Customized Research: A Philanthropic Case Study
For those seeking thought partnership or a taste of The Starfish Institute’s approach, we offer bespoke engagements around a particular challenge, opportunity, or inflection point. These engagements may take the form of coaching, strategic consulting, workshop design and facilitation, and/or custom research.
Case Study: Innovative Funding Models Research
In search of a way to catalyze more meaningful change through their philanthropic efforts, a global technology corporation’s giving arm partnered with The Starfish Institute to investigate multi-stakeholder change efforts and apply learnings to a new model of funding.
The Challenge: The problems that are most important to solve can’t be solved by individual organizations working alone, yet all of our funding in the social impact space flows to individual organizations. This mismatch is a key reason that progress on our most important challenges often stalls. Recognizing this, we conducted research to inform a more innovative, systemic method of funding.
The Result: We investigated multi-stakeholder change efforts from analogous contexts and research from within and outside of philanthropy to find inspiration, best practices, and insight. Interviews with representatives from a wide variety of industries - including apparel, law, technology, and philanthropy - were a central part of the approach. We sought out and engaged interviewees who could describe unique approaches to collaboration, shared funding, and distributed accountability.
These learnings were then applied to the design of prototype funding models that move beyond supporting individual organizations to enable broader systemic change. This model is currently being tested in one of the client’s giving regions.
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