Breaking the mould

Understanding the different classes of corporate philanthropy and the common giving initiatives related to them can help your organisation craft its own focus. This is particularly helpful in times of great need, or in the wake of a humanitarian crisis when swift action is required.

Corporate giving comes in many forms and organisations will exercise individual preference for the specifics of their giving. This may be reflected in the cause areas they work in, the beneficiaries they support, the type of resources they offer, and the way they transmit their support. Until recently, almost all corporate giving could be categorised within one of two classes:

Contributions towards existing interventions – e.g. scholarships and food banks –
have traditionally dominated corporate giving. Today, however, there is a rising trend towards philanthropy that is highly scalable, results-driven, and long term. This shift has expanded the simple two-category lineation to include a third ‘hybrid’ class. This is:

Within these three broad classes, most of the corporate philanthropy today is characterised by three distinct types of giving initiatives:

We will discuss each class and initiative in greater detail within this guide.

Whether your giving closes a budget shortfall for a well-known NGO or programme, breaks ground for a lab conducting cutting-edge scientific research, or grows a pilot programme beyond the start-up phase, all three classes of contributions are integral to the philanthropic ecosystem. Each is unique and each carries its own ratio of risk and reward, and each has an equal chance of delivering the impact you hope for.

Contributions towards existing interventions help community and civil society organisations maintain their critical operations. These organisations deliver programming that is sustained by fundraising and recurring contributions. For long-term initiatives, such as campaigns to reduce smoking in young people, this class of giving provides the year-on-year continuity that allows for meaningful progress. Although this class of giving does not always make headlines, it is a fundamental pillar of the nonprofit sector.

Bridging support initiatives ‘bridge gaps’ by filling immediate or projected resource needs for organisations and the programmes they operate. Giving initiatives of this type can be financial or in-kind. Whether it is supplementing general endowments, annual operating budgets, or covering acute gaps in funding and other resources, bridging support provides essential funding to worthy organisations and good ideas everywhere. Donors bridge support either by working with organisations to identify existing needs and gaps in the community, or by opening their doors to unsolicited proposals.

Giving class: contributions towards new interventions

Contributions towards new interventions allow civil society and community organisations, especially universities and other innovators, to bring new concepts to life. The rewards are immeasurable and can have positive and lasting effects on whole segments of society.

New initiatives carry significant risk, and they are impossible without support. This class of giving is particularly indispensable to scientific trials and policy-related research that often relies on audacious giving to get started.

Giving initiative type: driving advancement

Driving advancement giving initiatives provide the resources that catalyse or deliver innovation and progress. They can be offered to new organisations, or existing organisations undertaking a new intervention. They can take many forms, from research to grassroots pilot projects. As they generally require large financial commitments, these types of initiatives are often carried out with pooled funding from like-minded donors.

Driving advancement is made possible when your organisation can either anticipate community needs or is open to proposals for riskier, unproven programmes that may not yield success or immediate outcomes. It is, however, worth noting that innovation is not always dependent on high-cost technological breakthroughs. Lower cost or analogue technologies can be as effective, particularly in rural or marginalised communities.

Giving class: contributions towards new approaches that expand the reach of existing interventions

Contributions toward new approaches that expand existing interventions is an important hybrid class that allows good ideas and effective programming to have wider reach by finding new approaches to scale. Examples of these include identifying more efficient ways to leverage resources, distribute goods, and deliver services, as well as support pilot projects that have shown promise in their initial stages but still require significant resources in order to scale.

Giving initiative type: scaling what works

Initiatives to scale ‘what works’ typically provide the resources or know-how to grow proven projects. They can either support innovative approaches to reach more beneficiaries, or they simply inject increased resources needed to scale. Because greater scale often means higher capacity logistics and delivery, initiatives of this type can offer financial or in-kind support of vehicles, manpower, distribution networks and the like.

Corporate philanthropy is particularly well suited to this kind of initiative because it can efficiently transfer the intellectual property needed to support scale.

These projects are not, however, immune to risk because although pilot projects can be proven successful in the initial stages, there is no guarantee that they will resonate with larger populations or at larger scales.