Paul Brest

In this book Brest and Harvey provide a guide to large scale strategic giving. The book defines strategic philanthropy and discusses various approaches to strategic giving. It covers the gamut from setting goals to evaluating grant proposals to techniques beyond grant making.

The key point of this book is that strategic giving focuses on investing for impact and social return on investment with a strong focus on evaluation. Although the authors make clear that not all initiatives can be evaluated quantitatively and social impact can rarely be perfectly predicted, doing the best you can to define the expected impact and evaluate the result will help grant makers to spend their dollars more effectively.

As former a member of a grant committee, I found the most useful chapters to be those on goal setting and grant application evaluation. Other chapters were interesting but less relevant to me. Some chapters, such as the chapter on using advocacy to meet philanthropic goals, were not at all relevant to my grant making work. And, perhaps not surprisingly, if you are not doing large scale grant making, you will likely find the book uninteresting.

One concept discussed which has applicability beyond philanthropy is the idea of a sound theory of change. A strategy for change should be backed by a well supported theory of change. A theory of change connects what you are doing with what you want to accomplish. Without a well established theory of change, your actions are likely to be ineffective or even harmful.

Defining a theory of change also provides a departure point when examining failure: if a program did not have an intended effect, it could be because the program was not implemented properly or it could be because the theory of change which connected the two was faulty.

Since I learned about this concept, I have been trying to apply it in my evaluation of proposals for things like fixing the economy. Instead of evaluating the idea directly, I first try to assess what the theory of change behind it is. Although I have not had many chances to use this approach, it seems promising for increasing my understanding and encouraging more fruitful discussion.
… (mer)

This book wasn't quite what I expected, like other reviewers. It is written for individuals with lots of money who want to ensure that their capital makes a measurable difference in a desired area. I'm afraid I didn't make it through the entire thing, so I'm leaving the stars aspect of the review out, so as to not skew the quantative side of the reviews. I will, however, be keeping it in my personal library, should I be in a better place in the future to make this type of major financial gift. I have no doubt it will be a useful tool at that time.… (mer)

Money Well Spent is a valuable resource both for philanthropists and trust managers as well as people working for non-profits that are looking for ways to make their work appeal to donors.

If there is one key lesson from the book, it is this: there is a good way for a program to fail and a bad way. Money spent on a program that fails to meet its goal but results in learning and research is still money well spent. Realizing this lesson when creating programs and deciding when to fund them can make a big difference in the non-profit world.

In a bad economy non-profit organizations need to be able to put together the best possible proposal to attract funding from a diminished pool of resources, and this book will help.… (mer)