Scaling Philanthropic Impact with Strategic Partners
- Families seeking to put philanthropic capital to work at greater or more nuanced scale are increasingly partnering with intermediary organizations
- These entities can take different forms, but they typically offer on-the-ground insights, capabilities, and connections that enhance grantee sourcing and collaborative action
- The right strategic partner can help families spend more time on areas where their engagement is most meaningful
Today’s donors have many opportunities to make a difference, but pursuing philanthropic goals often requires significant time, coordination, and specialized knowledge. Especially at year-end, this complexity can increase for families whose giving spans causes, generations, and borders.
As families navigate the space between philanthropic intent and action, many are broadening their giving strategies beyond direct grants to include intermediary organizations that can provide insight and operational support.
Intermediary organizations, also known as regranting organizations, are nonprofit entities that provide specialized expertise, access to local relationships, and execution support. Intermediaries may be structured as pooled funds or donor collaboratives to bring funders together to combine resources and amplify support for a shared cause.
Used alongside direct giving, these approaches can help families scale their impact and focus their time where their engagement can be most meaningful — clarifying philanthropic priorities, engaging rising leaders, and nurturing key relationships with grantees, peer funders, and other strategic partners.
Why More Donors Are Working with Intermediaries
Donors and families may engage an intermediary for several reasons, depending on the type of support they need, including:
- Add capacity. Intermediaries can help manage research, grantmaking, and administration, freeing families to focus on broader philanthropic priorities. This support can be especially valuable at year-end, when giving decisions often coincide with financial, professional, and family responsibilities.
- Enter new areas of focus or geographies. Strategic partners often have local knowledge, established networks, and subject matter expertise that can help donors understand new regional or issue landscapes while making funding decisions.
- Preserve privacy. Intermediaries can help families structure giving in ways that protect donor privacy, particularly when funding a broad portfolio of grantees or supporting organizations where direct donor disclosure may add complexity.
- Reach community-based organizations. Regranting partners can help identify and evaluate smaller grassroots nonprofits that may otherwise be difficult for donors to discover or assess independently.
- Test emerging approaches. Intermediaries can bring together funding from multiple donors to pilot new ideas, assess what works, and help promising solutions gain traction. For example, a pooled fund might support several community-based organizations that are testing new approaches to supporting youth mental health, allowing promising models to build evidence before attracting larger-scale funding.
- Respond to urgent or evolving needs. Intermediaries can draw on established networks and infrastructure to direct funding during disasters, humanitarian crises, and other time-sensitive situations.
Partnering to Advance Research for Rare Disease
A donor family had several family members affected by a rare genetic disease that attracted limited commercial research funding. Through Bessemer’s network, the family identified an independent nonprofit research partnership established by several other families whose loved ones were affected by the same disease. The founding families had pooled their resources to build a more coordinated approach to advancing research, including identifying promising opportunities and sourcing, vetting, and funding leading researchers and institutions working toward new treatments and, ultimately, a cure.
By joining the partnership, the donor family gained access to specialized expertise and a network of families with shared experience, all while contributing to a larger pool of capital capable of supporting a more ambitious research agenda than any one family might pursue independently. The partnership also created opportunities for family members to engage beyond grantmaking. Rising generation family members participated in fundraising and events, building relationships with peers while developing their own leadership and philanthropic experience.
How Regranting Organizations Can Complement Direct Giving
Direct giving can provide donors with close relationships and firsthand engagement with the organizations they support. Intermediaries can augment that approach with additional expertise, infrastructure, and execution capacity. The table below highlights how the two approaches can play different but complementary roles.
