Our Vision

Too many nonprofits are overly reliant on ad hoc fundraising strategies that leave them with lopsided funding streams. As a result, the nonprofits with the most direct contact to people in need often struggle to maintain the predictable, unrestricted funding streams they need.
This is especially true of smaller and BIPOC-led nonprofits. Black-led nonprofits have ­– on average – 76% less unrestricted revenue than those with white leaders, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The consequence: BIPOC-led and small to midsize nonprofits are too often caught in a cycle where they can’t adequately invest in taking their work to scale, instead relegated to one-off funding with innumerable strings attached.
In addition, philanthropy has been slow to offer significant support for story-based marketing, denying what the for-profit sector has long understood: marketing is essential to growing business by more than one customer at a time.
Beyond creating a vital path to revenue for the nonprofits involved, The Giving List seeks to solve a much larger problem in the social sector: helping nonprofits simultaneously activate a critical mass of high capacity institutional and individual donors. In so doing we aim to create the predictable, unrestricted and diverse funding streams vital, vetted nonprofits need to do their critical work.
Our goal in launching The Giving List effort is to foment a sector-wide transformation wherein story-based marketing becomes standard practice for nonprofits and is seen as a core function funded by philanthropy. The ultimate intended result being that nonprofits spend less time fundraising and more time doing the essential work demanded of them.