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| Best Practices |
Fortifying Foundations
Darlene Siska
08/02/2004
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TOP VIEW
A plethora of consultants, banks and other professional services firms offer our
foundations aid for everything from routine bookkeeping to evaluating grants
and strategy. Whether outsourcing some of our foundation’s administration makes
sense for us depends on the firm’s skills, and the extent to which we want to
delegate some of the less inspiring aspects of our philanthropic pursuits. |
We should then
look at the potential savings in both money and time, Phillips advises. If we
operate from our own office, we have to manage a facility, set compensation for
staff and family members and manage our employees. If these often-mundane tasks
overwhelm us to the point of dulling our interest in our philanthropic pursuits,
it may make sense to outsource one or more.
What we want from an outsourcing
firm is often determined by where we are in our foundation’s life cycle. “We
find foundations come to GMA when they are just getting started because they
want help putting things like governance in place; then they go off and [work]
on their own,” Phillips says. “They need a few years before they come back and
say, ‘We’re not having any fun.’”
That is when the consultants step in;
competent firms can help the foundations evaluate the impact of their grant
making, create a new grant-making program or resolve other challenges that have
drained the enterprise of its fun.
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