From Paper to Practice: Key Lessons for Foundations Deploying Complex Strategies

As the philanthropic field continues to explore ways to increase impact and improve outcomes, more attention has focused on models that prioritize supporting grantee cohorts and collaborative efforts with shared intent over individual grantees and isolated projects. Public policy grantmaking, field-building, collective impact and public willbuilding all offer ready examples of these kinds of complex models and approaches.While each of these models and approaches has their own nuances, they have many commonalities in how they are planned and implemented. This report explores those commonalities through the lens of one foundation's experience in implementing a complex, multi-year public will-building strategy, and what that experience suggests be in place for effective implementation. The findings highlighted in this report are specifically intended for staff of foundations and other organizations interested in learning about the deployment of strategies that rely on building a cohort of established organizations to pursue a shared intent.