Philanthropy Podcast Giving Done Right: Q&A with Phil Buchanan & Grace Nicolette

 How much do Americans give to charity every year? Would you believe about $500 billion? In fact, according to the Almanac of American Philanthropy, Americans donate around seven times as much as continental Europeans to charitable causes per capita.

But generous Americans also expect bang for their philanthropic buck. That feeling is best expressed by Center For Effective Philanthropy (CEP) Vice-President Grace Nicolette who, when planning a giving strategy with her husband, asked these questions:

How much do I give? Where should I give? How do I know if I’m making a difference — or if I’m actually doing more harm than help?

Nicolette worked in the perfect place to answer those questions, the Center For Effective Philanthropy (CEP), which evaluates the effectiveness of money given to charity, whether it's one dollar or one million dollars. 

So, in September 2020, CEP CEO Phil Buchanan and Nicolette began Giving Done Right, and have completed two seasons.

The goal of their podcast is to dig into what it takes to effectively put your charitable dollars to work. In the podcast, they bust some myths that have long plagued donors and nonprofits alike. They also draw connections to how giving can counter racial inequality, and explore the roles of faith, family, and identity in giving.

Q. Phil, you’ve been the CEO President of the Center For Effective Philanthropy (CEP) for over 20 years since its inception. Why start a podcast in 2020?


Phil: We got to a point in what we have learned about effective philanthropy – from all our research and work – that we wanted to share it with a broader audience: not just the mega-donors and foundations we had worked with over the years but also everyday givers. 

This is what motivated me to work on the book Giving Done Right, and the podcast seemed like a logical extension. When the pandemic hit, we knew we wouldn’t be doing events or hitting the road for a while, so Grace and I said, “what the heck?, let’s try a podcast.” We never thought it would reach so many people.

Q. What was the most challenging part about starting the podcast?

Grace: Many people seem to think starting a podcast is easy, yet we wanted to make sure we were doing it at a high level of quality. It was challenging given the context; we started Giving Done Right while working from home in 2020. I recorded nearly every episode sitting in my closet! (Now we record in a small studio in our offices). If it weren’t for our colleague Sarah Martin, who had the skills and interest in helping us not just do it but do it well, I don’t think we could have done it.

Phil: Agreed. I kept saying, “how much work could it be?” And I realized, oh wow, if you want to do it well, it’s a lot of work: finding the right guests; researching them; editing the episodes. We are lucky that Sarah knows what she is doing.

Q. How did you want to use audio to spread CEP’s core mission -- providing data, feedback, programs, and insights to help individual and institutional donors improve their effectiveness?

Grace: We started Giving Done Right during the pandemic lockdown, when we couldn’t have in-person meetings and visit our target audience of individual donors and their advisors, to build relationships and share our resources on effective giving. The idea for the podcast came out of the limitations that the lockdown placed on us, when we were forced to think creatively about how to do our work.

Q. Phil and Grace, you sound so natural as co-hosts on the podcast, and that’s not usually a skill mastered without practice or experience. How did you both prepare for your hosting duties, and how do you sync so neatly on the episodes?

Grace: Phil and I have worked together for over ten years now, which I think helps. We are different in many ways, but we genuinely respect each other and enjoy working together. We prepare for our hosting duties by making sure we’re read up about our guest(s), and we usually have a short meeting before recording day to map out the questions we hope to ask. 

Sometimes we assign who will ask which question, but more often than not, we follow the flow of the conversation. We’ll cue each other with a look or by pointing to ourselves if we want to jump in with the next question.

Phil: Yes – working with Grace and Sarah on this podcast has been one of the highlights of my career. What I like about it is exactly what Grace said – that we often see things a bit differently, or come at things from different angles, and that’s what has made our working relationship so productive. I have learned a lot from Grace, and she’s challenged me to question some of my assumptions about the world.

Q. How did you organize the production end of the podcast? Studio? Music? Sound engineering?

Grace: For season one, we were very much figuring out how to put a show together and recorded everything remotely from our homes. Once we had one season under our belts, our executive producer, Sarah, worked with an audio engineer to outfit a former conference room into a podcast studio at our office in Cambridge, MA. 

