A Look Under the Hood of MacKenzie Scott's Yield Giving Open Call

In March, MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving announced the winners of its inaugural open call, capping a year-long process in which philanthropy’s most-talked-about donor partnered with Lever for Change, a nonprofit affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation that helps donors run prize competitions, to support organizations that serve “communities, individuals and families with access to the fewest foundational resources and opportunities.”

The open call was a notable departure from Scott’s typical practice of working with her consultants to identify organizations and then coming in from out of the blue with a big gift. It asked hopeful nonprofits to actually apply — something heretofore unheard of in Scott giving — and then to navigate a three-stage process. After Lever for Change vetted organizations for eligibility, they were assessed by peer applicants and then by an external evaluation panel. When all was said and done, Scott, who initially committed to providing $1 million apiece in unrestricted funding to 250 organizations, upped the payout to $640 million to 361 organizations: 279 gifts of $2 million, and another 82 of $1 million.

“Our task was to take the information from the participatory review and evaluation panel, organize it and present the organizations that best met the goals of her challenge, and one of the things that impressed us was how so many organizations met her criteria at a very high level,” said Lever for Change CEO Cecilia Conrad. Scott “took that information and opted, as she has in the past, to be generous.”

I recently chatted with Conrad about her experience working with Scott’s team over the past year. Looking back, she accentuated the importance of getting the word out to as many organizations as possible — “It’s not really ‘open’ if people haven’t heard about the opportunity,” Conrad said. She also discussed Scott’s focus on organizations, as opposed to an issue, which required her team to recalibrate elements of Lever for Change’s competition infrastructure. “Most of our competitions have been for topic-specific project grants, so that was a big difference in the architecture of this open call.”

With the competition in the books — and Scott vaguely hinting there may be subsequent rounds — here are five takeaways about the Yield Giving Open Call’s inner workings gleaned from my conversation with Conrad.

Scott adopted — and adapted — Lever for Change’s infrastructure

Lever for Change has been around since 2019, and in that time, it’s become the undisputed implementation hub for big-name donors looking to host philanthropic competitions. The value in a Lever for Change competition lies in its replicability. Rather than create an open call from scratch, donors can pull a model off the shelf and customize it according to their needs.

A key part of the model is a peer evaluation process — a participatory element Lever for Change introduced to its competitions back in 2019. “It provides a different kind of expertise,” Conrad said. “The advice is typically more pragmatic, and organizations tell us that it’s a useful way to understand what binds them to other organizations so they can collaborate in the future.”

For the Yield Giving competition, Conrad and her team worked closely with Scott’s camp to develop the open call’s application criteria and scoring rubric. “We have a conversation with the donor about what’s important, then we draft the criteria and present it to them,” Conrad said. “Frequently, there's some back and forth, some wordsmithing, to truly capture the donor’s intent.”

Speaking of donor intent, before the Yield Giving Open Call, Lever for Change’s competitions tended to focus on specific issues like gender equity or maternal and infant health (Scott previously teamed up with Melinda French Gates on the $40 million Equality Can’t Wait challenge, run through Lever for Change). But in line with her wider giving, Scott premised her open call on bolstering the strength of organizations themselves, regardless of issue area — though recipients had to be U.S.-based. This may sound like a subtle pivot, but it compelled the Lever for Change team to revisit some of the basic tenets of its competition infrastructure.

For instance, grant competitions predicated on a specific issue often prioritize metrics communicating how well an applicant has addressed that issue. Yield Giving’s scoring rubric similarly considered an organization’s “track record,” but it also included issue-agnostic criteria like “equity-focused” and “community leadership.” In another example, Conrad said that in issue-specific competitions, applicants “have access to technical assistance to strengthen their project implementation plans.” There were no such support mechanisms in the Yield Giving Open Call, since evaluators assessed organizations in their entirety, not projects.

Outreach efforts paid dividends

With the competition’s architecture in place, Lever for Change had to alert prospective awardees about it — especially those that, according to Conrad, “had been underserved by philanthropy in the past.”

The open call may have been the talk of the philanthrosphere early last year, but Conrad’s team still saw value in pursuing a robust outreach campaign. Lever for Change paid for media placements, identified local funders and encouraged leaders at those institutions to inform grantees about the opportunity. Conrad’s team held webinars and set up a rapid-response system modeled on a similar system used during the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition to address questions. The open call website included an FAQ page, an organizational readiness tool and the scoring rubric. “We put considerable effort into identifying local funders to help us get the word out,” Conrad said.

