“If baseball scouts’ intuitions lead to outcomes, use them, and if statistics produce greater success, as Moneyball portrays, then use them, and if together they provide better results, mix them,” he astutely observed.

Of course, while a baseball game can involve complex strategies, it is a more contained system than the nonprofit arena. It is governed by rules, which often fall short when tackling such pervasive problems as poverty. As Bill Veek once said, “Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very disorderly world—if you get three strikes, even the best lawyer can’t get you off.” It is easier to quantify a pitcher’s accomplishments than the spirituality stimulated by a religious organization, or the joy and healing by an arts group.

Nevertheless, sabermetrics offers constructive, as well as cautionary, lessons for foundations.

Proponents have found hidden value by better forecasting player performance. Historically, scouts “knew” that the best first basemen were tall left-handers, yet through rigorous quantitative analysis, the A’s discovered that body type didn’t matter, so they acquired some fine—and affordable—ones who were stout and right-handed. Moreover, on-base percentage, a statistic that was ignored, proved to be more predictive than traditional indicators such as batting average or stolen bases. Many donors, likewise, have determined that for calculating nonprofit effectiveness, programmatic outcomes are superior to administrative cost ratios and program outputs. Through enhanced perfomance assessment, they have realized that some legacy nonprofits are over-valued, while other innovative and evidence-based programs are underrated. 

Still, most foundations, especially smaller ones, underutilize strategy and performance measurement, diminishing their potential. Relying on untested “conventional wisdom,” they risk underestimating certain organizations by neglecting significant metrics such as program-related results per cost and the extent of their shared leadership, network connectedness, and reflective learning. The Hill-Snowdon Foundation, once a “charity-check-writing-around-a-family-kitchen-table” operation, has increased impact by strategically focusing its few million dollars of annual funding and using more data to inform decisions.

Yet relying too much on metrics brings its own risks, as baseball amply illustrates. Franchises that have discounted team chemistry, clubhouse leadership, and player conditioning have paid a price. While Moneyball techniques helped the Boston Red Sox win championships in 2004 and 2007, they collapsed this season—and devastated my four-generation Red Sox fan family—as a result of disjointed teamwork, collective stress, and other unpredictable circumstances.

In philanthropy, an approach that is overly rational, or too oriented around “command and control,” numbers and accountability can similarly backfire when inclusivity, responsiveness, and improvisation are overlooked. While particular nonprofits can benefit from control group studies, for example, most gain more from an iterative R&D approach to evaluation entailing real-time learning about cause-and-effect patterns and rapid program adaptation.

Moneyball should not convince funders to go overboard and let algorithms, logic models, and cost-benefit and ROI analysis dominate. Like baseball managers, they must begin by selecting players with the greatest potential. The craft of grantmaking is crucial: Funders should authentically cultivate nonprofit partnerships, collaborate on agendas and strategies, and allow for experimentation. They need to share control and work organically within fluid boundaries.

Just as baseball is both an art and a science, so can philanthropy benefit by deliberately tapping the dynamic tension between the humanistic and technocratic. A case in point is the Novo Foundation, which makes approximately $55 million in grants annually to empower girls and women. Foundation President Jennifer Buffett says that her father-in-law, Warren Buffett, advised her and her husband to focus their funding, take risks, be patient, and assess their impact. “In a field that works to build and support human capacities and change entire systems, it is not a good idea to fall into the trap of relying exclusively on metrics or a technocratic approach,” she comments. “We work in a very thoughtful way to equalize power relationships, build expertise on the ground, and listen and nurture…balancing and considering the head and the heart. That doesn’t mean we are not interested in sound structures, evaluation, and solid results. But, again, to us, solutions should always have a human being, a human voice, at the center.”

Neither philanthropy nor baseball can afford to disregard the varied ways to create value. Moneyball advocates would be well-served to view empirical data as the beginning, not the end, and heed intangibles. And baseball traditionalists should appreciate sabermetrics’ insights more.

Correspondingly, some technocratic philanthropies might benefit by not being as directive and rigid with grantees, “owning” the strategy less, drawing on values and intuition more, and looking hard for any blind spots causing over-confidence. And certain humanistic grantmakers could profit by providing further direction to grantees and holding them more accountable for outcomes. Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, wisely discerns that funders “need both assessment and morality” and “are morally obliged to seek to know how we are doing and what we can improve.”

