What is a philanthropic adviser, and why is their role growing in aid?

Global wealth has never been higher — nor has giving. In 2025, for the first time, there are more than 3,000 billionaires, with a combined fortune of $16.1 trillion — up roughly $2 trillion in a single year. At the same time, philanthropy in the United States surged to unprecedented levels, with charitable giving peaking in 2024 at $592.5 billion. As fortunes swell, the ultrawealthy are turning to an army of advisers to help guide them as they distribute their funds. Perhaps the best known is Bridgespan Group, sprung from the global consulting firm Bain & Company and famous for helping Mackenzie Scott disburse $9 billion, but there are others — power players such as Arabella Advisors and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, or RPA, in addition to single-shingle outfits that number into the hundreds or even thousands. While the idea of advisers isn’t new, several factors have contributed to their increased influence in recent years, said Peter Frumkin, academic director of the Gradel Institute of Charity at New College, Oxford University. Exploding levels of wealth have given rise to a growing number of donor-advised funds — investment accounts designed to provide instant tax deductions, coupled with the ability to make charitable contributions gradually. DAFs in the United States hold an estimated $252 billion in assets, offering “philanthropic checkbooks,” Frumkin explained, without many of the rules and restrictions faced by foundations. As high concentrations of wealth have grown, the opportunities for advisers have expanded accordingly. At the same time, the philanthropic sector has been undergoing a period of professionalization. Until the 1990s, consulting for nonprofits was conducted in much the same way as it was for corporations. But to those on the front lines, it became clear that simply grafting the tools and processes used for corporate clients onto the social sector wasn’t cutting it. In the years that followed, specialized consulting firms began to proliferate, with Bridgespan, Arabella, and RPA all established within a few years of one another in the early 2000s. “There’s always been a circle of people around donors wanting to provide opinions, expertise, and advice,” said Frumkin. But in the last 10 years, these once casual relationships have become more institutionalized. “It’s not a new invention, but it is getting more systematic and more formal.” What do advisers do, anyway? For the ultrawealthy, an adviser is a sort of financial sherpa — at the highest level, they can help clarify a donor’s mission and goals; at the most granular, they’ll help identify recipient nonprofits and structure funding agreements alongside tax attorneys and estate planners. Jessica Robinson Love, a senior managing director at Arabella, told Devex that the rise of advisers is partly tied to the decreasing popularity of perpetual endowed foundations and the desire of donors to use their funds in nontraditional ways. “When I came into this field 25 years ago, someone who inherited [money] or had a wealth event just put all that money in a foundation and started staffing up,” she said. But in Silicon Valley, where Love focuses and where many of the world’s billionaires are spawned, donors are less interested in hewing to the philanthropic status quo. Concepts such as “philanthrocapitalism” — the idea that market-based solutions can be applied to solving global crises — grew out of the idea that the richest among us are “best placed to save the world,” as Bill Gates put it at Davos in 2008. These same impulses that drive tech titans to “hack” industries such as transportation and personal banking are also being aimed at poverty. A new generation of donors, raised on an ethos of moving fast and breaking things, is less inclined to park their wealth in something as stodgy and resource-intensive as an endowed foundation. That shift away from foundations goes hand in hand with another trend in giving — the move away from grant applications. Historically, the next step after starting a foundation was to publish an application form and a list of eligibility criteria, and wait for nonprofits to ask for money. But nowadays, philanthropists are more likely to proactively select grantees based on independent research. It’s an approach typified by Mackenzie Scott, whose one-time, unrestricted grants have appeared almost like a bolt from the blue for many of her grantees. Here, the role of the philanthropic adviser is absolutely central, because it’s their job to help frame the problem, advise on potential solutions, and ultimately bring a list of potential grantees to the philanthropist’s door. “The best donors know that they don’t have all of the knowledge and all of the answers,” Love explained. “They may not be ready to build out an entire foundation, but they still need guidance. That’s where advisors come in.” In one case, Love described a client who felt that the problem with global philanthropy was simply a lack of knowledge about need. The solution, the donor felt, was to create an app where people from all over the world could log into the platform, share their problem, and connect with donors from there. “It was an ambitious idea,” she said. In response, Arabella launched a feasibility study, and the idea’s shortcomings quickly became apparent. In addition to issues such as language and technology barriers, “we realized that asymmetry of information wasn't actually the problem to solve,” Love said. Instead, Arabella helped the client identify existing organizations already working in key communities that could use support. “The donor went from wanting to create a software platform to actually making grants to organizations that were doing work in-country,” Love said. “That pivot was a result of the way we accompanied them through that learning journey.” Advisers have also been instrumental in assembling what are known as “collaborative funds,” which allow disparate donors to pool their wealth to tackle complex challenges such as climate change or world hunger. The idea is that working together will drive far greater impact than could be achieved individually; in the last ten years alone, more than 300 such organizations have been founded. These funds are “a huge advantage for the sector,” said Priya Shanker, executive director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, since they create cohesion around systemic issues that are much harder to tackle piecemeal. Beyond that, such collectives reduce the likelihood of duplicated efforts, promote information-sharing among participants, and even incentivize higher levels of giving. With advisers at the helm, collaborative funds allow individual philanthropists to do “more than they would if they were left to their own devices, so to speak,” Shanker added. The downside of advisers On the whole, the experts Devex spoke with agreed that the growing presence of advisers in the philanthropic landscape is generally positive. After all, there are worse ways the mega-wealthy can — and do — spend their money. Still, not all consultancies are created equal. As Arabella’s Love explained, there’s no certification process to becoming an adviser, meaning anyone can technically refer to themselves as such. Within the field, there has been much discussion about what sort of standards and ethics should be adhered to—for example, many advisers are former fundraisers, which can create potential conflicts of interest if not transparently addressed. Advisers also need to have an appropriate understanding of the field in which they’re operating. “If you're advising on scientific research, engaging primarily with university professors may be a perfectly appropriate knowledge base,” Love explained. “But if you’re advising on grassroots organizations, having actual relationships and firsthand knowledge is really important.” Bella DeVaan, the associate director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies, cited this lack of expertise as one of the main issues she’s seen with the growing field of advisers. “Sometimes there are real problems in trying to apply these processes honed in the business world, customized to funders, that are ineffective, that are imposing solutions, that aren't favored in a local context, and that ultimately maybe aren't always going to be able to address the problem that they seek to address,” she said. Then there’s the professionalization of philanthropy that advisers represent. Thinking of civil society as a “sector” has an impact on community engagement, said Shanker. Research from Giving USA reports that the number of American households that donate to charity has been in decline for two decades; today, fewer than half of all households make any charitable gifts throughout the year. One survey of more than 2,100 U.S. adults found that, among those who stopped donating, 47% said they decided to do so on the basis that wealthier households should be pulling more weight. And they are. Today, the ultrarich are giving more than ever. But it also means they have an outsized role in setting the agenda that suits them. “What is Big Philanthropy’s impact on civic life? And by extension, what is the role that these consulting and advisory firms are having in sort of pushing us towards big-ticket philanthropy and not everyday giving?” Shanker asked. “When people feel like [their] $10 doesn’t really do much, they become more disengaged with what is happening in the communities.” The fact is, however, that wealth is simply concentrated in fewer hands than it used to be. As long as that’s the case, advisers will likely continue to have a powerful presence in the philanthropic ecosystem. “I don’t see them going anywhere anytime soon,” Shanker said. “Increasingly, people want to do more, and quickly. I think advisors are a great way to do that.”