Where Intermediaries Can Add Support
| Consideration | Direct Grantmaking | Intermediary Partner |
|---|---|---|
| Issue Expertise | Donors often develop expertise over time in specific causes or organizations. | Experienced teams can provide on-the-ground knowledge across causes and communities, helping donors learn quickly and make informed decisions. |
| Grantee Identification | Donors, staff, or advisors identify, vet, and cultivate grantee relationships directly. | Established community presence and relationships can support grantee sourcing and provide early visibility into promising initiatives before they launch, in some cases. |
| Due Diligence | Donors, family offices, or advisors conduct due diligence, often on a grant-by-grant basis. | Due diligence is centralized, drawing on experienced teams and nonprofit relationships to enhance and streamline decision-making. |
| Grant Monitoring | Donors monitor progress and outcomes directly with grantees. | Intermediaries manage monitoring and reporting across grantees, reducing the donor’s administrative burden. |
| Responding to Emerging Needs | New grantees may require added due diligence, limiting the speed or scale of initial funding. | Established networks and resources can help get funding where it is needed quickly as needs evolve. |
| Collaboration and Peer Engagement | Collaboration can be time-intensive, particularly without dedicated staff to manage relationships, coordination, and shared processes | Intermediaries serve as connectors, drawing on existing relationships with donors, nonprofits, and civic leaders to convene, align resources, and advance shared goals. |
Developing a Focused Strategy for Community Impact
A donor family wanted to deepen its support for early childhood education and food insecurity in a community where it had longstanding ties. The family was particularly interested in identifying opportunities at the intersection of these priorities and understanding where its funding could fill important gaps.
Working with a community foundation provided local knowledge, access to established nonprofit relationships, and a broader view of how needs and organizations were connected. This led the family to support workforce development efforts aimed at expanding the pipeline of early childhood educators, as well as collaborative approaches to food insecurity, including funding that enabled nonprofits operating weekend backpack programs to work together and reach more children and families.
The community foundation helped identify opportunities, bring nonprofit partners together, and manage due diligence and grant administration, while the family remained closely involved in setting priorities and making funding decisions.
Choosing the Right Regranting Partner
The right intermediary can complement a family’s approach by providing expertise, relationships, and capabilities that may be difficult and costly to build independently. Because intermediary organizations vary widely in mission, operating model, donor engagement, and grantmaking approach, families should evaluate whether a potential partner aligns with their goals and values.
Questions to Ask When Interviewing an Intermediary
- Mission fit: Does the organization’s purpose and approach align with your philanthropic priorities?
- Expertise: Does this potential partner have experience and strong relationships in the relevant focus area, geography, or community?
- Governance: Is the organization well governed, financially sound, and positioned for long-term sustainability?
- Grantmaking approach: How does the organization identify, evaluate, and select nonprofits?
- Monitoring and learning: How does the organization report on progress and results, and what opportunities does it offer for donors to learn and engage?
- Reputation: Does the organization have a strong track record and trusted relationships with nonprofits, funders, and the communities it serves?
- Donor expectations: What should donors understand upfront about fees, funding minimums, timelines, and other requirements?
Joining Forces with Other Funders through Donor Collaboratives
Donor collaboratives bring funders together around a shared interest or goal, allowing like-minded participants to pool resources, learn from one another, and pursue work that may be difficult to undertake alone. Collaboratives can range from a small group of families supporting a particular community to national or global initiatives, such as expanding economic opportunity in a city or supporting women-led organizations in the Global South.
As noted earlier, intermediaries may be structured as donor collaboratives, managed by professional teams or consultants, or led by funders, with participants sharing responsibility for strategy and decisions. In some cases, intermediaries help connect donors with shared interests, administer pooled resources, or provide the infrastructure needed to support a donor collaborative. Across these structures, collaborative efforts can help families learn, share best practices, and put capital to work.
Integrating Intermediaries Into Your Giving Strategy
Intermediary organizations can be one part of a broader philanthropic ecosystem, alongside direct grants, responsive giving, and family legacy projects. They are not designed to replace direct giving or personal involvement, but they can give families another way to use their resources and relationships to support their goals.
Bessemer can help identify where intermediary organizations may complement direct grantmaking, introduce trusted partners through our network, evaluate fit and alignment, and, when appropriate, serve as an intermediary — including when donor privacy or anonymity is important. When combined, direct giving and strategic partnerships can help families extend their reach, deepen their impact, and build a lasting philanthropic legacy.