Fixed formulas for permanent solutions are unrealistic because the real world is not static. The way forward is intentionally intertwining the objective and subjective while diligently measuring shifting variables, creatively exploring how they influence outcomes and making meaning, and continually adapting strategies, tapping the wisdom of diverse stakeholders at every step. This emergent journey matters far more than the metrics. Whether you are striving to win the World Series or scale social innovation, you need to cultivate a symbiotic and vibrant interplay of logic and instinct, internal expertise and outside perspective. You need to follow the linear path along with the serendipitous one.

Kiva is an organization that I’ve held up in the past as really understanding how to tell an authentic story that “sticks” (in the vocabulary of the must-read book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die). The point of the book is that a good story is true and told in such a way that it spreads. Too often I worry that the effective philanthropy movement is convinced that if it can just find the “truth” about what works, the rest will take care of itself. But I don’t think that’s enough. We need to discover the “truth” about what works and learn how to tell the story of that “truth” in a way that spreads.

Here is a new video by Kiva. The video presents data about the increasing level of microfinance loans made by the organization over time. But this ain’t no Excel chart…

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva on Vimeo.

Wow.

This data is just as “true” as a simple chart like the one below (which actual does represent Kiva’s loan growth from early 2006 through late 2007).

In the book Made to Stick, the authors talk about how a group of food scientists spent a long time telling people about how much fat was in movie popcorn. But it wasn’t until they figured out how to tell the story of how fattening movie popcorn was for you—by showing and relating it to a table top covered with bacon, eggs and cake—that people started paying attention.

First, we need to figure out what works. Then we need to figure how to communicate the story about what works in a way that drives people to action. Too often, “effective philanthropy” is obsessed with the first step and ignores the second. Too often, successful fundraising is done with the second step in mind while the first is ignored.

What we need is storytelling for impact that drives people to take action in the service of programs that work.

This fable was the basis of a small group discussion at yesterday’s morning session at the Opportunity Collaboration, a meeting on global poverty alleviation that I am blogging from this week. At the end of our discussion, our moderator turned to Leah Barker, who heads CHOICE Humanitarian, an organization that works “to end extreme poverty and improve quality of life through a bottom-up, self-developing village-centered approach.” The moderator asked Leah if she had a real-life story that was similar to the fable. (CHOICE Humanitarian works with poor, remote rural villages in Kenya, Nepal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Mexico – villages that might be like the one in Stone Soup.)

Leah shared a beautiful story that was a perfect match with this fable and also spoke to the power and importance of community decision-making. Leah and her team had come to Tamaula, an impoverished village in central Mexico. They asked the villagers what CHOICE Humanitarian could help them build that could start the village on a path out of extreme poverty. The villagers were insistent that what they needed first was a church. This posed a dilemma to the CHOICE Humanitarian team who were not in the practice of starting with church-building to help a community break out of poverty; the organization had no religious affiliation. But more important was CHOICE Humanitarian’s conviction that the community must make the choice of what’s best for the community.

The church was built and became a gathering place for the entire village and a catalyst for many more new projects, including a health clinic, an online learning system for the children, and a goat cheese factory. The village is now growing and thriving, so much so that the many of the men who had left to seek jobs can now find employment in the community. When asked what they are most proud of, the villagers reply that they are most proud of the church. They knew best.

Read the Stone Soup fable.

Read a related post, “An Innovative and Financially Sustainable Nonprofit Model.”



Of course, the key issue of our day is what is the “public responsibility?” Libertarians such as Ron Paul argue that the list of public responsibilities should be as small as possible—smaller government is what we need, and we should leave business to do as much as possible. For example, today’s NY Times reports that Paul wants to do away with the TSA and have airlines provide security. He believes that market pressures would induce the competing airlines to provide just enough security screening to be safe but not so much as to be intrusive. Given that security is a present day operating cost balanced against a potential future threat, I’d argue that the airlines would cut, slice, and eventually abandon security measures as quickly as possible, as they incur costs against the bottom line.



Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed suggesting that philanthropists start building bridges and investing in the nation’s physical infrastructure. Just a few weeks ago I had a conversation with two colleagues about the “minimal viable role” of government. Defense spending was in there. So were roads. I guess I overestimated. 



