Over the last five years, MacKenzie Scott has gone from relatively unknown in the US philanthropic community to arguably its single most influential figure.
When she signed the Giving Pledge in 2019 following her divorce with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and wrote subsequent blog posts explaining her giving, Scott’s approach suggested an impatience to give away her wealth, a belief in giving as a way to empower the good works of others, and an unusual willingness to cede control.
Scott has not finished her giving, but with more than $15 billion granted to nearly 2,000 organizations, some meaningful patterns have begun to emerge.
Such themes are striking in their contrast with the approaches taken by other mega-donors, who often establish perpetual foundations, focus on specific issues, and exercise considerable control through reporting requirements, board seats, and conditional awards of gifts over time. So many in the nonprofit and philanthropy world wondered how Scott’s nonconforming principles would be expressed in her actual giving.
Scott, whose net worth has been estimated to top $40 billion, established the organization Yield Giving in 2022 to manage donations. She has not finished giving, but with more than $15 billion granted to nearly 2,000 organizations, some meaningful patterns have begun to emerge. We parsed all the Yield Giving donation information available to date and matched it with Internal Revenue Service data to provide a deeper view into a giving campaign rare in its scale and unprecedented in its pace.
Sizing up the nonprofit world
To build a data-driven portrait of Scott’s giving, we began with a list of 1,964 recipients listed on the Yield Giving website, including 360 organizations announced in December.
Our main source of information for our analysis was tax filings made with the US Internal Revenue Service, which is the most comprehensive and reliable source of nonprofit financial information. Our financial data reflects the year prior to the one in which the Scott grant was received. The limits of this data required us to exclude some organizations from our analysis, including:
Sponsored programs (initiatives of legally separate nonprofits or fiscal sponsors)
Organizations registered outside the US
Recipients of restricted gifts, donations with specific parameters about how recipients must spend them
Nonprofits with less than $25,000 of annual revenue
Private foundations
After removing these and a few other special cases for which tax data were not available, we were left with 1,625 organizations. Of these, 1,190 organizations disclosed the size of their gifts. It is too soon to gauge the lasting effects of these grants, so for now we focused on the recipients as a lens to evaluate the underlying strategy: who they are, where they are, and what causes they support.
To create benchmarks, we merged tax data for 554,000 organizations that filed at least once between 2018 and 2021 and created a comparison group. We categorized these organizations using standard classifications used by the nonprofit world. So, what did we find?
Scott directed funds to larger organizations
The average Scott grantee took in five times more revenue than the typical nonprofit. Recipient organizations also had average net assets of $46 million, almost quadruple the $12 million average for the sector.
Why would Scott seek out larger organizations that arguably have more resources and funding streams? There are many possible interpretations, but perhaps Yield Giving sought organizations with robust operations and established infrastructure that were likely to be able to use such large unrestricted grants effectively.
The typical nonprofit in the US is very small in terms of revenue. The average grant size among organizations that reported them was $8.4 million, exceeding the annual revenues of 95 percent of recipients in our comparison group.
Top causes: education and health care
Between 2020 and 2022, nonprofits in the youth, philanthropy, and housing sectors represented a larger share of grantees compared with the size of those segments of charitable giving generally. On an absolute basis, Scott devoted $1.5 billion to educational institutions and nonprofits, based on our research parameters.
Many of the largest grants went to the foundations or fundraising arms of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions—colleges and universities where 25 percent or more of students are Hispanic.
By contrast, grants to human services and youth development organizations were, on average, much smaller and made to organizations with much lower-than-average revenues. Nonetheless, the donations came during the acute years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many organizations grappled with higher demand and fewer resources.
In 2023, Yield Giving made a significant push into health care, its top category of the year on an absolute basis. Many of these gifts went to community health providers serving populations with less access to care.
Scott’s gifts leaned southward
Scott, who was born in San Francisco and has spent much of her adult life in Seattle, gave to nonprofits across America; remarkably, all 50 US states included at least one recipient organization. However, she gave a little more heavily to organizations based in the southern US. Nineteen of the 39 organizations that received at least $30 million are headquartered in the South, including many of the recipient HBCUs.
On a per capita basis, grants tended to flow toward states that are home to major cities, as well as the District of Columbia. But Scott also directed significant funds toward rural states, such as Alaska and Nebraska, and to states where incomes tend to be lower, like Georgia and New Mexico.
Aligning with affiliates meeting the moment
About one-third of the organizations receiving Scott’s grants were organizations affiliated with large national networks, often through small grants to 10 or more branches of a single network. Affiliates tended to be smaller organizations with average revenues of $17.1 million, versus $29.5 million for non-affiliates. Affiliates also received smaller grants—$6.3 million on average, compared with $11.2 million for non-affiliates.
Scott tended to target a handful of umbrella organizations each year. During 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she made large donations to organizations serving vulnerable populations, such as Meals on Wheels, Easterseals, the YMCA, and the YWCA.
In 2021, amid reports that the pandemic widened the educational achievement gap, she started giving to affiliates of Communities in Schools, a nonprofit that supports public schools. In 2022—a year marked by rising homelessness, a mental health crisis among American youth, and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade—funds flowed to affiliates of Habitat for Humanity, Girl Scouts, and Planned Parenthood. In 2023, none of the recipient organizations were affiliates.
To determine whether an organization was independent or an affiliate, the research team manually coded organizations as either affiliated or not affiliated with a national organization, such as Feeding America or the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. In a preliminary analysis, affiliated organizations were more likely to be in the South or Midwest.
Scott’s impact on philanthropy—and philanthropists
Early reports suggest that Scott’s large, unrestricted gifts have had a profound effect on the aspirations and financial viability of the organizations that received them. While their long-term impacts remain to be seen, the differences in her approach from those of other mega-donors is striking.
For grant-makers, Scott’s giving offers an important reminder of how philanthropy is a vessel for the expression of personal beliefs and values. While she is famously private, we know that she values the daily service of people who are less fortunate. As she writes in a 2020 essay, her gifts went to organizations that “have dedicated their lives to helping others, working and volunteering and serving real people face-to-face at bedsides and tables, in prisons and courtrooms and classrooms, on streets and hospital wards and hotlines and frontlines of all types and sizes, day after day after day.”
We also know that she believes that the collective empowerment of nonprofit leaders is the pathway to achieving good. While her essays stop short of an explicit theory of change, their main theme seems to be that good efforts and the empowerment of others have a multiplying, healing effect. As she writes in a different essay, “Something greater rises up every time we give.”
The breadth of Scott’s giving strategy, documented here, undoubtedly reflects this belief. For nonprofit leaders and board members, we hope it offers inspiration and a path forward for the support of essential organizations that are the beating heart of communities everywhere.
Matthew Lee is an associate professor of public policy and management at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Brian Trelstad is the William Henry Bloomberg Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Ethan Tran is an undergraduate student at Harvard College.
Disclosures: Matthew Lee is a former employee of the Bridgespan Group, a consulting firm that has been reported to have advised Scott on her giving. Brian Trelstad is on the boards of three organizations—Candid, GDI, and VisionSpring—that received Scott grants, and is on the Bridgespan Knowledge Advisory Board. None of the authors has a current financial relationship with these organizations, and the analysis presented here is based entirely on publicly-available data.
Correction: Due to an editing error, 2021 and 2022 sector data were transposed in an earlier version of this article. They have been updated.
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