The Bridgespan Group is a global nonprofit organisation that advises philanthropists, foundations and social-sector organisations on achieving social impact. Drawing on more than 20 years of work with donors and foundations, Bridgespan has developed an equity-oriented approach to due diligence that challenges funders to “trust, not prove”: using assessment to understand an organisation’s strengths and build trust, rather than requiring it to prove its worth through increasingly burdensome evidence.
Bridgespan acknowledges that its own earlier emphasis on programme measurement and a narrow definition of “what works” risked overlooking movements, advocacy organisations and groups without the resources to commission extensive impact studies. These disadvantages begin before formal assessment. Bridgespan’s research into grants of $10 million or more found that 42% went to organisations led by graduates of Ivy League universities, illustrating how reliance on established networks and conventional markers of credibility can concentrate funding among organisations already close to institutional power. Application processes can reproduce this inequality by advantaging organisations with sufficient staff time, fundraising capacity and specialist expertise to navigate lengthy applications. In one open call examined by Bridgespan, applicants spent more than 30 hours completing a ten-page application, although fewer than 5% ultimately received funding. This burden falls especially heavily on smaller and historically underfunded organisations, which must divert scarce capacity from delivering their work, while better-resourced organisations are more able to absorb the cost and present the forms of evidence funders expect.
Bridgespan’s alternative is an asset-based approach that begins by identifying an organisation’s distinctive strengths, community relationships and potential. Instead of asking whether a perceived weakness should disqualify an applicant, funders are encouraged to ask what support the organisation would need to achieve its goals. Assessment should combine appropriate quantitative evidence with respectful conversations, community knowledge and an understanding of the organisation’s context. Bridgespan also recommends reducing the “tax” placed on applicants by using light-touch diligence for smaller grants, making initial unrestricted learning grants, and compensating organisations that reach the later stages of an intensive assessment process.
The Lewis Prize for Music demonstrates what this can mean in practice. Through its assessment process, the funder awarded two organisations $500,000 each even though neither had any full-time staff at the time. Site visits revealed strong communities of people working in solidarity towards a shared purpose. Rather than interpreting the absence of paid staff as evidence that the organisations lacked capacity, the Lewis Prize concluded that the principal resource missing was funding. Bridgespan uses the example to show how due diligence can recognise forms of organisational strength that conventional measures of staffing, income and infrastructure routinely miss.
What practitioners can take from this
Replace the question “Is this weakness a reason not to fund?” with “What support would enable this organisation to succeed?” and “What are the organisation’s distinctive strengths beyond conventional forms of measurement?” That single change turns due diligence from a search for grounds to reject an organisation into an assessment of whether funding can address the very constraint the process has uncovered.