How about loans for businesses? Starbucks is working with Community Development Institutions (CDFIs) to launch what could become a significant loan program for small businesses. The “create jobs” plan is good—it has good leverage, gives everyday people a chance to engage, and could actually provide meaningful resources. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that a $5 donation to your coffee vendor is going to save the economy. CDFIs grew out of the mutual aid efforts of immigrant communities a century ago, they were boosted significantly by government support in the 1960s and have drawn significant private capital ever since. Their existence reflects a relationship between government, private capital, communities, and philanthropy. They’ve become core parts of the nation’s commitment to communities and small businesses (even if Howard Schultz had not ever heard of them until recently). Starbucks’ philanthropy can expand this, build on it, and engage everyday people in it—that’s all good. But it can only do so because of the base of institutions that government itself helped build and the regulations that require banks to pay some attention to communities. 



Philanthropy has a role in the ecosystem of funding for public goods. It is one key way that we use private resources for public goods—volunteering and impact investing are two others. Claims that philanthropy can replace public funding fail to understand its actual scope and potential. Counting on it to provide core public services is, among other things, simply undemocratic.

The Loudspeaker Effect
Donors who contribute actively to social media sites not only position themselves as leaders on certain issues, but also they can also promote the work of their grantees. As William Perrin of the Indigo Trust has observed, “If you see an inspirational beneficiary of one of your grants on a field visit, with their permission, talk about the experience with your supporters on social networks straight away—don’t wait until the annual report.”

Information Dissemination
Foundations can greatly amplify their impact by making their data publicly available through social media. Beth Kanter, an expert in nonprofit technology, has noted that “Foundations are repositories of a great deal of knowledge…they hold vast amounts of information on social problems in particular areas, as well as data from grant evaluations, applications, and impact.” Making that data available can be invaluable for grant-makers working in the same area; they can then make decisions based on a firmer factual footing. Social media platforms such as wiki sites can be effective tools to achieve this dissemination.

Stakeholder Participation
Philanthropists can use social media to invite stakeholders to input into processes that are normally internal and opaque; which, in some cases, can help them to achieve their goals. In 2006, the Case Foundation took the innovative step of designing a grant program that “…would be almost entirely shaped by people outside its doors—from determining the grant guidelines and judging criteria to reviewing applications and voting on the winners.” In opening up the grant-giving process, the foundation funded better-targeted community projects and encouraged direct civic participation—one of the key aims of the Case Foundation.

Promotion of Transparency and Accountability
As donors become more engaged with media platforms, their activities inevitably become more transparent to outsiders. This is a positive development: Greater clarity about a grant-making organisation’s internal processes helps strengthen bonds of trust between funders and grantees. What is more, those who view conversations from the outside could turn out to be potential supporters who spread the message to others, offer suggestions on how to improve programs, or even help deliver services. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s OE Wiki is an example of an initiative that has been successful in opening up internal information to a wider audience, making learning, thinking, and processes public.

These, then, are just four reasons—but forceful reasons—why those few philanthropists who are still tentative take the leap should join their peers in exploring the exciting opportunities for leadership, learning and collaboration that are available to them through social media. We believe that this step will be beneficial for them, their grantees, and the wider public. 

And yet he did give to our sector—very much so.  What he contributed was the radical leveling of the technological playing field, a shift that brought unprecedented power to the small, under-resourced organizations that dot the nonprofit landscape. 

A mere 10-15 years ago, only larger companies and well-endowed nonprofits like universities and hospitals could take advantage of technologies such as mobile computing, collaborative file sharing, remote accessed databases, and virtual meetings. In contrast, smaller nonprofits had trouble attracting talent, because they could recruit only locally and needed people who could work standard hours. There was also the cost of office infrastructure—staff at the average nonprofit had to work in the same location to accomplish anything. This meant higher costs for office space and other physical assets—things many nonprofits have a harder time affording.

Today, more and more nonprofits run virtual offices with staff based around the world, who can work remotely but still communicate and collaborate effectively. This means a larger talent pool. And today, office infrastructure costs less—a few laptops, a printer, and an Internet connection, and you’re up and running.

Of course, Steve Jobs did not accomplish this by himself. But he led the way to making new technologies available to more people—including the average nonprofit executive director. Certainly, the Apple aesthetic appeals to the non-conformist and progressive spirit that pervades the nonprofit world.

