Effective philanthropy and grant-making
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Effective philanthropy is in NPC’s DNA. We were founded more than 20 years ago by a group of philanthropists who wanted to help funders maximise the impact of their charitable giving. Today, we work with funders of all shapes and sizes from families and their advisers, to corporate foundations, to charitable trusts and more. We can support you at every stage of your impact journey, whether you’ve just started out, or whether you’ve been giving for many years, providing a bespoke and personalised service tailored to you.
We can help you pinpoint what you want to achieve through your giving, learn more about social and environmental issues and how your philanthropy could make a difference, find and fund impactful organisations, and learn what your funding has achieved. We can also help you think through key questions such as whether and how to spend down your resources, how to involve your family in your giving, and how to develop open and honest relationships with the organisations you fund.
Alongside our advisory service our think tank provides answers to questions and themes relevant for many funders, developing frameworks and tools available for free from our website. This research is often informed and inspired by questions and challenges our clients face, and in turn enables us to continually improve the support and advice we offer.
We support funders and philanthropists with:
Need help?
With our support, donors are progressing their charitable giving and making a difference to their chosen causes. Get in touch with Sarah Denselow NPC’s Principal for Effective Philanthropy or Senior Consultant, Nicola McKenzie.
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Grant-making strategy and planning
Whether you are just getting started with your giving, or whether you are an established grant-maker wanting to refresh your approach, we can help you hone your giving strategy and criteria. We often do this through a series of facilitated workshop-style conversations, aimed at helping you identify what you want to achieve through your giving, and the approach you wish to take. Our bespoke research can help you gain fast insights into the issues you are trying to tackle, to help you identify how best to target your giving. Recent examples of our work include research into the climate and nature crises, children leaving the care system, women and criminal justice, education, digital mental health services, and visual impairment. And we can help you with other aspects of planning, such as how to involve family members or advisors, other ways you could support your funded organisations (in addition to grants), or options for how to spend down your funds.
Finding and funding great organisations
As a funder it can be difficult to identify which charities or other organisations best fit your specific interests and criteria. We can identify organisations for you through targeted research, drawing on our extensive knowledge of charities and other social and environmental impact organisations as well as our guidance on DEI in grant-making. Our comprehensive approach to due diligence, based on our well known What Makes a Good Charity? framework, will help you make informed decisions about which charities to fund. We can also help you help you with the day-to-day business of managing and monitoring the grants or investments in your portfolio, acting as key point of contact for your funded organisations and managing contracts and payments, trustee meetings, or liaising with auditors.
Reflecting on and learning from your giving
We know that as a funder it can sometimes be difficult to get a clear picture of what your funding has achieved, and whether the support you are giving is the best way to help your funded organisations achieve impact. We can support you to reflect on and learn from your giving, whether you wish to understand the impact of your grants themselves or identify ways to improve the way you give. This can help you develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with the organisations you fund, better understand the impact of your giving, and identify ways you can improve the support you give. Our monitoring work is informed by NPC’s research into topics such as power dynamics and equitable evaluation.
Organisations we've worked with
Featured resources on philanthropy and grant-making
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Funder peer networks
With our support, donors are progressing their charitable giving and making a difference to their chosen causes. Get in touch with Sarah Denselow NPC’s Principal for Effective Philanthropy or Senior Consultant, Nicola McKenzie.
