As they become more and more comfortable with giving, donors come to define for themselves an engagement style that fits somewhere between totally hands off to deeply engaged. For nonprofits, these decisions about style can have significant consequences.

High levels of donor engagement may mean access to resources and talents of great value to the nonprofit. It may also entail a tremendous amount of extra work, as donors need to be handled and satisfied. For this reason, some nonprofits prefer to receive general operating support with as few strings attached as possible. Over time, however, almost all nonprofits learn to work with the different engagement approaches of their donors and understand that considerable variation is to be expected.

In thinking about the question of philanthropic engagement, two critical dimensions to any relationship between giver and recipient impose themselves. The first dimension is the one just described: the level of donor engagement, which can vary from very light oversight to heavy-handed control. The level of engagement will vary not only based on the style of the donor but also on the nature of the work being carried out by the recipient.

Some work, such as scientific research or the arts, makes it hard for donors to be engaged directly in the funded work because it simply requires a certain amount of independence. Other kinds of projects, such as youth programs and scholarship funds, are far more wide open to donor involvement and even reengineering. After all, everyone has an opinion on how to help young people, but few people know enough about genetic research to get deeply involved.

The second dimension is simpler and only describes the level of congruence or match between the values and intentions of the donor and the recipient. In some situations, donors and recipients think alike and share common aspirations, while in other cases, the two parties are very far apart, even if this is not apparent at the time of the grant. In either event, it is possible to view congruence, overlap, and coincidence in outlook and underlying values between donors and recipients as central to the formation of a strong working relationship.

Why would a donor seek a high level of engagement with a recipient organization, rather than simply maintain a more traditional and distanced philanthropic relationship?

The high engagement donor may want to get involved because they are reaching for the highest rung on Maimonides’ ladder: helping others to help themselves and gain independence. Or they may seek a high level of engagement simply because they believe that they know better than others how to manage a project, even if they lack the specialized training and experience of the leaders within the recipient organization.

This impulse to micromanage and meddle can be a product of years of managerial work in the business sector, which may have led to substantial wealth creation and success. It is often just a small—though sometimes unwise—leap to assume that these patterns will lead to success in philanthropy. It is also possible that the drive to engagement can be related to vanity, overblown self-confidence, or a desire to impose their will on others.

On the other extreme, an increasingly smaller number of donors are happy to withdraw from the grantmaking process and to let recipient organizations do their work as they see fit. Such deference may stem from a recognition that in many cases it is the nonprofit that truly understands the problem at hand. It can also be the painful result of experience in attempting to be highly engaged, leading only to the recognition that nonprofit managers prefer to have plenty of leeway in how they operate their programs.

There are other reasons to resist jumping too quickly into the philanthropic fray. Low engagement has been justified in the name of professional detachment and as a necessity for maintaining objectivity. It is also far easier and less time demanding to limit the scope of the giving relationship to pre and post grant evaluation, rather than to expect the donor to take partial responsibility for the execution of a program or for the recipient organization’s performance. In fact, the more engaged a donor is with a project the harder it may be to exit or terminate the relationship, if the facts so dictate.

Engagement can muddy the philanthropic waters by placing the donor into the program that is being funded, a position from which it is hard to render tough and objective judgments about quality and impact. For this reason, there are cases in which donors need to actively resist the temptation to throw themselves into the fray and get their hands dirty.

In assembling a plan for giving including an engagement strategy, donors need to think carefully about the question of who will carry out their philanthropic work and how this work will proceed.

In some cases, donors will seek out the advice and counsel of family members, friends, lawyers, and consultants when executing their giving. These parties may be brought in to assist with planning or implementing a philanthropic agenda.

A trend toward philanthropic disintermediation has, however, emerged in recent years: Younger donors increasingly have decided to cut out all philanthropic middlemen, and instead look to themselves as the principal agents of their own philanthropy. This do-it-yourself turn is, of course, the simplest solution to the agency question in philanthropy, one that removes the threat of deviation from the donor’s intent that delegating responsibility can create.

Engagement styles range from very hands-off approaches, in which nonprofit autonomy and expertise are privileged, to a more deeply engaged approach, in which the donor and recipient work together on program development and problem solving. There are donors who are involved in all aspects of their giving and with the work of the organizations that receive their funds. Often stemming from a sense that philanthropy must be about more than check writing, involved or engaged donors want to feel a connection and offer advice and input above and beyond funds.

This may lead the donor to talk to and toil alongside the inner-city community activists as they weed out a plot in the community garden that has gone unattended so as to understand the community better. It may entail listening in on a board meeting of an organization that is attempting to overcome a challenge and offering some suggestions where appropriate. It may involve the regular introduction of independent evaluators into the program to advise both the organization and the donor on the strengths and weaknesses of the program design and implementation. There are many ways that donors can and do more than just send checks.

The important question is why do donors at times become engaged and how do they go about adding value through engagement?