By the Business & Philanthropy Forum · Published 25 September 2026 · Updated 29 September 2026

Official figures show more than 2,000 single family offices in Singapore holding tax incentives at the end of 2024, up from 400 four years earlier, and the government now wants more of that wealth to reach charity. For each of those families, the harder question is what the giving is meant to achieve.

The five decisions behind strategic giving

  1. How long the money should last. Spend it within a set time, or keep it going permanently.
  2. What the giving is for. One or two causes, written down in a single sentence.
  3. How the money is held. Giving directly, a donor-advised fund, a family foundation or a family office.
  4. Who in the family decides. Including a real say for the next generation.
  5. How the family checks it worked. Agreed at the start, and reviewed each year.

Scale is not the deciding factor. A family directing S$50,000 a year to a cause it has thought through is working more strategically than one committing S$5 million to requests as they arrive.

In short: Strategic family philanthropy is giving organised around a written purpose, a chosen time horizon and a deliberate vehicle, with decisions shared across generations and results checked against the purpose. The practical choices are giving directly to charities, a donor-advised fund, a family foundation, or giving through a family office.

Reactive giving and strategic giving

Many families begin by responding to requests. The gap appears later, when the founding decision-maker steps back and nobody can state why the family funds what it funds.

The difference shows up in five places. A reactive family gives to whoever asks, usually through personal networks, and decides one gift at a time. A strategic family writes down one or two goals, declines requests outside them, and reviews a whole year of giving as a single portfolio.

The two also differ on time, on who decides, and on what gets measured. Reactive giving leaves the time horizon unstated, which in practice means indefinitely, and one person makes each call. A strategic family chooses to spend down or to endow on purpose, gives the next generation a real vote, and measures what changed because of each grant.

The first decision: how long should the money last?

This decision belongs first, because it changes every other answer.

Robert Rosen, formerly Director of Philanthropic Partnerships at one of the world’s largest private foundations, argues that families should choose deliberately between spending the money down and keeping it in perpetuity, because too often “perpetuity is a default, not a decision.”

The two choices lead to different structures:

  • Spend down if the problem has a window, the family wants to see results in its own lifetime, or the next generation has different interests. Money goes out faster and there is no endowment to manage.
  • Endow if the cause needs permanent support, such as a hospital, a school or a scholarship, and the family wants the name attached for generations.

In Singapore both options exist inside a single donor-advised fund. One Singapore sponsor offers flow-through funds that grant money out, endowment funds invested in perpetuity, and a hybrid that grants both the investment returns and the principal.

On timing, the incentives are unusual. An investment rewards acting early. Giving tends to reward waiting, because people hold off expecting to be smarter, wealthier or less busy next year. The better course is to start small, but start.

Devi Sahny, who later founded an education company in Singapore, started as a student. She sold handmade bracelets and necklaces to her teachers, earned nearly 300 euros in a month, and gave the proceeds to a juvenile centre. Over the 20 years since, her donations have supported 13 students attending high school. She credits her mother, who encouraged giving back long before success arrived.

Write the family’s purpose in one sentence

A purpose narrows the field. Without one, every request is equally valid, which is how families end up funding many things a little.

A purpose also differs from a ranked list. A “top five” of causes misses how climate, health, education and livelihoods depend on each other. The stronger approach is to choose the causes that matter to the family, then put the effort into how to fund them. Scholarships are a useful example: effective and popular, and on their own unlikely to change an education system.

A Singapore foundation set up in 1980 shows what a narrow purpose looks like in practice. It works on palliative care, eldercare, and maternal and child health, and describes itself as going after “neglected areas with little to no competition.”

A usable purpose sentence names a group of people, a change you want for them, and a place. “Help children” is too broad to act on. “Improve early reading for children in lower-income families in Johor” works, because it tells the family what to decline.

Giving is more than money: the 5 Ts

Money is only one of the ways a family can give. Nishtha Agarwal, a next-generation leader from a family of Indian textile manufacturers who advises charities on winning support from wealthy donors, finds that many of those donors “are eager to contribute ideas, connections, and expertise as well as to actively engage through volunteering.”

The 5 Ts of family giving

  1. Time. Family members on a charity’s board, or at the work itself.
  2. Talent. Lending the skills of the family business, such as its finance, legal or operations staff.
  3. Treasure. The money.
  4. Ties. Introductions to funders, officials and partners a charity cannot reach alone.
  5. Testimony. Listening to the people a cause affects, and sharing their experience with others.

