Joey Savoie: Why Grantmaking, Not Money, Is the Bottleneck

This transcript was generated by AI and may contain typos and inaccuracies.

Welcome to High Impact Growth, a podcast from Dimagi for people committed to creating a world where everyone has access to the services they need to thrive. We bring you candid conversations with leaders across global health and development about raising the bar on what's possible with technology and human creativity.

I'm Amy Vaccaro, VP of CommCare Growth and Strategy at Dimagi and your co-host, along with Jonathan Jackson, Dimagi CEO and co-founder.

Today, we're joined by Joy Savoy and John recorded solo on this one. Joey founded Ambitious Impact, the charity incubator behind more than 65 new organizations, a dozen of them now leaders in their fields. Today, he runs Elevate Philanthropy, where in his words, he used to train charities and now he trains funders.

And funders, he says, are harder to train. It's a strange moment for our sector. After years of scarcity, a wave of new tech wealth has flipped the question from, what if we lose half our budget to what would you do with double? John and Joey get into why the real bottleneck isn't money, it's people who know how to give it away well, why the most honest charities often get penalized for their honesty, and why when a whole field of NGOs starts behaving strangely, you should look at the funders.

If you're writing grant applications and wondering how much to tailor them, or you're deciding where a suddenly bigger budget should go, Joey has specific valuable advice. Enjoy.

Jonathan Jackson: Hello, and welcome to the High Impact Growth podcast. I'm here with Joey Savoie today. I'm really excited to have you, Joey

Joey Savoie: Excited to speak to you too

Jonathan Jackson: And I'm flying solo again without Amy. She'll be back next month, but really excited to, to do this one-on-one. And, as an intro and opening Joey, we've had the pleasure of working with many organizations that have gone through one of the previous organizations you started, Ambitious Impact, which does amazing work.

And so I'd love to start there. I know your story actually goes back before then too, but talk to us about this organization that is very well known in the effective giving and effective altruist community for having supported many organizations some that have been on the podcast and others, and what it does, how you came to start it, what led you to start it.

And then I'd love to get to what you're working on now as well. But really, I'm such a fan of Ambitious Impact, so wanted to hear about that.

Joey Savoie: Yeah. I think that's a great place to start. So Ambitious Impact is basically a school to help new great charities get started. And it came out of, I guess, my own journey a little bit of trying to be a charity entrepreneur and trying to be successful in that career path, and started a project on vaccinations.

It was pretty good, but also started kind of mentoring and coaching and supporting other organizations, and they were even better. And that kind of became, hey, wow, there's a lot of really great founders here who are a pretty small amount of support away from starting a truly great organization. So that's kind of what Ambitious Impact was set up to do.

How do we knock down those, often very small barriers to stop these people from becoming awesome charity founders? So sometimes it's finding each other, co-founder connection t- type of thing. Sometimes it's connection to an idea, so we'd have a research team that would kind of investigate all the possible ideas that one could start in a space and prioritize them and try to come to really fantastic ones.

And sometimes it was a little bit of financial funding, so we'd give like kind of the first grant or kind of connect them to funders who would give them this first seed grant. And sometimes it was even psychology and credibility. So h- how confident do you need to be to feel that you actually can start a charity that could be really great?

For some people, that comes really easily and intuitively. For other people, they need to kind of be encouraged, "Hey, we looked at 5,000 people who applied to this program. You're one of the best 10. You can do this." And that kind of gave them the ability to go over the edge. So yeah, I think 65 plus charities that have founded probably a dozen or so that are truly kind of field leading and top of class in their respective areas.

But they do all the hard work. I've been in the founder seat and in the teaching seat, and the teaching seat is a heck of a lot easier than the actual founding seat. So they deserve all the credit for it. We just gave them the, the kind of nudge out the door.

Jonathan Jackson: That's amazing. And I know you had been at that for a while with your co-founders and all these amazing founders of these organizations. You have now had the experience and seen years of progress towards these kind of pivotal leading organizations within their sector and the vertical that they're trying to make an impact in.

But I imagine that wasn't a linear, line to success as you built this. So what were some of the fits and starts that you went through trying to figure out if, like, this model made sense? So obviously helping new great organizations exist in the world to make impact, no-brainer. Doing it in this kind of incubator style entrepreneur in residence mode, maybe not the most obvious way to accomplish that.

So did it feel like it was working and clicking right away? Did you have to iterate on the model a lot? Like, just talk me through when you got that aha of like, okay, I think this is the right model.

Joey Savoie: Yeah. So I think it's almost like the, the credibility of the first couple mentorship calls gave enough momentum for it to be like, "Hey, there's probably something here." But finding out the kind of exact ingredients that went into the soup that became Ambitious Impact, that was tricky. And I think the core components ended up changing a lot in terms of how much we weighted stuff.

So at the beginning, and why a lot of people are drawn to the program is they're thinking, "Okay, the teaching, the training, the funding, that will be great." And in practice, I think our highest value is by far co-founders. So getting someone connected with someone else who's really great and then helps them help the project launch off, and ideas.

Doing the research, narrowing down. And we always narrow down to a pool of ideas, so it's not like we handed everyone, "Hey, here's the one idea you can do." But having a preset list of, "Hey, researchers have looked at 200 different ideas. These are the top five. They're really good. If you execute them well, they'll be one of the best charities in the world," that's pretty exciting and not something that a lot of entrepreneurs kind of have the capacity to do.

You can't just take two years off and research things yourself to kind of find something in most people's career.

Jonathan Jackson: And I wanna highlight that a little bit more. So that this is something I found really cool about Ambitious Impact and previously Charity Entrepreneurship as it was named priorly, is that it's not that the entrepreneur has to pitch the idea to you necessarily, right? Like there's a lot of effort that the organization puts in to saying, "Hey, we think an organization that tried to accomplish innovation X would be extremely cost-effective."

So when entrepreneurs or hopeful entrepreneurs look at Ambitious Impact, or if we have listeners who are thinking maybe they wanna become a founder, what percentage have kind of the idea that they wanna bring to you versus what are coming to you saying, "I know I wanna be in the impact sector." Like what are the ideas you guys have researched that, that sound really compelling?

Joey Savoie: Yeah, 75% of the latter. So most people are coming in with a very broad cause area. Maybe they know they like global health or something like that, or they know they like animals but not the specific ideas. And I think it-- this is very weird because in for-profit land, this is not the convention and many people are kind of coming in with their own ideas.

But the nonprofit world is far less efficient. If there's something that's kind of obvious and that someone would make a billion dollars off of, someone's gonna start that idea pretty quickly. So the way you kind of find a good idea in for-profit land is you find this edge, you find this kind of little competitive advantage you find a niche, a thing that you have access to or knowledge about that nobody else does.

In the NGO world, we haven't even started all the obvious stuff yet. So we find something that, hey, this is gonna be really great. This could be one of the five best things. Maybe a big study came out on it that shows it's really evidence-based, or maybe the cost effectiveness just got remodeled and it looks like it'd accomplish a lot per dollar.

And then kind of have that list there. And ultimately, if you're going into the NGO sector, a lot of the time it's because you want to help people. You wanna do as much good as you can, and whether that's malaria or tuberculosis is less important. It's kind of about saving lives. It's about helping people.

It's about supporting the, the fundamental values that you have. So unique model, but has worked out really well and I think is a little bit of the magic sauce. Probably also filters for people who are a bit lower ego and a bit more excited to just do whatever the data leads and whatever the evidence shows, as opposed to kind of like sticking on a pet theory.

