Measuring Our Success as Philanthropists

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Giving 2.0: The MOOC

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Stanford University

Giving 2.0: The MOOC

109 ratings

A philanthropist is anyone who gives anything — time, money, experience, skills, and networks — in any amount, to create a better world. This course will empower you to practice philanthropy more effectively and make your giving more meaningful to both you and those you strive to help. Giving 2.0: The MOOC, is a Stanford University-sponsored online course intended to teach givers of all ages, backgrounds, incomes and experiences to give more effectively. Taught by social entrepreneur, philanthropist and bestselling author Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, Giving 2.0: The MOOC will teach you how to assess nonprofits, create a high-impact philanthropic strategy, volunteer more effectively, use existing, free technology for good and more. Giving 2.0: The MOOC is a six-module course. Each module has a particular theme and 5-10 content-packed and activity-rich, videos exploring that theme. Videos will include lectures from Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen as well as interviews, discussions and lectures given by guest speakers. Guest speakers are renowned leaders in multiple industries including philanthropy, technology and business, who will provide unique insights into course topics. Course participants will have the opportunity to join Talkabouts – small virtual meeting groups created to discuss class-related topics. By the course’s conclusion, course participants will have created an Individual Giving Action Plan to guide their future giving in a highly effective and meaningful way. Course participants will also complete a formal nonprofit assessment and be provided with ongoing, post-MOOC philanthropy education content that will support continued development and execution of their philanthropic goals.

From the lesson

Philanthropy – the Never-Ending Gift

Learners will take stock of their progress over the course and learn how to stay connected with the course content and their fellow course participants moving forward.

Measuring Our Success as Philanthropists6:18

Meet the Instructors

Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

Congratulations!

You have made it to the last week of our course.

In our final week together, we will discuss learning opportunities beyond

this MOOC, so that you can keep innovating in your philanthropic practices.

But before we get ahead of ourselves,

let's return to what our giving is all about.

The social change each of us aspires to create.

As individual givers, we must consistently check in to confirm

that we are being accountable to ourselves, and

to those whose lives we aspire to transform.

We have to ask ourselves, how do we measure our success as philanthropists?

Complex challenges, a variety of stakeholders, and

often dramatically extended time horizons for completing our philanthropic work,

make the process of assessing our impact quite difficult.

That said, difficulty is not an excuse.

We must be vigilant in setting short, intermediate and

long term indicators for success.

And we must constantly be measuring our progress along the way.

Evaluation should be baked into our approach from the very beginning,

and ideally the nonprofits we fund, do so as well.

Just as we should maintain internal metrics for

our success, based upon our own philanthropic goals.

Ideally we fund non-profits that have organization or give specific goals

that are born out of a conversation with the non-profits that we hope to serve.

If your funding level is not significant to a nonprofit's annual budget,

which, by the way is in no way an indication of it not being

significant to the people that the non-profit aspires to serve.

Because if a gift is significant to you, it will be significant to somebody else.

But if your funding level, just to reiterate,

isn't significant to an annual budget of a nonprofit, and a nonprofit

can answer the questions we've discussed earlier in the course of how many,

how deeply, how much, then I highly recommend designating your investments for

either general operating, or for capacity building purposes.

By attempting to measure success, we will have something tangible

that we can use as a jumping off point to iterate and improve our strategy later on.

With the Learning by Giving Foundation grants that we are making through this

course, we encourage students to revisit our Coursera page,

or my foundation's website, laaf.org, where we will

post updates about the organizations that you have chosen to fund.

While there is certainly a significant strategic component of measuring one's

success as a philanthropist, in terms of the issues on which you focus,

there's generally value in most of the work that all philanthropist's do.

Whether you focus on curbing climate change,

improving educational outcomes, or funding medical research; there

are plenty of problems worthy of our time and attention.

The onus, however,

is on you to reflect deeply about the change that you wish to create.

And how that change is possible within the scope of your specific resource portfolio.

Well, everyone can be a philanthropist because

everyone has something valuable to give.

Becoming an effective philanthropist requires

an evaluation strategy, self critique, patience,

as well as an openness to both iteration and innovation.

Now this may seem like a daunting task for

anyone at the beginning of their philanthropic journey, or for that matter,

at any stage of their philanthropic journey.

With the resources of this course, and those outline in subsequent videos,

I have no doubt in my mind that your generosity

will translate into something extraordinary.

In the spirit of my own ongoing philanthropic learning, and

to give you a chance to reflect on your philanthropy for the last six weeks.

I am asking you, with the utmost respect, for your time.

But will you please submit a post course survey.

So that I will have the critical information that is necessary for

me to revise and improve this course for

new cohorts of lifelong learners in giving going forward.

I want to understand what worked for you, what didn't work for

you, what are your ideas about what you loved, and

what are your ideas about how I can improve this course going forward.

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