When your family asks what their giving has achieved - the answer should be immediate.
For most family office philanthropy operations, it isn't. Grants, commitments, and impact data live across spreadsheets, email chains, and systems that don't talk to each other.The data exists. It's in the foundation records, the DAF statements, the grant agreements. But consolidated, real-time, and trustworthy?
That's a different story.
Who this is for
This is for family offices running private foundations or multi-vehicle giving programs where the volume and complexity of philanthropic activity has outgrown the tools managing it.
Patterns I keep seeing
These are the visibility and control gaps that quietly undermine family office philanthropy operations.
Nobody can see the full picture
Most family offices track foundation grants, DAF contributions, and direct giving separately because that's how the vehicles are structured.
But when the family wants to see everything in one place, someone has to build it manually, every time.• No consolidated view across foundations, DAFs, and direct gifts
• Board questions trigger hours of spreadsheet workn
• Quarter-end reporting means piecing together three or more sources
Compliance runs on memory and improvisation
Grant approvals, due diligence checks, board documentation, regulatory filings - the compliance infrastructure for a private foundation is substantial.
For most teams, it lives across email threads, shared drives, and institutional memory rather than a system anyone fully trusts.• Grant proposals and Multi-year commitments tracked in email with no audit trail
• Board packets manually assembled for every meeting
• Regulatory filing prep is an annual scramble rather than a continuous process
The impact question goes unanswered
When the family asks whether their giving is working, most philanthropy operations can't answer with data. Grantee reports arrive and get filed.
The information exists somewhere, it just was never built to be retrieved.• No consistent way to track what grants actually achieved
• Grantee reports filed but never analysed
• No way to compare effectiveness across focus areas or time periods
If any of this feels familiar, it's worth a conversation.
No pitch, just a chance to think through what better could look like for your operation.
David Nabarro
Who I am and why I do this work
Helping private families give more effectively matters. Every grant that gets deployed well, every foundation that optimises for impact - that ripples outward.
That's why this work matters.
I spent years as CFO of a superyacht management company architecting the entire operational software infrastructure from the ground up.
The operational complexity you're managing such as multiple entities, compliance obligations, family stakeholders - I've experienced it firsthand and built systems to solve it.
The same patterns show up across industries. As a director at a San Francisco software agency I've designed and implemented custom operational systems for complex organisations - always starting from the same place: understanding how an operation actually works before touching the solution.
If you'd like to talk through your philanthropy operations and how to streamline them, I'm always happy to have that conversation.
Thanks for getting in touch.
I'll come back to you shortly to arrange a conversation.
Speak soon!
Let's talk
Lets have a conversation about your philanthropy operations and whether there's a better way to run them.