How will your family change the world?
For a lot of family business owners, success feels best when it benefits more than just your family. So, you start giving. You write checks. You join boards. You launch a foundation, seed some impact investments, set corporate responsibility expectations for your operating business. And then, months or years later, you hit an uncomfortable question: Are we making a difference, or are we just staying busy?
That doubt shows up in predictable ways. Sometimes it looks like endless debate: too many worthy issues, too many possible approaches, too much fear of irrevocable commitments and making the “wrong” choice. You have more meetings and make fewer decisions. That’s “analysis paralysis.” Other times it looks like the opposite: you act fast—grants here, initiatives there, a few big commitments, a few small ones—and suddenly the portfolio feels scattered. Everyone is working hard, but nothing adds up to a strategy. Classic “ready, fire, aim!”
Different paths to the same destination: a family with good intentions cannot achieve their desired impact. “Impact,” for our purposes, means the measurable change in the world that results from investing resources—money, time, or influence—in things that align with our values and improve the lives of others. Returns are clear in a P&L statement; “doing good” is fuzzier. That’s why families who are excellent at governance and capital allocation in the business can still struggle when the goal shifts from financial performance to impact. The three recommendations below are the simplest, most effective ways we have found to get unstuck.
Give from the heart
Support causes that resonate with you personally. If you have held season tickets to the opera for decades and listen to “La Traviata” on your morning jog, you may struggle to put support for medical research over arts funding in your giving even though access to healthcare is important. The best donors and impact investors are champions of their beneficiaries’ mission and evangelists of the cause. Their support is authentic. There is a virtuous cycle to funding the things that make your heart sing. If you have a visceral interest in the program you support, you are more likely to learn faster, build a network of deep relationships, attract co-funders, and create long term value. For this reason, many families adopt localized strategies (focusing on their community of origin) or thematic strategies (focusing on one topic — healthcare, education, the arts— and saying “no” to the rest).
One family we know had great unity in the senior generation behind common causes. They established a significant ($100M+) foundation addressing issues that were relevant to their employees and mattered to them personally: subsidizing free school lunches and eliminating “food deserts” in underserved communities. The mission was focused, relationships with grantees were strong, and they had evidence that their contributions caused meaningful change. However, those narrow causes were not as resonant to the next generation and their spouses. So, when the next generation began to express interest in finding their own opportunity for impact, they felt hamstrung. They respected the foundation’s work but didn’t feel energized by it. Engagement waned. There was minimal conflict in the family over giving, but both groups felt frustrated. The senior generation was disappointed that their children were not excited to carry the torch on causes that mattered to them, and the rising generation felt sidelined from directing the philanthropic resources they would one day control. Eventually both generations’ discomfort with the situation was greater than their resistance to change. With facilitation, they began conversations to revise the foundation’s focus and balance legacy causes with things close to the next generation’s hearts. The outcome was deeper understanding across generations and a refreshed commitment to working together.
Define the mission before the method
Before asking “what action will we take together?” ask “what change are we trying to achieve in the world?” This is challenging, especially for families who equate progress with putting capital to work. But shared mission is essential for effective impact for two reasons.
First, aligning on your goal makes choices easier. As baseball great Yogi Berra said, “if you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.” Will you support tried-and-true organizations and interventions, or emphasize innovation and “moonshot” ideas? Should you prioritize charitable giving, impact investing, corporate responsibility in the business, political advocacy, or some hybrid approach? Do you prefer to do your “giving while living” and sunset your philanthropy during your lifetime, or preserve assets to sustain impact projects across generations? There is no objectively correct answer to those questions. But the tradeoffs are easier to navigate when you are anchored to a shared goal.
Second, a clear mission makes measurement possible. This can be distilled to a fundamental question: “Does this action help make progress towards the change we are trying to achieve in the world?” There are sophisticated methods to connect inputs to outcomes and compare alternative uses of capital. However, the simplest—and often most clarifying—measurement of impact is whether the answer to the question above is a confident “yes.”
One example of a world class mission statement belongs to the Walton Family Foundation. It is: “We are a family-led foundation that tackles tough social and environmental problems with urgency and a long-term approach to create access to opportunity for people and communities.” This mission describes the change they seek (“access to opportunity for people and communities,”) rather than locking them into a particular approach. It avoids “analysis paralysis” by narrowing the scope of activity, and avoids “ready, fire, aim!” by imposing a coherence test. A strong mission statement is narrow enough that it creates unity and a sense that everyone is pulling in the same direction, and broad enough that family members can interpret it differently while remaining aligned. It allows family members to say: “we are comfortable having different perspectives on how to pursue the same goals.”
Balance “we” and “me”
In our experience, families who pursue impact work together encounter a common tension: they can achieve more collectively, but working together requires coordination and compromise. When the CCC Alliance surveyed family business owners to identify the things that unified them and the things that caused them conflict, collective philanthropy appeared at the top of both lists, according to the Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook. So, is it ultimately better to act together or separately?
The answer to this question is not black or white. Different shades of gray may work well for your family. Many families allocate a portion of their giving through group decisions made by consensus or voting and reserve another portion for individual giving. Adjusting the balance between collective and individual giving in a way that fits your family helps create an appropriate blend of unity and autonomy.
Take, for example, a simple budgeting process one family foundation adopted. They mutually agreed that half of their annual disbursements are decided collectively, and the other half are split equally among trustees for individual giving. Individual gifts must align with the foundation’s mission, and trustees have latitude in how they allocate their share. Collective giving is decided during an annual in person meeting, where trustees nominate organizations, explain alignment with the mission, and propose gift amounts. Through consensus, the family determines the final allocation. As one family member told us, “We are doing good and having fun together.”
Sometimes balancing “we” and “me” requires asking whether working together makes sense at all. Another family created an intergenerational workgroup to examine a single question: “should we do something impact-related, at scale, together?” Each word carried weight.
- Impact-related: this family had operating experience and a shared definition of success for their business, but impact work would be breaking new ground for them.
- At scale: they could potentially put hundreds of millions of dollars to work in this area and wanted to build on a solid foundation.
- Together: they had to decide if the greater scale they could achieve by working in concert was worth the additional coordination, compromise, and potential for conflict.
The family explored the implications carefully before moving forward. Ultimately, they concluded that sufficient alignment did not exist to pursue a large-scale joint initiative. That realization prevented wasted time and preserved family cohesion.
Even with the best intentions, families can become stuck. By employing a few simple strategies—give from the heart, define the mission before the method, and balance collective and individual action—families can regain clarity. Those who derive the greatest satisfaction from their philanthropic efforts prioritize principles over procedure, dialogue over documents, and regularly assess alignment between action and purpose. Do not let perfection be the enemy of doing good.