“At first, we just met as a family board to look at each request and determine which would be the most impactful,” Gail Miller says. “Then, Don came on, and we started being more deliberate about where we put our money rather than being reactionary.”
Today, Steve Miller is chairman of the board that oversees the businesses his father and mother created while also sitting on the board of the Miller Family Foundation. In addition to Stirling’s arrival, he says a focus-sharpened paradigm shift accompanied the 2020 cash infusion.
“Our whole perspective on philanthropy changed with that influx of money,” Steve Miller says. “Before, there wasn’t a lot of accountability. Today, the amount we can give is much more significant, which leaves us feeling much more responsible for ensuring the outcomes are measurable. We also find ourselves saying ‘no’ more often, where we didn’t as much before. Not because we don’t want to help, but because we are being more intentional about what we are supporting and looking for causes that align with our passions.”
Emotion is a servant, not a master
Though Stirling was hired to act as a dispassionate check on grantmaking decisions, there remains plenty of emotion in the criteria he uses to evaluate requests.
“We ask three questions,” Stirling explains. “The first is, if not for us, does help come? As the philanthropic circle grows, will other donors assist if we don’t? Second, if we do give, are there others who would join us in making this particular gift? And finally, is this effort sustainable and will it actually be transformational and bring real change?”
The struggle to maintain emotion is a consistent theme when discussing decision-making in philanthropy. Erin Trenbeath-Murray, executive director of the Robert H. and Katharine B. Garff Foundation, says her organization manages emotion by maintaining an extremely narrow focus on post-secondary education and measuring success based more on outcomes than output.
“We can say we sent 20 kids to college, but that’s the output. What those students do with that opportunity is the outcome we’re looking for,” Trenbeath-Murray says. “Will those 20 people graduate, contribute to our community and help stimulate Utah’s economy? That’s a very different question from, ‘How many kids did I send to college?’”
Meaningfully measuring outcomes requires philanthropists to maintain a high degree of long-term involvement. Trenbeath-Murray says this represents a significant paradigm shift from when foundations and nonprofits tended to interact just once a year to ask for more money.
“It used to be that nonprofits just got their gift and then went off to do good work, which was great, but donors really want to know they’re actually moving the needle,” Trenbeath-Murray says. “It’s not unreasonable in today’s climate that nonprofits should share not just outputs, but the actual outcomes.”
This expectation for greater transparency began to take hold with the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the significantly increased financial reporting requirements it placed on public companies, Trenbeath-Murray adds.
Utah’s thriving economy and the high number of tech unicorns it’s spawning are likely to produce more and more situations where liquidity events suddenly endow relatively young entrepreneurs with many millions of dollars to give away. Trenbeath-Murray counsels those future philanthropists to apply the lessons of their business success to structuring their foundation.
“In business, you define your mission, core values and non-negotiables based on what’s really important to you. Do the same thing with your philanthropy,” she says, advising that designing a foundation with a mission and core values that align with existing passions will help set expectations both ways. “[Applicants] should know that if you award them funding, it’s like a partnership. They’re agreeing to make certain things happen, and if they fail, they fail fast, analyze why, pivot, adjust and try something else.”
Promoting a hive mentality
A living symbol of the emergence of a new generation of philanthropists is Kristin Andrus, the wife of Traeger Grills CEO Jeremy Andrus. The Andruses have benefited from more than one liquidity event, which allows Kristin’s resume to consist of a single word: philanthropist.
“I drop my kids off at 8:00 a.m., pick them up at 3:30 p.m., and in between, I’m a philanthropist. It’s my day job,” Andrus says. “That means running our foundation, helping nonprofits, working on policy and generally being out in the community trying to fill gaps that I find.”
But Andrus deserves to call herself more than just a philanthropist, as much of her time is spent working with nonprofits to create connections and alliances that will make them more effective. Quarterly, Andrus gathers Utah nonprofits—particularly those focused on serving vulnerable youth—together in the same room to network with one another and receive training with the goal of helping them see each other as partners rather than competitors for the same limited resources.
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