REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Funders may be their own worst enemy in the pursuit of impact, according to a new report revealing that they are behind nearly half of the obstacles that get in the way of nonprofits achieving their goals.
Open Road Alliance, which provides capital to social impact organizations that face unexpected obstacles, released its Roadblock Analysis Report last month. Its analysis of 102 applications for support over the last five years found that funder-created obstacles — such as change in funder strategy, delay of disbursement, or change in grant cycles — accounted for 46 percent of the challenges that came up during project implementation. One visual from the report has been making the rounds at recent conferences on philanthropy, with organization misfortune in green, “acts of god” or economics in shades of red and orange, and funder-created obstacles in blue taking up nearly half the graph.
“While that blue rectangle is bad news, I also try and look at it from the solutions standpoint, and it’s good news because it means we can fix 46 percent of things that go wrong,” Maya Winkelstein, executive director of Open Road Alliance, told Devex at the Global Philanthropy Forum in Redwood City. “Had it been 46 percent of obstacles are ‘acts of god,’ then you could chalk it up to costs of doing business, but we don’t have to accept these obstacles as the costs of doing business, because it’s in our control.”