The emergence of the smartphone app—pioneered by Apple under Jobs’s leadership—is no exception. The very spirit of the app is small versus big. It is an implicit rebuke to the bloat and incomprehensibility of software suites that pervade the corporate environment. They are simple to use and usually focused on a singular purpose (indeed, a good nonprofit should resemble an app), and allowed cash-strapped nonprofits, among others, new tools for collaboration. Here are a few to try if you don’t use them already:

Salesforce
For nonprofits running their donor database on the Salesforce platform (free for nonprofits), you can access fundraising information wherever you are. About to meet a donor and forgot what her latest gift was or the name of her husband? Want to record her new status in your donor pipeline after the meeting? A few taps and swipes on your phone, and you can access and change database information.

SugarSync
This app lets you back up files or share them with a coworker by creating project folders that sync changes across users. As a sidenote, I prefer this file-share app to DropBox or Google Docs.

Tungle
Get more efficient at managing the dreaded “When can we all get together on a conference call?” routine. Tungle cuts out a lot of steps and the usual wait for everyone to get to their desk before they respond.

Time Cave
Here’s a common issue in virtual staff teams. You’re on the road, and you remember you’re supposed to check in with a colleague on something—only you’re supposed to do that next week. Instead of having to remind yourself to send a reminder to your colleague, you use Time Cave to write a message now and schedule it to send later. You can do this via Outlook on your computer, but I usually need this when I’m on the go.

Flow
You can manage team projects with this to-do app that distributes and tracks tasks across users. Everyone can keep each other updated, all from their smartphone.

Are there other apps that your organization couldn’t do without? Of course, apps are just one tiny piece of Steve Jobs’s massive impact on the world. But for the little outfit in a world that so favors the big, their impact can be significant. For that, we in the nonprofit world say, “Thank you, Steve.”

Paul funded and personally oversaw the largest, most important philanthropy program at a major foundation. He recognized that foundations should pay just as much attention to the practice of philanthropy as they should to the execution of their programs. Unlike others, he didn’t just pay lip service to the need for constant refinement of philanthropic approach. In recent years, the Gates Foundation has ramped up its own philanthropy program, but most large foundations do not seem to believe that funding the investigation and development of the philanthropic field is their responsibility.

Paul, a former dean of the Stanford Law School, holds strong convictions about the best approaches to philanthropy. He relishes a good debate and is willing to change or modify his beliefs when presented with compelling arguments. The philanthropy blogosphere is full of what superficially passes for debate. Too often “debate” is actually just two different points of view presented over and over again without any give and take, or any modification of positions that might suggest the “debaters” are looking to build their understanding of philanthropy rather than simply seeking to win the argument.

Paul celebrated the idea that learning comes from failure. He oversaw the release of “Hard Lessons,” a major report on a Hewlett Foundation program that went off course. He also created an annual prize at the foundation for the program that made the worst grant each year. Far from trying to embarrass anyone, he intended the worst grant prize to encourage program staff to embrace and learn from their mistakes.

Paul, preparing to retire at age 72, has always recognized the value of social media to the field of philanthropy. In the 2006 Hewlett annual report, Paul discussed the need for and process of creating an online information marketplace for giving. At a time when few foundation professionals even read blogs or tracked social media, Paul took to heart my argument that if he was serious he should launch a blog as a platform for debate. A year later, he launched his own blog on the Huffington Post and engaged in a level of constructive critique that is rarely heard in public within our field.

Unlike other foundation-hosted blogs, Paul’s didn’t use this space as a digital platform for press releases. Instead, he fully understood the conversational aspect of blogging that sets it apart. He took on my arguments about how strategic philanthropy is flawed, and we engaged in discussion. He also added his thoughts to debates started by other bloggers. He reviewed important books released in the field of philanthropy. He highlighted critiques of his book by other bloggers. He criticized as “virtually meaningless” the nonprofit rating system used by Charity Navigator (but in a move demonstrating his willingness to update his believes as the evidence changes, he oversaw a grant to Charity Navigator when it sought to improve its rating approach). And he wrote a scathing indictment of the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy’s position on how to assess foundations even while noting that Hewlett funds NCRP as part of its program to support the infrastructure of the philanthropic sector.

