Dec twenty second 2021
OVER THE previous 18 months, the world has heard so much about MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist previously married to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. She has given generously to charities on the frontline of the pandemic, together with meals banks, faculties and youngsters’s well being programmes. Relatively unknown, nevertheless, is the consultancy that has helped distribute nearly $9bn on Ms Scott’s behalf: the Bridgespan Group.
A non-profit consultancy, Bridgespan was spun out of Bain & Company, a administration consultancy, round 21 years in the past by three individuals, together with a former worldwide managing associate. 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 international 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 listing of non-profit teams it really works with isn’t 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 primary 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 info on the agency is contained in tax types and the odd remark from former purchasers. In December, Ms Scott introduced plans for a brand new web site with a “searchable database” of her presents and extra element on her decision-making course of. But many rich individuals like their privateness and Bridgespanners know find out how to hold their mouths shut. And there is no such thing as a strategy to know the way it goes about evaluating worthy causes and potential grantees.
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 ideas to their giving. It is now the norm for philanthropists to deal with donations like investments, organising huge foundations, monitoring the initiatives they fund and quantifying the return on their cash. An total business has emerged to help this “venture philanthropy”, together with consultancies, corresponding to Bridgespan, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Arabella Advisors, in addition to researchers, donor networks and information suppliers, corresponding to Candid and the National Centre for Family Philanthropy (NCFP).
Ms Scott has upended that mannequin. She has held off organising a basis, as an alternative outsourcing the whole strategy of selecting grantees, contacting them and meting out money. “That signals something dramatically new, which is deploying billions of dollars through intermediaries,” says Nick Tedesco, head of the NCFP. Middlemen corresponding to Bridgespan stand to profit.
For Bridgespan, with nice energy and bumper contracts comes nice accountability. The first problem for any organisation attempting to determine who deserves a multimillion-dollar grant is to ensure it has a full image of all of the non-profit teams doing good work in poor communities. A various workforce that is aware of these communities helps.
Bridgespan trumpets its places of work 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 positive it doesn’t simply choose 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 find out how to donate their cash usually additionally work with non-profit teams jostling for funding. William Schambra of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank, worries leaders of such organisations may really feel compelled to rent Bridgespan for recommendation so they’re entrance of thoughts when the consultancy recommends potential grantees. News that it’s advising Ms Scott, who says she plans to offer away her fortune of almost $60bn “until the safe is empty”, solely provides to that strain. “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 associate, is obvious 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.” It additionally doesn’t “design or run capital campaigns”. Nor does it promote non-profits to potential donors. Even so, one in each 20 non-profit 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 listing of organisations Ms Scott has donated cash to consists of a number of Bridgespan purchasers.
There is, nevertheless, 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 could be hefty. The agency pays high executives six-figure salaries. And it competes for initiatives with for-profit corporations corresponding to McKinsey, the excessive monks of administration consultancy.
Nonetheless, Bridgespan’s charges cowl solely about 75% of prices, and like many nonprofits, the group depends on donations to fund the complete vary of its work. And the outcomes are generally uncomfortable. Alongside the teams engaged on training, well being, gender equality and homosexual rights, on Ms Scott’s listing of grantees are a variety of intermediaries within the philanthropic sector—together with Bridgespan itself.