Stanford Social Innovation Review

Stand for Something

Imagine you are the new CEO of a publicly-supported grantmaker that has suffered declines in funds raised over the past 10 years. Would you choose to: 

• Redefine your primary purpose to be fighting poverty?
• Lead your large board of directors, overwhelmingly from large corporations, to make a substantial commitment to policy advocacy?

Such a strategy carries high risk, but it may also offer high rewards. In their canonical article “Philanthropy’s New Agenda: Creating Value,”¹ Michael Porter and Mark Kramer identified “changing the environment” in which grantees operate as the highest level of strategic impact a foundation could hope to achieve. (The others, in ascending order, were consistently choosing the best grantees over time, attracting support to those grantees from other funders, and improving the performance of grantees.) Not all “game changing” initiatives involve policy changes, but in many fields, such as health, human services, the environment, education, and social justice, potential policy changes comprise a commanding share of potential high-impact strategic goals. 

The same case for pursuing a policy strategy applies to nonprofits as well as to foundations. This is something I’ve always emphasized to nonprofit boards and executives when discussing the propriety and benefits of policy advocacy. Organizations trying to prevent foster children from becoming homeless, for example, should also keep an eye on how policy affects that purpose.  Sounds reasonable enough – that’s the case they should make to their boards of directors, and be prepared to make to the broader public.

That’s all fine for foundations with their endowments, I often hear; but what about the risks to a nonprofit’s ability to raise funds and attract volunteers? 

Community foundations have struggled with this dilemma for many years.  Facing competitive pressures from organizations like Vanguard or Merrill Lynch, some community foundations have sought to compete on the basis of efficiency and service to donors, while others have instead emphasized the change they hoped to help create through their philanthropy. Emmett Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and former president of the Minneapolis Community Foundation, has made a very persuasive argument that, while it may alienate some donors, taking leadership on community issues in the end should attract even more donors and more passionate commitment to the organization. 

The United Way of Greater Los Angeles is one organization that has taken this high-risk strategy. Its example may hold a number of lessons for advocates of funding for social change, and for funders who, whatever their motives, are looking to boost their impact. (I describe why and how they made this shift in this article in Responsive Philanthropy, NCRP’s quarterly journal.) It is too soon to tell whether its new strategy will reverse the downward trend in donations to UWGLA, and there are some who are skeptical about the motives behind the shift. But there is little doubt that the new focus is widely perceived in the Los Angeles philanthropic world to be a major step forward (based on comparing data from interviews with funders over two years ago to similar interviews last summer).  When I asked Elise Buik, UWGLA’s President, about Emmett Carson’s argument that asking donors to join a cause will attract more support over time, she responded, “Well, when you stand for something, you definitely attract new people, and good things can follow.”

UWGLA’s example also may say something about whether board members, who can be quite conservative and risk averse, are as likely to oppose adding policy goals to the mix as is commonly thought. I was recently fortunate to make a presentation to their board about the law governing policy advocacy for nonprofit organizations. Having made dozens of similar presentations to nonprofit directors and leaders, I was amazed at how little controversy was expressed among the board members about the decision to commit to take policy positions. Some of this, no doubt, was due to the work UWGLA staff had done over many months to prepare the board for this step, but it also seemed that the board members – three out of four from large businesses – already knew well the value of lobbying. As Matt Miller has argued, big business has found that well executed lobbying can deliver unbeatable returns. 

1. Free access to the article is also available here – use your own best ethical sense.

Peter Manzo is the director of strategic initiatives for the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy organization, and a senior research fellow with the Center for Civil Society in the UCLA School of Public Affairs. Previously, he was the executive director and general counsel of the Center for Nonprofit Management. 

Posted by Katie Harrington

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Games for Change

Global Kids, a New York-based urban youth nonprofit, launched a video game yesterday (from the fifth annual Games for Change conference in New York City) called Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City. In the game, set in New Orleans during the Katrina disaster, players follow the struggle of a fictional character named Vivica Water as she searches for her mother and helps her neighbors during the storm. Targeted toward inner-city high school students—and made in collaboration with a group of them at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn—this most recent offering from the new “cause gaming” movement aims to “celebrate New Orleans culture and draw attention to the continuing struggle in New Orleans as residents fight for housing in 2008.”

Similarly, a video game released in February called ICED: I Can End Deportation also seeks to engage the voices of society’s dispossessed. Made by the small human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, this game tries to promote immigration policy reform, Breakthrough’s mission.

Both games, thanks to their interactivity, pack emotional resonance as they tell the stories of the victims of social problems and policy disputes. To be sure, this is important, as empathy is the first step toward effective social problem-solving. But consumer, beware. Some of these games don’t go far enough.

ICED profiles five teens of different ethnic backgrounds and invites players to “walk in their shoes” to “learn how immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights to all immigrants.” Gen X and Y care a lot about social issues and there’s an opportunity for game-makers to influence these future leaders and decision-makers. But wouldn’t this game be even more powerful (and socially responsible) if players were given more shoes to fill? What if you could also play the role of an immigration officer, or a border patrol cop, or a senator fighting immigration reforms on Capitol Hill? Wouldn’t the nonprofit’s work be even more credible among policymakers or wealthy donors looking for social issues to support with their dollars?

There’s no question that the games for change movement represents an exciting and deservedly hot new trend for tech-savvy nonprofits: Games can be a powerful new way to raise funds and bolster waning membership rosters. Further, letting people of all ages “live” in new worlds and try on new behaviors can help nonprofits better engage the people they serve, as well as draw more public and private aid to the plight of society’s dispossessed.

But how carefully these games portray all sides of the social issues they’re advocating will be critical to their effectiveness and credibility in the long term. Indeed, solutions to social problems don’t occur simply because people gain a better understanding of the victims of poor social policy-making. Exploring the complexity of social problems, all sides, is what games can do best.

Consider World Without Oil, for example, a year-old game that bills itself as “a serious game for the public good” and attempts to capture multiple viewpoints by letting players imagine the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis and how it affects their lives—oil company leaders included.

Or take a look at Peacemaker, a game about the Middle East conflict developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University. It lets players take on the role of either the Israeli or the Palestinian leader, so as to better understand the kinds of decisions either one of them might be forced to make. It puts people into the decision-making shoes of one, or ideally both, of the leaders in that conflict.

Additionally, the United Nation’s Food Force engages kids aged 8-13 years old by sending them out on six realistic aid missions. It had more than 2 million downloads in its first couple of months of release in 2006 and it’s now up to 4 million. One key feature of this game is its ability to effectively portray the challenges of delivering aid amid a variety of real-world challenges.

A newer game that focuses on complex problem-solving from the start is UNICEF’s Ayiti: The Cost of Life.
It transforms poverty into a type of strategy game, asking players to “manage a family of five over four years and keep them healthy and alive, educated and out of debt,” says co-creator Barry Joseph of Global Kids. It’s tough: winning isn’t easy without innovative problem-solving.

As journalists have long realized, quality content is not simply about how well one can argue one side of an issue, but rather how deft one is at arguing multiple sides of it—indeed, acknowledging that multiple sides even have an argument to make.