Seeing the 5 Ts in practice

Dr A F Pinto and Dr Grace Pinto, who founded one of India’s largest private school networks, give through the family business in all five ways.

Time. Students across the group volunteer with orphanages, elderly care centres and homes for people with disabilities, and the group runs regular health camps in underserved areas.

Talent. The family’s expertise is running schools, and they have opened them in less-developed parts of India, including Raebareli, Jalna and Bolpur, where first-generation learners now attend English-medium schools.

Treasure. A nationwide food drive run by the group collected more than 738,000 kilos of food for over 400 charities.

Ties. The family works with a foundation led by Dr Kiran Bedi on tree planting in government schools and water management in Gurugram.

Testimony. Students take causes to the public through street plays and workshops on climate and the environment.

Treasure is the easiest of the five to count. Ties and talent are where a business family has the most to give that a charity cannot buy.

Choosing a vehicle

Four vehicles cover most families, and the choice between them is largely a trade between control and administration.

Giving directly to registered charities is the simplest route and requires no administration. A donor-advised fund gives the family a named fund without running an organisation, because a sponsoring charity handles the administration. A family foundation offers full control, its own board and a vehicle the next generation can run, along with the staff, governance and reporting that come with it. A family that already runs a family office can give through it.

The detail depends on where the family is based. In Singapore, donations to Institutions of a Public Character qualify for a 250% tax deduction, and one donor-advised fund sponsor sets its minimum at S$200,000 with no set-up fee. Since 2023, donations to qualifying local charities have counted as eligible spending under the family-office tax schemes, and a separate philanthropy tax incentive scheme encourages family offices to manage their regional giving from Singapore. How giving works in Singapore covers this in more depth.

Tax treatment is set by government and it changes, so confirm the current terms with a tax adviser before structuring any giving around them.

Where the family business fits

In many Asian families the giving comes out of the business, so the two are easier to plan together than apart.

A 2026 paper on family business succession argues that the family’s giving is a lower-stakes place for successors to practise the decisions they will later make in the company. When the next generation takes part in grant decisions, reviews impact reports and works with partners, “they’re building decision-making skills.” Families from different generations who must agree on causes and amounts end up saying what they value out loud.

The same paper lists three habits that work against it:

  • Tokenism. Giving the next generation a seat but no real vote.
  • No preparation. Putting successors in charge of grants without telling them the family’s history or how to judge a charity.
  • Two governance systems. Running the giving on different rules from the business.

For the first, give the next generation a budget of its own, with the authority to direct it toward something the previous generation would not have chosen. How next-generation philanthropists in Asia approach giving covers what that looks like in practice.

Strategic does not have to mean controlling

The usual framing puts strategic philanthropy against trust-based philanthropy: plans and metrics on one side, flexible funding and deference to charities on the other. Rosen calls that an artificial divide: the foundations most often labelled strategic use both.

In practice, strategy decides where the money goes, and trust decides how tightly it is held once it gets there. A family can pick its cause with great care and still give unrestricted funding to the organisation doing the work. The alternative is funding charities too tightly for them to build their own capacity, a pattern covered in how family philanthropy in Asia works.

It helps to treat the giving as a portfolio. Some grants are safe, with modest and fairly certain results. Others are experiments with uncertain outcomes and a much larger upside. Philanthropy can be bolder than ordinary capital, because it can fund the ideas other investors avoid.

The limit is measurement. The same interview notes that the sector still has no consistent way to define or measure impact, so a family expecting a clean scorecard should plan for partial evidence. Decide at the start what evidence would show the work is succeeding, and record it.

Questions about strategic giving

What is strategic philanthropy?

Giving organised around a defined goal, a time horizon and a chosen vehicle, with results checked against the goal. It is the opposite of giving in response to whoever asks.

What are some examples of strategic philanthropy?

A Singapore foundation limiting itself to palliative care, eldercare, and maternal and child health, and choosing neglected areas on purpose. A family opening a donor-advised fund with a written purpose and a separate budget for its next generation.

What are the 5 Ts of philanthropy?

Time, talent, treasure, ties and testimony: the five things a donor can give. Treasure, the money, is only one of them.

Sources

The Business & Philanthropy Forum 2026 runs 6 to 7 November at Shangri-La Singapore.

Two days with the families, family offices and foundations making these decisions, rather than reading about them afterwards. Reserve a place, or read the interviews first.