What trust-based philanthropy actually demands from your communications

Six in ten grantmakers now say they’ve embraced trust-based philanthropy practices. That’s the finding from the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project’s 2024 Grantmaker Survey — and it lands differently depending on which side of the relationship you sit on.

For NGOs, the headline sounds like relief. Less burdensome reporting. Fewer transactional interactions. Multi-year unrestricted grants that reduce the administrative drag of managing restricted funds cycle by cycle.

But Elephant Creative Co. put it plainly in their 2025 analysis: “If you’re no longer submitting 15-page grant reports, your other communications matter even more.”

That’s the thing that gets missed in the trust-based philanthropy conversation. Streamlined reporting doesn’t reduce the burden on communications — it redistributes it. The relationship-building work that used to happen in formal reporting cycles now has to happen through other means. Newsletters, programme updates, direct conversations, annual reports that function as relationship documents rather than accountability matrices.

The CEP’s 2025 research on MacKenzie Scott’s giving — “Breaking the Mold” — found that unrestricted gifts strengthen financial stability, increase leaders’ confidence, and create room for innovation. But it also found something underneath: organisations receiving large unrestricted grants often had to develop a different kind of communications muscle. Funders who trust you still want to feel the relationship. They just want to feel it differently.

The Bridgespan analysis of trust-based philanthropy describes a recurring pattern: longstanding funder-grantee relationships stuck in what they call a “Groundhog Day loop” — single-year, project-based grants with heavy reporting, neither party particularly satisfied, neither changing the dynamic. Trust-based practices break that loop. But breaking it only works if the NGO can communicate in the register the relationship now requires.

That’s not grant-speak. It’s not a log frame in narrative clothing. It’s an honest account of what the organisation is learning, what it’s still figuring out, and why the funder’s investment is part of something that matters.

Most NGOs don’t have that communication built yet. Building it is the work.

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