The Blind Spot in Conservation Philanthropy

At first glance, conservation philanthropy should be entering a period of extraordinary possibility. The language of environmental philanthropy is expanding rapidly, carrying the promise of new capital and a broader understanding of what nature is worth. Biodiversity finance has moved into conversations once dominated by climate alone. Family offices are exploring impact investing, while foundations are becoming more familiar with catalytic capital and outcomes-based philanthropy. Yet the conservation funding system has not evolved as quickly as the vocabulary surrounding it, even as the scale of biodiversity loss becomes impossible to ignore.

The amount of charitable giving in the United States appears to reinforce that sense of opportunity. Giving USA estimates that Americans contributed $617.2 billion to charitable causes in 2025, the first time annual giving crossed the $600 billion mark. Within that total, giving to environmental and animal organizations reached an estimated $24.57 billion, representing just under 4 percent of all charitable giving. That category grew by 11 percent in current dollars and 8.2 percent after inflation. By those measures, concern for wildlife and the environment is not fading. It is growing. Yet less than four cents of every charitable dollar went to the combined environmental and animal category, even during a year in which that category experienced substantial gains. [1]

Those numbers sit against a far darker financial landscape. The Paulson Institute’s 2025 update to its Financing Nature research estimated that the annual global biodiversity financing gap had grown from $711 billion in 2020 to approximately $942 billion. The United Nations Environment Programme reached the problem from another direction by examining the imbalance between finance that protects nature and finance that damages it. Its State of Finance for Nature 2026 report found that $7.3 trillion flowed into nature-negative activities in 2023, while $220 billion supported nature-based solutions. For every dollar moving toward the protection or restoration of nature, roughly thirty dollars were helping to degrade it. These studies use different definitions and methodologies, but they reveal the same underlying truth. Capital is moving through the global economy at a tremendous scale, while only a small portion is reaching the work required to halt biodiversity loss and restore damaged ecosystems. [2][3]

Conservation needs more money, but the shortage of capital is only part of the problem. Some organizations built to connect public engagement, science, fieldwork, and long-term outcomes are among the hardest to fund because their work crosses several institutional categories. The deeper challenge lies in the architecture through which philanthropy identifies work, evaluates it, and decides what belongs within the boundaries of a fundable program.

At Reel Earth Films, our work begins with conservation problems and the outcomes needed to address them. We work with conservation organizations already rooted in the landscape to understand what is preventing progress, identify where additional resources or public support could make a meaningful difference, and help build the partnerships and pathways capable of moving that work forward. Storytelling becomes part of the strategy when it can make those challenges visible, connect people with credible opportunities to participate, and help direct attention and financial support toward the organizations doing the work. A film may serve as the public-facing component of that effort, but it exists within a broader conservation impact model built around field partnerships, practical action, and evidence showing what changed. Because that model crosses conservation planning, public engagement, education, media, and nonprofit capacity, it rarely fits neatly within a single funding category.

That experience has made a larger problem increasingly visible. Donors may genuinely care, funding may be available, and effective organizations may already be doing the work, yet the path connecting those three realities can remain remarkably difficult to navigate.

A conservation funding system built around categories

Conservation philanthropy needs systems of classification. Without them, the volume of nonprofit activity would be nearly impossible to understand. Foundations divide their work into program areas, while grant databases organize organizations according to their primary subjects and activities. These structures make it easier to manage portfolios and compare proposals, but they become less useful when an organization’s theory of change depends upon work crossing several fields.

Nature does not function according to any such division. A river moving through a desert does not become a water project in one county and a wildlife project in the next. Its health may depend upon the surrounding watershed, the amount of water being drawn from the ground, whether wildlife can still move along its banks, and whether the people living nearby understand what could be lost if the system fails.

A wildlife corridor is no less complicated. It is not created by drawing a green line across a map and announcing that the work is complete. It emerges from years of scientific research, land-use planning, negotiation, and the gradual development of trust among people who may see the landscape through very different eyes. A biologist may recognize a migration route where a developer sees available land and a rancher sees a working livelihood. Meaningful conservation must understand all three realities if it hopes to produce an outcome that lasts.

