GOVERNANCE 62 STRATEGY PROCESS INSIGHT Making sure that the funds allocated for philanthropic activities are well spent and able to catalyse the change we want to see is, no doubt, a key issue for all foundations. The Poul Due Jensen Foundation is certainly no exception. Building not only a well-founded, coherent and robust strategy for the philanthropic activities, but also a strategy deeply anchored in the history of the founder – without challenging the ban on self-donations to Grundfos – was one of the important objectives for the Board of Directors in 2016. The results of the strategy process can be found in other places in this annual report. In these pages we would like to share some of the insights from the process with our stakeholders. Finding a model There are numerous well-developed tools and models to support a business strategy process, but the availability of guidance and support for developing a philanthropic strategy is limited. “We needed a simple model that on one hand allowed us to go deep into analysing the topics and involving the Board of Directors directly in the process, but at the same time we needed it to provide an answer, which would be easy to communicate to our many stakeholders,” explains Executive Director Christian Hartvig. The objective was to create a philanthropic strategy that could be visu- alised in one page or summed up in an “elevator pitch”, and which at the same time provided coherent storytelling between the founder, Grundfos and the future. The solution was found in the Business Model Generation work of Alexander Ostenwalder and Yves Pigneur, as only a few adjustments were needed to make it work for a philanthropic strategy process. “We translated customer segments into beneficiary segments and revenue streams into a description of our success criteria. The remaining part of the process, with all the analysis in between, could follow Ostenwalder and Pigneur’s model in both describing the past – the AS-IS description – and elaborating and discussing future options,” says Christian Hartvig. The history of previous donations made it natural to divide the philanthropic activities into three main areas: safe water, social responsibility and research/ learning, and to go deep within these three areas
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