His belief in building knowledge through debate extended to the ranks of his own foundation. I found his public sparing with me online and at conferences remarkable, but I just about fell out of my chair when I read the Stanford Social Innovation Review article “Letting Go,” co-authored by Kristi Kimball and Malka Kopell, both Hewlett employees. The article makes a case that is at odds with the tenets of strategic philanthropy as Paul lays them out in his book. Paul easily could have discouraged the employee from publishing the piece; instead, he allowed the difference in perspective and engaged in the debate publicly.

Paul was such a great large foundation president because he saw himself as a student of philanthropy, not just a teacher. It is easy for an executive in charge of billions of dollars of philanthropic assets to assume that getting the gig must indicate that they are the one who knows what to do. But as I wrote recently, knowledge is a process not a destination.

What the field of philanthropy needs right now is senior leaders who see themselves not as the people who own the knowledge but as student-leaders striving to help the field grapple with the many, many difficult challenges it faces.

Aaron Hurst: We are commemorating the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 this weekend. How did that day impact you?

Simon Greer: I had this epiphany. Up until 1989, the world had been defined by two poles. And now the world was going to be defined by two new polls: rising fundamentalist Christianity in this country and extreme Islam around the world. And I thought: What’s a Jew to do?

I decided to own my faith identity and to focus on the role local spiritually based organizations would play in social change.

How did that differ from what you were doing before?

I was trained that justice is at the intersection of love and power. I was way into the power part of it, but only glimpsing how much was missing without the love component. I knew something was missing but didn’t know how to bring it. I saw all these organizations driven by anger. The fast burn of anger and the demonization of the opposition was not the depth of transformation I was interested in.

You can clearly see your commitment to love over anger in your work over the last decade at Jewish Funds for Justice. Where do you want to take that now as the head of Nathan Cummings Foundation?

One of the things I’m excited about is the intersection of spirituality and social justice. I would call it the intersection of inner transformation and social transformation. What drew me to this job is that the Nathan Cummings Foundation describes itself as grounded in Jewish values, committed to social justice.

It is a big change—moving from a grant seeker to a grant maker. How do you plan to approach it?

I know a lot of work that I and my friends and peers have done is really solid, really good work. At the same time, I think we’re all pretty aware that all the good things we’re doing won’t get us where we want to be. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’re not going to solve the big problems—hunger, homelessness. I would like to find the space to answer those questions.

You are also becoming a leader in the broader philanthropic community. How would you like to use your seat at the foundation to impact how philanthropy works in this country?

You hear a lot about conservative funders, and how they are ideologically aligned, and developing and implementing best practices in movement philanthropy. What do the conservative foundations stand for? Lower taxes, the military, getting the government off your back, unbridled free market capitalism. It is easy to answer.

I don’t even know who would count themselves as progressive foundations. What do the progressive foundations believe in? There is no real obvious answer.

It would be such a blessing to work with other funding partners who we trust, and we could follow each other’s lead in programmatic areas, working together. There could be an aligned group of funders, I don’t know if we would call ourselves progressive, but we would share a similar analysis and worldview. And when opportunities come up for breakthroughs in how our grantees function—say, a shift in the political landscape or a new cultural opening we could step through—there could be a group of people who move lockstep, in the best sense of the word.

You hear that criticism in general of the progressive movement, that there’s a lack of alignment.

Businesses are organized around chambers of commerce; you don’t shut down the chamber at the end of a legislative session. There’s no place on the progressive side of social change work where people come together with such consistency. Instead, we build narrow coalitions, not something permanent.

So, what can we expect to see you do to this end during your first year?

My focus at first has to be building trust and rapport with employees and trustees. The level of trust and rapport guides the pace of change so much.

Aaron Hurst is the founder and president of the Taproot Foundation, a nonprofit organization building a national pro bono marketplace and leading the global service movement through its award-winning Service Grant program. Widely known for his thought-leadership in civic engagement, nonprofit management and corporate social responsibility, Aaron is an Ashoka and Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation fellow and has been formally recognized as a social innovator by the Aspen Institute, Social Venture Network, Fast Company, Commonwealth Club, the Manhattan Institute, the State of California, and the Alliance for Nonprofit Management. Aaron currently sits on the International Advisory Board of Directors of CiYuan, a three-year initiative to increase social investment in China, and serves on the boards of Reimagining Service and BoardSource. He co-authored the children’s book Mommy and Daddy Do It Pro Bono and is a featured blogger for The Huffington Post.