Lever for Change began accepting applications last March. When I spoke to Conrad two months later, she said her team received applications from all 50 states and four U.S. territories. It was also around this time that Lever for Change announced a new service allowing donors to launch a Scott-like open-call challenge focused on strengthening a field of their choosing by providing unrestricted support to a larger number of organizations than has been typical in Lever for Change’s competitions so far.

This “field-building challenge model” involves giving out at least $20 million in general support, with Lever for Change noting that a “field” could be a “specific geography, topic or type of organization.” This is one way the competition hub appears to be addressing a common critique of its model: That philanthropic competitions require significant legwork from a large field of organizations and only end up rewarding one or a handful with actual cash.

Yield Giving ended up backing 361 groups, which is far more than any other Lever for Change competition to date. But still, far more nonprofits applied than got funding. When the application window closed last June, Lever for Change had received a whopping 6,353 applications. Conrad and her team weren’t surprised. “We spent some time going through a Form 990 database to get an idea of how many organizations would be eligible, and came pretty close to guessing how many applications we’d receive,” Conrad said. “We anticipated a high level of interest because this was the first opportunity for many organizations to put themselves forward for this kind of funding.”

Peer reviews will remain in place and outreach will expand

The Lever for Change team will be reviewing its work on the Yield Giving Open Call to identify ways to improve future competitions. For starters, the peer review will remain “part of our normal process,” Conrad said, “unless there’s a strong argument why it wouldn’t work for a particular challenge.”

Such cases can be imagined — for instance, in a competition focused on a limited geographic area, or sometimes maybe even a specific issue area. There, peer reviewers or evaluation panelists may know the leaders of applicant organizations personally, surfacing conflict-of-interest concerns. In my coverage, I’ve encountered those dynamics in the case of artist-led grantmaking panels; it’s easy to picture them showing up in a competition peer review situation.

Relying so heavily on a peer review in the evaluation process also raises the possibility that individual reviewers’ biases will affect which applicants move forward, adding a level of inconsistency and potential unfairness to the process. The open call took steps to make peer reviewers consider their potential biases, but as long as this sort of participatory element is included, that possibility is always there.

On the positive side, another aspect of its model that Lever for Change often points to is that the work builds upon itself. Thanks to the Yield Giving Open Call, Lever for Change’s database of organizations is larger than it was last February. “It was a good investment for us going forward because we now have those contacts and relationships for future challenges,” Conrad said. Similarly, donors may be more incentivized to launch a competition knowing they can access an expanded database of viable applicant organizations.

That said, Conrad and her team aren’t resting on their laurels. A big action item will be engaging additional under-the-radar organizations so they can apply for future competitions. “We’re in the process of taking stock, and one of the things we’re looking at is improving our outreach,” Conrad said.

Lever for Change is assessing how to “streamline” the process

At the operational level, the Lever for Change team will consider how the Yield Giving process could influence the timelines of future open calls. Take the competition’s application window, which ran from March to June 2023. “We like to allow at least three months, and sometimes longer, because it gives us time to get the word out and identify regions where we’re not receiving as many applications,” Conrad said. “It also gives organizations a greater opportunity to respond.”

Nonprofit leaders signed up for the Yield Giving Open Call knowing they’d have to allot 10 hours to complete the application and two and a half hours to evaluate peer organizations. While that isn’t generally a deal-breaker in terms of time commitment, it also isn’t the kind of process that leaders can knock off in an afternoon. “We realize that completing one of these applications is a big time commitment, and even more so if you’re a very small shop,” Conrad said. “As we do after every challenge, we’re going to assess if there are ways we can streamline the process.”

The question of streamlining is top of mind not only in the debate over philanthropic competitions, but in the sector-spanning discussion over how many hurdles prospective grantees should be required to jump through. “It’s about finding a balance,” Conrad said. “We need to provide information so the donor will feel confident in making a decision, but at the same time, we don’t want to collect information just for the sake of it.”

A follow-up open call is still an open question

Before signing off, I asked Conrad the $64,000 question (or maybe I should say the $640 million question). Yield Giving’s website tantalizingly notes that Scott’s open call pathway is an “ongoing effort,” implying that we might expect another competition.

Conrad stressed that while nothing is on the books yet, she would embrace a second round — much like countless nonprofit leaders across the country. “We would be very happy to continue to support this kind of work from this donor or any other donor who might be interested in running an open call.”

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