Philanthropy advisors are increasing displacing charities from stewarding relationships with donors and helping create meaning from their giving.
This is the case put forward in a new white paper from the international think tank Rogare – Death by a thousand cuts: How other actors are displacing charities from giving, asking for support, and providing help (the first phase of a four-phase project with Kingston University Business School in London)
Death by a thousand cuts expands the typology of disintermediation developed at Rogare that was first published in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing.
As well as considerably expanding the subtypes and variants in the typology (full details in the notes for editors section), the new white paper provides a full consideration of how philanthropy advisors, donor advised funds and giving circles can displace fundraisers.
Key to understanding this whether they control the relationship with donors, which we have identified as a key marker of whether disintermediation is occurring.
If charities have access to donors to steward relationships with them and make further asks, then any fundraising done by external actors or suppliers is more likely outsourced.
But if those external actors restrict charities’ access to donors and guard their data, then the fundraising has been disintermediated. Some types of fundraising products – such as personal giving apps and shopping websites – use donor privacy as selling point.
Based on ideas presented in supplementary discussion paper written by Rogare Critical Fundraising Network member Cherian Koshy (vice president of Kindsight), we argue that not only can philanthropy advisors displace charities from asking for support, but they can also take over as the “primary interpreters and stewards of donor intent, inserting themselves as the central locus of decision-making, relationship management, and impact evaluation”.
Professional philanthropic advice thus introduces a new level of intermediation between fundraisers and donors, with advisors acting as gatekeepers to donors.
Regarding DAFs, the white paper argues that they “arguably represent one of the most structurally significant forms of disintermediation in the modern philanthropic ecosystem: DAFs do not simply mediate giving, they restructure it by separating the economic, emotional, and relational components of generosity into different moments and actors”.
- See pp48-49 of the white paper for more detail and info on the notion of control, and to see a graphic that maps types and subtypes according to how much control a charity has (or does not have), and pp31-34 for more on philanthropy advisors, DAFs and giving circles. For full details on philanthropy advisors as disintermediators of charities, see Cherian Koshy’s paper Take my advice – how philanthropy advisors are reshaping the stewardship of donors’ giving relationships.
- For full details on the typology of disintermediation, you can read more on Critical Fundraising here, or visit the Rogare website here.
We were able to undertake this work at Rogare thanks to the ongoing generous support of our Associate Members: ST (Stephen Thomas Ltd), Ask Direct, GoalBusters, Giving Architects, Chell Perkins, Fundraiser in the Room, and our strategic partnership with the Chartered Institute of Fundraising. Their support ensures all Rogare’s reports and other outputs are freely available to the fundraising profession – https://www.rogare.net/publications.
Critical Fundraising 