How to practice high impact giving year-round

The Center for High Impact Philanthropy’s annual giving toolkit provides individual donors and professional grantmakers with actionable guidance for high impact giving year-round.

We include a practical guide on what high impact philanthropy really means and four high-level strategies to help you practice it, no matter what cause or geographic community you care about. To illustrate how high impact philanthropy can be practiced across issue areas, we profile twelve exemplars with potential to achieve high impact and share lessons learned that can be applied in your own community.

The cover of the 2025 High Impact Giving Toolkit

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In this Toolkit

This year, our High Impact Giving Toolkit focuses on strategies for practicing high impact philanthropy. Whether you have $5 or $5 billion, we hope this toolkit and our team’s efforts help you translate your generosity and good intentions into greater social impact.

How to Practice High Impact Philanthropy

No one wants to practice “low-impact” philanthropy. But what does “high impact philanthropy” actually mean?

We define high impact philanthropy as the practice of using private philanthropic resources for the public good. In other words, it’s philanthropy for social impact.

Emerging Topics in Philanthropy

The 2025 High Impact Giving Toolkit includes three Emerging Topics in Philanthropy that our team identified as particularly effective strategies for amplifying funders’ philanthropic impact, no matter the cause area or community they care about. This section highlights three tools: Collective Giving, Guaranteed Income, and News & Civic Information.

Four Philanthropic Plays

Philanthropic support takes many forms. It can fund nonprofit programs that provide services directly to those in need; increase the capacity of systems so that multiple programs and organizations are more effective and efficient; support policy & advocacy initiatives that change the environment in which nonprofits work; and fund research & innovation with the potential for game-changing progress.

Takeaways from Nonprofit Exemplars

Here, you’ll find a list of the organizations profiled with take-away lessons learned, as well as links to other nonprofits we’ve profiled in recent years that are performing related work. We encourage you to apply the take-away lessons when analyzing these and other nonprofit organizations in the communities and issue areas where you aim to create greater social impact.

Nonprofits Making an Impact

Here we profile twelve nonprofits, each vetted by our team, and provide real-world examples of how you can help.

A math tutor works with a group of students on a whiteboard

A young man uses a drill on the frame of a house

A group of people speaking with Cure Violence staff in a circle outside

A group of children and their teacher smile with a recycling bin

A group of children smiling and holding their lunches

A group of smiling people gathered over a meal

Three women wearing health worker uniforms smile

A group of children stand against a fence watching a home being built

A group of young people giving a presentation on mangrove conservation

An aid worker presses a child's finger to a fingerprint scanner while the child sits on their mother's lap.

A group of people holding up photos of flooding damage and a banner that says ``Northeast Action Collective``

Platinum Sponsor:

The Fidelity Charitable® Catalyst Fund is a grantmaking program of Fidelity Charitable, led by its Board of Trustees and separate from its donor-advised fund program. The Catalyst Fund envisions a world where nonprofits that strengthen our communities have access to the resources they need to flourish. By investing in intermediaries such as the Center for High Impact Philanthropy, the Catalyst Fund helps build bridges between individual donors and promising nonprofits. When donors and nonprofits partner together, we can empower communities to thrive.