When an organization attempts to work within this living system, the pieces holding a project together may be reviewed separately by funders seeking different kinds of outcomes. Scientific research can fall within one portfolio, while restoration belongs in another. Public education may be welcomed by an education funder but considered outside the purpose of an environmental grant. Conservation storytelling may be treated as communications rather than conservation, even when public understanding and participation are necessary for the effort to succeed.

These funding silos create a peculiar situation in which nearly every part of a conservation strategy may be recognized as valuable, yet the strategy as a whole struggles to find a home. The applicant is asked to present the work in the language of a single category, reducing a living system to the portion that most closely resembles a funder’s guidelines. Once that happens, the connective work begins to disappear. Relationships among organizations become secondary, years spent developing trust are difficult to explain, and the people coordinating the larger effort may be placed beneath the heading of administration or overhead, even when the project would collapse without them.

Research on systems change helps explain why conventional conservation funding and measurement practices struggle with this kind of work. The Bridgespan Group describes systems change as fluid, nonlinear, and long-term. Progress may not move steadily forward, and conditions beyond the control of any one organization can reshape what is possible. Systems work can still be measured, but doing so requires a clear understanding of the system and meaningful milestones that can evolve as new information becomes available. [4]

Ecological work carries that uncertainty in a particularly visible way. A drought may delay restoration. A wildfire can transform years of planning in a single afternoon. Wildlife may return to a landscape without immediately producing the population trend a funder hoped to see. The work still needs direction and accountability, but it also needs flexible funding and enough patience to respond to a world that does not move according to a grant calendar.

Philanthropy understandably wants evidence. Donors deserve to know whether a program is accomplishing what it promised, and organizations have a responsibility to separate honest progress from attractive language. The difficulty begins when the clearest number becomes the only outcome that appears worthy of support.

An acre restored can be counted, as can a nesting structure installed or a mile of river treated for invasive vegetation. Those figures can carry real meaning, but they usually appear near the end of a much longer story. Before the acre could be restored, someone had to understand what belonged there and why it had disappeared. The organization then had to develop the project, secure permission, raise the money, and establish how the site would be monitored. When those earlier stages are repeatedly dismissed as planning or overhead, philanthropy funds the visible moment while weakening the foundation beneath it.

The same problem appears within nonprofit operations. Staff continuity is less compelling in a grant report than a photograph from the field, but the loss of an experienced project manager can set a collaboration back years. Financial systems do not restore habitat, yet a conservation nonprofit without sound accounting cannot safely administer a large grant. Insurance, leadership, fundraising, and evaluation are often discussed as though they exist outside the mission. General operating support and unrestricted funding sustain this infrastructure because each function makes the mission possible.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s three-year study of MacKenzie Scott’s large, unrestricted grants offers unusually strong evidence of what can happen when organizations are allowed to make those decisions for themselves. Nearly 90 percent of the nonprofit leaders surveyed said the funding had moderately or significantly strengthened their organization’s long-term financial sustainability. The study also found improved financial stability and little evidence that the widely anticipated dangers of receiving such large grants had materialized. Organizations generally used the funding to strengthen themselves over time rather than rushing to spend it immediately. [5]

That does not mean every conservation organization should receive a large unrestricted check without diligence. It means flexible funding should not be treated as a retreat from accountability. In many cases, flexible capital allows an organization to make more responsible decisions because it can respond to what is actually happening rather than forcing every development into a budget written months earlier.

Multiyear funding remains uneven. A 2025 Candid analysis found that 67 percent of surveyed foundations had made at least one multiyear grant during the fiscal year studied, but the share of multiyear support within their overall grantmaking varied considerably. Fifty private foundations reported that multiyear awards made up less than 5 percent of their total grant commitments, while only sixteen reported that every grant they made was multiyear. [6]

For an ecosystem moving through cycles of drought, recovery, migration, and disturbance, a one-year commitment can be painfully brief. Conservation may require annual reporting, but multiyear funding recognizes that it cannot always promise annual completion. Those are not the same thing, and conservation grantmaking should not confuse one with the other.