Don’t believe it? Just ask some of the kids starting to play ICED. In a soon-to-be-released survey, a majority of them said that while they like the game and find it an authentic portrayal of the impact of current immigration policies, many students also “felt manipulated and like they were being asked to play politics for somebody else,” says Shelley Pasnik, director of the Center for Children and Technology, which collaborated with developers on the game. “These games represent a good start, but there’s no question that they will need to become more sophisticated as the games for change movement evolves.”

Viva the evolution. In the dawn of new media, the public’s ability to understand the multiple grays of an issue should count the most when it comes to making change that matters—and that sticks.

Says MIT professor Henry Jenkins, an expert in youth media and an enthusiastic supporter of the emerging social games movement: “We have to think of ways to use games not just to escape reality but to re-engage with reality.” Amen.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Katie Harrington

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Why All Leaders Should Have Gone to Design School

How do I get my kids to read, to do well at school? How do I get my staff to do better work? How do I get people to support me, vote for me, and even volunteer for me? How do I get myself to stay in shape or lose weight?

Designing environments where people do things is the bedrock of our society. In a professional setting, it is essential in order to maximize efficiency, productivity, and/or innovation and often called human resource management. Go one step beyond management. “Getting the most out of people” or helping people reach and go beyond their potential is a common definition of great leadership. But great management and leadership are outputs; you know them when you see them. The inputs are more elusive. After going through the Stanford MBA program myself and $100K+ later, I can say with confidence that there’s still little clarity around what these inputs are! Although we’re still taught the core management “skills” like strategy, accounting, finance, etc., it’s now commonly argued that these have become commoditized; they can be obtained from an online course or manual. Good management and leadership are born elsewhere. After starting and managing an ostensibly successful nonprofit, I have some street-cred to confidently say I agree.

What if great management is less about the skills of the trade, being a good “people person,” or having a killer network? What if it’s more about design, the design of the “doing” environment? What if there were best practice design principles and processes that could be brought into any casual or professional work environment to get more out of people? Let me be more specific: What if there were design principles that either extracted more value out of a finite number of people or that tapped into a larger pool of human resources at the same cost? Although deep belief, personal commitment, and a knack for clear and compelling communication are undeniable requisites to effective leadership, I would argue that the primary driver of great leadership is great design: great designers of social systems!

What is your first reaction when you hear that people have given away without any compensation more than 100 million hours of their precious time to build Wikipedia? What is your reaction when you hear about software developers spending millions of hours coding massive new software programs for free? Let me guess: either complete shock or a glib dismissal of these contributors as losers without anything better to do with their free time.
Due to the recent societal phenomenon in which we only believe in fame, fortune and status—extrinsic motivational forces—as effective ways to incentivize work, we have collectively forgotten, for the most part, about intrinsic motivational forces that are equally powerful ways to get great work done. Intrinsic motivational forces include feeling competent and capable, feeling good (ethically and morally righteous), feeling entertained, and feeling appreciated and loved. A more colloquial way to summarize intrinsic motivations is the feeling of a sense of meaning and fulfillment. In fact, these intrinsic motivations usually are the most important to people. Repeatedly you hear the wise reminding us that what really matters are those things that reinforce you intrinsically rather than extrinsically.

We can shake our fists and get mad at the world and at ourselves, but let’s instead try to understand this phenomenon. In my version, there’s actually a happy ending. So why has this happened? Why have most of our society’s most powerful and important institutions collectively forgotten or dismissed intrinsic motivations? It doesn’t seem like a utility-maximizing way to organize ourselves.
Let me venture an answer. One of the main reasons I think this has happened goes back to the industrial revolution when most of the work became modulated, granular, and process-orientated, the work of armies of ants. It is difficult to harness the power of intrinsic motivation to get work done and, when human capital is not scarce or expensive, then it’s not worth the trouble. Extrinsic tools like a salary were used and relied on almost exclusively, and it worked so well that it became the gold standard. Most of the economy is still industrial, so I don’t expect people to dismiss this style of management altogether, although I don’t encourage it. However for those bumping into the future, the informational economy, where the most critical input or factor of production has become human capital (not physical capital like iron ore), we have had to get more innovative about how to motivate people. People have become in effect the only input in many professions (software development, consulting, finance, law, etc.) or the only point of differentiation in others (Toyota, Cemex, etc.). Market forces are requiring us to evolve our level of understanding and sophistication around motivation. 

It’s not as intangible as you might think. You don’t have to be born a charismatic leader in order to unleash the advantages of an intrinsically motivated work force. You need to design it into your work environment. There are design tricks (principles and templates) to make that happen. Just ask Obama (we funded and organized his campaign and might also run his administration—see change.gov) or Google (we create the links) or eBay (we vet for quality—reputation system) or the film studios (through word of mouth we market their movies) or any successful social entrepreneur like Gandhi or Wendy Kopp. I could go on, but you get the picture. We are inclined to overvalue the importance of managers’/leaders’ vision and charisma and drastically undervalue their ability to design systems that tap into people’s intrinsic motivations to do much more or better work than any extrinsic motivational tool could ever do. 

I am told that many studies have recently and conclusively shown that getting the most out of people, not surprisingly to any of us, involves making work interesting, rewarding, and fun. No longer will this be a luxury but rather a necessity for success in all professions, not just the citizen sector (NGOs, government, and education) where we also have done a terrible job overall. I’m excited and encouraged that the industrial period’s mode of human resource management is fading: that market forces are starting to evolve our society towards a more enlightened (higher level welfare or utility-maximizing) mode of management where our intrinsic motivations are no longer ignored. To succeed in this new paradigm, we need to put on our designer hats and sharpen our designer utensils!

For more insights into these trends, get acquainted with the brilliant Clay Shirky starting with PopTech!, techPresident, and TED.

Lloyd Nimetz founded the online giving market HelpArgentina.org. While pursuing his MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nimetz has focused on for-profit business models that address social challenges. This summer he will launch a payments platform for India’s bottom billion.

Posted by Katie Harrington

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A Technology Revolution for Revolutions!

In the good ol’ USA it’s no surprise to anyone that the Internet has transformed power dynamics. In some respects, it took the Internet to push out the old guard and bring in the new—and the first minority president in the history of our nation. Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters compared to McCain.  He also had 24 times the number of Twitter followers and three times the number of website visitors to his site in the final weeks of the campaign. Voters watched 15 million hours of Obama video on YouTube and his campaign regularly emailed approximately 13 million people and received of course half a billion dollars in online donations. The Washington Post termed this the “YouTube Presidency.”

The revolutionizing of revolutions is not only an American phenomenon; it has quickly become a critical catalyst behind collective action throughout the world. Interestingly these Internet savvy activists are using tools not designed initially or intended for these purposes, but they are powerful tools nonetheless with regards to social action, labor action and really any kind of collective action. In its article, Revolution, Facebook-Style, the New York Times reported recently about how these Web 2.0 tools have been adopted for Jihad but also to protest dictatorial leaders in police states. As the Internet improves at exponential rates, so too will the way it is harnessed for the sake of power and influence. It will be used for forces of good and forces of bad. 

