Unrestricted: How a Venture Funder is Confronting Rapid Change

As funders rush to shift operations to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, one grantmaking niche appears quite well-poised for impact: venture philanthropy. Borrowing lessons from the business worlds of venture capital and private equity, groups like New Profit, Propel Capital and NewSchools Ventures have long pursued an interesting if outlying approach to social sector funding, providing unrestricted support and offering high-touch management assistance. New Media Ventures (NMV) is another venture funder to watch. Founded nearly a decade ago, NMV draws on c3 philanthropy and other capital streams to fund a portfolio of scrappy progressive organizing platforms.

When the 2016 election shattered liberal assumptions and left major funders reeling, NMV got to work applying its modest capital to a new crop of resistance-era groups. Many of those investments paid off. NMV has backed lots of big names in the new progressive organizing field—think Swing Left, Mijente, Indivisible and Sister District. And when the 2018 midterms validated that work, NMV doubled down on its boundary-blurring model, rolling out its largest funding round yet in a climate of cautious optimism on the left.

That was last year. Now that COVID-19 has cast the nation into a new era of uncertainty, how are unconventional funders like NMV and its fellow venture philanthropy shops faring?

Quite well, actually. Given NMV’s specific focus on digital organizing, it’s suited to the needs of the moment. But much remains uncertain. “This may be the most impactful historical event in my lifetime. It compares to the fall of the Soviet Union,” NMV’s new president, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, told me. “This is an earthquake of a change, and more recent groups are in many ways better positioned to deal with it.”

New Leadership

It’s pure happenstance that Stinebrickner-Kauffman is taking the reins at NMV just as COVID sweeps the country. Her predecessor, Christie George, presided over NMV as it grew its investment budget, in part through support from OSF, Ford, the Omidyar Network, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Libra Foundation. The five or six-figure sums NMV invests in its network members may be pocket change for billionaires or major foundations, but modest support can be make-or-break for the kinds of bootstrapping platforms NMV likes to fund. Doubly so when those platforms are too political to expect, or accept, support from traditional philanthropy.

Stinebrickner-Kauffman would know. Earlier in her career, she founded the corporate watchdog and advocacy platform SumOfUs, one of the first groups in NMV’s portfolio. Stinebrickner-Kauffman worked extensively with George to cultivate donors, hone her pitch and set SumOfUs on the path to where it is now—in its founder’s words, an “organization that has now engaged over 15 million people and won hundreds of campaigns for corporations to treat workers fairly, become more environmentally sustainable, combat human rights abuses, and more.”

Crucially, NMV also furnished the fledgling progressive group with around $175,000 in funding and other support. That was all the startup capital SumOfUs needed to free itself from the daily fundraising grind. “That’s a lot of money for a very small early-stage nonprofit. It let us spend three or four months building organizations and running campaigns,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman said. Over the years, she deepened her relationship with NMV, including through a stint as entrepreneur-in-residence during the busy period following Trump’s election. Being at NMV, she told me, provides a “privileged vantage point to see the most interesting things happening in the movement.”

Open to Pitches

Right now, of course, the measure of a movement is how well it shifts from in-person organizing to a fully remote, digital toolkit. How long that kind of pivot might take for many groups is still unclear. But if the commonly cited timeframe of 12 to 18 months for a COVID-19 vaccine holds true, organizers of all political stripes must prepare for the long haul. NMV sees this as a chance for digital organizers to step up.

“For the vast majority of organizations and companies we invested in, it was because they were doing interesting work around digital organizing. That skill set is absolutely essential right now,” said Shannon Baker, NMV’s vice president of programs and partnerships. “But it’s not just about having the right tech. We need significant investment in capacity-building to move [grassroots organizing] to digital.”

NMV has made major changes to its 2020 open call process in response to the pandemic. While the team had already received hundreds of pitches prior to an original deadline in early March, NMV has reopened its pitch window and will evaluate new applications on a rolling basis, giving priority to those received before May 4. NMV will award some successful applicants with grants and investments from $25,000 to $250,000 through its brand-new Crisis Innovation Fund. The goal is to move rapid-response funding to founders with direct experience in communities hardest-hit by COVID, toward the larger purpose of “advancing progressive values in the face of an unprecedented crisis.”

Among NMV’s existing portfolio, a number of organizations have stepped up to the plate with projects to help organizers adapt to COVID-19. Run for Something, which encourages young progressives to try their hand at seeking elected office, has launched a COVID-19 response hub to help its candidates adjust. Parents Together, a family-oriented news and journalism platform, has been conducting surveys and interviewing medical experts to counter misinformation on the disease. And the Center for Technology and Civic Life, already set on “pushing American democracy into the 21st century,” has expanded its resources and guidance on vote-by-mail.

“Assume Nothing"

As an outlying branch of the larger philanthropic tree, venture funding has drawn criticism in the past as yet another intrusion of business methods into the nonprofit world. Venture philanthropy’s slow migration to the left may allay some of those worries, but it raises different questions about interested money and toeing the political line.

At the same time, philanthropy’s overall reaction to COVID-19 has so far validated venture funders’ basic premise that general support makes organizations stronger and more resilient than heavily restricted grants. We’ve seen liberal democracy funders rally to the causes of election protection, census outreach and keeping journalists at work, often with expanded general support funding. And more broadly, the crisis has sparked discussion of whether this may be a turning point in the field’s long struggle for greater trust between grantmaker and grantee.

NMV wants to continue finding ways to finance the “wave of innovation happening in the world right now in civic tech and progressive tech,” as Stinebrickner-Kauffman put it, with an eye toward keeping progressive institutions whole during a challenging time for fundraising. Those institutions include newer tech-savvy organizing platforms, as well as the older stalwarts that may have been less prepared for the sudden disappearance of in-person organizing. Confronting that digital divide—as well as the technical chasm between well-resourced national groups and hard-pressed community organizations—is a major challenge for the advocacy community right now.

Still, the team at NMV is hopeful, if in a guarded way. “Social distancing is revamping organizational culture and processes as we know them—and creating a moment when everything is on the table for re-evaluation,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman wrote recently. “Within NMV, our current mantra is ‘assume nothing.’”

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