As I announced in April, during the Monitor Future of Philanthropy workshop, the attendees broke into small groups to rapidly prototype an innovation that could help propel some of the themes discussed in the workshop. The group that I was a part of ended up winning the prize for best innovation. My group thought that we’d keep running with our idea and continue to build it on the fly. This has lead to the creation of the Smart Money Award.
The informal group behind this effort is now looking for nominations. Please use the nomination form to submit your suggestions.
The Smart Money Award is about bringing recognition and praise to funders who are willing to embrace the idea that sometimes, in order to maximize your impact, it is best to “follow what works.” The award celebrates funders that decide to lead by following the good work of others, helping to scale up or replicate an already proven initiative developed by someone else. We hope to remove any stigma associated with the concept of following, and instead highlight how it can be a powerful “next practice” in philanthropy.
“Smart Money” and “Following” are concepts I believe are powerful, but missing, elements in philanthropy. I blogged about my view on these concepts in a post titled Signaling, Smart Money & Philanthropy.
At the workshop, we awarded the first Smart Money Award to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for their $16 million grant to support a project of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund. Commenting on the grant at the time it was made, Kellogg president Sterling Speirn said he “saw no reason to start from scratch when a good approach to advocacy and education was already in place.”
In announcing the award at the workshop, we gave the certificate pictured above and a check for $50 to Kellogg vice president Anne Mosle who explained the rationale behind the grant saying “we don’t believe we have to lead everything.”
Now obviously we had fun with this. But we are quite serious about the award.
Our goal is to announce the next award on June 26, the anniversary of the announcement of Warren Buffett’s 2006 gift of over $31 billion to the Gates Foundation—perhaps the largest act of philanthropic “followership” ever made.
I’ll keep you updated on this project as we move forward. Keep in mind that this was something that we hatched in about 45 minutes in a group of people who for the most part didn’t know each other. But the audience members at the Monitor workshop did chip in another $50 (!) to fund our next award. So we’ll keep operating under the assumption that we’ll find what we need along the way and see what happens!
The informal working group designing the Smart Money Award:
- Noah Flower, Monitor Institute
- Lance Fors, Silicon Valley Venture Fund
- John Hecklinger, GlobalGiving
- Bob Hughes, Robert Hughes Consulting
- Gabriel Kasper, Monitor Institute
- Barbara Kibbe, Monitor Institute
- Eugene Eric Kim, Blue Oxen Associates
- Mayur Patel, Knight Foundation
- Diane Sanchez, East Bay Community Foundation
- Sean Stannard-Stockton, Tactical Philanthropy
- Kelvin Taketa, Hawaii Community Foundation
- Edward Wexler-Beron, Monitor Institute