Similarly the Economist wrote recently about how online protest spontaneously emerged after the Greek police shot a young boy, facilitated by an online-enabled self-organization.

Activism does not only affect those in political power, but also big business. In 2007, the first virtual strike was organized in Second Life and caused IBM’s CEO of Italy to resign and the workers to gain better terms in their union negotiations.  See the video below.

IBM Virtual Strike

Labor strikes, PR scandals and government regulation are all examples of non-market threats that are recognized as a major business risk in today’s economy. Billions of dollars are spent in this industry every year. As the nature of this threat transforms itself and grows more daunting with the adoption of new social software technologies and the saturation of internet penetration, business will need to react. Social protest and advocacy is evolving at a similar pace as well threatening those in political power. They will need to embrace this phenomenon as quickly as those without power.

Existing tools and future Web tools yet to have emerged are not going to be used only for insurgents trying to overrun those in power: a tool for revolutionaries. They are utilities whose fundamental value is to help crowds emerge into organized campaigns deployed as a force by the organizers, be it those in power or those seeking greater influence.  However, because crowd-sourcing is most effective when voluntary, those businesses, organizations or governments looking to do so better be in the right. They better have such great products and such good policies that their supporters and evangelists are willing to hit the e-streets. One more point for democracy!

Lloyd is the founder of Blitz Bazaar, a social network and campaign-management platform for a new class of young, grassroots changemakers organizing in a networked society.  In 2002, Lloyd founded and directed HelpArgentina.org, a pioneering organization of the online giving marketplace model.  He is a Fulbright scholar, Stanford MBA and a Williams College undergraduate.  He has contracted for Prosper, Ashoka, Endeavor, the UNDP and the Inter-American Development Bank.  Lloyd grew up in New York City playing soccer, ice hockey and has been seen teaching tango to Stanford football players.

He’s starting Blitz Bazaar because “there is nothing more exhilarating than building an enterprise that changes the world.”

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Second (and Third) Thoughts About Public Funding for the Arts

The Nonprofiteer was in Bloomington, IL, last weekend to see Ailey II, the farm team of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. As she watched this astonishing company perform to an ecstatic crowd in a converted Masonic Temple building, a light bulb went on over her benighted head.

Of course you’re indifferent to public funding for the arts, you dodo; you live in Chicago, where major performers and exhibitions will show up anyway. Public funding for the arts isn’t for Chicago–it’s for Bloomington.

And she remembered growing up in Baltimore, which is not a small town but which waited for months between visits of major dance companies; and she remembered the thrill of seeing those dance companies for the first time.  And she realized (or remembered) that that’s the real point of public funding for the arts: to make available to everyone the thrill of exposure to first-rate art.  Everyone: that means people who live in Bloomington, and International Falls, and Arroyo Hondo, even though the free market would not support a stop in any of those places by the latest tour from the Joffrey or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Met.

Doubtless her arts-administrator readers are thinking “Duh!”–but cut the Nonprofiteer some slack.  The conversation about public funding for the arts has for 30 years been a clash between the Jets of “We’re artists!  Art is important so if you challenge the value of anything we create you’re a boob and a censor and a miser!” and the Sharks of “We’re ordinary people!  We don’t want our tax money spent on things we don’t grasp or approve of so that over-educated sissies can avoid getting jobs!”  Needless to say, this has not been a very productive debate, unless by “productive” you mean “of hysteria and hostility.”

But if it’s public funding for the performance of the arts, or their exhibition, or education about them–if it’s public funding for the arts audience, who can disapprove?  Except in the deepest reaches of the Glibertarian right, we’re beyond debating whether education should be publicly funded, and making arts displays and performances available to the widest possible audience is simply public education on a grand scale.  Yes, yes, the Nonprofiteer knows: education isn’t well-funded either; but relatively few people argue that public funding for education is just a plot to spread disgusting lies, or to keep teachers from having to work.  Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.

In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU.  No one cares about you.  What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

And once you accept that, you have to accept another, equally painful truth, which is that no one can actually determine what “art” is until at least 25 years after it’s been created. Probably the Nonprofiteer doesn’t need to remind you that people threw things at the stage the first time they saw and heard The Rite of Spring, now part of the musical canon. But what she probably does need to point out is that this doesn’t mean the public should accept and/or fund every objectionable thing it sees in hopes that it will ultimately turn out to be art. Rather, it means that support for creation is a mug’s game, a gamble at which most players lose, and that the public should instead put its money into presentation.

Many arts advocates roll their eyes at this and ask from where, then, money for creation is supposed to come. The Nonprofiteer refers those people to the Guggenheim Foundation and 3Arts/Chicago and the Rosenwald Fund and all the other agencies of private patronage that have supported artists and their creative process over the years, and urges them to reach out to reestablish private patronage.  Yes, yes, times are financially tough; but if Julius Rosenwald could single-handedly support the Harlem and Bronzeville Renaissances throughout the Depression, surely our contemporary moneybags can do as well.*

Or, as Rabbi Joshua said much more succinctly: render unto Caesar . . .

Let the public fund what benefits the public, and let private wealth make possible acts of private creation.
——-
*Note that this required that the Rosenwald Foundation spend itself out within 25 years of the founder’s death. In Rosenwald’s eyes that was a feature, not a bug (as our software colleagues would say); but it requires the philanthropist to value what s/he accomplishes above how s/he’s remembered.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Swarms

Manhattan’s birds are brilliant. From my 42nd-floor conference room in Midtown, I often see flocks fly by in perfect formation, suddenly veering right, then left, to dodge the buildings below. It’s as if they’re being choreographed by some grand master hawk squawking orders from atop the Empire State Building.

Truth is, of course, birds aren’t very smart. [Central Park’s birds still can’t seem to distinguish a cookie wrapper from a bagel chip.] But flocks of them? Different story. Group-think helps them to negotiate skyscrapers and migrate to Miami in a heartbeat.

Humans, too, gain some advantages in groups: we’re just starting to figure out how much smarter we can be when linked online. [Five years ago, we began using social media to find and aggregate the people we knew into simple social networks. Then we started organizing our networks to do things, like raise money for a cause.] Now? We’re experiencing another big evolutionary shift in the way we use the Net to collaborate. Think swarms—multiple social networks that aggregate rapidly to influence the offline behavior of others. They’re much bigger and more powerful than our single social networks ever were. And like SWAT teams, they’re all about swooping in to do something quickly, then disbanding.

