Learnings

Magnify Community began in 2018 as a small and nimble philanthropic innovation lab, working with urgency and a three-year time horizon to start to change norms around local giving in Silicon Valley.

Almost three years in, we’ve taken the Silicon Valley script to heart: we've moved fast, thought big, and worked hard to change our piece of the world.

As we reach the final phase of our experiment (sunsetting in September 2021), we hope that transparency will fuel more learning, more impact, and more inspiration to join the local giving movement — here and elsewhere.

What We’ve Learned So Far

Part I: Our tools

Our first set of reflections focuses on the tools we developed to make local giving easier, more rewarding, and higher impact.

Part II: Our donor community

Our second installment—in four chapters—shares insights from our efforts to seed a new local giving norm among high-capacity givers in Silicon Valley through a three-year pledge.

Part II - Chapter 1: Could a Local Philanthropy Pledge Spark a New Norm?

This chapter focuses on why we focused on norm change, and how we constructed and rolled out the Magnify Community Pledge.

Part II - Chapter 2: From a Pledge and a Pandemic to a Model of Donor Organizing

This chapter focuses on the ways in which our work advancing the Magnify Community Pledge evolved into a donor-organizing effort that created a community of engaged and activated local donors.

Part II - Chapter 3: Lessons and Limits in Donor Organizing

This chapter highlights some of the challenges we faced and the many lessons we learned and are continuing to learn as we use the Magnify Community Pledge as a vehicle to organize donors and help set a local giving norm in motion.

Part II - Chapter 4: Progress and the Road Ahead

This final chapter takes the measure of what we’ve learned through advancing the Magnify Community Pledge, what questions we still hope to answer before this time-limited initiative concludes in September 2021, and what questions we would like to see the larger community answer in the months and years ahead.

Part III: Our partners

In the last installment of our learnings series, we share lessons learned through partnerships with donor-supporting organizations and philanthropic intermediaries, such as foundations, donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsors, wealth advisors, and philanthropic advisors.