If philanthropy is personal, how can you find your charities?

This is the final blog in my mini-series, which began with a simple question about relational infrastructure in the charity space. It’s been a journey; thanks for tagging along.

In the earlier blogs, I argued two things:

• First, many charities’ ‘USP’ doesn’t sit in hard infrastructure; the service offer, the operating model, the balance sheet. It sits in the relationships they hold in a place: trust, legitimacy, proximity, convening power, and the ability to do work that outsiders can’t easily replicate.
• Second, if relational infrastructure is the differentiator, then there is no universally ‘right’ charity to fund. The ‘right’ choice depends on the funder too; your values, your appetite for risk, the kinds of relationships you’re willing to build, and the role you want to play.

So, how can funders actually find the charities that are right for them?

I think it comes down to four practical moves:

1. Define the system you operate in (before you start ‘choosing’ charities)

Most funders start with choosing organisations. I’d start one level up: the system.

Because if you don’t know what system you’re operating in, you’ll end up funding symptoms, not drivers, and you’ll keep wondering why your portfolio feels fragmented.

At NPC, we talk about systems change as something that should be practical, not abstract, and we’ve developed tools to help people do that: System Practice Toolkit.

This is the step where you ask yourself: what are the boundaries I’m trying to influence, and what sits outside of it? That one question can stop you accidentally funding five disconnected things that never meet.

And if you’re thinking: this sounds theoretical, it really isn’t. Check our resources on the website.

2. Identify the problem in that system, then choose a strategy that matches it

Once you’ve defined the system, the next step is to be clear about what you think is actually going wrong within it.

Not ‘what issue do I care about?’ but: where is the system falling down, and why? Sometimes the problem is a gap (nobody is doing X). Sometimes it’s duplication (too many actors are doing the same, poorly connected thing). Sometimes it’s a broken pathway between services. Sometimes it’s missing infrastructure: weak convening, weak data, and weak trust across institutions.

This is the point where your philanthropy becomes personal in a good way: because your strategy should reflect your strengths and intent.

Do you want to back frontline relational work? Build connective tissue? Fund advocacy? De-risk innovation? Strengthen infrastructure? Convene others?

3. Use AI to free up time for what actually matters: conversations and relationships

Here’s the thing: doing the two steps above properly takes time. And the old way of spending time (endless desk research, long lists, scanning websites, reading hundreds of PDFs) is not the best use of a funder’s attention.

This is where AI can help — not by ‘choosing’ charities for you, but by doing the heavy lifting that gets you to ask better questions, faster.

AI can make the work more relational by freeing up space to collect and analyse information — leaving more time for creative thinking and relationship-building.

A practical example of this from NPC’s work is our project with This Day. Our work approached social cohesion as a field-mapping challenge — building a framework, then using data and analysis to understand who is active, how they describe their work, and where activity and funding sit.

In my view, the right relationship with AI is using it to:

• Widen your line of sight (who’s operating where doing what).
• Reduce the admin of discovery.
• Then spend your human time on what AI can’t do: listening, understanding context, and building trust.

Because relational infrastructure can’t be downloaded. You only understand it by talking to people.

4. Measuring your impact as a process, not an outcome

Finally, if philanthropy is personal and relational, then evaluation can’t just be a ‘prove it’ exercise that you do at the end. It has to be part of how you learn and improve as you go.

Our guide — Monitoring, evaluation, and learning with trust and equity — points out that MEL, when done well, is about improving what you do to strengthen impact, and sets out practical steps to do that in more trusting and equitable ways.

If you value relational infrastructure, then your MEL approach shouldn’t punish honesty or reward perfection. It should support learning, mutual accountability, and better decisions, including decisions about how you fund.

My closing thought: the ‘right charity for you’ is the one you can back properly

If I had to summarise the whole series in one sentence, it would be this:

The right charity isn’t the one with the best pitch deck. It’s the one whose relational space you understand and whose work you’re willing to back in a way that strengthens trust rather than extracting it.

Define your system. Choose your role. Use AI to see more and waste less time. Build relationships. Learn as you go. And treat measurement as part of your practice, not a report you commission at the end.

That’s how philanthropy becomes personal, in the best sense.