Jonathan Jackson: I will say I've gotten to talk with a lot of your network and also pitch our Connect platform to a lot of your network. And there's something uniquely non-ego about many of the founders I've met through the Ambitious Effect network. And I think that is due to exactly what you said, coming in with this humility of "I don't have a predefined idea.

It's not my idea, and I'm trying to figure out how do I help the most people

Joey Savoie: The ego thing is really important too. Like, I think it's kind of this underestimated trait, but if you realize we're all working towards this shared goal, you can do things that other people see as crazy. Like, I've had grads who recommend funders, "Oh yeah, we have a bit of funding gap, but actually this other charity has an even bigger funding gap, and you should probably talk to them first."

I've had people who are competing for the same hire, and both orgs will talk to each other very openly about the pros and cons, and they'll both go, "Yeah, probably they're better fit for your organization at the end of the day." Like, kind of crazy coordination that would never happen in the for-profit world and you wish would happen in the NGO world more often, but is pretty rare there too.

And it is because if you tone down the ego and you go, "Hey, I care about good being done regardless if it's my NGO, my neighbor's NGO, an NGO that kind of has a different brand altogether," who cares? As long as the person gets saved from malaria, and it's easy to forget that, but that's the point.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah. That's so cool. And I think you mentioning that there are these somewhat obvious interventions that are extremely cost-effective. I know this now goes to kind of what you're trying to do at Elevate Philanthropy, your current organization. But taking a step back, throughout the course of your career, how did you come to experience, learn, and now have a thesis on like why is it the case that there are these obvious ideas?

Why is there a list on the shelf of organizations that should be started given there's just a gajillion NGOs, there's tons of people trying to do good? So how come there's this backlog of good ideas?

Joey Savoie: Yeah, I think I've become kind of obsessed with ecosystems and incentives. kind of motivates or drives things to happen in, in the world? And when you think about NGOs, yeah, there's a million NGOs, but what is the process most people use for founding an NGO? They're probably altruistic, they're probably well-meaning, they probably care about something.

They probably have something happen to them that draws an attention to their eyes. Maybe a family member gets a disease or maybe they do a trip and see something. That is a very non-systematic kind of fluky approach. And even though indeed there's tons of NGOs they're patchworks.

They're just getting started in kind of random haphazard or even kind of inversely predictive because, for instance, a lot of the people who maybe have the financial resources to start an NGO or to take that risk, they're not experiencing the same problems as what you would experience if you just unilaterally spread everyone across the globe.

So I think that's why you kind of see these low-hanging fruit of, hey, this is a really great idea, people totally should jump on this, but no one really has because, most of the people going through our program who are often, super brilliant, talented, extremely lucky individuals who've had a lot of things go right for them in life, they haven't had malaria.

They haven't experienced, some of these challenges that don't really affect - the UK or the US or wherever the heck they've been growing up. Or even if they have grown up in the country, different wealth and associated socioeconomic status tiers kind of put these issues in less visible categories or that sort of thing.

So I think that it's kind of an incentive problem and it's kind of a problem with how NGOs in general get started, which is they're often started as passion and love projects, which is great for motivation and great for psychology and not great for selection. Thus, you see these kind of $100 bills on the street.

Jonathan Jackson: And so I assume part of that has led you to what you're now working on at Elevate Philanthropy. So I'd love for you to share how this, pathway from Ambitious Impact has led to what you're working on at Elevate Philanthropy, and then what are you working on currently?

Joey Savoie: Yeah. So basically Ambitious Impact was there for seven and a half years kind of building up these charities, and we started getting a lot of conversations with funders and grant makers. Some of them were kind of tracing back, "Hey, the last five projects we've all funded have come out of this program.

Like, what the heck are you teaching here?" Some of them saw our methodologies or talks or podcasts online. "Hey, I like this methodology. I like how you're thinking about things." And the question was always very similar, which was, "Okay, this is great for NGOs. What do you have for funders? What do you have for grant makers?

Because we suck too." Or, the modest ones said we suck too," or, "We could use training too." And at the end of the day, the process for grant making foundations getting started is actually very haphazard in a similar way to the NGO process. Someone gets an inheritance or makes it big, often in a surprising way if you're looking at like new tech wealth and that sort of thing, and then they're going, "Okay, well, I wanna make a difference in the world.

I wanna set this up. Let's start a foundation on this." It's not a spreadsheet process where they compare 100 different areas, and often even stuff like the hiring, might be a trust-based hire for the first hire, someone you know, someone you went to college with, that sort of thing.

So these foundations are kind of patchy. How do you even become a good grant maker? There's no degree, there's no course, there, there's no kind of like structured methodology. People just kind of bumble around and talk to other people and kind of pick up the lessons slowly. So there was this obvious gap of, hey, how do we get really great foundations, grant makers, principals in the same way to how we get really great charities?

And, a little bit of that we did , through Ambitious Impact at a point, and then that became more and more of my job, and now Elevate my joke is I used to train charities and now I train funders, and the funders are harder to train. But that is , what has occurred now.

So now we do a whole ream of stuff to do with philanthropy, but a lot of it does break down to how do you train someone to get better at grant making? How do you train someone to be able to solve a bottleneck that's gonna help them deploy more quicker or more effectively? Something like that.

Jonathan Jackson: That's great. And you've written about the challenges of senior grant-making time being such a massive bottleneck right now in foundations. And obviously one of the things one can do is step up. But for a lot of foundations, they either can't or won't. what types of conversations are you having this year, with what people expect is a lot of new wealth from AI technology about to, to be liquid or SpaceX and some of these other IPOs compared to how it felt last year when you were having these discussions?

Like, I'm curious if you felt the qualitative difference in the types of discussions you're having right now.

Joey Savoie: Yeah. It's been a big difference. So a lot of the most quantitatively minded funders are in big tech and finance, and both have gone very well in the last 12 months. So anyone who has stock investments, anyone who's about to IPO, anyone who's an early stage staff, all those folks are looking at more deployment than they had planned for.

And that sounds like all a good thing until you realize it's actually really hard to do that super well. And I think people take it for granted, "Oh, it's just giving out money. How hard could that be?" Well, giving out any money to any person, super easy. Giving out money super well to the best actors in the field, very difficult actually, especially if you're-- it's in high volumes.

So yeah, I think the narrative and conversation has changed a little bit from, how do we spend a small amount of money extremely cost effectively, to what can we do that builds up capacity, infrastructure, scale to be able to ab-absorb maybe 10 times as much as we thought we would be putting into this area, or 10 times as much collectively going into that area as we thought?

Jonathan Jackson: you talk about how there was this really amazing network effect and people could behave a certain way with Ambitious Impact because they were coming into the conversation like we're all trying to do the most good for the most people. Have you had any community start to rise within the funder network that you're now doing with Elevate where you're starting to see maybe some positive synergy and leverage there?

Joey Savoie: Yeah I'm really lucky. I mean, I said this with Ambitious Impact all the time in that I get to teach the most excited students in the world, right? Like imagine you're a teacher, but you get to select your top 10 students out of 5,000, right? Like, man, that makes the teaching job a heck of a lot easier.

And it's a similar selection effect that I have on the grant making side. So I can kind of say what the grant making world as a whole does, and then what the folks I work with do, and they're totally different stratospheres because the people who I'm typically talking to are the people who wanna learn how to become better.

