Why would a donor seek a high level of engagement with a recipient organization, rather than simply maintain a more traditional and distanced philanthropic relationship?

The high engagement donor may want to get involved because they are reaching for the highest rung on Maimonides’ ladder: helping others to help themselves and gain independence. Or they may seek a high level of engagement simply because they believe that they know better than others how to manage a project, even if they lack the specialized training and experience of the leaders within the recipient organization.

This impulse to micromanage and meddle can be a product of years of managerial work in the business sector, which may have led to substantial wealth creation and success. It is often just a small—though sometimes unwise—leap to assume that these patterns will lead to success in philanthropy. It is also possible that the drive to engagement can be related to vanity, overblown self-confidence, or a desire to impose their will on others.

On the other extreme, an increasingly smaller number of donors are happy to withdraw from the grantmaking process and to let recipient organizations do their work as they see fit. Such deference may stem from a recognition that in many cases it is the nonprofit that truly understands the problem at hand. It can also be the painful result of experience in attempting to be highly engaged, leading only to the recognition that nonprofit managers prefer to have plenty of leeway in how they operate their programs.

There are other reasons to resist jumping too quickly into the philanthropic fray. Low engagement has been justified in the name of professional detachment and as a necessity for maintaining objectivity. It is also far easier and less time demanding to limit the scope of the giving relationship to pre and post grant evaluation, rather than to expect the donor to take partial responsibility for the execution of a program or for the recipient organization’s performance. In fact, the more engaged a donor is with a project the harder it may be to exit or terminate the relationship, if the facts so dictate.

Engagement can muddy the philanthropic waters by placing the donor into the program that is being funded, a position from which it is hard to render tough and objective judgments about quality and impact. For this reason, there are cases in which donors need to actively resist the temptation to throw themselves into the fray and get their hands dirty.