“How much is a simple “Like” on Facebook worth to a nonprofit? Why bother?”

You heard it here first: Hands down, the most popular questions to ask a social media expert working for social good relate to slacktivism: what it is, why it is, and how to get rid of it. While researching my new book, Twitter for Good, I encountered this phenomenon in spades.

And I’m here to say, once and for all, that I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

Slacktivism Didn’t Start with Social Media
Unmotivated donors didn’t materialize out of the ether when social media started taking over the world.

There have always been individuals who are willing to volunteer 30 minutes of time to call up donors, but who are not willing to write you a check. There will always be an urbanite ready to pass off a half-eaten sandwich to a homeless man instead of buying him a sandwich. As I learned when starting Hope Runs, there will always be someone who wants to donate a pair of used running shoes rather than cut a check. 

This is the way the nonprofit world works, and this is just fine.

There are thousands of causes in the world. Some donors support many organizations and yours isn’t their priority—hence, they look for a less engaged way to help. Some aren’t moved by your cause but feel obligated to do something small. Some donors aren’t really donors at all—for your cause or anyone else’s.

Social media hasn’t changed this.

Friendraising
What social media has changed is the ease with which you can create weak ties with people who may be interested in your cause. This is the crux of the concept that some have coined “friendraising.” Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other platforms make it easy to share your message with the world in a new way. First, they allow you to target a mass audience, making the possibility for viral spread far more viable than ever before. Second, they allow you to connect with influencers in a way that wasn’t possible before—for example, on Twitter, you can technically send an @reply to any influencer out there. Tweet a hundred and one might respond.

One law of nonprofit support is that inevitably some early supporters who first make small gifts turn into big donors later on. For every hundred people that send their dirty, worn-out running shoes to help the Hope Runs athletic programs in Africa (nary a $5 bill for international shipping enclosed), one just might one day send a check to support an educational scholarship. It’s just the way it is, and nonprofits accept this. The same law holds true for supporters you connect with on social media.

Social media hasn’t created slacktivism anymore than Charity Navigator has created nonprofit financial accountability, and it’s time to rethink our plague-like fear of the big, hairy slactivism beast.

The next time someone likes your campaign but doesn’t give you money, think about the upshot: Never before have you been able to spread a message so easily to so many potential supporters.

Today only: Download the electronic version of Twitter for Good free via a number of outlets, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

If you miss that window, you can still download the first chapter for free.

Claire Diaz Ortiz (nee Williams) leads social innovation at Twitter and wrote Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet at a Time. Follow @ClaireD on Twitter or read her blog.

Alberto has had a storied career as former publisher of the award-winning Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Wesleyan University. Prior to that, he served five years in the Peace Corps in Venezuela and Colombia. I caught Alberto as he was preparing to fly out for last week’s Forum on Communications and Society at the Aspen Institute, which set the stage for our conversation about his role as an advocate for democracy, and an educated and engaged citizenry.

Aaron Hurst: There has been a lot of recent discussion in the nonprofit sector about the emerging trend of social enterprises that have a dual purpose of generating financial as well as social rewards. Do you see journalism as double bottom-line industry?

Alberto Ibarguen: I was publisher of a Knight newspaper and sat in [Co-founder of Knight-Ridder newspapers and the Knight Foundation] Jack Knight’s actual office for eight years. There was a unity of business and mission under Jack Knight’s ownership, and informing community was at the core of his business model: If he didn’t inform the community, he didn’t make money. That’s a big issue in media today. The institutional shareholders of some publicly held media companies are not committed to news or information; they are committed to a certain return on their institutional investments. Jack Knight was committed to both.

It’s a great opportunity to apply Jack’s business tradition at the Knight Foundation. Running a nonprofit should be little different from a for-profit—the major difference is just a question of what you do with the return, if there is any. When I look at the nonprofit or online news organizations that we fund, I’m interested in their ability to continue doing that job indefinitely because the community’s need for information is indefinite, so part of the model needs to be about sustaining the organization by providing value to the market. It’s a way of thinking about philanthropy that is about social investing rather than charity. As a social investor, I want some return in the form of sustainability and the evolution of the project so that it continues to do the good that we intended in the first place.

AH: You recently joined the board of directors of AOL. What parallels do you see between what they are doing and John S. Knight’s vision for the role of media?