Four types of super-swarms made headlines recently, offering up some tough lessons in mass collaboration for organizers and bystanders, alike:

• Twestival—the 250-city, one-day global gathering of Twitter users offline—ended up catalyzing hundreds of thousands of people in 186 cities worldwide to raise money for charity:water.org, a New York-based nonprofit that builds freshwater wells in Africa. It was the largest, if not the first, swarm-for-good ever assembled. Yet for more than a week after the Feb. 12 event, Twestival organizers still didn’t know how much money they raised toward their goal of $1 million. Amanda Rose, Twestival’s London-based chief organizer, sent out a tweet that attempted to lower expectations: “Reaching $1 million that quick was always going to be tough,” she tweeted, “but the awareness that came out was worth it. Will not blame those who didn’t reach it.” [This followed an earlier tweet that indicated that only 25 percent of the cities participating had reported how much money they raised. Later still, she tweeted: “We are close to £200k ($284,703.210) so nothing small. Announce soon.”] Throughout the day, Rose urged people to continue donating in a last-ditch effort to bring the tally closer to the goal. Take-away: Swarms can easily overwhelm the individuals who organize them; their behavior is very difficult, if not impossible, to document in detail or control by any one individual or nonprofit once catalyzed.
• More than 4,000 people swarmed into London’s Liverpool Street Station Feb. 9 to both mock and mimic an ad by a local phone company. Some characterized this Facebook-driven swarm—which totaled 14,000 participants online and off—as, simply, the latest in a series of Internet-inspired pranks in recent years [The first recorded flash mob occurred in Manhattan in 2003.] But this one was different. It might be the first swarm mobilized to mock or mimic something commercial. Previous “flash mobs”, new media experts say, have been focused simply on having fun. This swarm resulted from viral marketing writ huge. Take-away: Companies can help to launch a swarm as part of a viral marketing campaign but can’t guarantee it will stay “on message.”
• The Women’s Media Center mobilized a swarm in New York and Washington on Feb. 10 to protest remarks made by TV personality Bill O’Reilly following President Obama’s first press conference. O’Reilly derided veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, calling the 88-year-old journalist “the wicked witch of the East” and poking fun at her age. Within hours, more than 10,000 people sent angry emails to O’Reilly and his producers, forcing the conservative provocateur to apologize to Thomas on air the next day—precisely what the swarm ordered. Take-away: Swarm-advocacy can be used to both challenge and promote free speech and social norms in new and highly powerful ways, raising new questions about the power of a networked crowd to shape the expression—and the behavior—of an individual.
• al Qaeda forces Feb. 11 staged simultaneous suicide attacks on three Afghan government ministries by mobilizing newly formed online strike-swarms. Terrorist “flash mobs” are now being used in smaller-scale terrorist violence, similar to the kind first seen in Mumbai last November, swarm theorist John Arquilla says in a piece he wrote Feb. 17 for The International Herald Tribune. Arquilla says al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using swarm tactics for several years and that they are being coordinated, increasingly, through the use of social media. Take-away: Flash causes, or swarms—when politicized—can be dangerous and difficult to minimize or pre-empt.

Howard Rheingold, the author of the 2003 bestseller, “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”, says digital swarms are just getting started. Given the evolving “brush fire” mentality of the Web, expect to see many more of them taking collective action offline—for better or worse—in coming months. Warns Rheingold: “As these [flash groups] become politicized, there is a potential for good and for danger.”

For more on the early work of swarms, see Cisco engineer J.D. Stanley’s recent paper, “Digital Swarms”, here. Also check out “Swarm Theory,” an article by Peter Miller in the July 2007 National Geographic. And for the upside of swarms, check out Charles Leadbeater’s 2008 book, We Think, about mass collaboration and innovation.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Of Kids and Dogs

Obviously the Nonprofiteer has been in the business too long, because the press release below, trumpeting an uptick in aid to charities serving Indian children in the wake of the release of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire,” made her think of nothing so much as the “101 Dalmatians syndrome” dog-lovers mention to explain their dismay that the Obamas are getting a Portuguese water dog.

The dog-lovers fear people will be inspired to copy the First Family’s choice of dog and then abandon the animals when they prove to be too much trouble. The Nonprofiteer fears that people will be inspired to support children’s charities in India this week and then abandon them when some equally photogenic opportunity emerges next week or month–abandoning the Indian children, in other words, when they prove to be too much trouble.

On the other hand, when she heard the dog-lovers’ plaint she thought, “Oh, get a life!” Dog adoption on balance is a social good, and shouldn’t be discouraged just because some people who engage in it probably shouldn’t (much like parenthood).

Likewise, donations to children’s charities in India are a social good, and shouldn’t be discouraged just because they won’t continue forever. What we hope is that people who adopt dogs grow into the responsibilities that go with pet ownership, and that at least some of the people who turn their attention to Indian orphans on a whim will grow to understand the causes of their poverty and thus to support the means necessary to alleviate it.  (Prominent among those necessary means: not just consistent individual giving but an increase in the U.S. foreign aid budget.)

And meanwhile, UNICEF (along with the charities cited below) will be glad of any and all contributions, no matter how passing the fancy which produces them.

CAFAMERICA: SUCCESS OF “SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE” IS AIDING CHARITIES

Oscar-Winning Film Inspires a Boost in Donations to Groups Working With India’s Children; CAFAmerica Offers Simple Means By Which to Target Donations to Best Programs In India.

ALEXANDRIA, VA///March 3, 2008///The Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” depicting the often dire circumstances faced by children in poverty in India, has sparked interest in charities that target the problem, according to CAFAmerica, which promotes borderless charitable giving as part of the CAF International Network that spans six continents and has over $4 billion of charitable funds under management.

CAFAmerica CEO Susan Saxon-Harrold said: “Individuals and organizations that have been touched by ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ should consider donating to aid Indian children. I have seen the excellent work by charities working in the slums in Mumbai. These charities are making a huge impact on the health, welfare and education of children living in poverty with very little by way of resources. The success of the film has thrown a positive spotlight on their efforts. We advise donors on how best to get involved in giving to India as well as how to make donations safely to get the best impact. As well as working with individuals we work with CAF India to help corporations with their corporate community involvement goals in the region.”

According to an estimate by UNICEF, there are currently 11 million children living on the streets of India, many of whom have fled abuse or mistreatment at home.

The film “Slumdog Millionaire” has inspired a boost in donations to the following children’s charities:

• Railway Children reports that has experienced 10 times as many hits on its Web site as normal and is witnessing a new wave of donations. Based in India, Railway Children established its first charity project in India in 1996, working with local third sector organizations to address the problem of homelessness. Chief executive Terina Keene has been quoted as saying: “We just hope that this marvelous film will help put us at the forefront of people’s minds when it comes to helping the charity. The children on the streets of India desperately need our help.”
• SOS Children’s Villages of India is a non-profit, non-government, voluntary organization, committed to the care of children in need. The aim and objective of SOS-India is to provide long term family based care to parentless, homeless and abandoned children and to strengthen disadvantaged families as a preventive measure against abandonment and social neglect of children. Since its inception in 1964, SOS-India has expanded its services for children at a rapid pace.
• Save the Children, India is an independent member of the International Save the Children Alliance. The organization fights for children’s rights and delivers immediate and lasting improvements to children’s lives in India. Save the Children has existed in India since pre-independence days and is currently working in 11 states and union territories of India.

Both SOS Children’s Villages and Save the Children, India have reported an increase in donors and sponsors in the wake of the release of the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

Individuals and organizations that wish to rely upon the knowledge and due-diligence capacity of CAFAmerica to investigate these and other overseas charities listed here, can donate to help Indian children by going to the CAFAmerica Home page and clicking the donate “Now” button.

