Fundable Is Not Enough. Findable Shows Up in the Network.

Before a nonprofit can be funded at scale, it has to be fundable.

But it also has to be findable.

Building on Kevin L. Brown's excellent "fundable and findable" frame, consider Yield Giving, MacKenzie Scott's giving vehicle.

We previously looked at what Yield Giving funds: large, unrestricted gifts to mature, financially solid nonprofits, sized to transform them.

Now the harder question: how does Yield Giving find them?

Yield Giving is an LLC, so it files no foundation 990-PF return. On paper, its selection process is mostly invisible. But its recipients show up in everyone else's filings, and that is enough to reconstruct the funding network they already belonged to.

Its grantees are stable: established, program-heavy, solvent. The easy read is that Yield Giving funds for stability and performance.

We tested this stability explanation. Within the same sector, Yield Giving's grantees have two to three times as many foundation funders as comparable nonprofits, and nearly twice as many even after accounting for financial health and size. Stability is not what distinguishes them. Position in the funding network is.

Yield Giving's mapped grantees carry a median of 15 foundation funders, versus 6 for all mapped nonprofits in our dataset. These grantees sit near the center of the network, not its edges. Other funders had converged on many of these grantees years before their Yield Giving gift arrived.

The pattern looks less like drawing a new funding map than reading one that already exists.

The Blue Meridian overlap

In our data, a tight cluster of established equity-oriented and outcomes-focused funders showed portfolios overlapping heavily with Yield Giving's. One stood out: Blue Meridian Partners.

Nearly 40% of Blue Meridian's grantees are also Yield Giving grantees, the tightest alignment of any funder we examined.

That alignment has a public explanation. MacKenzie Scott is also a Blue Meridian General Partner, and Bridgespan is publicly connected to both: advising Scott's philanthropy and supporting Blue Meridian's sourcing, due diligence, and investee strategy.

The overlap our data surfaced is the footprint of a shared network.

What this means for nonprofits

None of this is a knock on the giving. The gifts are fast, large, and unrestricted in ways that genuinely transform recipients.

But it changes how nonprofits outside the network should think about getting there.

There is often no open call for Yield Giving's quiet research, so the path is rarely direct. It runs through the network Yield Giving already trusts: the intermediaries, advisors, and funders whose portfolios it reads.

So if you want to be findable to a funder like this, the question is often not how to reach them directly.

It is whether you are building visibility inside the network they already trust.

Source: SciRise Mission-Driven Capital Intelligence Dataset

SciRise is an independent venture and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Duke University.