That’s where we recorded season two, as well as our upcoming season (fall 2022). We work with a fantastic freelance audio engineer and part-time producer who work closely with Sarah to produce each episode.

Q. The CEP blog, which seems to be published several times a week, is fearless in taking on controversial issues, such as racial equality, climate change, and promoting democracy to church philanthropy. How does the blog generate ideas for the podcast?

Grace: My team manages CEP’s blog, and our organization’s posture is one of constantly learning, because the landscape for philanthropy is always changing. In the same way that we don’t allow just anyone to use our blog as a platform for mere self-promotion (guest posts must have clear lessons for the field), we also very carefully curate who we invite as guests onto the show. 

Though we are constantly pitched, we rarely respond to cold pitches unless there’s a very clear reason why the message of the guest needs to be heard and how it dovetails with the goal of the podcast and of CEP.

Q. Who is your core listener to the podcast? What groups would you like to consume the podcast? How has the listener's response been?

Grace: We want to help donors grow and improve – whether they’re giving a few hundred dollars a year, a few thousand, or a few million. Naturally, many philanthropic advisors also like to listen to our show, so they can also get smart on how to inspire donors. The response from both groups so far has been really positive. We love getting notes from listeners about what they learned from the show.

Q. In season one, you talked with Melinda Tuan, a trusted advisor to foundations and major donors around the country. She talked about the complexities of being an effective philanthropist. What do you think about those complexities, and how can they be best addressed?

Grace: It can be easy to think that giving money away is simple, especially in comparison with the skills it took to earn the money. But in reality, to do it well requires its own set of skills, understanding, learning, humility, and a healthy appreciation for nuance. We often see many new major donors make grand statements about how they want to “disrupt” philanthropy or nonprofits through their giving, or how they want to apply principles they used in business to their advice to nonprofits. 

Then, they get going with their giving and realize that this is a completely different world than what they’re used to, with its own steep learning curve. With Giving Done Right, we’re trying to bust some myths, really inspire donors, and bring them along on a journey to becoming more effective. Effectiveness in our context means being better partners to the nonprofits and communities they give to and listening well, with humility, to those who are actually doing the work.

Q. In the debut episode of season two, you talked with Cathy Moore, executive director of Epiphany Community Health Outreach Services in Houston. In the episode, you discussed the constant tension in philanthropy between giving in a crisis and addressing the root causes of the crisis. How do donors deal with that tension? What should listeners take away from that episode?

Phil: I met Cathy while doing research for Giving Done Right, the book. To me, she exemplifies the kind of front-line nonprofit worker who works in every community, helping those who most need help. She doesn’t have the luxury of just focusing on “root causes” when there is suffering all around her. 

She has to – and does – care about both addressing those causes and addressing that suffering. Her commitment to that work, her leadership style, her incredible dedication to treating each person with the dignity and respect each person deserves – it’s inspiring. People like Cathy are unsung American heroes. And they’ve been tested these past years by natural disasters, by a pandemic, and by the everyday challenges facing people who are poor and marginalized. Everyone can learn from someone like Cathy. We may not be willing or able to do a job like hers, but we can donate; we can volunteer; we can show up.

Q. Of course, we have to ask: When does season three begin?


Phil & Grace: The trailer for Season 3 drops on September 8th, and our first episode will be out.

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One of my favorite episodes is the September 16, 2021, show in which Cathy Moore discuss Hurricane Harvey relief efforts and then pose existential questions about giving: How can donors best step up in a time of crisis? How to think about the tension between giving to meet immediate needs and addressing an issue’s root causes?

One of the most compelling aspects of this podcast is the polish, perspicacity, and prescience of the co-hosts, Buchanan and Nicolette. They obviously know their stuff, work seamlessly together as co-hosts, and allow their guests to shine and display their expertise and insights.

 Check out Giving Done Right. You'll learn so much about effective giving and feel better knowing that your money is doing a lot of good.