CAFAmerica helps companies, family and community foundations, and individuals to manage their international philanthropy efforts and strengthen charitable activity around the world. It also advises on fundraising and grantmaking, allows online account management, and provides an online giving mechanism for nonprofits to place on their Web sites.

ABOUT CAFAMERICA
CAFAmerica was founded in 1992 as a member organization of the London-based CAF International Network, which provides charitable financial services to nonprofits, individuals and companies. The CAF International Network spans six continents and has over $4 billion of charitable funds under management.

CAFAmerica is dedicated to expanding borderless charitable giving by providing guidance and international grant making options for donors. CAFAmerica’s range of innovative charitable solutions for US donors and overseas nonprofits include Donor Advised Gifts, Donor Advised Funds, Matching Donor Advised Fund and most recently, the Friends of Charity Fund.

CAF CONTACT: Patrick Mitchell, in the US, (703) 276-3266 or pmitchell@hastingsgroup.com; and Fiona Fountain, in the UK, +44 1892 544035 or fiona@fionafountain.co.uk.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Membership Trends: A Word to the Wise Art Museum

A fascinating report from Membership Consultants charts current trends in membership and includes a rude wake-up call for art museums, where membership is declining–in marked contrast to other member-based agencies (including associations, conservation groups, aquaria and zoos).

Maybe it turns out that increasing your door price 50 percent (a la the Art Institute of Chicago) isn’t, after all, a way to get people to say, “Might as well get a membership,” but instead a way to get people to say, “Those bleepers! Bleep them–let’s go to the zoo.”

Membership Consultants:
“...Membership Totals–When comparing 2008 to 2007, the largest percentage of responders, 48.7 percent, stated that they ended the year with more members than the previous year, and 10.5 percent stated that membership totals ‘stayed the same.’ Less than half (42.1 percent) stated that membership totals had decreased.

Membership Revenues–From the revenue perspective, membership departments fared even better: 59.2 percent stated that membership revenues were up in 2008 over 2007 while 14.5 percent stated that membership revenues ‘stayed the same.’ The percentage that reported revenues decreasing from year to year was 37.5 percent.

...Pulse of Membership by Sector–The most interesting results emerged from comparing sectors of the membership world. The categories of respondents included Museums, Conservation/Nature-related organizations, Associations and Zoos and Aquariums. The difference in responses by sectors was significant and very telling. In general, Associations, Zoos and Aquariums, Science Museums, Conservation/Nature organizations, and ‘Other’ types of membership organizations reported much more positive membership results compared to Art and History Museums. Respondents totaling 80 percent of Associations and Conservation/Nature organizations reported greater membership totals in 2008, as did 61.5 percent of Botanical Gardens, 58.3 percent of Zoos and Aquariums, and 53.8 percent of Science Museums and ‘Other’ membership organizations. Only 33.9 percent of Art Museums and 44.4 percent of History Museums reported greater membership totals in 2008. Art Museums reported fewer members at a rate of 51.8 percent, and 61.1 percent of History Museums reported fewer members in 2008 as well.

On the revenue side, all types of membership organizations, except Art Museums, reported greater membership revenues in 2008 than in 2007. While all other membership organizations reported greater revenues (76.9 percent of Botanical Gardens and Science Museums, and 72.2 percent of Zoos and Botanical Gardens), only 41.1 percent of Art Museums reported higher revenues.

...Over half of Botanical Gardens, Science Museums, Zoo and Aquariums, Associations and Conservation/Nature organizations reported attracting more members in 2008 than in 2007. Art Museums (40 percent) and History Museums (50 percent) attracted fewer members in 2008 than in 2007.”

If you would like to receive the full tabulation of survey responses, email your request to info@membership-consultants.com.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Charter Schools and Unions: Good Ideas in Conflict?

The on-line ChiTownDailyNews reports a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on at a charter school where teachers are talking–and preparing to do more than talk–about organizing a union.

The Nonprofiteer doesn’t know the rights and wrongs of this particular engagement, but she firmly believes that charter schools–like other nonprofits–are the most fertile territory for union organizing, and she’s not surprised to see that organizing professionals have figured that fact out as well. Combine the relative immobility of most nonprofits–the Art Institute of Chicago won’t pick up stakes and move to Singapore–with their routine underpayment and general exploitation of their employees, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when the union comes to call.

Nonprofits sustained themselves for many years on the unwaged labor of women, and for many years after that by skimping on financial capital and trying to make up the difference in human capital. Everyone who works in the sector is familiar with poor salaries, no benefits, routine demands for unpaid overtime and other violations of the labor laws, and a resistance to improved working conditions based on the “let’s you and him fight” argument that decent salaries for nonprofit workers can only come out of the pockets of nonprofit clients–instead of the pockets of nonprofit Board members, whose job it is to provide resources for their beloved agencies.

It’s not clear that the tactic in this particular organizing battle–to point out that charter schools get public money and thus should treat their teachers the same as those in public schools–is especially on point. (And, to reiterate: the Nonprofiteer is not making any assertions about this particular school, its particular Board of Directors, or its particular employment policies.) Rather, it seems to the Nonprofiteer, teachers at nonprofit charter schools should range themselves on the side of all nonprofit employees, and note that the people who do society’s hardest and most important work should probably be paid reasonably for the privilege.

Nonprofits must economize, sure, and more now than ever; but they don’t get to do it on the backs of their workers.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is principal of NFP Consulting, which provides strategic planning, Board development and fundraising advice to charities and philanthropies. She is also a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Philanthropy: Science, Art or…Music?

Sometimes (OK, a lot) the vision of philanthropy advanced by people like me seems to suggest that philanthropy is a science. To me, philanthropy is “tactical.” To Matthew Bishop” it blends with “capitalism.” Paul Brest advances a “strategic” view. Leslie Crutchfield & Heather McLeod Grant focus on “impact.” All of these words seem most at home in scientific world view.

But philanthropy is not a science. To people like Phil Cubeta, Bill Somerville and Tracy Gary, philanthropy is an art. Words like “love,” “inspiration,” and “intuition” dominate their conversations.

While I’m guilty of gravitating to the language of business and science when I write about philanthropy, I think it is actually a blend of art and science. But even that doesn’t capture it. Philanthropy is really something else entirely.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how music is maybe the best metaphor for philanthropy. Music is an art, sure, but it is an art based in math. Google “the science of music” and you’ll get 222,000,000 results. Music is driven by passion, but even though anyone can pick up an instrument and play it, it is broadly agreed that making good music is a talent and something that can be learned.

While music is a personal taste, we also have broad agreement around the idea of what is considered truly great music. Yet great music doesn’t always “go to scale” and in fact certain types of music reach their fullest potential when they are intentionally kept small.

