For high net worth donors, the potential to create positive social change is significant. The question is: how do you identify the right talent and build the team to realize that potential? This guidebook is our answer to that question.

Talent for Giving: Building the Team to Help You Do Good, A guide for high net worth donors, has strategies for finding the people, talent, and networks to help you do more good with your giving.

In This Toolkit

• Avoiding Philanthropy’s Talent Pitfalls
• The Philanthropic Talent Ecosystem

The Talent You Need for Greater Impact

• Talent to Help You Clarify Your Initial Goals and Approach
  • Deciding on Your Initial Goals and Approach for Philanthropy
• Talent to Implement Your Philanthropic Activities
• Talent to Help You Assess, Learn, and Improve
  • The Cycle of Assessment

The Need for Talent for Giving

Scholars estimate that there will likely be more wealth transferred to philanthropy during the first half of this century than in the entire 20th century. Over the past several years, there has been an increase in the number of billionaires and centimillionaires, accompanied by public commitments by many of the world’s wealthiest to use their money philanthropically. To effectively deploy this scale of philanthropic funds, high net worth donors will need help.

There are many professionals devoted to helping donors achieve the financial, legal, and tax goals associated with philanthropic activity. Such talent is relatively easy to identify and source among lawyers and tax experts specializing in estate planning, philanthropic service centers of private banks and wealth management firms, and specialists within family offices. However, we found relatively few resources focused on the talent that donors need to create social impact — i.e., the intended public good that inspires many to give and that matters to us all.

During interviews conducted for this project, we found the word “staff” was sometimes associated with factors that donors deemed undesirable (e.g., bureaucracy, expense, and loss of personal engagement) and not understood as necessary professional talent to achieve results. We also wanted to distinguish the people you need from the employees of a foundation, since foundations represent just one type of organization used for philanthropic activities and only 18% of total giving.

For all those reasons, we refer to the people who can help youachieve greater social impact as the “talent for giving.” We use the term “talent for giving” to refer to the ecosystem of people that includes philanthropic advisors and consultants, professional staff hired to guide and implement your activities, institutional grantmakers, subject-matter experts, peer donors, and friends and family. Most importantly, this talent includes the leaders and staff of the nonprofits and social enterprises that implement the work you will fund and the stakeholders of that work, including the beneficiaries themselves.