Why conservation storytelling belongs inside the strategy

The divide between communications and conservation is one of the places where funding silos become most apparent. There is a persistent assumption that one group of organizations performs the real work while another merely tells people about it. At its worst, storytelling can certainly become superficial. It can simplify a complicated issue until the audience is left with a heroic image, a moment of alarm, and almost no understanding of what conservation actually requires.

That weakness is not an argument for removing storytelling from conservation. It is an argument for doing it more responsibly.

Most people will never stand beside a biologist examining tracks along a remote riverbank. They will not watch a restoration crew return native plants to a damaged wetland, nor will they sit through the years of meetings required to protect a wildlife corridor. Their understanding of those places will come from the stories that reach them, and the quality of those stories will help determine whether the work feels remote or personally meaningful.

The evidence surrounding film is promising, although it is more nuanced than the claims often made on its behalf. One experiment examined Hidden Rivers of Southern Appalachia, a documentary following conservation biologists and explorers through one of North America’s most biologically rich networks of rivers and streams. Viewers who saw either the complete film or a shortened version expressed stronger alignment with its conservation beliefs and greater interest in conservation behavior than participants who watched a nonconservation film. [7]

A nationally representative study of American adults reached a related conclusion using four professionally produced short documentaries about science. Viewers who became more absorbed in the story and connected with its characters were more likely to recall information correctly, feel that they understood the subject, and express an interest in learning more. The study found an association between narrative engagement and those outcomes rather than proving that the films alone caused every change, but it provides useful evidence of how real science films may connect with a broad public. [8]

Another experiment tested a more immediate behavioral question. Participants watched either an excerpt from National Geographic Channel’s Wild Yellowstone or a documentary about New York City architecture. The Yellowstone narration contained no direct environmental appeal. Afterward, participants decided how much of a real payment to donate to an environmental organization and whether to recycle their disposable headphone coverings. Those who watched Wild Yellowstone donated more on average and recycled at a higher rate, although the difference was driven primarily by participants who entered the experiment with weaker environmental beliefs. The authors cautioned that the results could have been influenced by the particular videos selected and should not be interpreted as evidence that all nature content will produce the same response. [9]

Together, those studies suggest that film can move some viewers from distance to understanding and, in certain settings, from understanding to an immediate action. No single viewing, however, should be mistaken for lasting behavioral change.

That limitation became clearer in a longitudinal study of The Sea & Me, a documentary about Australia’s marine environments and marine parks. Knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intentions rose immediately after the screening. Over the following ten weeks, however, participants who received no follow-up declined more sharply. Positive changes in reported conservation behavior remained only among groups given a practical next step, such as access to conservation information and petitions or a list of inexpensive actions they could take. The study had important limitations, including substantial participant attrition and reliance upon self-reported behavior, but its larger pattern was revealing. [10]

A documentary can awaken interest, but viewers are more likely to carry that interest into their lives when they are shown something practical they can do with it. Film should not be expected to create lasting conservation impact in isolation. Its greater value emerges when public engagement is connected with conservation partners and meaningful opportunities to act. A story can open a door, but something worthwhile must be waiting on the other side.

Measuring conservation impact requires different evidence

Much of what a film first creates is qualitative. It may deepen a person’s understanding of a landscape or alter the way a species is perceived. It may create empathy for an animal that was previously feared or reveal an ecological connection that had gone unnoticed. Those changes involve emotion, identity, and personal connection that cannot be reduced to the number of views beneath a video.

They can still be studied. Audience research can measure what people understood before a screening and afterward. Educators can report how a film was used and whether students retained its central ideas. An impact campaign can determine whether viewers visited a conservation partner, volunteered, donated, or completed a clearly defined action. These measurements do not capture every change within a person, but they provide evidence that the story traveled beyond passive consumption.

Field conservation requires a separate body of evidence. The recovery of a waterway or continued use of a wildlife corridor will not be measured in the same manner as public engagement. Researchers may need to examine water quality, vegetation, verified wildlife movement, habitat connectivity, or the continued viability of a monitoring program. Those outcomes may take far longer to emerge, and their achievement will almost always depend upon several organizations rather than a single institution.

