• What it Takes to Get the Work    Done
 • Beyond Skills
 • A Growth Opportunity
 • Occupational Hazards
 • Special Opportunities
 • Setting Your Course
 • It Takes Time

 • Quiz
 • Study Guide

Appendix
 • Council on Foundations (COF)
 • AffinityGroups
 • Regional Association of
   Grantmakers

What it Takes to Get the Work Done

Skills and Attributes of a Successful Grantmaker
If the odd dimensions and culture of foundation philanthropy were not enough, there is one more aspect of grantmaking that further complicates your role. The problem: You are charged with ensuring public benefit through the wise and timely distribution of funds to productive and well-run nonprofit organizations. Unfortunately, results in the nonprofit sector are notoriously difficult to measure.

Unlike the business world, the nonprofit sector seldom offers a reliable bottom line to demonstrate whether investments of money, time, hope and energy have proven successful. It is difficult to assess the likelihood of a proposed project reaping its intended benefits and even harder to predict. Nevertheless, you may be expected to render this kind of judgment hundreds or even thousands of times throughout your career.

To make sense of the complex process of judging the potential of any proposal, project or organization, program officers must cultivate five essential skills.

1. Ability to recognize what your board wants to support.
All your work should be based on a clear understanding of your foundation’s values and mission. Does your board want to fund efforts in health, education and welfare or does it prefer projects that support scientific research and the environment? Are board members inclined to nourish startup projects with seed money or provide long-term support for established organizations? Is the emphasis on expanding knowledge, influencing policy or providing direct services? Is the bulk of your funding local, regional, national or international? What is the policy on general operating support, endowments, reserve funds, building campaigns?

The clearer your foundation’s vision, the more specific your goals—and the keener your board members’ ability to articulate their preferences—the easier your job will be. Wealth does not wipe away the dilemmas of choice.

No matter how much money your foundation accumulates, the number of potential funding opportunities will always outstrip your financial resources. Without direction from your board, you will find it a bewildering experience to sort through these myriad opportunities.

2. Knowledge of the fields funded by your foundation.
Throughout your career, you may be asked to render judgments on the value of everything from arts to zoos. Forget about becoming an expert in each of these areas; nobody can. But over time, you should be able to cultivate a basic understanding of the fields funded by your foundation so that you can knowledgeably enter into the conversation, review most proposals, provide intelligent analysis and make appropriate decisions.

Indeed, as you work with a growing roster of nonprofit collaborators, your knowledge base will expand accordingly. You will sharpen your insights and deepen your understanding of the background issues. You will read the hundredth proposal that comes across your desk on land use management with far greater acuity and imagination than the first one you encounter. You will come to instinctively (and cognitively) separate the promising organization from the long-range liability, the healthy plan from the good intention.

Successful foundation officers tend to be smart, intuitive, hardworking and analytically inclined. They are also honest about their ignorance. Nobody expects you to know as much about the issues as the specialists working inside the organizations funded by your foundation. You are, however, expected to listen, learn and keep learning. Good foundation officers invite applicant organizations to advance the grantmaker’s education without unduly adding to the group’s burden in the process. They seek assistance from outside experts and leading practitioners. They read a great deal, think about what they have read and discuss it whenever possible with their colleagues. In short, they relish their continuing acquisition of knowledge. They are hungry to learn more. They exercise, nurture and prize their own curiosity.