Written to a new grantmaker. The first three points are the most important. Focus on opportunities many times your bar. Most value comes from finding/creating projects many times your bar, rather than discriminating between opportunities around your bar. If you find/create a new opportunity to donate $1M at 10x your bar (and cause it to get $1M, which would otherwise be donated to a 1x thing), you generate $9M of value (at your bar). [1] If you cause a $1M at 1.5x opportunity to get funded or a $1M at 0.5x opportunity to not get funded, you generate $500K of value. The former is 18 times as good. You should probably be like I do research to figure out what projects should exist, then make them exist rather than I evaluate the applications that come to me . That said, most great ideas come