The two forms of evidence should be related through a clear theory of change, but they should not be collapsed into one impressive figure. Ten million views are not ten million acres protected. At the same time, an acre restored without lasting community support may be more vulnerable than the grant report suggests.

This distinction also requires honesty about attribution and contribution. A film organization should not claim that it restored a river because the restoration effort appeared on screen. It can, however, demonstrate that the film helped a partner attract donors, reach a larger public, or recruit participants into a defined program. In systems-change work, Bridgespan recommends recognizing an organization’s contribution to a larger outcome rather than insisting that every result be attributed to one actor. [11]

An integrated model therefore needs at least two connected measurement tracks. Narrative impact asks what changed among the audience and whether that change produced a meaningful response. Conservation impact asks what changed within the landscape or the organizations caring for it. The connection between them should be tested and documented, but uncertainty should not be disguised. Credibility will be worth far more in the long run than a dramatic claim that cannot be defended.

Capital that can follow the conservation outcome

The structure of the funding matters because no single financial instrument is appropriate for every conservation need. Donor-advised funds illustrate the potential for capital to follow an outcome across traditional categories. According to the Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, 1,512 sponsoring organizations managed 3.59 million DAF accounts in fiscal year 2024. Those accounts held $327.87 billion in charitable assets and distributed $64.60 billion in grants during the year. [12]

A donor-advised fund is not a private account that the donor continues to own. The contribution is made to a sponsoring public charity, which assumes legal control of the assets, while the donor retains advisory privileges concerning investments and future grants. [13] Its value for conservation lies in the ability to think beyond a single transaction. A donor concerned about a river system does not necessarily have to choose between the organization conducting research and the organization restoring habitat. A funding strategy can follow the ecology rather than the category, provided the donor understands the purpose of each grant and the relationship among them.

A DAF does not create that strategy on its own. Capital can remain fragmented even when housed in a flexible vehicle. The opportunity emerges when a donor begins with the desired conservation outcome and works backward to understand which organizations must remain strong for that outcome to become possible. One year might require baseline research, another may bring an opportunity to protect land, and a third may require public engagement capable of building local support.

Impact investing belongs beside this conversation, although it should not become a more fashionable name for every environmental expenditure. The Global Impact Investing Network estimated that more than 3,900 organizations managed approximately $1.571 trillion in impact-investing assets in 2024. Its 2025 research found continued growth and substantial interest in climate solutions, water and sanitation, and sustainable agriculture. [14][15]

Impact investments intentionally pursue measurable social or environmental benefits alongside a financial return. That requirement creates an important boundary. A sustainable forestry enterprise may produce revenue. The patient work required to monitor an endangered animal may not. Restoration can sometimes generate investable cash flow, while public education and long-term community relationships usually cannot be made commercially viable without distorting their purpose.

A sophisticated conservation finance strategy should not force every need into the same instrument. Philanthropy can support work for which no realistic revenue model exists and absorb early uncertainty that conventional investors will not accept. Investment capital can enter where there is a credible path to repayment or return. Bridgespan describes these as complementary forms of capital, with philanthropy well placed to support early project development and impact investment capable of scaling successful models when sustainable revenue becomes possible. [16]

Building an integrated conservation impact model in Arizona

The model Reel Earth Films is developing begins with the conservation challenge rather than the medium. In Arizona, that means looking closely at habitat connectivity and the growing pressure placed upon the routes wildlife must continue to use. It also means examining the condition of critical waterways, where restoration and timely protection could prevent far greater losses in the years ahead.

Habitat connectivity demonstrates why integrated work is necessary. Wildlife populations depend upon the ability to move between habitats, yet development and expanding infrastructure can interrupt those movements even when some protected areas remain intact. The Arizona Game and Fish Department has spent years identifying wildlife linkage zones and barriers, recognizing that connectivity requires coordination among agencies and organizations involved in land-use planning. [17]

Identifying a corridor is only the beginning. Protecting it requires reliable ecological information showing how wildlife uses the landscape, partnerships capable of working with the people whose decisions will shape its future, and resources reaching organizations in a position to act before the connection is lost.