Can you think about how to be tactical or strategic in how you produce music? Yes. Does capitalism have anything to do with music? No doubt. Is “love,” “inspiration” and “intuition” relevant to music? Of course. If you want to make beautiful music that changes the world and is a joy to play, you must understand music as both an art and a science. Same thing with philanthropy. Without heart, music and philanthropy are superficial. You can’t “prove” that great music or great philanthropy is truly great. Both philanthropy and music benefit the player and the listener, the giver and the receiver. The joy that a musician takes from her music does not diminish its value to the listener, it enhances it. Same thing with philanthropy. But the fact that a musician spends years trying to understand what works, analyzing other efforts and intentionally trying to craft something amazing does not diminish their work either. We expect that music is hard and that great music does not happen on accident. We should expect the same in philanthropy.

So queue up Beethoven’s Ode to Joy or the version by The Deadly Snakes if that’s more your thing. But while you’re listening check out the book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is a principal and director of Tactical Philanthropy at Ensemble Capital Management. Ensemble Capital provides families both traditional investment management and philanthropic planning. He is the author of the blog Tactical Philanthropy and writes the column Tactical Philanthropy for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Three Museums in One

The historic Collaboration Prize, sponsored by the Lodestar Foundation and Arizona-Michigan-Indiana Alliance, announced co-winners on March 5th this year for the best collaboration in the country. The award garnered 644 applications but ultimately the judging came down to a tie between the YMCA & JCC of Greater Toledo and the Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas, Texas. In March I wrote about the former winners of the $250,000 cash prize; this month I am writing about the Museum of Nature & Science, a merger of three museums in Dallas: The Dallas Museum of Natural History, The Science Place, and the Children’s Museum. I interviewed the board chair, Frank-Paul King, of the combined entity which is now three years old.

Mission Plus Strategy: You were the Board Chair of the Natural History Museum at the time the merger occurred. Why were you in favor of the merger?
Mr. King: Fundamentally the museums suffered from mission over-lap, and as a result you create for yourself a couple of problems. Number one, it becomes increasingly difficult for your donors, who are your primary providers of capital, to differentiate how your product is different form anyone else’s. Number two, it’s very inefficient to have three times the overhead, so anytime you can achieve the mission with more efficiency, it is massively beneficial to all that are involved.

Mission Plus Strategy: As the Board Chair of one of the merging entities, what was your role in supporting the merger and making it happen?
Mr. King: My primary role was twofold. Number one: I was one of the champions of the proposed merger within our board. Number two: I was one of the primary transaction facilitators of the mergers. That meant we didn’t have to hire a professional facilitator.

Mission Plus Strategy: How did you combine the boards?
Mr. King: Any institution wants everybody involved who’s interested in being involved. There are different levels of involvement in any organization; anyone who wanted to be involved at a governing board level we let in. We had some pretty high expectations, we need your time, talents and money, and anybody who held up their hand and said I believe in this mission we brought in. 

Mission Plus Strategy: Why did your merger work?
Mr. King: The reason that this worked after it had been talked about on and off for a decade, was because we created a vision for the museum of nature and science for the next century. We asked ourselves: one hundred years from now, what will the iconic nature and science museum look like? That was our big expansive vision and that started us down the road and as we went with it, it made sense for each museum to be with it. The vision has never changed. All that has happened is that the assets have grown, fabulously interesting people have come on board, and the governance changed little.

Mission Plus Strategy: Overnight your job as board chair got much bigger after the merger. What was that change like for you, personally?
Mr. King: Operationally it’s much bigger, but my essential job did not change. My job is to help set priorities and fly the flag for the vision. In many ways, the jobs got easier because we had removed the impediments discussed earlier. We had huge donor support for this.  From an operational perspective, it’s taken us two years to combine the cultures from the organizations; but today it is a rare, rare thing that anyone would say “I came from this or that institution.” It is only by virtue of the Lodestar Foundation that we have even talked about this in the last two years; we are so far beyond the merger; it’s old hat.

Mission Plus Strategy: Do you have any advice for others contemplating this move?
Mr. King: First, it’s all about the vision and the mission. That’s step one. Is the vision shared? The second is slowly developing trust: together we are better off realizing this vision than apart. One of the beautiful things about the economic reality today is that we are forced to think about our missions in a new way because otherwise they might not happen. Once you have vision and trust at a board level, the rest is blocking and tackling; you can hire consultants to help you get there.

Mission Plus Strategy: Why don’t more boards engage in mergers like yours?
Mr. King: Because as human beings we are territorial. It takes inspired thinking to say there is a better way. Let’s not talk about your way or my way; let’s talk about the best way. The for-profit world has the profit motive which can overcome the human issues and the territoriality; in the nonprofit world that doesn’t exist. The only currency you have in the nonprofit world to deal is this bigger vision. If it’s true that you can create something massively bigger by working together then let’s talk about that. We can get excited about that. Let’s just forget about where each came from and, rather talk about where we can go from here - then you’ve got inertia. Lodestar finalists created wonderful inertia.  Once it starts, the naysayers were overwhelmed, and welcome to the advancement of civilization!

Jean Butzen, Mission Plus Strategy consulting, specializes in mergers and alliances in the Chicago area.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Do Goals Hurt Your Chance of Success?

When we talk about measuring impact, evaluating nonprofits or how to compensate nonprofit executives, we are implicitly talking about setting goals. Unless you have a goal, you cannot measure your progress towards reaching it. Right?

But it seems that setting goals can be dangerous. In a recent Harvard Business School working paper titled Goals Gone Wild (hat tip Phil Cubeta) the authors make the case that setting goals can be counterproductive.

From the article:

“In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision. We offer a warning label to accompany the practice of setting goals.”

The gist of the article is that when you set a goal, you tend to pursue it at the expense of everything else. This can be a good thing if the goal is very well defined and captures the core of what you are trying to achieve. But it can also literally blind you to other important things that are going on. Don’t believe me? Check out this video to see how dramatic your blindness can be.

So here’s the thing, when we try and achieve impact and measure it, we need to be very careful in how we define impact. For instance, defining a “good nonprofit” by looking at the ratio of overhead costs to program costs ends up systematically starving nonprofits of the resources they need to grow. Oops. Incentivizing bankers to make mortgage loans without regard to the borrowers ability to pay it off broke our economy. Oops.

Does this mean goals are bad? No, but it does mean that, as the HBS paper states, goals are “prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.”

Powerful tools are usually dangerous if used incorrectly, so this should be no surprise. But when we incentivize people to achieve certain goals, we better make sure they are the right ones. Otherwise we might just accomplish the wrong thing.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is a principal and director of Tactical Philanthropy at Ensemble Capital Management. Ensemble Capital provides families both traditional investment management and philanthropic planning. He is the author of the blog Tactical Philanthropy and writes the column Tactical Philanthropy for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Rethinking Compensation for Nonprofits

Imagine that you’ve built a business that generates $10 million in revenue per year.  What would be a fair level of compensation to expect?  Now, imagine that this enterprise is a program that helps low-wage workers receive Earned Income Tax Credit funds, and that the $10 million is the net amount of value the program brings to low-income neighborhoods.  How did this change your estimate of fair compensation?

