Special Management Challenges of Initiatives

Many of the tasks of managing an initiative are the same as those of managing an individual grant or a cluster of grants. There are, however, a few challenges that distinguish initiative management from other forms.

1.  “Intensivity” versus “extensivity.” When you are managing an initiative you work with fewer grantees than you do when you are managing clusters of grants, but the initiative requires much more intensive work per grantee. In managing initiatives, you do less project development and more project oversight; you have less hands-on contact with grantees and do more work with intermediary organizations.

2.  Coordination versus individual management. Whether you are managing an initiative or clusters, there are bound to be several “balls in the air.” There are more if you are an initiative manager, however, and they need to be closely coordinated in order to prevent their falling to earth. Integrating grantmaking with evaluation, strategic communications, social marketing, and policy work is a full-time task in itself. You truly must learn to be a master juggler to keep all these balls in the air.

3.  Narrowing versus broadening. Managing an initiative can be so time-intensive that it leaves little time for you to interact with other colleagues, whether they be colleagues in the foundation or those working for other foundations. There are many benefits to be gained by focusing on a single initiative, but inevitably there are costs in terms of loss of flexibility and ability to work broadly across different areas.

4.  Planned versus organic development. Initiatives have a targeted outcome in mind from the start, whereas clusters have a less defined goal. Any veteran program officer will affirm that projects, whether they are part of an initiative or part of a cluster, will often develop very unpredictably. Sometimes, in fact, the serendipitous outcomes of a project are far more impressive and important than the expected outcomes. In a cluster, with its more developmental sensibility, it is often possible to abandon the original plan and improvise to move in the new direction that is working well. Within the tighter, more strategic sensibility of the initiative, it is difficult to abandon—or even to extensively modify—the original plan. You must find ways to keep initiative projects on track, avoiding temptations to go off on intriguing but strategy-busting tangents. And you must keep the projects moving at approximately the same pace—no mean feat in a world in which just about everything, and projects most of all, tend to develop at their own rates.

5.  Losing one aircraft carrier versus losing many frigates. In cluster grantmaking, there are a large number of grantees per cluster, and the cluster itself is somewhat loosely connected, so that if a couple of grants “slip beneath the waves,” the cluster itself can survive. If a couple of grants in a tightly coordinated initiative should sink, they could pull the entire initiative down to the depths with them. Therefore, instead of losing just a couple of grants (which is bad enough), the foundation could lose a lot of money and the years of work that it took to develop the initiative (which is very much akin to the Navy losing an aircraft carrier). If you are managing an initiative, you will want to avoid that scenario, lest you discover why the captain of an aircraft carrier would choose to go down with the ship.