By Goran Buldioski, Senior Adviser, OnThinkTanks and Senior Fellow, Hertie School

Think tanks and other independent organizations whose work depends on support from various funders often ask themselves, "What do donors want from our communications?" That is a perfectly legitimate practitioner question, but it is a very incomplete one.  

I spent 19 years as a funder of think tanks at the Open Society Foundations devising strategies and signing off concrete grants, and I can tell you: what a funder wants from think tank communications depends almost entirely on how that funder communicates about itself.  

Read the funder's communicative posture, and you know what they want from yours. Misread it, and no amount of comms–fundraising alignment will save you. Therefore, the more pertinent question is, "What role does communication play in a donor's own theory of change?"  

In this article, I explore how this shift affects think tanks' approach to communication and fundraising as well as present a taxonomy of different models of communication strategies funders employ and give some advice to think tanks on what to do about it.

A different theory of change

The first question, "what donors want from think tank communications," implicitly has in mind the following theory of change:

Good think tank communications → Better reputation → Donor confidence → Funding

In essence, this is a fundraising model which assumes that communications is a support function.

However, today most foundations no longer see communications merely as evidence that grantees are successful. Whether they communicate well or poorly themselves, foundations increasingly see communications as part of the overall intervention (or in their jargon: theory of change). And this approach looks more like this:

Funding → Research → Convening → Communications → Policy change → Social impact

This approach changes what foundations look for in grantees. They are no longer asking, "Can these people write nice newsletters and good policy briefs?" but "Can communications itself help produce the change we seek?" That is a much richer conversation which actually does not start with the communication strategy of the think tanks but those of the foundations.

A basic taxonomy of funder approaches to communication

Different donors want fundamentally different things from communications because they use communications differently themselves. Drawing on two decades of experience in the foundation where I worked, as well as interactions with dozens of foundations across Europe and the United States, I have developed a basic taxonomy of foundations by communicative posture. Using two axes: 

1. Whose voice: the founder, the institution, or the field, and 

2. What the communication is for: positioning, enabling others or affecting policy. 

Under this second axis, I came up with five different types¹:

1. The Herald. The foundation speaks through a person. What does a Herald want from a think tank? This is typically association value, so things like: its stage, the prominent event photo, its credibility rubbing off. Think of high-level meetings and events, the presence where political and economic power meet. Heralds are like this themselves and expect think tanks to contribute to this comms approach. If the comms team of a think tank downplays the visibility of the founder, it should not be surprised when the renewal conversation goes cold. An example of a foundation like this is Open Society Foundations under Alex Soros.

2. The Steward. These foundations are the exact opposite: deliberately invisible, amplifying grantees, never themselves. The worst thing you can do with a Steward is thank them loudly. Your visibility is their impact metric. They are quietly auditing whether their money makes you louder — not them. Sigrid Rausing Trust is the archetype of a Steward.

3. The Persuader. A foundation as a thought-leadership brand. They are aiming at policy influence, and they read your comms output as a proxy for your theory of change. Do you reach the right desks in the Commission, the right ministries? Access and impact are the key metrics. Think tank comms teams feel that pressure every day. They just rarely say it aloud. Gates Foundation, Welcome Trust and to some extent, Mercator Stiftung illustrate this group well.

4. The Mobilizer/Organizer. They face outward, to their national public and their own donors. They need stories they can retail: human-scale and emotionally legible. Think tanks are terrible at producing this. Which often means it's the cheapest win in the room: give a Mobilizer one usable human story per grant and you have communicated success in the language they understand the best. Fondation de France and King Baudouin Foundation in Belgium, to a large extent, exemplify this category.

5. The Producer. These are operating foundations whose entire output is communication: indices, studies, reports, briefs, newsletters, conferences and much more. Strip out their comms function and their product is invisible. They're barely donors at all; they're competitor-collaborators. If a think tank collaborates with one, they should understand that there is no product without a significant comms part. Often, the asymmetry of power in these partnerships is total. Bertelsmann Stiftung and Körber Stiftung, partially, come to mind under this category.

The misalignment point

Think tanks comms and fundraising teams always face the risk of misalignment. In my funder-side diagnosis, the internal misalignment usually mirrors an external misreading. Fundraisers instinctively treat every funder as a relationship target: the Herald logic. Comms teams instinctively treat every output as audience-building: the Persuader logic. When the actual funder is a Steward or a Mobilizer, both functions miss simultaneously and then blame each other at the away-day.  

The fix is not another coordination meeting. It's a one-page exercise: a think tank should take their top ten funders and prospects, and have communications and fundraising colleagues jointly assess which of the five postures best describes each funder. Then derive what each funder actually wants from the think tank communications. Ten funders, one page, one hour per founder. It will do more than any restructure and will save so much energy in looking for the problem internally.

The trust point  

Funders also want something that no proposal template explicitly captures: legitimacy. The Council on Foundations in the US ran the largest study ever done on philanthropy narratives, and the headline finding was that the sector's own messaging is a major reason the public doesn't trust or understand it. European funders also know this. The European philanthropic network Philea recently published an entire report on communicating in polarised environments. Foundations have a legitimacy problem and they know it. Which means a think tank whose communications makes its funder look good in the right way: evidence-based, grounded, balanced. Think tanks are not just reporting impact, they are building their funder's social licence.  

A provocation to close  

Most think tank communication departments dwell on how communicators can support fundraising "without becoming fundraisers themselves".

From the funder's side of the table, that distinction does not exist. It's invisible. Every output a think tank communications team produces is a funding document. Funders read your newsletters, your LinkedIn feed, your event line-ups, your press hits — continuously, between proposals, as due diligence. By the time the think tank submits the application, the decision is eighty percent made. The proposal rarely changes the story. It confirms the one your communications have already been telling. Then, the right question isn't how comms can support fundraising. It's whether a think tank understands that, to the people with the money, communications is part of who you are and not just a support function.

This article is based on the author’s panel intervention at a WonkComms Breakfast at MERICS on July 6, 2026.

Endnote

1  | Please note that this is a preliminary conceptual typology based on my professional experience rather than on a systematic empirical study of foundations' communication strategies. The foundations mentioned serve only as illustrative examples of each type. In practice, most foundations combine elements of two or more communication approaches, although one typically tends to dominate. The examples therefore reflect my assessment of each foundation's predominant communicative posture rather than the findings of a formal survey or comparative analysis.