I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but have followed the effective philanthropy “scene” since 2007 or so. My sense is that most EA community members aren’t very knowledgeable about this whole side of institutional philanthropy, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the history recounted pretty accurately here! With that said, one quibble is that the book you cited entitled Effective Philanthropy by Mary Ellen Capek and Molly Mead is not one I’d ever heard of before reading this post; I think this is just a case of a low-profile resource happening to get good Google search results years later.
Here is a bit of additional background on the key players and some of their intersections, as I understand it:
The effective philanthropy movement was very much a child of the original dot-com boom in the late 1990s. While CEP is based in Boston, the scene was mostly driven by an earlier generation of West Coast tech magnates who were interested in bringing business concepts like results-based management to philanthropy. Education funding was viewed as a major priority and there were close ties to the charter school movement, which saw a number of influential organizations like KIPP incubated by funders looking to put these ideas into practice. With that said, CEP’s Phil Buchanan has consistently pushed back against the idea that nonprofits are analogous to businesses, despite his own MBA from Harvard Business School.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has an Effective Philanthropy Program and has been a major financial supporter of CEP for a long time. Hewlett’s former president Paul Brest (2000-2012) pioneered the notion of “strategic philanthropy” which is closely related both in spirit and sociologically to this movement. Fun trivia note: Hewlett’s Effective Philanthropy program was an early funder of GiveWell at the time when that organization was precariously situated (i.e., pre-Dustin & Cari).
Stanford Social Innovation Review was closely associated with this scene as well. With startup funding from Hewlett, I believe it was intended to be a Harvard Business Review for the social sector when it was founded in 2003. (HBR had published the original article on “venture philanthropy” in 1997.)
Over the past decade, the consensus among US-based staffed foundations has shifted hard against some of the technocratic premises that drove the effective philanthropy movement, in particular its emphasis on measurable outcomes and tendency to invest lots of funder resources in strategy development. The Whitman Institute’s work probably contributed in a minor way to that dynamic, but in my read a much stronger influence has been the growing emphasis on racial justice in the nonprofit sector since the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement that, via a variety of pathways including the widespread socialization of Tema Okun’s work, caused so-called “top-down” approaches like effective/strategic philanthropy to feel out of touch with the moment. One of the earliest points of tension was a series put out beginning in 2009 by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy called “Philanthropy at its Best” critiquing current foundation practices, which Brest wrote a four-part essay responding to in 2011. A parallel thread of critique comes from complexity science, via the argument that the wicked problems philanthropy is trying to solve are knotty enough that trying to predict the outcomes of philanthropic investments with any meaningful level of detail is a fool’s errand, and funders should therefore defer to the expertise of grantees wherever possible. On that front, this essay from one of the co-founders of FSG (a philanthropy consultancy closely associated with Harvard Business School and the early days of venture philanthropy) was particularly influential.
I don’t believe there was one single event that caused the momentum around effective philanthropy to fall apart, but by 2016 or so it was clear that its peak was in the rear-view mirror; a particularly dramatic turn was when Hal Harvey, Paul Brest’s co-author on their 2008 book Money Well Spent which was written while Brest was still president of Hewlett, wrote an op-ed apologizing for his role advancing strategic philanthropy. There’s a much longer conversation to have about to what extent and which of the critiques of effective philanthropy are worth attending to, and how they relate to effective altruism, but I’m happy to see it pointed out that many of the topics EA is most concerned with have been discussed at length in other venues.
I don’t think EP has fizzled out entirely. ImpactMatters is perhaps part of the second wave of EP. Charity Navigator acquired it in 2020 and incorporated its impact ratings into its Encompass Rating System.
Do you think that some of the people who would have been attracted to effective philanthropy in the past now just join effective altruism?
I’ve had a loose interest in institutional philanthropy for a while (I knew of your work at Createquity while it was on-going!) and while I think EP has been influential, I just didn’t find the work from CEP and similar places as intellectually engaging as what EA puts out (or as important overall).
Do you think that some of the people who would have been attracted to effective philanthropy in the past now just join effective altruism?
Some, sure. EA seems to be a lot more mainstream now than it was even 3-4 years ago, so that’s probably the main reason.
While I think EP has been influential, I just didn’t find the work from CEP and similar places as intellectually engaging as what EA puts out (or as important overall).
I think the main thing EA has going for it over EP is that it has a much better track record of taking ideas seriously. EP explored a lot of promising directions and anticipated a number of things that EA organizations ended up doing (e.g., incorporating expected value estimates into grantmaking). But in my view the key players, in trying to optimize for elite credibility at the same time as intellectual rigor, didn’t give themselves enough weirdness points to work with. As a result, they both failed to pursue their best ideas to their logical conclusion and didn’t do enough to distinguish between transformative ideas and mediocre ones.
