Good intentions are powerful. They’re also unreliable.
In philanthropy, that combination creates more problems than most families realize.
For more than 25 years I’ve watched thoughtful, deeply committed donors work incredibly hard at their giving, and still feel disappointed with the results. Not because they didn’t care or weren’t generous. Because no one had ever helped them think clearly about how decisions were being made.
This is the quiet trap I wrote about in my latest bookDelusional Altruism.When generosity becomes the organizing principle, almost everything feels justified.
If someone asks compellingly enough, you say yes. If a cause feels urgent, you respond.
Individually, these are reasonable decisions. Collectively, they create drift.
Here are a few patterns I see repeatedly:
- Familiarity masquerading as effectiveness:The organization closest to the family, geographically or emotionally, receives the funding. Not because it’s the strongest solution, but because it feels familiar.
- Responsiveness replacing priorities:The inbox becomes the strategy. Over time, the loudest or most persuasive requests win.
- Avoiding discomfort by funding everything:Saying no feels awkward. So families expand instead of choosing. The result is dispersion, not focus.
- Outsourcing moral judgment:Advisors, peers, or nonprofit leaders subtly become the arbiters of what is “good,” because no shared framework exists inside the family.
None of this is malicious. In fact, it often comes from kindness.
But strategic philanthropy for families requires more than kindness. It requires shared agreement about what matters most, what tradeoffs are acceptable, and how decisions will be made when values compete.
Without that clarity, philanthropy starts to feel busy instead of meaningful.
This is where the idea of a family giving plan often enters the conversation. Not as formality or rigidity, but a way to move from reactive generosity to deliberate choice.
The families whose philanthropy holds up over time are not more controlling. They are simply more explicit about their priorities. They make fewer grants, but better ones. They say no more often. They revisit their assumptions and adjust as conditions change.They treat philanthropy as something that deserves the same level of thought they give to their investments or business decisions.
The uncomfortable truth is this: most well-intentioned giving misses the mark not because families lack heart, but because they lack a shared framework.
And once giving grows in size or visibility, that absence becomes harder to ignore.
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