A Permanent Philanthropic Change?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Organizational Project Management  

According to Candid.org, $11.9 billion of philanthropic funds were donated to coronavirus-related causes in the first half of 2020. And remember that the full effect of the pandemic wasn’t being felt until March, so the rate of donation was even bigger than it appears from that headline statistic.

This amount is massively bigger than donations to any other disaster, and other reports have suggested that those donations have appeared faster and with fewer strings attached than is normal for large-scale philanthropic contributions.

Maybe this is just a blip, a reflection of the unprecedented situation and the need for large-scale funds to fuel research into treatments and vaccines. But I have to believe that at least some of the changes happening within philanthropic organizations and among corporate donors are here to stay.

In particular, I suspect there is going to be a permanent shift in the requirements for funds to be released and for expenditures to be reported. Once conditions have been loosened, as has been the case around COVID-19, it is very difficult to get that genie back in the bottle.

There are a number of implications of that. Donors imposed restrictions on grants and donations—or tied the release of funds to certain conditions being met—because they wanted to try and ensure their contributions were achieving their intended purpose. …

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