9.8 Foundation Strategy Reviewer
Reviews philanthropic strategies across six key dimensions to ensure effective and sustainable impact. Launch on platform.
What is it?
Dragonfly’s Foundation Strategy Reviewer delivers rigorous, systems-based assessments of philanthropic strategies to ensure that good intentions translate into sustained, equitable social change. Designed for foundations seeking to maximise impact, it interrogates the assumptions, power dynamics, and structural conditions underlying grantmaking decisions.
More than a performance audit, it is a strategic tool for aligning purpose, elevating beneficiary voice, and catalysing systemic transformation. It combines quantitative social ROI analysis with qualitative ecosystem insight to move from charitable outputs to long-term change.
Why is it useful?
Employing the Foundation Strategy Reviewer enables you to:
Clarify mission integrity: Ensure grant portfolios reflect founding intent, strategic priorities, and beneficiary-defined needs. Evaluate impact effectiveness: Quantify the social return on investment with attribution analysis, cost-per-outcome benchmarking, and evidence audits. Map ecosystem complexity: Reveal interdependencies, power imbalances, and ripple effects that shape both intended and unintended outcomes. Stress-test sustainability: Assess program durability, financial resilience, and grantee capacity in the face of shifting contexts and resource constraints. Advance equity and justice: Diagnose who holds decision-making power, who receives resources, and how systemic change is pursued. Build adaptive intelligence: Embed learning loops, failure integration, and cross-sector knowledge sharing into institutional practice.
How does it work?
The Foundation Strategy Reviewer follows a structured six-part process:
Mission Alignment
Focus: Validate strategic priorities against founding purpose, analyse funding coherence, and assess integration of beneficiary voice.
Example: Revealing that 78% of funding targets a single issue area while marginalised communities receive only 12% of resources.
Impact Effectiveness
Focus: Audit impact chains, test attribution, benchmark cost per outcome, and assess sustainability of social outcomes.
Example: Calculating that a youth employment initiative delivers $12 of social value per dollar invested—double the sector median.
Ecosystem Complexity
Focus: Identify leverage points, power structures, unintended consequences, and coordination challenges within the broader system.
Example: Tracing how funding in maternal health inadvertently shifted resources away from local mental health services.
Sustainability & Resilience
Focus: Assess endowment health, grantee dependency, exit strategies, and multi-scenario financial modelling.
Example: Stress-testing reveals a 5-year horizon before a major grantee network becomes unsustainable under a base-case economic slowdown.
Equity & Justice
Focus: Examine how power is distributed in decision-making, resource flow to marginalized communities, and representation metrics.
Example: Identifying that only 1 of 9 board members has lived experience of poverty while 68% of funding targets economic equity.
Learning & Adaptation
Focus: Audit learning systems, evaluate knowledge product uptake, and assess capacity for iterative adaptation across portfolios.
Example: Highlighting that only 34% of program failures are formally reviewed and just 12% result in strategic shifts.
Turning Complex Analysis into Action
To effectively utilise Strategy Reviewer insights:
Anchor in purpose: Use the mission as a decision filter and accountability anchor across portfolio shifts.
Invest in grantee capacity: Support not just program delivery but long-term self-sufficiency and adaptive strength.
Elevate equity intentionally: Shift power to communities, not just resources. Measure voice, representation, and systemic influence.
Accelerate learning loops: Turn insights into practice by closing the gap between evaluation and iteration.
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