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Practice IV — Philanthropy Advisory
The what is far more common than the how.
Funders have made the commitments — trust-based philanthropy, flexible funding, localisation, diversified decision-making. We work on the part that is harder to see: the budgets, workflows and operational systems that decide whether any of it is real.
The practice
The bureaucratic how
Philanthropy talks about grant-making and programmes. It looks far less closely at finance, compliance, human resources and investments — the operational systems where power is actually held or released.
Our research is deliberately positioned there. We study the everyday organisational dynamics, workflows and decision processes that underpin which commitments get pursued, on whose terms, and to what end — then advise on the changes that would make a declaration operational. We also bring quantitative rigour to allocation: testing theories of change before they are funded, and pricing demand the way a commercial team would.
Who we work with
Private foundations Intermediary funds Donor advisory consortia Corporate philanthropic programmes Product-development partnershipsWhat we do
Four lines of work
Power mapping & institutional research
Mapping how power is held, shifted or reinforced inside funding institutions — across budgets, human resources, transparency, and diversity in leadership and decision-making — using confidential interviews with staff, leadership and advisors.
Intelligence for giving
Advisory support for foundations and corporate philanthropic strategies — prioritising causes on quantitative impact rather than salience, and testing theories of change before they are funded.
Market intelligence
Willingness-to-pay surveys and market research for modular diagnostics and health products — including Lassa fever and Nipah virus — in collaboration with partners such as IQVIA and CEPI.
Strategic prioritisation
Helping donors navigate the humanitarian financing gap by identifying high-leverage interventions across West African health systems, with transparent unit economics and modular programme tiering.
Signature research
The Power Shifting Shuffle
Mapping power dynamics and practices inside human rights philanthropy. Twenty-five interviews with philanthropic staff, leadership and advisors across seventeen organisations, commissioned by the Fund for Global Human Rights.
Anna Levy and Nonso Jideofor · February 2025
The guiding question. Fifteen dynamics, dilemmas and processes were distilled from the research — a selection below.
- The what outruns the how. Power-shifting practices were adopted at some level across every organisation studied, clustered in four areas — trust-based philanthropy, flexible funding, localisation, and diversifying leadership. How internal planning, operations and monitoring adjusted to support them varied widely.
- Operational teams are the real infrastructure. Programme and grantee-facing teams are seen as the frontliners, but finance, HR and communications are central to building — or slowing — the operational infrastructure that makes commitments real.
- New practices collide with old ones. A common example: publicising highly flexible reporting for existing grantees while retaining invite-only processes for new ones.
- Decision-makers are not aligned. Two-thirds of interviewees described staff, leadership, donors and boards as holding vastly different understandings of power shifting within the same organisation.
- Internal dynamics stay unspoken. Funder–grantee power is discussed openly; interpersonal power inside organisations — race, gender, nationality, class in leadership–staff exchanges — much less so.
- Localisation carries two traps. Reducing it to nationality in ways that privilege elites, and channelling funds through intermediaries in ways that outsource rather than shift power.
- Crisis is when infrastructure gets built. Moments of crisis are precisely when the speed of decision-making, disruption of norms and openness to innovation are highest.
Why it sits inside a delivery studio
Advice from people who implement
- We see the last mile. The health security practice runs the border systems that preparedness money is supposed to buy. That feedback loop is not available to advisory-only firms.
- We see the recipient side. The social and economic justice practice works with the organisations and movements downstream of funding decisions — including those screened out.
- We publish the method. Every engagement is structured to generate defensible evidence and a knowledge product, not a private deck that dies at the board meeting.
Evidence & partners
Selected work
The Power Shifting Shuffle
Commissioned by the Fund for Global Human Rights — an intermediary fund that has partnered with or funded human rights movements and defenders in more than 80 countries.
Lassa & Nipah WTP research
Willingness-to-pay and market-sizing research for modular diagnostics, conducted with IQVIA and CEPI to inform product-development investment cases.
Donor landscape mapping
Continuous mapping of funder priorities across CEPI, the Gates Foundation, the Global Fund, the Pandemic Fund and the World Bank — matched to programme design.
Work with this practice
Test the strategy before you fund it
Most engagements start with a power mapping, a prioritisation review, or a theory-of-change stress test — scoped in weeks, not quarters.
Request a scoping call Read The Power Shifting ShuffleElsewhere at Present Lab
Four practices. One method.
Each practice runs its own team, partners and body of evidence — sharing only the studio’s methodological spine.