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Too often social entrepreneur organizations adopt a hero culture, where we take advantage of each other in pursuit of our great cause. I work equally with corporate and nonprofit organizations, and I’ve been stunned by the fact that nonprofit cultures are usually more toxic and unjust than my for-profit clients.

During strategic planning with these nonprofits, I’ll ask, “What’s the biggest barrier to your success?” More times than not they respond, “Our organization.”

The unspoken, but very clear social entrepreneur narrative goes like this: “Because we are good and our mission is noble, I can ask you to work long hours, pay you badly, and ask you to sacrifice more for the cause. So suck it up.”

Through these actions the nonprofit sector is saying is: “We need to be unjust to bring more justice into the world.”

Many young people who are growing out of their post college years at a nonprofit aren’t just disappointed at their experience with social change—they’re bitter. It’s no wonder that more and more of them are telling me they’d prefer to find for-profit social entrepreneur companies than to pursue work at nonprofits.

While more and more social sector organizations are using professional coaches to develop their talent, few invest in the hard work to develop a just organizational culture. But until they invest in developing talent in conjunction with improving the organization, the results will be disappointing.

Social entrepreneurs, who pride themselves on their reputation of being champions for justice, have a difficult time admitting that their own organization is unjust. And it’s rarely in anyone’s interest to call them on it.

But there are nonthreatening ways to do this. The Leadership Circle recently developed an amazing assessment tool. Its Leadership Circle Cultural Survey offers an “MRI of leadership culture,” and I would argue that it is one of the best tools to gauge the health of an organization. Though it is primarily corporations that use it, it can provide a powerful tool for the social entrepreneur sector as well. Basically, it graphs where the organization’s leadership thinks the organization’s culture is, compared to where employees and board members think it is. The gap presents a nonjudgmental starting point for an organizational strategy plan.

It’s next to impossible to make the world a more just place while your own world or organization is unjust. All true world-changing organizations must have a written strategic plan that supports both personal leadership development and improvement to the organization’s leadership culture.

The social entrepreneur sector must better itself before it can better the world.

“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.

As a leader of one of the largest capacity-building organizations in the country, I want to let you in on a little secret. You can ignore nearly all these findings and best practices.

Nonprofit consultants and the industry’s media are largely to blame for this proliferation of noise. It is not due to bad intentions. It is simply a natural outgrowth of specialization, survival and marketing.

Consultants become specialists (in social media, strategy, governance, and so on)—and they need clients to survive. Unfortunately, some turn to the tried and true marketing formula of: think up a potential “next big thing,” tell a few success stories, share a few supporting trends about adoption, and make the case that if you don’t keep up with the Jones’s and hire them, your nonprofit will get left behind. The media eats it up, the consultant gets speaking gigs at conferences, and pretty soon their practice or idea or approach is accepted as fact. But it isn’t.

Our sector wastes an insane amount of time implementing best practices that have painfully low—if not negative—return on investment (ROI).

Here are five examples:
1) Volunteers. Recruiting and managing volunteers generally isn’t worthwhile unless you use at least 50 per year, they do at least 50 hours of service each (or fewer volunteers and more hours each), and you invest in volunteer management systems. Short of that, it’s almost certainly a waste of time.

2) Websites. Most nonprofits (the small neighborhood ones) would likely be fine with just a Facebook page. A template site would do the trick for slightly larger group. Only 25 percent of nonprofits need customized web design.

3) Board. There is a tremendously high fixed cost to training your board to facilitate donations (in kind or cash). If your board can’t generate a large part of your budget (say, 20 percent), you are likely to find them getting in the way of fundraising success and eating up senior staff time (and increasing burn out). If that’s the case, your organization would likely see more success with a smaller board focused solely on audits and the legal requirements of governance.

4) Social Media. Does it drive your advocacy, fundraising, or program success? It does for likely less than 2 percent of nonprofits. Everyone else is wasting a ton of time and energy on it. Much like my local car wash that urges me to “like” it on Facebook.

5) Strategic planning. You need a strategic plan, but for most organizations it can be a lot lighter than most MBAs want to admit. It doesn’t need to be perfect and frequently should be more of a living document.

My bottom line advice is that you should only invest in things you need to achieve your goals and be very careful of anything that you should do. If you are not positive which category an investment falls into, don’t ask a consultant. Ask your peers about their experience.