As a society, we pride ourselves on our generosity of spirit and purse – on helping people in need and on championing causes that matter to us.  Why, then, do we pay so little to the people who work for the things we say matter most to us – the well-being of our children and the elderly, our environment, the interests of groups like disabled veterans or disaster survivors?

In his book Uncharitable, Dan Pallotta makes a compelling case for completely rethinking compensation in the nonprofit sector .  (Incidentally, chapter 2 of Pallotta’s book should be required reading in all business, law and management courses claiming to put the nonprofit sector in context.)  The challenging question Uncharitable poses to all of us is what would a new approach to nonprofit compensation look like?

Let’s start off by looking at approaches to compensation in the for-profit world.  While nonprofit workers struggle to get adequate compensation for their contributions, the for-profit world, of course, presents compensation problems at the other extreme.  Most recently, the bonuses AIG paid out using federal bailout funds has symbolized these excesses, but over the past 20+ years we’ve seen leading executives receive shockingly high amounts of pay.  In the aftermath of the financial meltdown, the government’s response to the problem so far has been to appoint a “compensation czar” to set executive pay limits.

A more promising approach being discussed in the finance world is tying compensation to longer-term results and productivity gains. The argument is that such an approach, sometimes referred to as “Silicon Valley Compensation,” may both preserve high rewards for innovative or significantly superior performance and simultaneously reduce the potential for kleptocracy.  As noted economist Brad DeLong explains in a recent post:

The engineers of Silicon Valley startups are significantly smarter and work a lot harder than do the traders of Wall Street.  Some of the engineers of Silicon Valley make fortunes: they are compensated with relatively low salaries and large restricted equity stakes in the startup businesses they work for, and so if the businesses do well they do very well indeed—in the long run, in the five to ten years it takes to assess whether the business is in fact going to be a viable and profitable going concern.  And the engineers of Silicon Valley have every incentive to use all their brains and all their hours to make their firm viable and successful: they get their cash only at the end of the process.  They don’t get big retention bonuses if they stick around until the end of a calendar year.  They don’t get big payouts if they report huge profits on a mark-to-market basis. 

Nonprofit pay dynamics also call out for Silicon Valley rules, not because pay is excessive but because it is too low. When successful nonprofits deliver extraordinary results, we all benefit, but the sector does not capture and recycle any of that value into attracting and keeping more talented people.  Because it is hard to “see,” and therefore put a price upon, the value that nonprofits produce, funders, employers and watchdogs alike all focus solely on the pay nonprofit leaders and employees receive, rather than the value they create. That leaves them – and more importantly, the people and causes they serve – at the mercy of the perverse expectation that nonprofit workers should sacrifice financial stability and secure futures for themselves and their families. (Pallotta traces this distortion to the carry-over effect of Puritan ethics). 

Remember the thought exercise from the first paragraph?  In the first example (for-profit), “fair compensation” would include a nice salary, bonuses and perhaps an exit package that will allow you to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.  In the second case (nonprofit) however, you could expect no more than a base salary, simply because you work for a charitable organization.

Paying people tied to the value they deliver over a longer term would seem to make sense for any enterprise.  But for nonprofits, the problem is two-fold; the challenge is not just how to measure value creation, it is also where to find the surplus revenue to fund increased compensation.

For all the talk and debate about results in our sector, in practice, results are rarely measured for a number of reasons.  These include the time lag between providing a service or activity and the manifestation of the results, the difficulty in determining what share of the results is attributable to the service or activity rather than other factors, the lack of adequate resources to enable meaningful measurements, and the reluctance of most donors to pay for costs they do not see as essential to the continuing mission of the organization.

But assume for the moment we could measure productivity gains and added value. Where, then, would the funding to pay deferred compensation for superior performance come from?  Given all the attention venture philanthropy and social enterprise has received over the past 10-15 years, we’ve seen surprisingly little discussion about how to compensate organizations and people who make extraordinary contributions.

There is much that funders and the government could do, such as offer loan forgiveness or ROTC-type programs that cover education costs for people who choose to work in the sector (as I’ve argued in SSIR previously). 

The much harder question is how to offer higher performing nonprofit workers a reasonable chance at increasing income over their careers – the ability to make a living that allows them to stay in the sector without asking their families to sacrifice too much.

In a recent post, Robert Egger posed the question of whether the economic downturn, which has created a buyer’s market for talent, offers the nonprofit sector the chance to try out what he calls the “Starbucks” model .  This model is one in which moderately increased compensation, significantly improved health and other benefits,  could help nonprofits compete for the best people .  It would be a very positive sight to see more public good organizations and their donors adopt this model.  Unfortunately, the dominant trends at the moment – layoffs, hiring and wage freezes, sharp cuts in foundation and government funding – are pushing in quite the opposite direction.

It will likely take years of experimentation (and yes, venture capital) to solve this challenge. There has been a great deal of energy put into prize philanthropy in recent years. What if a similar amount of funding and attention were put into bonus pools for collaboratives working on challenges suitable for result measurement?  Might we learn something from the way cooperatives measure and reward contribution to the whole? Perhaps the workforces of different organizations could be assigned shares of a pool of “success funds.”

Think about your favorite cause or nonprofit. If you could prove that your favorite charitable venture produces, let’s say, $5 in value for every $1 invested in it, how would you persuade donors to pay a premium for that rate of value creation, what would that premium be, and how would you allow your workers to participate in that success?

Peter Manzo is President & CEO of United Ways of California, which improves health, education and financial results for low income children and families by enhancing and coordinating the policy advocacy and community impact work of California’s 37 United Ways.

Posted by Jason Chua

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How to Become a More Resilient Nonprofit Leader

The nonprofit sector is changing at such an alarming rate, even those of us that do the work of social change day in and day out cannot keep abreast of all of the economic, political, and environmental trends affecting our field. In the midst of layoffs, program cuts, and fundraising concerns, most of us would rather stick our heads in the sand rather than face the fact that there’s no more business as usual. Most of us freak out in the face of change, even going so far as to change careers when the going gets too tough. Especially when it comes to Generation Y, we have to wonder whether our youthful passion for change gets overshadowed by the sheer and utter difficulty of the work we thought we so desperately wanted to do. I know my peers, and I have to admit that there is some truth to Baby Boomers’ complaints that we don’t stay in jobs very long. Where is our resilience?

Merriam-Webster tells us that to be resilient means

a) capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture or
b) tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.

In short, being resilient means that we have the ability to bounce back from crisis like an elastic rubber band. But how do we cultivate resilience when all day long we’re putting out one fire after another?

Learn From New Experiences

Maxine Dalton writes about the importance of developing strategies to learn how to adapt to changing circumstances. Our experiences with change can be either rewarding or unpleasant, but we can be intentional about how we react to them. Dalton suggests four key ways to prepare to deal with challenges and ultimately become more effective learners.