AI: AOL has made a very big bet on local news as a way forward and is moving to create a series of “Patches,” or local news operations that include locally produced journalism and blogs and community information. They reflect the community and are technologically very easy to use. The grand vision is you end up with the United States covered by these Patches, with The Huffington Post overlaying a regional and national perspective. That creates a future news organization that is sustainable by the engagement of readers and advertisers at the very local level.

To the extent that you can figure out how to create a for-profit business, you may also be able to figure out how to create sustainable new operations that may or may not be for-profit. Separately, at Knight Foundation, we are also interested in looking at possible changes in the tax laws that might be needed to encourage local nonprofit and community-owned news operations in the United States. There are all kinds of models and hybrids that are being talked about in lots of different places, including in Congress. They may look and run like businesses, but in fact are for public benefit. They could be community institutions or even universities.

AH: You were a leader in the publishing industry for a long time before moving to the philanthropic sector. What has been the most challenging part of making the transition?

AI: It’s hard to remember that you’re not doing the project. I come from a world where I was very much an activist. At a foundation, it is important to remember that you are supporting an individual, a set of leaders, or an idea. The biggest trap is that others will pervert their own idea so radically that it becomes some version of your own idea in order to get the foundation’s money. In my experience, that leads to failure because there wasn’t a commitment by the person doing the project or idea. It is important to maintain open communications and remind ourselves that it is not our project. We look for great ideas that can inform and engage communities, and allow them to come together to decide their own interests.

AH: So then, in your role as a foundation president, how do you measure success?

AI: People in philanthropy seem to want an equivalent for cash as a metric of success. Cash is an easy metric to have in business: You sell the product and make the money, and at the end of the day, you add it all up. You can put a number on it, and it is concrete. We’re in a different business. We should not be afraid to look for metrics, but we should also not be afraid to say you can’t assess social change in the same way you can count cash. We shouldn’t confuse the two. It’s as Jack Knight said: You want to be fair, open-minded, and opinionated. You take in all the facts, you try to be as fair as humanly possible, and then you develop an opinion. We’re in the judgment business, and we ought to be more comfortable—and transparent about—expressing that judgment.

AH: Both in journalism and philanthropy, you are constantly being pitched ideas. How to you filter and respond to these multiple requests?

AI: Coming into the philanthropic side, I underestimated how much pressure feeling good can create. It feels wonderful to say, “That’s a great idea. Here’s a million dollars!” It is much harder to say, ‘”‘m sorry, that’s a wonderful project you’re doing, but that’s not what we fund. We fund informed projects that lead to informed and engaged communities.” Sticking to the strategy and funding focus is really very hard because it is so easy to fund feel-good projects.

AI: How do you maintain that discipline?

AI: The pressure has to be self-imposed. In my past positions, there were readers who could simply walk away if the newspaper wasn’t providing services, or my legal clients could find another lawyer. At a foundation, there is no market pressure to achieve goals—it is all internal. Part of my job as CEO is to provide some of the urgency that is natural in business and necessary for foundations to stay focused on the changes in society. At Knight Foundation, we fund projects that will lead to transformational change by supporting informed and engaged communities. This comes directly from Jack Knight’s philosophy on the purpose of a great news organization: to inform and illuminate the minds of its readers so that the people may determine their own issues and interests and best decide how to move forward. I think that is a wonderful model and the kind of thinking that should inform an organization like ours, creating the pressure that will substitute, to some extent, what the market does for a business.

Read more from this interview at Taproot.

Aaron Hurst is the founder and president of the Taproot Foundation, a nonprofit organization building a national pro bono marketplace and leading the global service movement through its award-winning Service Grant program. Widely known for his thought-leadership in civic engagement, nonprofit management and corporate social responsibility, Aaron is an Ashoka and Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation fellow and has been formally recognized as a social innovator by the Aspen Institute, Social Venture Network, Fast Company, Commonwealth Club, the Manhattan Institute, the State of California, and the Alliance for Nonprofit Management. Aaron currently sits on the International Advisory Board of Directors of CiYuan, a three-year initiative to increase social investment in China, and serves on the boards of Reimagining Service and BoardSource. He co-authored the children’s book Mommy and Daddy Do It Pro Bono and is a featured blogger for The Huffington Post.