Farfetched? Maybe not. We’ve all been to a fund-raising dinner where the executive director wraps up his speech by boldly saying, “Our mission is to put ourselves out of business!” The emotional audience jumps up and applauds. The leader basks in the praise. But what if a business owner really did that—intentionally?

In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Successfully People, Stephen Covey says to “plan with the end in mind.” When I trained as a FranklinCovey coach, I learned an exercise that carried the point: We all had to write about our own funerals: Who was there? What was said? It sounds morbid to some, but by clearly envisioning how we see the end of our life, we can become more intention-driven in the present. The same could be said of world-changing leaders.

When social entrepreneurs came on the scene in a big way in the ’90s, they were reformers not institutions. They pledged to lessons of the business world to address injustice and change systems. Ironically, the part of corporations they’ve most imitated is the desire to build an organization and keep it alive at all costs.

Businesses are built to last; social entrepreneur efforts should not be—they should shed light on necessary reforms, offer solutions, and change systems.

Social entrepreneurs’ priorities typically shift over time. When they begin, the priorities often look like this:

1. Create awareness of injustice
2. Create a model that remedies injustice
3. Raise the funds to fund the program
4. Build the talent to implement the model

Over time, the mission creeps away from tackling the injustice to institutionalizing the model the company created. The new priorities:

1. Raise money to keep the program going
2. Hire staff members who can raise money
3. Keep the program going sufficiently to raise money

Ultimately, many nonprofits exist purely to fund-raise. The world-changing model has become like the set on an old movie—it’s just propped up to put on a show. The commitment shifts from changing systems to paying the bills. All things related to fund-raising get elevated, while program concerns and changing policy fall by the wayside.

Imagine what would happen if social entrepreneurs announced on their organization’s launch day, “We will increase literacy in this city by 5 percent over the next 10 years. We’ll succeed or fail with our reforms, but either way we’ll shut down in year 10.” There could be four big benefits:

1. Donors would be more likely to invest funds, because they know there’s an end game. 
2. Social entrepreneurs would stay focused on long-term strategic systems change.
3. Funding for the next generation of social entrepreneurs would be freed up when their older, sister organizations shut down.
4. When organizations did shut their doors, we could celebrate their great accomplishments and disruptions instead of shaking our heads in sadness as we often do now.

Keeping the focus on the mission—not the institution—may not be as hard as it sounds. Michigan Corps, founded by Anuja and Rishi Jaitly, launched as a nonprofit in 2010 with a seed grant by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.

Redefining social entrepreneurship, they announced their mission as purposely bringing local and global Michigander’s together to change their home state. From there, the Jaitlys intentionally moved out of their leadership roles and into advisory roles—they moved to the organization’s board after year one. 

They saw results quickly. Last spring, they were heralded by former President Bill Clinton at his Global Initiative Conference for fostering a first-of-its-kind connection between Michigan social entrepreneurs and Kiva, the world-famous micro lender. The organization has also set in motion countless instances of leaders collaborating in new ways.

When I asked them how they see Michigan Corps in existence, they said: “We built the organization in response to unlocked potential among pro-Michigan leaders everywhere; as the engagement of Michiganders evolves, our organizational role must necessarily shift too. We need to keep our eyes on the mission and off the perpetuation of one entity.”

By creating an organic organization that rises up to meet challenges and goes away after it fosters connections, the Jaitlys are offering a new way for social entrepreneurs to address issues.

Maybe social entrepreneurs don’t need to announce on day one when they plan to shut down. But the sector needs to shift the definition of success from those organizations that survive to those that actually achieve their missions.

So the next time you hear a social entrepreneur say an organization’s mission is to put itself out of business, ask the obvious question: “When?”

For decades, the main pressure facing networks was to be in more places and serve more people. Now, there is a different kind of pressure: to get better. Networks with multiple sites are increasingly expected to provide donors and supporters with a higher level of evidence that their work is effective and delivered consistently across the board. While an “outcomes” orientation isn’t new, its effect on the sector has been magnified, in part because of the difficult economy.

In our work, we have seen several networks take promising steps to deliver measurably better results in achieving their missions. Central offices are working collaboratively with affiliates to improve the way in which their network’s high-level strategy translates into action across the entire organization. They’re figuring out where their best work is being done, finding ways to become more effective, and learning how to ensure that all affiliates benefit from the experiences and know-how of their peers.