They are the people who wanna maximize their impact. They are the people who are a little bit lower ego and kind of interested, I got contacted from one grant maker, and they said something along the lines of I'm basically one of the most skilled grant makers out there. I don't really think I have anything to learn.

Is there anything that you could teach me?" I said, "Well, probably not, that you have

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah, that's your opening question. Yeah.

Joey Savoie: Yeah I think we're probably on different wavelengths. So thankfully, most of the folks I work with are very much on the other side of the spectrum, where they're shockingly modest, shockingly humble, shockingly interested in trying to make the most difference.

And yeah, that does mean that it's a little bit easier to coordinate your funders 'cause not everyone's trying to get the same name written on the building or that sort of stuff.

Jonathan Jackson: And Ambitious Impact has a significant cost-effectiveness component to it and reflective giving approach. Is that a big focus on a lot of the grant makers that you're talking to now? Are people trying to-- they're kind of already bought into that thesis and that approach to giving and they're trying to do it better?

Or are you in conversations where people are trying to learn kind of the core elements of just what that field of giving thinks about and does? I'm curious, like how that breaks down.

Joey Savoie: Yeah. So I see this as there's like variance on two dimensions. There's variance on do you want to do better at the stated goal that you have, and there's variance on the goals that you're actually aiming towards. And I, I see a lot of variance on the exact goals. So maybe I talk to one person who's focused on livelihoods and economic development and this sort of aspect.

I talk to another person who's focused on DALYs and QALYs and health metrics and that sort of thing. And I don't really have a horse in this race in that I, I think those come down to pretty soft philosophical judgments where very, very smart people have come to divergent conclusions on that. So I'm pretty excited about helping either of those folks get as high up on the mountain as they can get.

But there are some areas that are tougher tougher to justify from a helping as many beings as possible perspective. If someone's really focused on a super local niche, that's tough. That typically that wouldn't be someone who'd work with us because, they're only funding a specific city or something like that, and ultimately you're quite bounded in what you're able to do when you're working in a specific city.

So . i would say they would all have a cost-effectiveness bent. They would all have an aim towards improvement or maximization of something. But the variables they're trying to maximize are pretty diverse. The methodological approaches to that are pretty diverse. Do you take a high-risk approach?

Do you take a low-risk approach? Do you try to build everything up in-house? Do you try to build out external bodies? How much do you see as coordination versus not? I think that if you think that there's one best charity in the world, you're probably fooling yourself. It's really hard to tell what is the best with all the ethics and epistemic and all the difficult judgment calls that are going into that.

On the other hand, if you think every charity is the best charity in the world you're probably a little bit on the naive side, like there, there are charities that are just twice as good than other charities that are doing the exact same thing, and it's very hard to make a case for why you shouldn't kind of support that one.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah that's, definitely something that we believe in, in a lot of the work that we do and have certainly seen it in the data of our new Connect platform trying to find local organizations. And some are just, are twice as good as other ones at delivering services to their communities, and they deserve more funding.

And I think on that tactic then, if you have those two dimensions, so you have cause areas that you've come to for whatever reason, and then you're trying to most effectively give within that cause area what types of conversations are you having with funders about how to improve their grant making?

And I'll couch this a little bit with we do have funders listening to the podcast, we're gonna say more on the asking side of the table. So how are the conversations you're having-- how would we translate that to advice for people who want to speak better or be more compelling to these funders that you're kind of accepting the premise that they're rationally picking a cause area they can think they make a big difference in and are trying to do better, earnestly trying to do better, which is hard, as you said?

Joey Savoie: Yeah. Well, I think actually a lot of it does very naturally cross apply. Pe- people think that every little issue is super unique and specialized and that sort of thing, and of course everything has different flavors and there is variance, but there's actually some very similar problems that occur across almost every grant making size, almost every cause area.

So a really common one is there's multiple people involved in the grant making. One person wants to donate more, one person wants to donate less, right? Like, almost everyone's gonna have some sort of experience with that, and, it could be a parent-child, it could be - a sibling thing, it could be a spouse thing.

That, that is just the reality of the world, that not everyone wants to donate the exact same amount, and someone's gonna be on the more category and someone's gonna be on the less category. So a thing we might work on is, "Hey, we're talking to the person who wants to donate more. How do we help you strengthen that case?"

So what is the hold up of the person who wants to donate less? Is it a skepticism towards the charity sector? Is it a financial fear? what's the diagnostic that kind of makes this person able to kind of step to the next level? And a lot of it is kind of empathizing and understanding what the blockers are, and then trying to work on those more directly instead of maybe making the same case again and again or stating the case that is compelling to the, the person who's already sold on donating more.

So some of it's kind of like soft commsy stuff. Some of it's a lot more structural and strategic. So, say your money's going up and you wanna think about how to actually deploy it should you hire staff or should you not? Should you be the, the deployer yourself, or should you find someone completely else to defer to?

What is your role as the principal? Do you wanna be the person who, who's involved? Is this a one hour a week job for you? Is this a 40 hour a week job for you? Where do you want this fitting into your life? And the kind of answer of what the most optimal thing to do changes based on that, maybe you need to hire a really great executive director if you're giving 10 million plus and you wanna put under 10 hours a week into something. If you're giving, 60 hours, maybe you are the executive director and what you actually need is a really good support staff team. Maybe you only wanna think about it one hour a year, in which case you should look really closely at charity evaluators to see if there's someone you can defer to who could give out that sort of capital in a really reliable way.

So I think th- those sort of challenges are, almost human universals when it comes to grant making.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah, that, that makes a ton of sense. And I'm curious there's been a lot of challenges, dating before USAID and dating before this new wealth that had been talking about just the massive challenges of like administrative cost between trying to apply for a grant, trying to run the grant, doing annual reporting.

Just kinda like the, the transactional component of this. , Ignore correctness in what you selected, but just doing the work and doing the thing. How much is that coming up in, in your conversations, if at all? And, or are the funders that you're talking with kind of already didn't make the same mistakes or aren't coming from that legacy?

I'm curious like how big of a topic is that for you? 'Cause I know if you spend seven and a half years at Ambitious Impact Delivery yourself, plenty of entrepreneurs struggle with this on, gaming out what's the theory of change model that I have to put in so that this can go through and we all want this deal to happen, and it doesn't quite make sense to, to articulate it in this way.

So yeah, would just love to hear like how much of that or is it you're talking with funders that are kinda like they didn't make that mistake yet, so they're not like bound to fix the way the current system works.

Joey Savoie: Yeah. I mean, even very good funders, I think, make that mistake in terms of it, it's hard. H- what information exactly do you need to make the call? That's a question that I kind of coach a lot of funders through. Like, are you asking for anything in your application form that you actually don't look at?

Um, Another thing I encourage a lot of funders to do is apply for their own application form, see how much of a pain in the ass it is. Really enlightening exercise. Even if you're quite smart it's much clearer when you're on the other side and you're actually kinda going through and you're going, "Man, this is kind of a pain in the ass question."

You go, "Yeah, well, we wrote it, so we should probably cut it, or we should probably modify it." So yeah. I mean, I think the, there's like small scale solutions, which is like look at your application form, go through it yourself, see what things are burdensome, see what you can cut out. I have a real pet peeve for redundant information.

So if you've already asked them their name one spot, I really hate asking their name another spot. Or if you have their budget in a spreadsheet, I really hate asking for it in PDF or that sort of thing. So I love kind of coaching that out of the process. But I think the bigger and cleverer things are thinking more macro, who else has vetted this grant?

