Q&A: Inside the Gates foundation's 5-year effort to engage everyday givers

SAN FRANCISCO — Victoria Vrana, deputy director of the philanthropic partnerships team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, last visited headquarters on March 4. That was the day the office closed, as COVID-19 spread in Seattle, Washington — and globally. The Gates foundation has directed most of its resources to the pandemic, and since Vrana returned to her base in Washington, D.C., she has been working with the philanthropic partnerships team to respond to the crisis. On May 5, the Gates foundation launched PowerOf, an online platform that connects individuals with opportunities to support organizations that are addressing the impacts of COVID-19. Last week, GlobalGiving, which partners with nonprofits in 170 countries and connects them with donors, joined other Gates foundation grantees, including Candid, DonorsChoose, GivingTuesday, and VolunteerMatch, to fill the platform with more opportunities to donate and volunteer. The initiative was launched in response to the pandemic, but it builds on five years of work under a Gates initiative called Giving By All. The effort focuses on everyday givers, as compared to high net worth individuals, or the billionaires that are the focus of the Giving Pledge. Vrana spoke with Devex about the launch of PowerOf, and how it connects with the foundation’s goal of supporting better giving. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You lead the Giving By All initiative, as well as the Gates foundation’s support of the charitable giving ecosystem. Can you expand on how those two areas of work came together into one strategy? Five years ago, when we created the Philanthropic Partnerships Team, we had three teams at the foundation actually merge together. There was the Giving Pledge team, another team working with donors, and a team we called the Charitable Sector Support team. When those three teams came together, we stepped back to say: What do we do that we want to keep doing, and what gaps might we fill that we’re not filling? “We see PowerOf as an aggregator, as a way to pull in all the great partners that are there, and present a way for donors to give time and money — something you can’t do on other platforms right now. The intention is to aggregate and to amplify.” --— Victoria Vrana, deputy director of the philanthropic partnerships team, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation The everyday donors are such a huge part of the giving ecosystem for nonprofits, and they provide incredibly unique support. It’s almost all general operating support, there’s no strings attached, you’re mobilizing supporters often as well as donors. It’s just such an important piece of the ecosystem and we decided we wanted to see if there was anything we could do to help the space. The Giving By All program was created five years ago to test and see whether the Gates foundation could play a role in really encouraging and celebrating everyday giving. We had been giving grants for a long time in the sector ecosystem space, but the everyday giving space was really new. So we went into it as a learning initiative. Can we do this? Should we do this? How should we do this? Can you expand on how the strategy has taken shape? After the first three years of learning, we’re now in our second phase. We’re funding in four areas. We fund research on donor behavior and the market itself. We’re funding innovation — really working with partners to develop concepts and prototypes and pilots — not investing in building a new platform, but in bringing new ideas to the giving sector. The third piece, and we only have a couple investments in this space, is investing in launching a feature or product that could go to scale — and usually, that’s something that could work across multiple platforms or giving channels. Then the fourth area is we’ve really been convening the field, bringing people together, sharing knowledge. We have a newsletter. We’ve had two summits. There are a lot of gaps in our market, a lot of disconnects, so we’ve been bringing together those silos and we’ve seen some great partnerships form out of that. It sounds like COVID-19 was a catalyst for you to launch the PowerOf platform. How did that take shape? We quickly became the center of all of these inbound requests and offers around giving. We were able to quickly see some gaps and opportunities in the everyday giving space. We were checking in with all our grantees. In this amazing outpouring of generosity, there were some real gaps in getting that where it needed to go, both for everyday donors and high net worth donors. That was when we began to think there was an opportunity to do something more here. Our approach has always been to work with existing platforms and players. We never have had intentions to build a public grassroots giving platform. And we still don’t. We see PowerOf as an aggregator, as a way to pull in all the great partners that are there, and present a way for donors to give time and money — something you can’t do on other platforms right now. The intention is to aggregate and to amplify. “It’s so inspiring to see this need to collaborate and this desire, because it’s not always there.” --— You’ve worked together with grantees to launch PowerOf. Candid, DonorsChoose, GivingTuesday, VolunteerMatch, and most recently GlobalGiving are filling the platform with opportunities to donate and volunteer. What has this time been like for your partners, and what opportunities and challenges do you think they will face moving forward? For most of our partners, everything is sort of amped up. I anticipate online giving increasing a lot in a way that hopefully will stick for the sector going forward, but despite some incredible increases right now, I do think individual giving will decline. History has shown that in times of economic turmoil. That’s part of why I think volunteering is so important, and I’d love to see micro giving opportunities out of the sector. I do think if we give donors the opportunity to give one dollar, five dollars, to round up change, to keep giving even if it’s not at their usual level, I think that would engage people a lot. This market is very siloed, and there are lots of individual organizations and platforms and different channels for giving, and so it’s a challenge to connect up those players and connect up those gaps. I’m hoping that’s a challenge that PowerOf meets. A challenge we’re wrestling with that I’m hoping we’ll solve soon is the taxonomy. The way that nonprofit data is collected and classified is not the way the donor thinks and the way the donor wants to give. If someone says I want to give in support of personal protective equipment, on the backend, the data isn’t built to respond to that need. So we’re working on that. Your team is also working on a separate website to drive more giving from high net worth individuals as compared to everyday givers. Can you give us a preview of that work? It’s just a need we’re seeing. We’re part of a number of donor conversations and collaboratives and working groups, and we’re seeing donors coordinate by email, by Slack, by Google Docs. It’s so inspiring to see this need to collaborate and this desire, because it’s not always there. And so you see this incredible interest and people relying on each other’s expertise and due diligence and learning from one another, but the tools are really inadequate. So we are exploring if there’s a way to fill that gap. But we haven’t made any decisions yet about how to move forward on that. Is this just kind of behavior in the midst of an emergency that will diminish over time, or is it behavior that can be learned and strengthened and built during an emergency that will carry through in the future? I don’t think we know the answer to that yet but we’re excited to find out.