The same is true of Arizona’s waterways. The Arizona Wildlife Conservation Strategy reports that up to 80 percent of the state’s wildlife species depend upon riparian areas during some portion of their life cycle. These areas provide water and shelter while functioning as natural passageways through landscapes where dependable resources may be separated by long distances. They are among the state’s richest habitats, but also among its most altered and threatened. [18]

Conservation organizations throughout Arizona already possess deep knowledge of these places. Many have spent years collecting data, restoring habitat, monitoring wildlife, and building relationships with the communities around them. Their challenge is often not a lack of worthwhile work. It is that the scale of the need has grown faster than their access to public attention and philanthropic resources.

Our role is not to replace those organizations or claim ownership over the outcomes they produce. It is to help create a stronger bridge between their work and the people who may be willing to support it once they understand what is happening and why it matters.

A major film project is being developed as the public-awareness and educational component of this effort. Its purpose is to bring Arizona’s ecological story to a broad audience with enough depth and visual power that the landscapes become more than scenery and the wildlife becomes more than a collection of remarkable images. The project can help people understand how the pieces fit together, why habitat connectivity matters, and what is at risk when waterways or movement routes begin to fail.

The film will not be presented as the conservation outcome itself. It will be the public-facing portion of a larger effort, and its value will depend upon what happens around it and afterward. The attention created through conservation storytelling must be connected with credible opportunities to support field partners and strengthen existing conservation programs.

This is why the impact work must develop alongside production rather than being invented after the film is complete. Conservation partners need to help identify where meaningful support can be directed. The public needs clear and trustworthy pathways into the work. Donors need to understand how their contributions can move beyond general awareness and toward measurable conservation impact that can be observed over time.

Those outcomes will differ according to the needs of each place. In one region, the priority may be protecting a vulnerable wildlife passage. Somewhere else, the immediate need may involve restoring a riparian corridor or expanding a partner’s ability to monitor wildlife movement. The model must remain flexible enough to respond to what the landscape requires while remaining disciplined enough to show where resources went and what changed because they were provided.

Reel Earth Films is building this model while the work moves forward. That means testing assumptions and developing a measurement system capable of distinguishing narrative influence from ecological change. Some results may become visible relatively quickly, while others will require years before their full meaning can be understood.

What matters is that the relationship between storytelling and conservation implementation is being designed intentionally from the beginning. Public awareness is not a separate campaign whose value ends with the number of people reached. Field conservation is not background material used to make a story more compelling. Each side has a distinct purpose, and the potential lies in what becomes possible when they are allowed to support one another.

We have written previously about this developing approach in A New Model for Conservation: How Reel Earth Films Is Turning Storytelling Into Direct Impact, How to Fund Conservation Outcomes With a Donor-Advised Fund, and Why Conservation Needs a New Philanthropic Model. Together, these essays describe an emerging model that places measurable conservation outcomes at the center and treats storytelling as infrastructure capable of helping those outcomes reach the public and philanthropic capital.

What better conservation philanthropy could look like

The answer is not to eliminate categories from conservation funding. They serve a practical purpose, and many funders possess deep knowledge within their chosen fields. The opportunity is to become more flexible at the edges, particularly when an organization can demonstrate that the relationship among several activities is central to the outcome being pursued.

For a hybrid conservation organization, the first requirement is not finding the closest available funding category. It is establishing enough financial clarity that a funder can understand how the different parts work together without losing sight of where the money goes or what each investment is expected to accomplish. Production funding and direct conservation support should not disappear into a vague promise of impact. The same is true of public engagement and organizational capacity. A donor should be able to see what each portion will accomplish and how it relates to the larger strategy.

The evaluation should begin with the quality of the model and the credibility of its intended outcomes, not with the question of which institutional silo is willing to claim it. Hybrid models should be examined carefully. Their finances must be transparent, the role of each partner must be understood, and their claims must be supported by evidence. Crossing traditional boundaries should invite closer examination, but it should not automatically be treated as a weakness.

