Purpose
Turn a list of candidate issue areas into a defensible, scored ranking against six weighted criteria — so a foundation can decide where to concentrate capital, staff, and reputation rather than spreading thin across everything that sounds worthy. Produces a decision-grade comparison a board can review, not a values statement.
When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Choose between multiple issue areas or cause candidates for a foundation's focus
- Build or rebalance a grantmaking portfolio across causes
- Justify a focus-area decision to a board or family with a rigorous framework
- Evaluate whether to enter a new issue area or exit an existing one
- Compare a shortlist of causes on more than gut feel or founder passion
- Translate a broad mission into concrete, fundable focus areas
Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- Candidate issue areas: 3–8 causes, programs, or focus areas to compare
- Funder profile: Assets/annual giving budget, staff size, and giving horizon (spend-down vs. perpetuity)
- Existing assets: Relationships, expertise, geography, prior grants, brand, or convening power the funder already holds
- Mission or values constraints: Non-negotiable commitments, donor intent, or areas explicitly out of scope
- Risk appetite: Preference for proven interventions vs. high-uncertainty, high-upside bets
- Criterion weights (optional): If the funder wants to weight the six criteria differently than the default
- Time-to-impact preference (optional): Whether near-term wins or long-horizon change is valued more
If weights are not provided, use the default weighting described in Step 1 and state the assumption. If existing assets are vague, infer conservatively and flag low-confidence scores.
Instructions
Step 1: Establish the Scoring Framework
Score each issue area 1–10 on six criteria. Default weights (override if the funder supplies their own):
- Magnitude of Need (weight 20%): Scale and severity of the problem — how many are affected, how badly, and whether it is worsening.
- Tractability (weight 20%): How much the problem yields to additional resources — is there a known path from dollars to outcomes, or is the bottleneck non-financial?
- Neglectedness (weight 20%): How under-resourced the area is relative to its importance — crowded fields dilute marginal impact; neglected ones amplify it.
- Strategic Fit (weight 20%): Alignment with the funder's mission, existing expertise, relationships, geography, and credibility. This is the foundation-specific adaptation — a cause can be globally important yet a poor fit for this funder.
- Proximity to Change Levers (weight 12%): How close the funder can get to the actual mechanism of change — policy, key institutions, field-shaping actors, or root causes — versus funding downstream symptoms.
- Time-to-Impact (weight 8%): How quickly meaningful outcomes are plausible, calibrated against the funder's giving horizon.
Compute a weighted score (0–10) for each area. Show the arithmetic transparently so the board can audit it.
Step 2: Score Each Issue Area
For every candidate, produce a short scoring rationale (2–3 sentences per criterion, not one word). Requirements:
- Cite the specific reasoning behind each number — a magnitude score of 8 must say why it's an 8.
- Where evidence is thin, mark the score (low confidence) and explain the uncertainty.
- Flag where a high raw importance score is dragged down by poor strategic fit — this is the most common and most decision-relevant tension.
Step 3: Build the Comparison Matrix
Assemble a scoring table: issue areas as rows, the six criteria (with weights) plus weighted total and rank as columns. Sort by weighted total, highest first.
Step 4: Interpret the Rankings
Go beyond the numbers:
- Top tier: Which areas clear the bar decisively, and what specifically makes them strong.
- Contested middle: Areas where a weight change or a resolved uncertainty would flip the ranking — name the sensitivity explicitly.
- Bottom tier: What disqualifies them for this funder (often fit or tractability, rarely lack of need).
- The "important but not for us" list: Causes that scored high on need/neglectedness but low on fit — worth naming so the board sees they were considered, not ignored.
Step 5: Portfolio Construction Guidance
Translate ranking into an allocation, not just a winner:
- Concentrate vs. diversify: Recommend whether to go deep on 1–2 areas or spread across a portfolio, based on funder size and staff capacity.
- Suggested allocation: Propose a percentage or tier split across the top-ranked areas with rationale.
- Complementarity: Note where two areas reinforce each other (shared beneficiaries, levers, or grantees).
- Sequencing: Recommend what to fund now vs. what to enter later, tied to the time-to-impact and horizon inputs.
Step 6: Decision Recommendation
State a clear primary recommendation and the single strongest reason for it. Name the one assumption most likely to change the answer if it's wrong, and the one piece of research that would most reduce uncertainty before committing.
Output Format
- Structure: Framework and weights → per-area scoring rationales → comparison matrix → ranking interpretation → portfolio guidance → recommendation
- Length: 1,100–1,500 words
- Format: Mixed — scored comparison as a table; rationales and interpretation as structured prose; allocation as a labeled list
- Sections: Scoring Framework & Weights → Issue Area Scores → Comparison Matrix → Ranking Interpretation → Portfolio Construction → Decision Recommendation
- Tone: Analytical and board-ready — decisive, evidence-anchored, willing to rank causes bluntly while respecting that all candidates have merit
Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] Every candidate issue area is scored on all six criteria (count the cells)
- [ ] Weighted totals are computed correctly and the weights sum to 100%
- [ ] Each criterion score has a specific rationale — no bare numbers without reasoning
- [ ] Low-confidence scores are flagged, with the uncertainty named
- [ ] At least one sensitivity is identified — where a weight or assumption change flips the ranking
- [ ] A single clear primary recommendation is stated, not a hedge across all options
Notes
- Strategic fit is what distinguishes foundation cause prioritization from a purely impartial framework: the same cause ranks differently for a $50M health funder than for a family foundation with deep education relationships. Weight it honestly rather than pretending the funder is a neutral maximizer.
- Neglectedness scores should account for other funders' activity, not just government spending — a cause can be publicly funded yet philanthropically neglected, or vice versa.
- Resist the pull toward the largest-magnitude cause by default; magnitude without tractability or proximity to a lever produces spending that feels important but moves nothing.
- For spend-down foundations, weight time-to-impact higher; for perpetual endowments, near-term speed matters far less than durability of the change.
How to use this skill
This file is a Claude Code skill in Anthropic's standard format — markdown with YAML frontmatter at the top.
Installing in Claude Code:
~/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md— auto-loads in every session anywhere on your machine (recommended for skills you'll use across multiple projects)<your-project>/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md— auto-loads only when working in that project (recommended for project-specific skills)
Restart Claude Code or open a new session to register.
Using in Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools:
- Drag this file into a new chat, or copy and paste its contents
- Send your task or request as your next message — the AI will apply the skill where it fits
For Claude Code skill details: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills