Twice As Good

Twice As Good is a practical guide for foundations, grantmakers, and serious donors who want their funding decisions to produce far greater real-world impact. Drawing on years of experience evaluating and launching evidence-based charities, Joey Savoie shows how to replace intuition and convention with clear standards, comparisons, and measurable outcomes, helping anyone involved in grantmaking make decisions that reliably do more good with the same resources.

What if your grantmaking could do twice as much good, without doubling your budget?

Philanthropy shapes lives, institutions, and entire fields. Yet most grantmakers operate without clear standards for deciding where their money does the most good. In Twice As Good, experienced grantmaker and nonprofit builder Joey Savoie offers a clear, practical framework for making smarter, more effective funding decisions. Drawing on years of work launching and evaluating evidence-based charities, Savoie shows how foundations and donors can dramatically increase the impact of their giving by focusing on outcomes, comparisons, and substance.

This book translates complex ideas about effectiveness into a simple, usable process that works for foundations of any size. Readers are guided step by step through the full grantmaking cycle, from identifying promising organizations to evaluating trade-offs between cause areas and communicating productively with grantees after funds are allocated.

Along the way, Savoie provides concrete illustrations of what donations can achieve. One million dollars might save hundreds of lives through proven global health interventions, improve the lives of tens of millions of animals through welfare reforms, or remove large quantities of carbon dioxide by supporting effective climate policy advocacy. The differences between good and great grants are often enormous, and they are measurable.

At the core of the book are six practical principles, the POWERS of good grantmaking, which help donors clarify costs, compare real alternatives, set benchmarks, reduce unnecessary burdens on nonprofits, and focus on how impact is actually produced rather than how it is presented.

Written for foundation leaders, grantmaking staff, and serious individual donors, Twice As Good is also valuable reading for nonprofit professionals who want to better understand how funding decisions are made. It offers a disciplined approach to philanthropy that replaces guesswork with clarity and transforms good intentions into reliably better outcomes.