These organizations also require time. A funder willing to support only the visible stage may help complete a project without helping build the system around it. Flexible, multiyear general operating support allows an organization to retain knowledge and remain present after public attention has passed. It gives partnerships time to mature and allows the work to adapt when the landscape refuses to follow the original plan. That continuity is where trust develops, and trust is often the unseen currency upon which conservation depends.

The most forward-looking conservation philanthropists will recognize that the future is unlikely to arrive in the form of one perfect institution. It will be built through stronger relationships among organizations that previously occupied different corners of the field. Filmmakers will not replace biologists, and investors will not replace philanthropy. Each has a role, but their value increases when the connection between them is intentional.

The danger for philanthropy is not merely that it may overlook one organization. The greater danger is that it may repeatedly reject the models being developed to address the limitations of older approaches. As conservation challenges become more complicated, the organizations responding to them are likely to become more interdisciplinary. A philanthropic system committed to the future should be able to recognize that evolution rather than punish organizations for building across boundaries.

There is more charitable and investment capital searching for environmental impact than at any earlier point in the development of this field. There are also better tools for measuring change and more conservation organizations experimenting with approaches that cross traditional boundaries. What remains uncertain is whether the structures governing that capital will evolve quickly enough to recognize those models before the ecological need becomes even greater.

The next era of conservation philanthropy should not force donors to choose between a story that changes how people see the natural world and fieldwork that changes what happens within it. The more consequential task is to build a bridge between those outcomes and measure, with honesty, what travels across it. Nature has always operated as a connected system, and the future of conservation may depend upon whether philanthropy can finally learn to do the same.

References

1. Giving USA Foundation. “Giving USA 2026: Charitable Giving Rose to $617.20 Billion in 2025.” Research conducted by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, 2026.
2. Paulson Institute. “Paulson Institute Warns Global Biodiversity Crisis Is Worsening While Financing Gap Surges.” September 24, 2025.
3. United Nations Environment Programme. “State of Finance for Nature 2026.” 2026.
4. The Bridgespan Group. “How Nonprofits and NGOs Can Measure Progress Toward Systems Change.” July 11, 2024.
5. Center for Effective Philanthropy. “Breaking the Mold: The Transformative Effect of MacKenzie Scott’s Big Gifts.” 2025.
6. Candid. “Where Do Foundations Stand on Multiyear Funding?.” January 27, 2025.
7. Bozeman, Bryan B., Celeste M. Condit, and Gary D. Grossman. “Do Conservation Films Generate Support for Conservation? A Case Study Using Transportation Theory and Hidden Rivers.” Science Communication, 2022.
8. Howell, Emily L., Shannon L. Behrman, Elliot Kirschner, and Sarah S. Goodwin. “Storytelling in Science Film: Narrative Engagement Relates to Greater Knowledge, Interest, and Identification With Science.” Science Communication, 2025.
9. Ibanez, Lisette, and Sébastien Roussel. “The Impact of Nature Video Exposure on Pro-Environmental Behavior: An Experimental Investigation.” PLOS ONE, 2022.
10. Hofman, Karen, and Karen Hughes. “Protecting the Great Barrier Reef: Analysing the Impact of a Conservation Documentary and Post-Viewing Strategies on Long-Term Conservation Behaviour.” Environmental Education Research, 2018.
11. The Bridgespan Group. “Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning: A Guide for Field Catalysts.” 2024.
12. Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative. “Annual DAF Report.” Updated analysis of fiscal year 2024 data.
13. Internal Revenue Service. “Donor-Advised Funds.”
14. Global Impact Investing Network. “Sizing the Impact Investing Market 2024.” October 23, 2024.
15. Global Impact Investing Network. “State of the Market 2025: Trends, Performance and Allocations.” October 8, 2025.
16. The Bridgespan Group. “Five Levers for Philanthropists and Impact Investors to Pull to Help Conserve and Restore the World’s Natural Systems.” January 28, 2026.
17. Arizona Game and Fish Department. “Planning for Wildlife: Identifying Corridors.”
18. Arizona Game and Fish Department. “Aquatic Systems Overview.” Arizona Wildlife Conservation Strategy.