Who else could we co-due diligence with? So, you imagine 10 funders who are all funding in a very similar area. Should the average NGO have to apply 10 times to each of those funders? Probably not, right? Like, probably a lot of these people are asking very similar questions. They're looking at similar characteristics.

So how do you modify that? Do you have one open application process that's very thorough, and then once people pass in that process, they're kind of vetted with a softer level of due diligence between the group there? That could make sense. Do you have application processes that if you do, you then share it with five other funders?

So kind of anyone who gets in kinda gets a, a, a shot at this. And there's a lot of informal systems that exist in this, but it's super variable depending on cause area. And there's way too much redundancy. I mean, in a given year of fundraising, probably 50% plus of it could be cut immediately if the funders were more coordinated.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah. that's interesting and I think the experience I've had, and I'm curious when you had this on the fundraising side and now as you're speaking with funders. So when I get a version of this which is: "We know you're super busy, we know everybody is getting lots of asks right now, just send us what you have."

And then my brain goes to like, well, there's a 5% chance it really matters what's in this document, and there's a 10% chance I can tailor it to what I'm guessing they think, even though I'm totally guessing. So I should spend a day tweaking this, guessing what they think, even though it's a total guess, and I spend hours with my, team guessing on what Joey wants to hear.

And then we write that up, and then we send it. You may or may not even read it. You might be just passing it along. So I'm curious how, A, that could be... I don't know if honest is the right word, but something around like, "I really need you to send it to me," or, "It might actually matter if you tweak this."

The other experience I just had with GiveWell on this open malaria RFI they put out that a lot of people responded to was great. They wrote and said, "We want to share your application with other funders." So they don't give you an opening to tweak it, and then they give you an opportunity to say, "No, I don't want you to."

That's great because that kinda takes off the should I spend an extra eight hours trying to guess what people wanna hear. And that's wonderful. So I would encourage on the donor side to like take that off the table. Don't offer, to write it up. Be like, "Send me an application you've sent somewhere else," so you're really not putting this choice.

'Cause it, eight hours times this happening twice a week is like the whole week, at the end of the day.

Joey Savoie: Yeah I love the checkbox system. I think that's a really great inclusion for tons of donor forms. And then actively, if you're a donor, if you're a grant maker, look at your top 25% of your portfolio, maybe even everybody you grant to arguably, but at least your top 25% of the portfolio and think who else could fund this?

Because at the end of the day, the funders have a way better idea of who else is in the funding ecosystem than the average NGO does. So I actually think it's really valuable for them to kind of think about it that way. And if you just have a checkbox, almost all NGOs say like, "Yes, please forward this on to other opportunities," and then it kind of eliminates that.

On the first point you made, I mean, it comes back down to incentives, and I think people run themselves into trouble all the time with incentive stuff. So if they say, "Just send us what you have," but there is a bit of benefit of tweaking it, everyone's gonna tweak it, or at least a lot of people are gonna tweak it, and then you've lost the benefit of even asking that question in the first place.

I have this story that I tell about a funder that I was coaching, and they said I hate going to conferences. Every conference I go to I get jumped. In the hallways people are there. There's people waiting outside the bathroom. As soon as I come out of the bathroom they kind of pitch me."

And I go, "Oh, that sounds really stressful." And he's like, "Yeah, the conference is no, no fun at all." And I said, that, that sounds terrible. How do you decide who you grant to and who you don't?" And he said, "Well, basically whoever I talk to at conferences impresses me."

I'm like, "Well, you're entirely creating the problem that you've set out to avoid," right? So I do think when you see NGOs doing weird stuff a lot of the time, if it's one NGO doing a weird thing, that's probably the NGO's fault. If it's the whole school of NGOs doing a weird thing, that's probably the funder's fault.

H-how do you set up incentives so that the kind of time-efficient thing is the right thing? I mean, maybe it's unified applications. So I've run funding circles before where there's 10 funders on the funding circle. There's one application process that they've all agreed on, but the funders themselves are anonymous, so people know that there are funders, but it's hard to tweak and cater to that, so you just do the most honest version of this.

Even very simple things. Do you ask for someone's CV or do you ask for their LinkedIn profile? Well, a LinkedIn profile you can't tweak for every person that you apply it to, and it's typically just a copy-paste of a link. A CV, you might tweak it for every single person that you apply it to.

So one of those implicitly carries more work, even though theoretically attaching a PDF should take the same time as attaching a hyperlink.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah, that's a really cool and interesting example. I'm curious on the common application for funding circles, like how... Has that really saved time? Do you think that's like a potential process for where there could be efficiency gain? And actually, I wanna take a step back. One of the reasons why, and I believe you've written a lot about this, efficiency is important is because if it's not efficient, it becomes harder and harder to source who you're gonna fund, which makes it more and more trust-based and where the power lies, which makes it less and less likely you're finding these amazing local organizations that probably disproportionately make money go really far, and you really wanna see them scale.

And so funders don't have time to source, and that connection doesn't happen then it's a problem. So the efficiency that I have, if I already have visibility to a funder, it's just kind of annoying for me. But the, the consequence is catastrophic, which is because it took us an extra eight hours to get the deal done, that was eight hours that didn't go towards sourcing the next amazing organization that you haven't heard of.

Joey Savoie: Yeah, that, that's exactly right. I mean, efficiency, it costs the, the foundation time to vet, it costs the NGO time to apply, and it tends to benefit larger NGOs because larger NGOs have more advanced development teams and they have more staffing capacity to throw at some arbitrary request of throwing a bunch into eight different formats to apply for a given form.

A thing that's really challenging, a pet peeve I have on this that I wonder if you've experienced as well is it's pretty common for foundations to not really stratify the amount of due diligence required dependent on grant size. Which means if you're applying for a $5 million grant, you actually might have a fairly similar process to someone else applying from a 50K grant.

Now, from a foundation back-end perspective, it's convenient to keep everyone in the same application process and to kind of have a similar methodological process regardless of grant size. But for the charity, of course, how much makes sense to invest in a 50K application is very different than how much makes sense to invest in a $5 million application.

And you end up implicitly pushing everyone to do really big applications because , if it's the same amount of effort, why not apply for the $5 million application? Why even bother going to this funder for the 50K application? So effort stratification is a really interesting factor, and this is the thing that even a lot of really good foundations don't do as much as they should having kind of dichotomous levels of rigor.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah we've had that in spades. At one point, I don't know if the Gates Foundation is still doing this, but at one point they had piloted this like fast grant idea. So you could like, if the grant total was under 100K, you could like not do the normal massive grant process that we do with them.

And that worked really well for a couple ideas we had and this country just needs this like tweak to the grant that we're doing already and but it wasn't like a, primary new idea. But I certainly think a lot of foundations recognize that challenge. But then to your point, they have like one grant management system, so they can't really change it very easily and it does absolutely cause you to then wanna seek the bigger grants and be like, "Oh, that's not, big enough."

I also find, and I'm curious how your funder network talks about this or how you talk about it at Ambitious Impact, people get extremely good at writing how this is the most innovative thing ever and totally ready for scale, or how this is like a great bet, but definitely gonna work. And it's also so much of the grant itself is like wasted language trying to, position something that shouldn't have been asked to be positioned in that way in the first place.

And so I think part of that due diligence problem is, you're trying to explain why your organization is totally safe to invest in, why you are, definitely not gonna have like all these things. And at some point you're like, look, we have to kind of, to do this efficiently, acknowledge risk.

