5 Key Ingredients for Donors Seeking Audacious Changes

Philanthropy has helped propel some of the most important success stories over the past century. Near-universal global eradication of polio; marriage equality; free or reduced-price lunches for all needy schoolchildren in the United States; and widespread use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation all benefited from philanthropic donations.

These efforts have transformed or saved hundreds of millions of lives. That we now take these advances for granted makes them no less astonishing: They were the inconceivable “moon shots” of their day, before they were success stories in retrospect.

Many of today’s emerging large-scale philanthropists aspire to achieve similarly audacious successes. Even as society grapples with important questions about the increasing concentration of wealth, many of the world’s most generous philanthropists feel the weight of responsibility that comes with their privilege. And the scale and impatience of their ambition, along with the wealth they are willing to give back to society, is breathtaking.

But a growing number of these donors privately express great frustration. Despite writing big checks for years, they aren’t seeing successes as quickly as they wish. When faced with setbacks and public criticism, the best philanthropists reexamine their goals and approaches, including how to better seek out and incorporate the ideas of the people they hope to serve. But unfortunately, some shift to seemingly safer donations to universities or art museums, while others withdraw from public giving altogether.

Audacious social change is incredibly challenging. Yet history shows that it can succeed. To better understand why some efforts defy the odds, our recent study dove deep into 15 projects that led to major breakthroughs as varied as broad access to end-of-life hospice care, fair wages for migrant farmworkers in the United States, and a lifesaving rehydration solution to treat diseases spread by dirty water in Bangladesh.

Our research found that nearly 90 percent of the initiatives took more than 20 years to achieve widespread results (the median was 45 years); 80 percent involved changing government funding, policies, or actions; nearly 75 percent involved active coordination among key players in the nonprofit world, government, business, and elsewhere; and roughly 66 percent featured one or more philanthropic investments of $10 million or higher.

Our research also revealed that there are five key elements that greatly affect results when philanthropists want to swing for the fences to change how society works. To be sure, many of the issues are highly complex, and countless factors bear on the results, but we hope that focusing on these five common elements might help increase the odds of success in achieving major progress. It takes sustained attention, over decades, to win large-scale landmark victories, and these historic success stories provide lessons on how to do it. Our findings show that success in tackling big issues requires donors to:

Build a shared understanding of the problem and its causes. Many of the historic social-impact success stories began with donors dedicating resources to understand the key elements of the problems they were trying to solve. Importantly, they continued to follow the problem as it evolved over time. They knew who was affected and what forces perpetuated the problems.

They often studied deeply entrenched racial, cultural, and economic dynamics, which led to attacking root causes; figured out who benefited from (and would fight to preserve) the status quo; and paid for research that could be used to propel smart action.

Consider the movement to reduce tobacco use. Success required a shift in framing the problem that donors were trying to solve. In the past, nonprofits focused on urging individuals alone to break a cheap, popular, ubiquitous, highly addictive habit. But what really worked was adopting a broader approach that increased taxes on tobacco, prohibited the sale of tobacco to persons under age 18, created social stigma by limiting where people could smoke, and added blunt health warnings highlighting the dangers of secondhand smoke. Today, with both adult and youth smoking rates down steeply, tobacco-control activists face the next challenge: building a shared understanding of what remains at stake.

Serious efforts between donors, government agencies, and others produced actionable research to figure out what steps would lead to a serious reduction in smoking. Organizations like Truth Initiative are leading the charge to maintain urgency until tobacco use becomes a thing of the past. Redefining the problem and constant monitoring made all the difference.

Set emotionally compelling “winnable milestones.” Making progress is hard when the goal is big and vague; behavioral science teaches us that it’s human nature to become paralyzed in such situations. The leaders in our case studies kept people motivated and engaged by identifying concrete goals and promoting progress toward that through emotionally compelling messages or calls to action.

In the campaign for gay rights, for example, philanthropists rallied around the specific goal of marriage equality as a tangible yet emotionally compelling milestone in the broader struggle for equal rights. By focusing on a specific, measurable goal, advocates were able to make significant progress in a short period. It wasn’t easy to develop a message with strong emotional appeal for everyone; the effort required a variety of nontraditional philanthropic investments, such as paying for polling, message testing, and focus groups. While some donors treat these investments as unnecessary overhead in nonprofit budgets, these efforts are critical to maintain focus, measure results, and sustain momentum.

Design approaches to work on a large scale. A solution that doesn’t work at the scale of the problem isn’t a real solution. Unfortunately, over the last century, billions of philanthropic dollars have been poured into perfecting strategies viable for small groups (think hothouse flowers), but which are too expensive or too complex to be viable at the full scale of the need. Successful philanthropic efforts envision ways to make an impact at massive scale from early days (think invasive dandelions), avoiding reliance on scarce philanthropic resources.

Some donors have done it by investing deeply in research and developing an innovative form of an existing product or process; some have found a breakthrough business model; others have taken advantage of an existing distribution system instead of trying to build a new one.

In the case of polio eradication, the first vaccine worked to end polio in developed countries, but the need for trained medical staff to administer injections made the approach difficult to implement in less-developed areas. It wasn’t until Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine that global immunization could effectively eradicate the disease.

Often, philanthropic dollars are the only way to finance this kind of innovation and experimentation, especially for solutions that truly work on a large scale.

Drive (rather than assume) demand. Even if you build it, they may not come. Philanthropists and others who have succeeded in ambitious tasks funded research on what beneficiaries really wanted and needed. They also supported robust marketing efforts and strong distribution networks that could both serve existing demand and unlock more. Vietnam’s crusade for the use of motorcycle helmets included the development of a new style of “tropical” helmet that was better suited to local consumers; the original model was too hot and didn’t fit a typical Vietnamese rider. Supporters of the country’s new mandatory helmet law also bolstered the campaign with funding for billboards, television ads, and more conveying both fatalities among those who didn’t wear helmets and the sanctions for non-compliance. The best efforts put beneficiaries (often poor and underserved) at the center of the issue and treated them as respected customers whose needs had to be understood and their trust earned. A Bridgespan study, “Selling Social Change,” found such investments to be rare. Understanding “what works” is only half the battle; to ensure what actually works in local contexts, it’s essential for philanthropists to understand and engage with the people they seek to help.

Embrace course corrections. In every successful effort to bring about large-scale change, methods and approaches were regularly adapted and improved, in some cases, over decades.

Often, the effort entailed serious investments in data and measurement to learn what worked and figure out how to change things for the better. For many, this sustained attention meant investments in data and measurement for learning.

In the case of Florida farmworkers advocating for higher wages, the initial approach of trying to persuade their employers didn’t work. But when farmworkers took their case to grocery stores, they were able to persuade retailers that consumers wouldn’t buy tomatoes picked by people who were impoverished. Ultimately, pressure tactics and public opinion led fast-food companies to pay a penny per pound more for tomatoes and designate the increase for worker pay raises.

The focus on measurement and data, therefore, is all about donors and organizations learning together how to get better results, not simply a way to demonstrate accountability to philanthropists.

For today’s philanthropists who wish to achieve similarly audacious results for society, this research shows that flexibility and creativity is critical to success. In all of the 15 projects we studied, philanthropists did not go it alone. At their best, philanthropists deeply understood the problem and the people who were affected by it; identified funding gaps left by others; focused their investments at specific, strategic points of leverage; and supported nonprofits working directly on important problems to propel historic wins for society.

Susan Wolf Ditkoff is a partner and co-head of the philanthropy practice at the Bridgespan Group, where Abe Grindle is a manager, Andrew Flamang is a consultant, and Phil Dearing is an associate consultant.