Jan 1st 2022
OVER THE previous 18 months, the world has heard loads about MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist previously married to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. She has given generously to charities on the entrance line of the pandemic, together with meals banks, faculties and kids’s well being programmes. Relatively unknown, nevertheless, is the consultancy that has helped distribute nearly $9bn on Ms Scott’s behalf: the Bridgespan Group.
Listen to this story
Your browser doesn’t help the <audio> aspect.
Enjoy extra audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.
A non-profit consultancy, Bridgespan was spun out of Bain & Company, a administration consultancy, round 20 years in the past by three individuals, together with a former managing accomplice. What started as a handful of good individuals toiling in a small workplace above the Hard Rock Cafe in Boston is now a 329-person world operation with $59m in working revenues in 2020.
It has suggested a number of the world’s largest donors, together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The checklist of non-profit teams it really works with is not any much less spectacular, together with cutting-edge analysis centres such because the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and big-name charities just like the YMCA.
Bridgespan has two predominant strains of enterprise. It advises rich donors, studying their pursuits and serving to them create a donation technique, then researching and doing due diligence on potential organisations they could donate to. It additionally helps non-profit teams function extra effectively. Beyond that, Bridgespan is shrouded in thriller. The solely public data on the agency is contained in tax varieties and the odd remark from former shoppers. In December Ms Scott introduced plans for a brand new web site with a “searchable database” of her items and extra element on her decision-making course of. But many rich individuals like their privateness and Bridgespanners know learn how to hold quiet.
Bridgespan’s story is, partially, the story of philanthrocapitalism, a motion that started across the flip of the millennium, as billionaires began making use of enterprise rules to their giving. It is now the norm for philanthropists to deal with donations like investments, establishing huge foundations, monitoring the initiatives they fund and quantifying the return on their cash. An whole business has emerged to help this “venture philanthropy”, together with consultancies, akin to Bridgespan, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Arabella Advisors, in addition to researchers, donor networks and knowledge suppliers, akin to Candid and the National Centre for Family Philanthropy (NCFP).
Ms Scott has upended that mannequin. She has held off establishing a basis, as a substitute outsourcing the complete means of choosing grantees, contacting them and doling out money. “That signals something dramatically new, which is deploying billions of dollars through intermediaries,” says Nick Tedesco, head of the NCFP. For Bridgespan, with nice energy and bumper contracts comes nice accountability.
The first problem for any organisation making an attempt to resolve who deserves a multimillion-dollar grant is to verify it has a full image of all of the non-profit teams doing good work in poor communities. Bridgespan trumpets its workplaces in India and South Africa, stuffed with native workers. It hires nearly twice as many ladies as males and fewer than half its workers are white. Nidhi Sahni, who heads Bridgespan’s American advisory enterprise, says the agency makes certain it doesn’t simply decide on the “usual suspects”. She is adamant, as an illustration, that proficiency in English shouldn’t decide whether or not a possible grantee makes it onto the agency’s radar.
The subsequent hurdle is coping with potential conflicts of curiosity. Consultants that advise wealthy individuals on learn how to donate their cash typically additionally work with non-profit teams jostling for funding. William Schambra of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank, worries leaders of such organisations would possibly really feel compelled to rent Bridgespan for recommendation so they could come to thoughts when the consultancy recommends potential grantees. News that it’s advising Ms Scott, who says she plans to provide away her fortune of practically $60bn “until the safe is empty”, solely provides to that stress. “If I had a non-profit I would be banging down their door,” Mr Schambra says.
Bridgespan’s response is easy: “Given the amazing organisations we work with, some of them household names, it would be surprising not to have some of them come to the attention of donors.” William Foster, the group’s managing accomplice, is evident that he can’t get a non-profit chief a lunch assembly with a big-name donor. In its conflict-of-interest coverage, Bridgespan says that it “do[es] not make introductions to donor clients or share confidential information about donor priorities or strategies.” Nor does it promote non-profits to potential donors. Even so, one in each 20 teams that has acquired funding from a philanthropist it advises had additionally been a shopper within the 5 years previous to receiving funding, by its personal estimates. The checklist of organisations Ms Scott has donated cash to consists of a number of Bridgespan shoppers.
There is one other tough conflict. Bridgespan, like many middlemen on the earth of philanthropy, is itself a non-profit. In some methods, that’s stunning. Though Bridgespan doesn’t disclose its pricing mannequin, researchers that cowl the philanthropic sector say its charges may be hefty. And it competes for initiatives with for-profit consultancies akin to McKinsey.
Nonetheless, Bridgespan’s charges cowl solely about 75% of prices, and like many non-profits, the group depends on donations to fund the total vary of its work. The penalties of this may be moderately tangled. Alongside the teams engaged on training, well being, gender equality and homosexual rights, Ms Scott’s checklist of grantees consists of a variety of intermediaries within the philanthropic sector—together with the Bridgespan Group itself. ■
For unique perception and studying suggestions from our correspondents in America, signal as much as Checks and Balance, our weekly e-newsletter.
This article appeared within the United States part of the print version below the headline “The charity-industrial complicated”