And I think part of the reason it's hard to stratify is because there's no true discussion around that in the same way that has open and honest communication around like, this is the bet, could totally not work. Because what you do is like you acknowledge that and then you have to write the material as if it's definitely going to work.

Joey Savoie: Yeah, I think that's right. I think in general, there's a lot of weight on like what I call style factors over substance factors, stuff like how persuasive and communicative you are. And often that doesn't correlate particularly with how good your execution skill is, and if anything, kind of pushes towards these exaggerated metrics and claims.

I think I have a, an example in one of my books about the $10 to save a life bus. It's kind of like you, you see a bus pass by and it has an advertisement on the side of it so it says, "You can save a life for $10." And then you kind of look up the most rigorous evidence and you find, hey, it costs $3,000 to save a life.

Like, what the heck's going on here? And of course, it turns out that the, the bus advertisement is using a different way of measuring. They're saying $10 could save a life. Potentially you save a life for $10 if you deliver this particular medication or that sort of thing, not you on average save a life for $10.

But if people are pretty naive in their giving and they just give to whatever kind of one-sentence version looks best, you'd give to the, the bus charity instead of the kind of rigorous measured charity. And I think this measurement error does occur, where probably the most honest charities do get penalized a bit for their honesty, not from all funders, but from a lot of funders.

And probably the charities that kind of make fairly bold claims as long as they're believable according to the funder get an advantage for that, get an advantage from the exaggeration or that sort of thing. Now, how do you systematize that out as a funder? I think part of that is you have to dig into the data a little bit deeper.

So like, is the plausible claim here viable? They're saying they can get this crazy scale and get this crazy cost effectiveness, really treat that plan with skepticism. Like, the more crazy and wacky and better than everything else ever it is the higher a bar of evidence you need to prove that.

So it's a little bit more extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence kind of thinking.

Jonathan Jackson: So to, to take this advice on how you're talking with funders and how you're thinking, and then go back to the Ambitious Impact school what are kinda like the most surprising things that you're teaching people coming through the program, given this knowledge of funders?

But like, what are the non-obvious things that, that lots of first-time entrepreneurs or even second-time entrepreneurs in, in the social impact space mess up, given what you know and the experience you've had seeing a lot of organizations go through this. But like, I'd love to hear that, like what are you teaching where you're like, "Yeah, this doesn't sound like it's true, but it is"?

Joey Savoie: Yeah. one thing I tell people a lot, and people hate this 'cause it's very irritating fundraising advice, but is your fundraising ability is kinda like your comms skills multiplied by the charity kind of legibility and how good it is. So one way is like get really good at comms and really polish your product and that sort of thing.

But another way is if you can just get your product itself better, it makes it a lot easier to sell. You can be a, a crappier salesman if you have a better product. So a lot of the time when I want a charity to get better at fundraising, there's actually some other aspect that's totally not communicationally related that is the holdup for them doing well.

Maybe it's that they haven't proven out their evidence base. Maybe it's that their five-year plan sounds kind of bad and they need to map that out a little bit clearer. So part of it's like checking off the boxes so that you can super convince someone to come work for you, someone to be your co-founder, someone to kind of get excited about your project in general.

Those things correlate pretty well to a funder getting excited about it. Funders aren't magic. They're just human beings, and they're kind of getting on board with your idea the same way that anyone else would. So I think that's one kind of like maybe unorthodox thing that I recommend a lot of the time is someone's like, "Oh, I'm having trouble fundraising."

I'm like, "Well, have you really made sure that you've got your plan 10 out of 10 fleshed out in each of the steps? Because maybe that's the thing that's holding you back."

Jonathan Jackson: That's cool. I think that actually goes against other advice I've heard at many times, which is like, you should be able to sell anything. Like, your organization's already way better than it needs to be. And you need to put the effort out there. I'm an engineer by training, and there's like a common thing where engineers would much rather tweak their product, , than go do the hard work of sales and marketing.

So have you seen the flip of that too, where you're like, "Look, you are way above where you need to be in terms of like actual product quality. You can just get out there and like be better at

Joey Savoie: I think there are orgs that fall into that. I mean, academics come to mind as an, as a really common example here, where they'll be like super technically savvy and good, but they won't have a website, they won't be able to communicate their stuff in any sort of concise or kind of like basic language sort of stuff.

So there definitely are examples like that, but I think there's kind of things that catch people's eye and people get obsessed about o- on all sides of the spectrum. So I make fun of people about logos. People spend a lot of time on logos and rebranding and redesign and that sort of thing. And there's a lot of things that probably should go ahead of your second logo redesign.

For a lot of the NGOs that we came out who are many like very best in class in the world right now, they spent like an hour building their logo. It wasn't like a graphic designer, it wasn't a debate with 20, 25 committee members. It was like, good enough, let's go. This logo's probably not gonna make or break our existence.

And sure, if you're a $25 million a year budget charity and you're getting huge amounts of organic traffic to your website and your brand's massively important, like, okay, get... fine. Spend some time on your logo. But I think that there are certain pr- problems that feel solvable, that feel tractable, that feel kind of like obvious how to make it better, and people gravitate to those.

So logo stuff, website stuff, maybe going to conferences is something more on the comms side that people are very drawn to doing. And then the harder stuff, might be something like taking a fairly ambiguous problem and trying to like break that down into steps. And whether that's like break down the step of, hey, we really need this funded to get on board, how do we break that down into steps?

Or whether it's we need to figure out how to operationally execute in this difficult conflict zone and break that down into steps. Those are just so much less clear than like making your website a little bit sharper or making your tech product a little bit sharper or something like that. So, I guess different bumps for people to get caught in.

Jonathan Jackson: That's awesome. And so you've been giving a lot of great advice on this podcast, but I'm curious, , like, what are you trying to cause, as the change you see out there when you're talking with these funders? What is the ultimate top-level mission of, Elevate Philanthropy? One of the really cool things I was doing in prepping for this call, I found the article that you had published on cause areas that you think should exist and, fund sizes, which I thought was, like, super cool to put out there.

But if you just take a super high-level step back in what you and your partners are doing at Elevate Philanthropy what is it? Like, there's lots of intermediaries out there trying to advise giving right now and other things, but your unique point of view how do you think about what you're trying to accomplish?

Joey Savoie: Yeah. I mean, at the very highest level, it's like do the most good possible, which is of course hard to argue with and very vague. I think one step lower in terms of where-- what we think is interesting there, I think we tend to think about bottlenecks, things that stop foundations, especially reoccurring bottlenecks across the ecosystem, and how can we solve that in a way that creates a public good?

So one thing that's a bit weird about us is we put out a lot of stuff publicly. We're very non-shy about IP and that sort of stuff, and I wish a lot more foundations in general put out a lot of stuff publicly, honestly, because there's great answers to some of these problems that people have encountered that are just locked away in a Google Drive somewhere and at some foundation's backend.

So I guess things that are a bit unique, us versus other consultancies, is a little bit more of that public focus. We try to put things out. We try to make like, a transparent or a common good project version of every project w- that we get commissioned to do. Another thing is I really don't wanna direct people's money.

So I think a lot of advisories kind of at the end of the day, they're like, "Why don't you just give us the money and we'll decide for you?" And that's kind of my nightmare. I want to teach people how to be really great at grant making. don't want to run a foundation that, that redeploys all that money.

