Deciding to Make PRIs: Skills and Staffing Required

PRI making requires three sets of skills: programmatic, financial, and legal. Foundations structure those functions somewhat differently, depending on their size, strategy, and internal capacities. Larger foundations, which tend to have a higher volume of deals and make bigger investments, typically establish separate investment teams or PRI units. Smaller foundations tend to take a more ad hoc approach, forming investment teams as needed.

Foundations have two options for acquiring PRI expertise: buy it (from consultants, financial analysts, or financial reporting services), or build it in-house (by hiring experts or training current staff), or some form of a blended approach.

Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.

This takeaway was derived from Program-Related Investing.