Description

From September 2007 to April 2008, the Center for High Impact Philanthropy conducted a series of structured interviews to determine how high net worth individual philanthropists (defined by the Center as having the capacity to give $1 million per year) make decisions about giving. What we found were a set of diverse and evolving practices, a predominant reliance on peers for information, a narrow and negative view of evaluation (despite a strong desire to make a difference), and difficulty with exiting established relationships with nonprofits, perhaps because the transaction costs of “breaking up” seem too high. To our surprise, we also found that nearly a third of the study participants do not think of themselves as “philanthropists,” despite giving an average of nearly $1 million annually.