I wanna build up the capacity of the ecosystem as a whole because that feels like the better long-term solution. Joey can only manage so much money, but if I teach 100 people, they're gonna do a lot more than that. Very similar to Ambitious Impact, 65 charities. I couldn't start 65 charities in my life.

I couldn't CEO 65 charities. If we had a big NGO with 65 wings, I guarantee they'd be much worse than the independent orgs that we've got started. So I think there's also maybe more of a push towards diversification and getting a, a bunch of really smart actors, a really healthy ecosystem of intelligent debate and disagreement of people all trying to strive towards having more impact.

Jonathan Jackson: That's awesome. so you talk about public documents and public sharing of you have. I think one of the things that would be very helpful is for more CEOs, founders, fundraisers to, like, better be able to empathize in both directions, funders too, to, to people running organizations. But, you feel like you're grasping at straws sometimes of like, what do these people think?

What goes into the decision? And I think that could be a lot more efficient, but I'm curious if you do and how that could happen. But for a lot of work, and particularly right now where everybody's like, "Oh, third wave money's coming and how do do it?" People are just like wildly guessing, what the mentality of people giving in.

And you imagine, I talked about this on a previous episode, but like, given how busy everybody is, and if you're public about giving, like you're just getting slammed right now. And so even if you have the perfect, best, most aligned email and proposal ever, you're still just one more row in the inbox, right?

And so what could be going better in the, the short term and as somebody asking for money, seeking funding who's listening to this or somebody giving, but like how do you contribute to a more efficient process right now? In, in theory we can get it better, but like right now it feels pretty hectic out there.

Joey Savoie: Yeah. I mean, okay, so there's a lot of things I can think of on the funder side. I think one answer is if you're getting swamped in your inbox, don't make grants out of your inbox. Just like the person who got swamped at a conference, create the system which you want people to use and only ever grant make via that system, and then that will encourage people to use that system.

So, if you incentivize the wrong behavior, that, that's what you're gonna get. And even though the first grant you give at a conference or through your inbox or that sort of thing, it'll be fun and easy, much easier than doing like a big open process or something like that. the 100th grant you give will be much worse because you'll end up kind of g- getting this constant inbound friction.

And I think the same thing a little bit applies to the NGO side, although I think they have a lot less power in kind of shaping financial systems of what is the kind of like, behavior you want to encourage NGOs to do. So if every NGO exaggerates their impact by 10%, that's probably not a good world to live in.

That's probably not the world we wanna live in, even if it's like individually beneficial. So I do think, kind of taking the hit sometimes and being a little bit more candid is the right move kind of in the long term. But as I said, it's really tough for NGOs to like go against that set of incentives and that set of systems.

I think it's a, a brave NGO that's kind of, more honest, even if it means that they look worse than all their peers. I do think it's really great when they do that, and I do think more examples of that the better.

Jonathan Jackson: That's great. And what are you hearing from the network and the alumni of Ambitious Impact? So you could think that they're gonna be like poster children for, getting some of this funding that's coming in given the cause areas and effective giving they've been through. But are they feeling super optimistic right now?

Are they feeling stressed? Like, what's the-- what are you hearing from the network and how do you feel? Both maybe give me that answer from the perspective of like a charity that hasn't kind of become name brand in their vertical and for the ones that are like kind of name brand Vesting Glass.

Joey Savoie: Yeah. think all of them are less stressed. Their mode of getting funding probably isn't directly from the principals. So say there's a, tech billionaire who just became a tech billionaire. That person is probably looking at giving through something like GiveWell or Coefficient Giving or some sort of fund vehicle or something like that.

And then those fund vehicles are often already familiar with kind of top AM charities. So they don't really need to interact with anyone new. It's just interacting with the same funders and actors they've already been interacting with just at higher scales. So I think a bunch of them are thinking about that.

They're thinking, "Okay, well, my favorite funder is about to have twice as much funding as they used to have. How can we live in that world? How can we staff up or build up capacity or thinking about new ambitious avenues?" So that sort of thing. So that, that's an exciting challenge for them to have.

Some of them are being pressured to scale up a lot. That can be challenging. Like, "Hey, don't just double. Why don't you 10X?" That presents a new set of challenges 'cause then you have to kind of use nonlinear strategies to build up your NGO and that sort of thing. But they're feeling optimistic. I would say the, the one kind of demographic of of orgs that are a little bit more wary is as funders get more money, they tend to change the weight class and how they grant.

We talked about how people kind of use similar methodological rigors. Another habit like that is as foundations get bigger, they tend to give bigger check sizes. So there is a slight worry of, hey, if I'm only seeking 100K and the funders who used to give 100K are now all giving million-dollar check sizes, who's coming in to fill that, that small gap?

But some of that can be solved by re-granters. So maybe someone gives, to a funder who's gonna distribute it to a set or to a fund that's gonna distribute it to a set. But in general, the, the mood is optimistic amongst the charities. They are, I think, excited and thinking about how to build and grow and deal with this capacity in a kind of a, a sane way.

Jonathan Jackson: That's great. it is crazy and I imagine many people are feeling what Dimagi and a lot of our partners are feeling of like it, it swung pretty quickly in the last three to six months from sky's falling like just survive to, "Hey, how do you think about 10X? And how do you think bigger?"

And it is a massive cognitive dissonance of having, if you've been in this for the last, let's call it two years and were doing well before the industry started to really change, you've been on quite the journey over the last couple of years.

Joey Savoie: I think philanthropy has a lot of ups and downs and waves, and there's things that come in trend and then go out of trend and that sort of thing. And I always coach NGOs to kind of figure out your principles and try to stay true to those, because it's true, 12 months ago, maybe there's different questions about how would you do with half your budget.

Now it's gonna be what are you gonna do with double your budget? But ideally, you wanna keep what is valuable and core to your NGO independent of the environmental circumstance changing. And the funding landscape will change again, right? So everything looks great. If everyone doubles and triples, it's not like funding is gonna double and triple indefinitely forever, right?

Like, people will grow and absorb those gaps, and then funding will become scarce again and that, that will always switch. So, you can't bank on it staying the same state of play for the long term.

Jonathan Jackson: That's right. And I think that's actually a really important comment you're making. There's been moments of time in the past when certain funders have come into the scene and written big checks, and then those organizations had to scale back down at the end of that three-year, five-year period.

And so I also think what advice you're giving right now on figure out your values, figure out your core plans related to those values, and try to stick to them somewhat. Obviously, you may or may not need to cater certain things 10 or 20% to a particular funding partnership. if you cater too much, you really end up with a plan that like has a cliff with no, no plan to solve said cliff, as you scale it up.

Joey Savoie: Yeah, and I think some costs are really easy to reverse and some are really difficult, and people treat all those the same. And I actually like breaking them up in budget. So like if you hire a staff, there is an implicit commitment there, and it's gonna be hard for you to say, "Oh, sorry, I have to fire you two years from now 'cause the grant maker didn't renew the grant."

That's painful. If you do a multi-year commitment with the government, maybe you're kind of on the hook for longer than a funder is. On the other hand, some things can scale up and down. So say you're paying for Google Ads, right? You can pay for twice as many Google Ads, you can pay for half as many Google Ads.

That's like a click of five buttons. So I think it's useful to track out what is kind of, core and very painful to modulate, and then what's a more mobile cost that you can move up and down and okay, at this point we're gonna invest in these things, but we kind of know that they're ongoing.

I talk to people sometimes about salaries like this. It's very easy to move up salaries and extremely difficult to move them down. So in a time of plenty, a lot of people move up their salaries and then they're screwed two years later when it's less of a time of plenty. You gotta be careful with that modulator, right?

Like that's one that you can't move up and down quite as flexibly.

Jonathan Jackson: And the and the good times, there can be lots of pressure to try to move those up. And I

Joey Savoie: From the funders who are like, "Hey, I'm paying myself a lot." You should be paying yourself a reasonable wage. And, I think there is a place for salary variability as the world changes, and sure, you have to adapt. But yeah, you wanna be careful about locking yourself into these, these huge fixed-cost budgets when ultimately the world and your charity's place in it is variable.

Jonathan Jackson: and so you mentioned two grant-making organizations, GiveWell and Coefficient Giving, who are very well known in effective altruism, have moved a lot. There was a really exciting , announcement a few weeks ago with Coefficient Giving announcing a billion dollars to GiveWell. So obviously GiveWell is gonna deploy significantly more capital than originally planned.

But as you have talked about this whole episode, like senior grant-making capacity is a bottleneck. And so, I think how do you think about what, if you could snap your fingers and change the ecosystem in some way? Obviously GiveWell's doing amazing work, Coefficient Giving is doing amazing work, but they're two organizations.

There's lots of of cost-effective things that need to get funded and to your point, at various scales. So a downside of this would be, oh, we can only write huge checks now because we have so much money, so we can't even explore the 500K, 100K, early stage checks. And it's like, well, you're also asking for this evidence-based barrier that I can't ever overcome because you won't write me the small check.

are you worried about? How do you advocate for gaps that you see that you n- you mentioned the re-granting approach, but I'm just curious, at a practical level, have you pushed forward certain ideas and are you worried about that challenge?

Joey Savoie: I definitely am. I definitely am. And there's two mechanisms that I'm pretty excited about to solve it. One is philanthropic funds. I mentioned them a couple times. Th- and basically this is kind of halfway between an operating NGO and a private foundation. And there's a bunch of cool advantages of funds that foundations don't have.

Funds tend to be expert-run. They tend to have more staff capacity, which means they tend to give smaller grants. They tend to be a bit more actively involved in the ecosystem, so going to conferences, involving with grantees maybe having presence in, in different countries and this sort of thing.

So I think funds are a really cool mechanism. They can kind of really bridge this gap of if you have one mega foundation who's hyper-dominant, they can donate to a fund who does some of this mid-stage building capacity ecosystem work that maybe the foundation itself doesn't have the capacity or the risk appetite to have, both of which are significant factors.

So I really like philanthropic funds, and I think we need more funds, and I would love more funds. And one of the questions I often ask funders is like, "Hey, you're doing a foundation. Should you give to a fund? Should you start a fund?" Like, what are the odds that you should literally only be deploying your capital, and that there's nobody in the world who could do it better, and that if you're doing it really well, there's not other people who could give it to you and you could grow?

Like, more people should be thinking about funds or just vehicles where you are not dependent on the capital that happens to be associated with your foundation's name. It's dependent on how good your vehicle is.

Jonathan Jackson: And so I wanna let you expand on that definition a little bit so that listeners who might not get this distinction quite between a fund and a foundation. So how do you

separate those?

Joey Savoie: Yeah, so it is a messy spectrum, and there's ones that will accept, make exceptions on all these rules. But classically, a foundation is endowed by one financial actor or maybe a couple like a, a married couple or a family or something like that. A pretty small number of financial principals who are giving to a foundation that ostensibly is running in their name.

Sometimes it's even literally their name, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, whatever. But often it's effectively that, that family's entity that is donating. And there are some really nice benefits of that. It means that they can take higher risks. They are only kind of directly accountable to the family.

So there's some nice things about that. But there's also some cons. Funds tend to be a grant-making entity still. So they still give grants like a foundation would, but they're often endowed or funded by multiple different actors. So maybe there's five different families that are involved in giving money to a fund.

Sometimes there's public funding that goes to a fund. You could argue something like GiveWell is kind of a fund in that, it's getting funding from a bunch of different actors, Coefficient Giving being one of them, but also many different financial people kind of contributing into this, this pot and then GiveWell working as a, a de facto grant maker to deploy that out.

So, funds fundamentally get money from more sources. They're closer to a fundraising org, even though they're deploying out in a grant-making shape a lot like a foundation. But because of that very small difference of funds fundraised from multiple sources, it means, for example, funds have more incentives to be really good because if you're a really good fund, you might get twice as big.

If you're a really good foundation, but you're the Rockefeller Foundation, your earnings probably is tied mostly to the principal's wealth. It's not really gonna be dependent on your output. If you are really bad as a fund, maybe your top funders pull out. You have to be really bad as the Rockefeller Foundation for the Rockefellers to pull out.

Like, , it's a different set of incentives that kind of results in, I think, funds operating really well a lot of the time. Now there are disadvantages. Funds tend to be more short-lived. They tend to be bounded around specific problems, so they're a bit less flexible. So it's not that funds are all sunshine and roses, but if I was turning a dial of how much money net goes through foundations and how much net goes through funds, I'd definitely move more through philanthropic funds right now than is currently going through them.

Jonathan Jackson: that's great. I wanna come back to any philanthropic funds you are excited by and that you're advocating for currently. But you mentioned that as one tactic. Was there another that you wanted to highlight on the, the original question that I had asked?

Joey Savoie: Yes. Yes. The other is grant maker training. So we have done a bunch of grant maker training, which has been focused on existing grant makers who are already in the role getting better. But I think there's a real question of how do we get the class of the next new generation of great grant makers? If there are new foundations getting started, there are new funds coming into existence, there are foundations that are expanding rapidly and hiring people, where are those people coming from?

And the answer is not a very clear path, not a very obvious route to become a grant maker. Some of them get hired out of NGOs, some of them get hired by friends of friends, some of them get hired by all, all sorts of random techniques. And I like the idea, I mean, this is gonna sound very similar to the, the charity school, but school training teaching that creates a legible route for someone to become a grant maker, for someone to get involved in deploying philanthropic capital.

And I don't care at the end of the day if that person gets hired by CG or starts a fund or goes and is the ED of a brand new foundation that comes into existence. But I think we need really talented people who are thinking very analytically, very thoughtfully, very deeply about how to turn money into impact, because that pool's thin.

That, that is a hard pool to hire for, and you put out a grant maker job and lots of people apply, but getting experience in grant making is very difficult. So not many foundations wanna give someone, say, a $10 million foundation job if they've never deployed $100,000 before. So how do we build up the seed funding and the intermediate funding of training up grant makers?

I think that's a really interesting challenge that our team's been thinking a lot about and working on some projects on of training up the next gen of grant makers.

Jonathan Jackson: That's a really cool problem. Do you have ideas? Let's take the commercial side of this. You wanna become an investor or a venture capitalist, so you have LPs that you have to go raise the capital from, so that's the equivalent of raising money from the foundations, and you give it away.

But you can be measured on your return seven to 10 years out. Like, there's a very quantitative, clear metric. If we want the career path to be legible for grant makers, what does good performance look like? How do we measure it? How do we identify the people who are good grant makers?

Joey Savoie: Yeah, I think the easiest way is to give them money. So, so one thing I'm excited about is re-granting programs, is funds, is these sort of things where you can give someone a pot of money and see how they deploy that. And, that can be very hands-off where you give them total autonomy over it, or it could be more like they give recommendations into a foundation.

