"Philanthropy’s Success Stories"

I see impressive choices of causes and organizations; I don’t see impressive “tactics,” i.e., choices of projects or theories of change. This may simply be a reflection of the Casebook’s choice of approach and focus. There are many cases in which I found myself agreeing with the Casebook that a foundation had chosen an important and overlooked problem to put its money toward, but few (if any) cases where its strategy within the sector seemed particularly intricate, clever, noteworthy or crucial to its success. The spreadsheet above categorizes grants both by “sector” and by “type of grantmaking”; there is a surprising (to me) amount of variety when it comes to the former, and not as much when it comes to the latter. My intuition is that the choice of sector is the most important choice a funder makes.