Thomas J. Tierney

A decade ago, Thomas J. Tierney left Bain & Company to cofound The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit focused on helping donors and nonprofit leaders to develop and execute strategies to accelerate social change. In Give Smart , Tierney pools his hands-on knowledge with Duke professor Joel L. Fleishman's expertise to create a much-needed primer for philanthropists and the nonprofit organizations they support. Drawing from personal experiences, research spanning twentieth- and twenty-first-century philanthropy, contemporary interviews, and Bridgespan's extensive field work, Give Smart presents the definitive guide to engaged philanthropy.

Scarce resources (both money and time) are routinely wasted in the critical linkage between donor and grantee. As a consequence, our communities—the causes and constituents we are trying to serve—are being unnecessarily shortchanged. What’s needed is more effective donor-grantee collaboration, so that philanthropists and the nonprofit organizations they support can get the absolute most from every scarce dollar they invest. Reduced to the essentials, there are three imperatives of true collaboration—for which both donors and grantees must share responsibility. They Resource it Make sure that the grantee has what it takes to get the job done. Pursue Develop shared goals and a productive working relationship (which demands a certain level of strategic clarity and a reasonable “cost-of-capital” burden on the grantee). Get Better Create the necessary conditions for learning and continuous improvement. These imperatives appear simple; experience has shown, however, that following them almost always requires confronting—and overcoming—some deeply ingrained dynamics, assumptions, and behaviors. The Donor-Grantee Trap details each imperative in turn. It is written for nonprofit executives, their boards, and their major donors. Based upon and excerpted from the book Give Philanthropy That Gets Results, by Thomas J. Tierney and Joel L. Fleishman, it is also supplemented with content from several related Bridgespan articles, which reflect The Bridgespan Group’s extensive field experience working with both donors and their grantees.