How Families Can Build an Intentional Philanthropy Strategy, Instead of Giving Reactively

For those with significant wealth, including families with long-term philanthropic ambitions, charitable giving can quickly become reactive: A request arrives from a charity. A friend recommends a cause. A family member becomes passionate about an issue. An organization approaches with a compelling proposal.

In some cases, it might start to feel as though there is always another giving opportunity to consider.

When individual requests begin to determine where a family’s wealth goes, it can become difficult to see the bigger picture. Families wishing to make a long-lasting impact may need to take a step back and create a more intentional, strategic plan for giving.

London TIGER 21 Chair Brian Pohl, points to a question that often comes up in the Groups he runs: “What is the wealth for?” The answer can be just as important when considering philanthropy as it is when thinking about investment, family governance, or succession.

Along these lines, a true philanthropy strategy is not simply a list of causes, organizations, and grants, or even a one-off declaration of intent. Instead, it can be a set of values a family returns to as its giving evolves. This way, a family can keep returning to what its wealth is intended to achieve and make decisions accordingly.

With a view toward developing a successful strategy, the considerations below can help a family better understand its circumstances, priorities, and ambitions.

Purpose: What Is the Family Wealth For?

Before deciding where to give, families with significant wealth can start by asking why they give at all. The answer will be different for every family. Philanthropy might be about addressing a particular social or environmental issue, supporting a community, expressing gratitude, creating something that lasts, involving the Next Gen, or putting family values into practice.

The important distinction is between having a single cause and having a philosophy. A family may care deeply about education, for example, but still need to decide what it hopes its giving will achieve and what role it wants to play. Explore more on how philanthropy can clarify family purpose and values.

Questions about philanthropic vehicles, organizations, or individual grants can come later. It’s most important to put the question of what the family wants its wealth to do first.

Priorities: What Matters Most to Your Family?

Once purpose is clear, families with significant wealth can examine their priorities, which are shaped by factors such as a family’s experiences, values, geography, businesses, and communities.

Peer learning groups can offer a useful space to get perspective on these priorities. Discussions with others who have faced similar questions around their giving strategies can offer opportunities to test hypotheses, challenge assumptions, and gather insight.

Even within a family, priorities may vary. Different generations may have different ideas about which problems deserve attention or which approaches are most effective.

Conversations about philanthropy can make those differences visible—and create an opportunity to understand where values overlap, where they diverge, and how to act from common ground.

The result can provide a shared sense of what the family wants its philanthropy to represent.

Giving Opportunities: A Streamlined Approach to Decision-Making

Once a family has established what matters, individual giving requests become easier to assess. A compelling proposal from a charity does not automatically become the right opportunity. Instead, the family can ask whether it fits the agreed purpose and priorities.

This provides discipline without eliminating flexibility. Families may decide to support an unexpected opportunity because it is closely aligned with their purpose. Equally, they may decline a worthy request because it falls outside their chosen focus.

This framework creates a point of reference, a template for requests to be judged against. The result is a more streamlined giving process, instead of a series of one-off decisions the family has to make every time a giving opportunity presents itself.

Philanthropy Governance: Who Decides, and How?

An effective philanthropy strategy doesn’t necessarily require a complicated governance structure. The right approach will depend on the family, its size, the generations involved, and the scale and complexity of its philanthropy.

What matters is clarity around:

• Who has a voice?
• Who makes the final decision?
• Which decisions are shared and which can be made individually?
• When should the Next Gen be involved?
• How are disagreements handled?

These questions become particularly important when philanthropy moves from an individual activity to a family one.

Family meetings can provide a forum for making these conversations intentional.

When Does the Next Gen Join the Conversation?

For some families, involvement in family philanthropy begins simply: with conversations about values and the reasons behind existing giving. For others, younger family members may gradually take responsibility for researching causes, assessing organizations, or making decisions over part of the giving.

Early involvement can develop judgment, a topic more important than ever ahead of the coming Great Wealth Transfer. These discussions can make philanthropy part of a wider conversation about family purpose, values, and stewardship, rather than simply another activity associated with wealth.

Outside Expertise: When Should a Family Bring in Specialists?

Philanthropy can involve legal, tax, investment, governance, and operational questions that require specialist expertise. Bringing in outside advisors can help families better understand all their options as they structure their giving in alignment with their strategy and goals.

As it did for decisions around giving opportunities, the family purpose can act as a north star to make final decisions based on advisors’ recommendations.

Succession: What’s Next for the Family Giving Philosophy?

As family leadership changes hands, questions may arise as to what’s next for the family’s philanthropic goals and strategy.

• For some families, the answer is continuity. Philanthropic purpose can transfer across generations, with Next Gen members taking increasing responsibility in continuing to execute the family’s shared vision.
• Other families may give their next-generation family members the flexibility to meaningfully shape the family’s giving philosophy.

These are personal decisions, ones that every family will approach differently. However, if a family with significant wealth wants its giving to continue, it needs to consider not only what it wants to achieve but also who will carry that intention forward. If it wants to give future generations the flexibility to act as they see fit, they need to make those intentions clear, to prevent friction down the line.

Peer Perspective: Where Do Families Compare Notes?

Some philanthropic questions cannot be answered by a framework alone. Family leaders may find it useful to understand how others handled disagreement between generations, changed direction after an initiative failed, balanced personal interests with a shared family purpose, or decided what their giving should look like after a generational transfer of leadership. A group of peers speaking from lived experience can offer these types of insights.

TIGER 21 Groups bring Members together in confidential environments where they can test ideas and learn from others who have faced comparable questions. The Philanthropy Exploration Defense provides a setting in which Members can examine their philanthropic philosophy and benefit from the collective intelligence of their peers. Learn more about Membership.

A Strategy That Can Change Without Losing Purpose

The questions change as wealth changes, as family members grow older, as the Next Gen becomes involved and as the world around them changes. A cause that once felt central to a family may no longer be the right priority.

A strong philanthropy strategy does not eliminate uncertainty or guarantee agreement. It gives the family a way to navigate both. It brings the conversation back to the question central to a cohesive philanthropy philosophy: What is the wealth for?

Continuing to ask this question can help a family keep its philanthropy intentional—and impactful.