talent at all levels--Geoffrey Smart's Who: The A-Method for Hiring is a great resource to draw on as you develop your "people process."

Sourcing Faithful Stewards

Faithful stewards are often sourced by starting out with someone you already trust, and you’ve asked them to help you with your giving. One pattern we see a lot is that donors have someone in a family office, in their business, or simply have a long-time friend with whom they’ve built a high-trust, working relationship over a period of years. These people are often asked to take on more and more responsibility working with a donor to help them carry out their giving. Faithful stewards with no particular expertise or connection to the challenge you want to focus your giving on can quickly get in over their heads if it turns out that the problems at hand are actually complex, dynamic systems, not subject to straightforward causal chain approaches. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Sourcing Trusted Advisors

What about trusted advisors—where do you go to find someone for this kind of role?  Bringing on a trusted advisor requires significant willingness to stretch and grow on the part of the donor. That said, the benefits are commensurate with the challenge. Great, effective, trusted advisors in philanthropy are people who are able to embrace a donor’s perspective and interests while also authentically leveraging their own passion, practical experience, and proximity. This is how trusted advisors help the donor achieve both lasting social impact as well as personal fulfillment—and even joy!

In the relationship between an advisor and a donor, mutual trust is crucial. Seeking and speaking the truth about the complexities of social change is vital to unlocking high-impact philanthropy. When there is mutual trust, the donor is able to fully share not just their goals for social impact, but also what they are truly seeking in terms of meaning and fulfillment. Likewise, the advisor is able to share their full and honest perspective, even when this is challenging for the donor to hear. 

Unfortunately, dysfunctional relationships between advisors and donors are all too common. In many cases, the advisors that donors engage to help with their giving—whether family foundation staff or consultants on contract—fear that the relationship with the donor won't survive sustained truth-telling. They sense that what the donor really wants is a faithful steward, or even simply hired help, rather than a true, trusted advisor.

When a donor does take the leap to seek out a trusted advisor, the biggest mistake they typically make is that they start with trust and try to build proximity and passion. In effect, they try to grow a faithful steward into a trusted advisor. This is actually much harder than taking the opposite approach. 

My advice is to seek out the people who have a proven passion for a subject, practical experience with the systems surrounding that issue, and proximity to the people you seek to impact. When you identify those people, you can then work to build a trusting relationship with them. It’s usually far easier than you might think.

How do you find those people? Here are two approaches you can take. 

1. Look for philanthropic advisors who have a background in social entrepreneurship. Advisors who have come from the ranks of social entrepreneurs often have deep, practical experience. They typically continue to maintain close connections to the issues and the networks within which they previously worked directly. So, when you’re evaluating potential advisors, don't substitute “expertise” and polish around concepts and ideas for practical experience and proximity. 
2. Be open to building trusted advising relationships with active leaders of social enterprises. This might seem counterintuitive. How can someone who is actively raising money for their own change-making venture not have a conflict of interest providing trusted advice to you? But the evidence is right there. These are folks who have chosen time and again over the course of their lives to give their all to tackling some of society’s toughest challenges. In far more instances than you might think, you can trust these committed change agents to prioritize impact—even if that means setting aside their own ask—to help you make the best possible allocation of resources. They usually do not shy away from opportunities to address the very challenges they have dedicated their lives to solving.

Sourcing Delegated Decision Makers

What about finding a delegated-decision maker? Where do you go to find people to fill this kind of role? One great opportunity is to look for pooled social impact funds that are run by social entrepreneurs who are both passionate and proximate to the issue(s) you want to address. Recently, more and more social entrepreneurs have been coming together to create philanthropic funds to attract investment and make decisions about how to allocate philanthropic resources. For example, look at funds like the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, the Southern Reconstruction Fund and The 1954 Project. In these funds, a whole array of Black social entrepreneurs with lifelong commitments to key issues are joining together to amplify the voices of other Black social entrepreneurs. Together, they work to build power across all kinds of issues and communities. These funds allow those with a lot of wisdom and proximity to particular issues to focus philanthropists’ attention on compelling change agents whose work is already making a meaningful impact on those issues. 

Another option for finding delegated decision-makers is to start with a trusted advisor who is already part of your team. Simply give them greater responsibility for making decisions on your behalf. The very attributes of passion, proximity, and psychological maturity that make people great trusted advisors can also make them great delegated decision-makers.

Lots more on all of this, and many other aspects of forward-thinking philanthropy in my forthcoming book, Money with Meaning: How To Create Joy and Impact Through Philanthropy