But I like the idea of giving more opportunities for people to kind of show off their grant making chops. And I also like, more explicit training on that where like, okay, let's make a book, let's make some content, let's kind of find some techniques the grant makers are using, all that sort of stuff.

But I think at the end of the day for someone to be de-risked enough to like lead a new foundation as a talented person, probably most of them need to show, "Hey, I've been given some deployment. I've done this with it, and here's the outcome." Almost every fantastic grant maker I know started off with some pretty small deployment and then worked their way up, and often they got the pretty small deployment via fluke.

Maybe they had some money themselves, or maybe they had a friend who made some money and deployed. I'd love to get rid of that fluke section. How do we have an inbound pool of, okay, these people look pretty good. Let's give them each 100,000 or 500,000 or a million or something, see how they do with it, and then let's look at that pool as potential future grant makers.

And, that doesn't make measurability perfect, but it's a lot easier than just looking at someone's vague resume and being like, "Well, they seem pretty smart. Maybe they'll be good as a grant maker."

Jonathan Jackson: I love that. It sounds hard to me to know, just like it would be with angel investing, you're only deploying 100, 200K. What signals would suggest you did that well or, comparatively well? Because obviously the outcomes are so disparate and hard to measure and maybe long term.

So as you think about this curriculum, this ecosystem that could be developed, what are the early signals that, that could be kind of semi-objective that would separate good grant makers from less good?

Joey Savoie: Yeah. Well, I think one answer is you give a much smaller, much more bounded problem. So say ultimately you want someone who's gonna be a great grant maker in generalized global health. That, that is maybe a problem you can look at if you have like $100 million portfolio or something. But for 100K portfolio, that's crazy.

That, that's way too big a scope. But if you go, "Hey, what's a really specific problem that in a year with 100K you could really wrap your head around? Or with 500K you could really wrap your head around?" I think that's an interesting challenge because you're kind of practicing the muscles on a small scale problem that then you can execute to a bigger scale problem.

Same thing with the feedback loops. I like testing people and working with people on things that have tighter feedback loops as they're getting their grant making kind of training wheels on, and then you give someone, "Okay, you did really good at this sort of thing. Maybe now you move on to health policy," which is in, a bit of a messier area and you're probably gonna have a couple years, but you kinda demonstrated that you can do that.

And I think this is what happens a lot with with different actors, even in the for-profit thing. You kind of demonstrate your chops on something that is a bit more verifiable, and then you build up a little bit of trust to get the next thing. In the NGO sector, often it's someone hiring an implementer.

They're like, "Hey, this person ran a great NGO for seven years. I'm going to make a bet they might be a good grant maker." So I think if we combine some of that of, okay, they've got some grant making experience now, tested in a small experience, they got some implementing experience in their history, kind of putting the pieces together and then do that.

It doesn't make it easy to find the right grant maker to, give that 500K to or something like that. That's still a difficult process. But then it does become kind of, I guess, almost like VCs looking for entrepreneurs before they've popped. It becomes more of a people matching talent and then- the VCs and angels de-risk them for the Series A funders.

I think that's kind of the same thing you wanna do in grant making. You wanna build up some capacity of people that de-risks it enough for, for larger actors to take the chance.

Jonathan Jackson: Love it. So before we close I mentioned I wanted to come back to it. Like, what are the philanthropic funds you're most excited by that, that you'd love to see get off the ground?

Joey Savoie: Yes. Okay. Well, so there's a category that I think is really exciting, which is benefits across causes. So I'll pick on family planning as a really good example of this. So for a long time, by a lot of health funders, family planning was measured by maternal mortality, so the, the mother dying in birth.

Now, of course, that is super bad, but it's a very small percentage of the benefit of actually having access to contraceptives. In fact, it's not even really the stated benefit why most people are using contraceptives. So you're kind of measuring this very small portion of the problem. Our models was this was about 25% of the kind of negative effects of someone not having access to family planning.

And, maybe it doesn't quite pass the bar. Maybe it doesn't quite look competitive with malaria or something at that level. But what if you measure a couple other effects? So what if you go, "Okay, well, we're not just gonna me- measure mother mortality. We're gonna look at the health of the kid.

We're gonna look at the kind of economic effect on the household of losing a child. We're gonna look at non-mortality maternal effects," that sort of thing. Oh, wow, now this looks really good. And I think that the, these kind of co-benefits are a thing that's a bit neglected because on the one hand, you have your super analytic funders who pick one metric and race up that mountain as high as they can go.

On the other hand, you have your people who are like, "The world's complicated. Maybe we shouldn't try to measure anything. We just should try to look at a bunch of flow through effects." Neither of them get to something that looks good on two effects. So, think that's an interesting neglected challenge.

So yeah, we came up with these top areas for new philanthropic funds, and that was a very common thread. So family planning, okay, a bit neglected because it's, it hasn't been measured quite as thoughtfully as I would like it to be. Food systems, very interesting one. There's some really great stuff in food systems from a climate angle, from an animals angle, from a livelihoods angle, and from a global health angle.

You'll find some food system stuff at the top of all of those. Is anyone looking at stuff that cross-cuts between two of those cause areas and looks really mutually beneficial? Not really. Not a lot of established actors doing that sort of thing. So that, that's the category. And we came up with 10, another one we came up with was true cost, which kind of looked at health taxation when it come to sugar and salt and tobacco and that sort of thing.

But a lot of these were kind of things that might be mismeasured by by an initial kind of analysis, but a, a deeper analysis might make look really promising. But yeah, th- that, tip of the iceberg. Those are 10 funds. There's probably 100 funds that, that could really make a valid case for coming into existence and having a great impact in the world.

Jonathan Jackson: Awesome. Well, that's a great place to stop. I'll link to that list of funds that you published in the show notes. But really appreciate your time here and sharing all of this amazing prior experience and what you're doing now. Pleasure to have you on

Joey Savoie: Yeah, it was really fun

Joey, thank you. That was a genuinely useful conversation, and thank you for being so candid about a system you're actively trying to change. And thank you to our audience for listening. A few things I'm taking with me. First, watch the incentives, not the behavior. If one organization does something strange, that's on them.

If a whole field does it, look at what funders are rewarding. The funder who dreaded getting ambushed at conferences was funding the people who impressed him at conferences. He built the thing he hated. Second, a fundraising problem often isn't a fundraising problem. Joey's formula is your comm skill multiplied by how good your organization actually is.

So if you're stuck, the fix might be your evidence base or a five-year plan that doesn't hold up, probably not your second logo redesign. Third, , know which of your costs you can reverse. You can scale ad spend up and down in five clicks, for example. You can't do that with salaries and staff.

This wave of funding will turn again, so protect what's core to your organization independent of the environment around it.

And finally, the bottleneck isn't money anymore. It's senior grant making capacity. There's no clear path to becoming a great grant maker today. Joey's argument is that we should build one through philanthropic funds, through regranting, through handing talented people a small pot and seeing what they do with it.

That's our show. Please like, rate, review, subscribe, and share this episode if you found it useful. It really helps us grow our impact and write to us at podcast@Dimagi.com with any ideas, comments, or feedback. This show is executive produced by myself, Prathana Balachandar, and Michelle Avalencia are our editors.

Natalia Glowaki is our producer and cover art is by Sudan Chu Kanth. A final note in the spirit of transparency, we use AI to assist with guest research, copywriting, and post-production so a small team can produce a high quality show. All AI assisted content is reviewed and edited by humans, and we retain full responsibility for what you hear.