Practicing strategic philanthropy: Notes from the field

Abstract

Strategic philanthropy is a field that has yet to tangibly apply Porter and Kramer’s (2002; 1999) original concepts. In line with Kubickova’s (2018) review of the field, this short paper seeks to fill a gap on the ‘how’ of measuring impact and applying strategy frameworks and tools to better managerial decision making. Action research was applied to answering two questions, following a five-week retrospective on synthesizing a framework to do just this for a grantmaker in Singapore. Application always precedes measurement, but adaptation needs to be made to the frameworks and tools. A competitive position and capabilities for ‘outside-in’ strategy is operationalized through issue-based dynamic capabilities and investment, as well as ongoing boundary critique on focus issues (where meaning is transverse on multiple planes). By comparison, the value chain in ‘inside-out’ strategy requires a synthesis with process-based approach to horizontal flow (where analyses on demand and attribution are bi-directional due to the nature of public goods). Saliently, the measurement inherent in cost accounting has a unique function of recombining both ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ strategies for an integrated approach and a cogent framework to embed in organizations. Scholar-practitioners would well benefit from mining the under-researched links between strategic management, systems thinking, and action research, where there has been theoretical exploration in the past five years. This is especially so for a field where meaning, horizontals, and systems in value creation cannot be divorced from what Laudal (2019) terms the utility, supply, and conversion of public goods in his novel analysis.