How to Think About Giving in a Crisis

Four methods for impactful giving, and how to prioritize them.

By Caroline Barlerin

People often ask my advice about the most effective ways to give. My usual answer is: it depends! It depends on your goals, it depends on your resources. Even during the COVID crisis, “it depends” was still my honest answer.

However, I found that folks were looking for something more concrete when we were in the middle of a real crisis. So that’s what this two-part series will cover. First is an overview about how we think about giving broadly and what it means during a global pandemic. Part 2 will be focused specifically on financial giving.

How to Think About Giving

Generally, giving can be impactful by doing one of four things: providing direct services, enacting policy change, driving systems change, or seeding innovation.

Providing Direct Services is the most self-explanatory: Here impact is created through—you guessed it—directly providing a necessary service to the community. An example would be donating cash to a food bank so they can continue providing meals at a time when the number of food insecure people has suddenly spiked (such as during the COVID crisis).

Enacting Policy Change can include lobbying for specific legislation or executive actions as well as supporting particular candidates or ballot initiatives. An example is spending your time to call your representatives in support of emergency measures you want to see, or donating to a political candidate whose leadership or policies you think will help us recover from an emergency.

Driving Systems Change is perhaps the most ambiguous. It means changing the underlying structures and dynamics that are creating or exacerbating these problems. An example could be supporting organizations that strengthen small-business associations to be ready for rebuilding cities post-crisis, one storefront and block at a time.

Seeding Innovation refers to investments in developing new technology to address the societal needs. A COVID-19 example would be donating toward research and development of new vaccines and treatments for the virus.

“Once you know what matters most, you can think about where you have most leverage. ”

These categories are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes policy change is needed for systems change. Sometimes systems change is needed for innovation to be brought to scale. Specific organizations may be involved in just one or in many of these types of impact.

Okay, okay I get it. But how should I prioritize where to give?
Just as there is no one right way to give, there’s no one right way to prioritize. It will always depend on what kind of impact you are trying to have and what you are able to give. That said, we can still apply a framework to this decision, and the one I like to use is to consider both proximity and leverage.

High Proximity, High Leverage opportunities should be prioritized.

First, consider proximity. Prioritizing proximity means, whenever possible, helping those in your own community first. You can choose to define community in a literal sense—people in your local community. Or, you can think about community in a more ideological sense—a community of kindred spirits who may or may not be geographically close to you.

Thinking about proximity will help you figure out what matters most to you. Once you know what matters most, you can think about where you have most leverage. When I talk about leverage in this context, I’m asking you to think about where you can have the greatest impact with the same contribution—whether that contribution is financial, skills-based, or in-kind.

To better understand leverage requires us to look in more detail at these different types of giving. And there is, of course, an additional element to consider in all of this, which we haven’t talked about: time.

We will explore all of this in more depth in Part 2!