Here are five promising elements that networks are using to raise the bar:

Use the network’s unified strategy to drive decision-making. Although network members operate in distinct communities—serving populations or causes that may vary by geography—consensus around a common strategy keeps each site moving in the same direction. The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, for example, identifies key performance indicators (such as academic success measures and frequency of visits) that apply to all clubs, regardless of size, programming, and population characteristics. These measures help the organization assess individual clubs, identify the things that individual affiliates need to do to improve their results, and show where one club might benefit from the experiences of another.

Create a common language by defining the dimensions of effectiveness. When affiliates share an understanding of what high performance looks like, it becomes easier to identify reliable indicators of effectiveness. Networks should ask themselves: What information will allow us to set clear expectations and compare results? What will help us see how all affiliates are performing against their common strategic goal and understand why some affiliates may be achieving more than others? What support is needed to transform the effectiveness of the individual organizations and the network itself?

Create paths for affiliates to improve. No basketball coach would ever tell a player to “just play more like Michael Jordan.” Professional athletes hone their skills by progressing through a series of developmental milestones. The same is true with network affiliates trying to become more effective. Once the networks we studied have developed a clear sense of the dimensions that indicate high performance, they have then shifted their focus to defining clear, intermediate developmental stages on the way to reaching those goals.

Diagnose where the network is today and uncover pockets of strength. Having figured out the developmental stages that characterize an affiliate’s progress, these networks have moved to diagnose their current state, giving themselves a baseline against which to measure progress. They ask: Where do affiliates fall on the developmental continuum? Are there pockets of strength, or weakness? How might the entire network strengthen performance if affiliates could improve in one key area?

Consider the experience of the National Guard Youth Challenge Program (ChalleNGe), which offers a quasi-military environment for teens who have dropped out of secondary school, with the aim of helping them become productive citizens. In 2010, ChalleNGe identified key dimensions of program effectiveness and assessed affiliate performance against those dimensions. If all affiliates could match the performance of the top quartile, then 2,700 more young people would graduate from the residential program each year—a 35 percent increase in impact—without needing to add new locations.

Capture knowledge that matters: After completing the tough task of assessment, networks face the challenge of leveraging affiliate knowledge to improve results across the board. This means figuring out what to do first and how affiliates can best learn from their colleagues throughout the network. Especially important may be the use of a self-evaluation tool by which affiliates can track performance indicators, understand their strengths and weakness relative to other network members, and tailor performance improvement strategies to those strengths and weaknesses.
We have seen a growing number of networks embark on a journey to drive impact in their work. A new article, “Growing Network Impact: How Nonprofit Networks are Raising the Bar on Results” shows how the work of six networks illustrates these practices. Please share your thoughts, ideas, and stories.

Alan Tuck, a partner in the Boston office of the Bridgespan Group, leads Bridgespan’s work with networks and is the former head of the Boston and New York offices. In addition to his work at Bridgespan, he serves on the Executive committee of the Board of Directors of the YMCA of Greater Boston.

Mandy Taft-Pearman is a partner in Bridgespan’s Boston office and lead the work with environmental networks. Prior to joining Bridgespan, Mandy worked for the National Safe Kids Campaign, a national network focused on children’s public health.

The Sea Change-Lodestar Fund‘s mission is to facilitate and fund sensible collaborations among nonprofit organizations. It is prepared to help cover a portion off the one-time costs associated with nonprofit mergers and collaborations. It makes two main types of grants:

• Exploratory grants (generally $25,000 or less) to explore and evaluate a potential collaboration
• Implementation grants (up to $250,000) to cover a portion of the one-time costs associated with implementing a collaboration

MacIntosh explained: “Implementation grants are always made alongside funders of the collaborating organizations, often specialized in sector or from the local geography where the merger or collaboration is happening. Our fund believes in having a high engagement level with the leadership of the collaborating nonprofits, quick turnaround, and a thorough evaluation and approval process.”

When I asked MacIntosh why Sea Change was collaborating with the Lodestar Foundation on this fund, he replied, “We each bring different things to the table. Lodestar is unique amongst foundations in its focus on collaboration. We were thrilled when they approached Sea Change about working together, and put the issue of nonprofit mergers and collaboration on our radar screen. The team at Sea Change has deep financial and transactional experience in both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds, so this was a very natural step for us to take in our effort to help nonprofits have more impact while also seeking opportunities to make leveraged grants. Sea Change does much of the front-end work, the analysis, the site visits, and speaking to the leadership. We have raised some outside funding for this work, though Lodestar remains the biggest funder and Sea Change the second biggest.”

