A new center at the University of Pennsylvania wants to help them make sure they do.

The Center for High Impact Philanthropy was founded last year but is just gearing up now, in part because Executive Director Katherina M. Rosqueta recently returned from maternity leave.

The center is part of Penn's School of Social Policy & Practice but doesn't offer courses or degree programs.

Instead, Rosqueta said, its purpose is to provide "information and analysis and evidence" to help philanthropists understand where they can have the biggest impact.

The center was founded by a gift from alumni of Penn's Wharton School who wish to remain anonymous. Rosqueta won't disclose the size of the gift, but she said it was large enough that the center doesn't need to seek grants to fund its operations.

The center also won't make grants.

"We are really trying to establish the center as [a] neutral provider of information," Rosqueta said.

The information will deal with three subjects: K-12 urban education; disadvantaged populations in the United States; and global public health and development. In each, the center will try to gather information on programs and practices, see which have been the most effective and put its findings into formats that philanthropists can easily use.

The center is working with philanthropists, including one in the process of making a large gift in the public-health area, to see what those formats are, Rosqueta said.

Richard James Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice, expects the center will have a Web site for philanthropists.

Some of the center's information will come from large foundations that make big gifts themselves and so examine the effectiveness of various kinds of programs and practices to see whether their gifts are working and where they should put money in the future. But the center also plans to get information from the School of Social Policy & Practice and other schools within Penn.

"There's a lot of good information that could be useful [to philanthropists], but it's locked up," Rosqueta said.

To help unlock it, the center has hired some top staffers, including Rosqueta, who are capable of moving in multiple worlds.

Rosqueta came to the center from giant consulting firm McKinsey & Co., where she spent five years helping clients with strategy development, capability development and post-merger management. In the 10 years prior to joining McKinsey, she worked in community development, nonprofit management and venture philanthropy.

"This was an opportunity to bring all those experiences together in a way that will lead to better, smarter, and maybe even more, money going toward [nonprofit] organizations that can make the biggest difference," Rosqueta said.

The center's formation comes at a time of record philanthropy in the United States. Charitable gifts in the country totaled $295 billion last year, according to Giving USA 2007, the annual survey of philanthropy published by Giving USA Foundation. Of that, 75.6 percent, or $223 billion, came from individuals.

Few of those were wealthy philanthropists, however. About 65 percent of all households with incomes below $100,000 give to charity, according to Giving USA 2007. Those people don't need the center's services. But Gelles said early response to the center indicates there are plenty who do.

"The reaction is, 'I'm really glad you have that. I want to figure out how you can use that,'" he said.

The need for something like the center became apparent to Gelles about five years ago when he noticed that a growing number of relatively young, successful people were becoming interested in philanthropy and wanted to apply the same principles to it that they had used in their businesses.

Meanwhile, the school Gelles heads was interested in expanding its mission from simply training social workers to both equipping people with the skills to run nonprofit organizations and using research to shape public policy.

"We were circling, from different vectors, the issue of, 'How do you accomplish social good?' but the one vector we didn't get our arms around was philanthropy," Gelles said.

The traditional academic approach would have been to develop a degree program. The school was on the verge of doing that when Gelles met the center's lead benefactor.

"He had the same angst that I do about philanthropy, but what he wanted to do was set up a model where donors could identify what the questions were and then how to go about answering the questions," Gelles said.

That model is the center.

R. Andrew Swinney, president of the Philadelphia Foundation, a collection of more than 750 trust funds established to make gifts to nonprofits in southeastern Pennsylvania, shares Gelles' view that an increasing number of philanthropists are taking a more bottom-line-oriented approach to their giving.

"I think there is a growing desire in those who have lots of money to look at their philanthropy as an investment, and if you're looking at it as an investment, you want the best return on your investment, so I think more and more you're going to see donors seeking best practices," he said.

The key to the center's success, Swinney said, will be whether the best practices it identifies are the ones that interest philanthropists and, if they are, whether it can present information about them in a form the philanthropists can use.

"The demand for it will only be there if what they do is good stuff," Swinney said.

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