I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but have followed the effective philanthropy “scene” since 2007 or so. My sense is that most EA community members aren’t very knowledgeable about this whole side of institutional philanthropy, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the history recounted pretty accurately here! With that said, one quibble is that the book you cited entitled Effective Philanthropy by Mary Ellen Capek and Molly Mead is not one I’d ever heard of before reading this post; I think this is just a case of a low-profile resource happening to get good Google search results years later.
Here is a bit of additional background on the key players and some of their intersections, as I understand it:
The effective philanthropy movement was very much a child of the original dot-com boom in the late 1990s. While CEP is based in Boston, the scene was mostly driven by an earlier generation of West Coast tech magnates who were interested in bringing business concepts like results-based management to philanthropy. Education funding was viewed as a major priority and there were close ties to the charter school movement, which saw a number of influential organizations like KIPP incubated by funders looking to put these ideas into practice. With that said, CEP’s Phil Buchanan has consistently pushed back against the idea that nonprofits are analogous to businesses, despite his own MBA from Harvard Business School.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has an Effective Philanthropy Program and has been a major financial supporter of CEP for a long time. Hewlett’s former president Paul Brest (2000-2012) pioneered the notion of “strategic philanthropy” which is closely related both in spirit and sociologically to this movement. Fun trivia note: Hewlett’s Effective Philanthropy program was an early funder of GiveWell at the time when that organization was precariously situated (i.e., pre-Dustin & Cari).
Stanford Social Innovation Review was closely associated with this scene as well. With startup funding from Hewlett, I believe it was intended to be a Harvard Business Review for the social sector when it was founded in 2003. (HBR had published the original article on “venture philanthropy” in 1997.)
Some other funders that have been influential include Mario Marino’s Venture Philanthropy Partners and his Leap of Reason community, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and REDF (which developed the social return on investment methodology, a form of cost-benefit analysis).
Over the past decade, the consensus among US-based staffed foundations has shifted hard against some of the technocratic premises that drove the effective philanthropy movement, in particular its emphasis on measurable outcomes and tendency to invest lots of funder resources in strategy development. The Whitman Institute’s work probably contributed in a minor way to that dynamic, but in my read a much stronger influence has been the growing emphasis on racial justice in the nonprofit sector since the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement that, via a variety of pathways including the widespread socialization of Tema Okun’s work, caused so-called “top-down” approaches like effective/strategic philanthropy to feel out of touch with the moment. One of the earliest points of tension was a series put out beginning in 2009 by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy called “Philanthropy at its Best” critiquing current foundation practices, which Brest wrote a four-part essay responding to in 2011. A parallel thread of critique comes from complexity science, via the argument that the wicked problems philanthropy is trying to solve are knotty enough that trying to predict the outcomes of philanthropic investments with any meaningful level of detail is a fool’s errand, and funders should therefore defer to the expertise of grantees wherever possible. On that front, this essay from one of the co-founders of FSG (a philanthropy consultancy closely associated with Harvard Business School and the early days of venture philanthropy) was particularly influential.
I don’t believe there was one single event that caused the momentum around effective philanthropy to fall apart, but by 2016 or so it was clear that its peak was in the rear-view mirror; a particularly dramatic turn was when Hal Harvey, Paul Brest’s co-author on their 2008 book Money Well Spent which was written while Brest was still president of Hewlett, wrote an op-ed apologizing for his role advancing strategic philanthropy. There’s a much longer conversation to have about to what extent and which of the critiques of effective philanthropy are worth attending to, and how they relate to effective altruism, but I’m happy to see it pointed out that many of the topics EA is most concerned with have been discussed at length in other venues.
I don’t think EP has fizzled out entirely. ImpactMatters is perhaps part of the second wave of EP. Charity Navigator acquired it in 2020 and incorporated its impact ratings into its Encompass Rating System.
Do you think that some of the people who would have been attracted to effective philanthropy in the past now just join effective altruism?
I’ve had a loose interest in institutional philanthropy for a while (I knew of your work at Createquity while it was on-going!) and while I think EP has been influential, I just didn’t find the work from CEP and similar places as intellectually engaging as what EA puts out (or as important overall).
Some, sure. EA seems to be a lot more mainstream now than it was even 3-4 years ago, so that’s probably the main reason.
I think the main thing EA has going for it over EP is that it has a much better track record of taking ideas seriously. EP explored a lot of promising directions and anticipated a number of things that EA organizations ended up doing (e.g., incorporating expected value estimates into grantmaking). But in my view the key players, in trying to optimize for elite credibility at the same time as intellectual rigor, didn’t give themselves enough weirdness points to work with. As a result, they both failed to pursue their best ideas to their logical conclusion and didn’t do enough to distinguish between transformative ideas and mediocre ones.