But I wondered how the fund defines “sensible collaboration.” MacIntosh explained, “We define collaboration as when two or more nonprofits combine some or all of their important activities in a formal, long-term, or permanent way. It can take many different forms, including mergers, acquisitions, and various forms of alliances and partnerships. A sensible collaboration is one that has the potential to increase the efficiency, effectiveness, or sustainability with which they pursue their missions. We want to help organizations that have gotten to the point of exploring something or consummating a collaboration, to do it.”

The really nice thing about this fund is that it is set-up to fund what it calls the “unavoidable but uninspiring” costs of collaboration, such as IT integration, re-branding, severance costs, and lease-breaking—costs that many funders would find an anathema. The fund is not a passive donor, however; it gets intimately involved in some of the transactions when it feels it can add value as an outside party. If the fund feels it cannot add any value it is less likely to fund the transaction. Guidelines state: “Our due diligence process is intensive…”—so be sure you want a partner if you approach the fund for support.

And in this age of focus on cost cutting and efficiencies in nonprofit mergers and collaborations, MacIntosh had this to say: “The whole question of cost-savings is more nuanced than many people believe. In our experience, saving money is neither necessary nor sufficient motivation for collaboration. Often the level of potential cost savings wouldn’t be enough to justify the collaboration, but it’s often enough to put the transaction costs in a healthy context. The ability to save money doesn’t mean you actually save it, but instead you reallocate your resources to the program side. After all, the goal is not to reduce the budget, but to produce great contemporary dance, educate more children, etc.”

The Sea Change-Lodestar Fund for Nonprofit Collaboration, based in New York City, takes proposals on a continuous basis from across the country. It’s great to see new, creative funding opportunities like this one for nonprofit mergers and collaborations.

A prime example came up recently in a major capacity-building initiative that my colleagues and I managed, when our data revealed that one-time trainings brought some of the best results. According to conventional wisdom, this should not have been the case. Typically trainings are regarded as an unlikely path to lasting change; the thinking is that whatever learning they produce doesn’t stick. For this reason, we decided to try out some new ideas when we helped design the Strengthening Organizations to Mobilize Californians initiative (click to read the just-released “lessons learned” report).

Funded by The James Irvine Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the initiative involved 27 community organizing nonprofits in California, including Alliance for a Better Community, Communities for a Better Environment, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Focused on improving organizational capacity, the initiative ultimately sought to meet the funders’ broader goal of supporting democracy through more inclusive decision-making.

Trainings were one item on a broad menu of learning community activities provided over two years from 2008 to 2010. All told, the initiative offered 12 trainings, 18 peer exchange sessions, and 2 convenings. We were eager for the opportunity to compare these different elements. One of our biggest questions was whether trainings would succeed, and if so, which ingredients would lead to that success.

Our team found through an evaluation process that trainings generated some of the initiative’s biggest gains. Those who attended the sessions on communication, for instance, noted marked improvement in their ability to articulate their organization’s vision, develop a communications plan, implement that plan, and manage change over time.

We were pleased—but we weren’t completely surprised. The findings supported ideas about capacity building that our firm, TCC Group, has been exploring for years and increasingly putting into practice. Namely, our evaluations of more than 50 capacity-building projects over the past decade have shown us that the reason many fail to achieve organizational change is that they focus on preparing leaders to change, rather than actual implementation. We use the parlance of “Ready, Set, Go.” Skills-building, reports, and plans, we have found, will only take people so far (i.e., “Ready” and “Set”). In the end, they need to be able to take action (i.e., “Go”).

Our idea was to make sure that “Go” happened during the training. Discussions focused on practices that work. As one participant put it, this dialogue “allowed us to compare our strengths and weaknesses with other peers and learn from their experiences.” The trainings also featured hands-on worksheets, role plays, and action planning.  Finally, they focused on concrete takeaways to guide immediate improvements.

Three other characteristics set the trainings apart. First, they were tailored to small organizations that were struggling to make change without many resources. The practices presented, for instance, required a reallocation of these limited resources—not additional time or money. Second, whole teams were encouraged to attend, again underscoring a focus on forging action plans and following through. Third, organizations volunteered to participate. Those that came, then, were highly motivated regarding that training topic.

“Go” is all about the time and space to think not just about big ideas, but the details that really matter in implementing change. Preparing, of course, is important, but execution takes something more—practice, feedback, realistic expectations, and insights from talking with others about their experiences. “Go” is about rolling up your sleeves and getting down to work, and for our team and many initiative participants, it managed to make trainings feel exciting and relevant after all.

What has your experience been with organizational effectiveness training for nonprofits? Have you been able to make it more action-oriented and sticky? What are you suggestions for how funders can go beyond support for assessment and planning (“Ready” and “Set”) activities and provide better support for implementation (“Go”) work through training, clinics, peer exchange, and coaching? 

Susan Misra is the associate director of Program and Grants Management and Capacity Building at TCC Group, a national management consulting firm that provides strategy, evaluation, and capacity-building services to funders, nonprofits, and corporate citizenship programs. She has worked with clients in a variety of fields, including the arts, environment, education, community development, and social justice. She received an MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Verstergaard Frandsen, maker of fine mosquito nets and the mostly useless LifeStraw Personal, has announced plans to give away a million of their LifeStraw Family water filters to households in western Kenya. CEO Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen will invest $30 million of his own money in the project—known as Carbon for Water—but according to Fast Company, “he’s not worried about losing out—because for each LifeStraw he donates, he’s going to be making money.”

How’s that work? Through the magic of carbon credits, of course! Back to Fast Company: “Kenyans boil their water to eliminate waterborne diseases, using wood fires. Those fires generate a large amount of carbon, and eliminating the need to boil water means fewer emissions from Kenya. Because they’re providing the means to reduce emissions, Vestergaard Frandsen earns carbon credits for each LifeStraw donated. He will then turn around and sell those credits to companies in countries that have carbon caps and exchanges.” And these ain’t plain ol’ vanilla carbon credits, either: “Because the project is based in Kenya and has significant humanitarian and health co-benefits, these credits can be sold for a premium.”

This scheme is so wrong on so many levels that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

First, this is a bogus application of carbon credits: People in western Kenya, by and large, don’t boil their water. I’ve made numerous trips there and have talked to any number of far more qualified people working in the region. One of those is Jeff Albert at Aquaya, who says, “Boiling prevalence is likely very low throughout Africa, but we have some actual data from western Kenya in particular. What we found was that out of 400 randomly selected households in the study, only about a quarter of the respondents reported boiling their drinking water with any frequency, and I suspect that even that number was inflated by courtesy bias (the natural tendency to tell the visitor what you think would make them happy).” The notion that you’re going to prevent lots of carbon going into the atmosphere by distributing water filters is ridiculous, and anyone involved in this charade should be ashamed of themselves—especially the Gold Standard Foundation, which certified it.

Second, there is little evidence that LifeStraw Family water filters reduce diarrheal disease under real-world community conditions. There is exactly one rigorous study looking at health impacts. Tom Clasen, an excellent researcher, and his team, did a 12-month randomized trial in the Congo where they gave filters to 240 households: They did not find a statistically significant reduction in diarrheal illness. Moreover, at 12 months, 24 percent of households didn’t use them at all, and only 56 percent understood how to use them properly (it’s not that simple). That’s just one study, of course, and perhaps subsequent trials will paint a rosier picture, but it certainly doesn’t justify the distribution of a million of these things.

Third, the LifeStraw Family water filter is just too damn expensive, and it has to be replaced every three years. There are only two ways that a product like this can get to real scale: the market or free government distribution. The wholesale cost of the device from VF is about $25; the real cost to a customer, if you include distribution and marketing, would be more like $50 to $70. Put another way, you’d be asking a smallholder farmer to spend a quarter of her annual income on a water filter. That’s not going to happen, nor will governments pass out a device this expensive. Even if the LifeStraw Family did achieve the claimed carbon and health impacts, you’d have to repeat a $30 million give-way every three years.

Projects like Carbon for Water make a mockery of the effort to prevent carbon emissions, and as a physician, it’s especially depressing to see a loopy funding scheme paired with a lousy public health solution. The social sector has got to escape this pattern of bogus idea, hyperventilating media, and eventual, invisible failure. This idea should have been dead on arrival, and I hope that Mr. Vestergaard Frandsen gets to experience the joy of a $30 million donation rather than a profit on his investment. I wish that his company would stick to the manufacture and distribution of their excellent and affordable mosquito nets.