1. Take Action: Try learning how to do a new task through trial and error versus research or a how-to book or class
2. Think: Gather data about a new situation by reflecting on past experiences, imagining likely outcomes or scenarios of a possible decision
3. Feel: Develop personal strategies for managing with your fear or discomfort that results in experiencing something new or unfamiliar
4. Access Others: Seek advice or instruction from others who have been in a similar situation or use another person as a model or example for what you need to figure out
Develop a Spiritual Practice No matter if you meditate or practice an organized religion, the crux of your spiritual practice can serve to make you stronger if it helps you to focus on your core purpose in life. I love how Oprah defines spirituality for herself and how it comforts her in times of uncertainty:

When you begin to realize that you are more than your body, that your purpose is greater than your profession or your career—that every life, because you were born you have a right to be here and there is a calling on your life—it means you live your life without fear and you know that no matter what happens, no matter what happens, you are going to be all right. You are going to be all right. That’s what spirituality is for me.

Fail Upward Sometimes we think we have failed, when in fact all we’re doing is being true to ourselves. I remember when I heard the news that Darian Rodriguez had resigned as Executive Director of the Craigslist Foundation, I was sad. Until I heard that he was going to travel all around the world for six months. Talk about awesome. Most people don’t just up and go fly around the world, so undoubtedly that was something he had always wanted to do. Some might say that Darian gave up, that he failed because he left the organization - not so. There’s a big difference between failing and failing upward. When you fail upward, you give yourself permission to follow your joy, even if it means you’ll screw up every now and then. This month’s Oprah magazine quotes Robert Mack from his book, Happiness From the Inside Out: The Art and Science of Fulfillment:

All great champions, most of whom are optimists, have become great because of-not in spite of-great adversity. Michael Jordan, a perennial optimist, once said, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game’s winning shot…and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’ If ever there was a case for optimism, this is it.

Take a Vacation Paul Schmitz, CEO of Public Allies talks about the importance of taking a vacation, even in the midst of the hectic pace of nonprofit work. Paul believes that taking time off helps him to be a stronger nonprofit CEO:

I believe that the balance I try to strike makes me more effective. I have had some of my best insights and strategies emerge when I have been away from the office and unplugged from the day to day. And a good vacation brings me back energized and feeling excited to be back.

The inconvenient reality for nonprofit leaders is that there will be no going back to the “old days.” There will be no return to normality after the recession is over. We have to find ways to become better and stronger while we work with less resources and more demand. The good news is that we have done this before, as Barbara Kingslover puts it so beautifully in High Tide in Tucson:

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another - that is surely the basic instinct . . . Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

We must strive to become as resilient as possible if we are going to be able to strengthen our organizations in times of uncertainty. Our communities need the kind of leaders that will stay the course of social change, even after being knocked down and out. Even when the rules of the game change right before our very eyes. Even when the going gets so tough we just feel like giving up and going to work for corporate America. How do YOU maintain your resilience and strength as a nonprofit leader?

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Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Jason Chua

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We’re Lost But Making Good Time

Despite my many years of stridently stressing the importance of outcomes and assessment for nonprofits, I have grown increasingly worried that the vast majority of outcomes efforts will yield, at best, marginal benefit.

Granted, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and a few others have keenly focused on the challenge of social outcomes and have dealt with them well. Yet many other efforts may end up misdirecting, even wasting, precious time and financial resources. In some extreme situations, well-intentioned efforts may actually risk producing adverse effects on nonprofits and those they serve.

To What End?
The main reason the dialogue on social outcomes is off track is because we have failed to keep our eyes fixed on the ends we are trying to advance. Every ounce of our effort on social outcomes should be with one end in mind: helping nonprofits create greater benefits for the people and causes they serve.

Most outcomes efforts today have drifted far from that end. Too often, measurement has become an end in and of itself.

- If greater benefits were the end, the sector’s dialogue on outcomes would be 95% about mission and 5% about metrics. Today, we have the ratio reversed.

- If greater benefits were the end, nonprofits would be driving the discussion about outcomes—not funders. Attempts to define outcomes seldom produce positive benefits when they are imposed on organizations from the outside.

- If greater benefits were the end, we would be working to help nonprofits clarify the end results they are trying to achieve. Achieving clarity of purpose produces increased benefits even if you never put a single metric in place!

- If greater benefits were the end, we would properly differentiate between operational performance and organizational effectiveness. What good is it to focus on an organization’s overhead costs or fund development levels if we don’t have a clue as to how effective the organization is at creating benefits for those it serves?

- If greater benefits were the end, we would own up to how much encouragement and support nonprofits need in order to define and assess what they do and how well they do it. We’ve approached this challenge as if it’s about numbers when it’s really about changing cultures. Changing culture requires large and persistent investments of time, talent, and money. 

Common Sense Left Behind
A vivid illustration of measurement run amok comes to us courtesy of No Child Left Behind.

Like most people, I believe we need ways to judge our schools and how well our students are doing. But No Child Left Behind does these things poorly. It’s the classic example of metrics over mission.

The current regime of “memorization and testing” and the growing battery of standardized tests risk rewarding targeted test preparation while not informing us or the students themselves whether they are developing the relevant skills and competencies they and our society and economy so sorely need. Yes, it’s very important to achieve—and measure—core competencies like reading and math. But where are the incentives for schools to educate young people to be curious, engaged citizens capable of critical thinking and problem solving? Where are the incentives to encourage collaborative development and learning? Where are the incentives to give students practical experience in the ways of life outside of school?

Too Hard on ‘Soft’ Outcomes
But I should be careful not to cast stones.

In the early years of Venture Philanthropy Partners, we got a lot of resistance to my push for “clearly defined outcomes” from leaders whose organizations placed a premium on being holistic with their services and functioning as “community builders.” Although I agreed with them in concept, I felt that a focus on “community building” was too soft to be a legitimate outcome. Outcomes related to “community building” are, after all, radically ambiguous compared to outcomes like reduction in teenage pregnancy and substance abuse.

I now see better that serving the entire family (holistic services) and building community are some of the very things that create the environment—a web of support and community—that helps youth avoid high-risk behavior, get an education, and prepare for college or a job. But talking about “community building” was too intangible, and not readily measureable to us at the time—and, candidly, difficult to sell to our own stakeholders and the emerging field of nonprofit performance at large.

I regret not being more open in my thinking back then. Instead of pushing back on what we were hearing, we should have done more to understand “soft” achievements that may in fact be every bit as real and important as “harder” outcomes. I aspire to do a better job of making them part and parcel of future efforts to assess outcomes and performance—even if that means using qualitative and/or anecdotal indicators.

The point is this: When public or private funders establish performance metrics and then tie significant rewards or consequences to their achievement, organizations and people will migrate to the behaviors that will allow them to meet their defined targets. If the metrics are appropriate and closely tied to mission, this is a good thing. But if the metrics are overly simplistic and unmoored from mission, then organizations will go racing in the wrong direction. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, they’ll get lost, but they’ll be making good time.

Shining Lights
Some nonprofits have made significant strides in adopting a culture focused on defining and achieving outcomes for the people they serve. One example is the Cleveland Clinic, which I serve as a trustee. The Cleveland Clinic, along with the Mayo Clinic and a few others, lead the field in their use of outcomes to assess their own effectiveness. The Cleveland Clinic now openly presents this information via its website.

Thanks to my good friends at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, in the field of human services I often hold up the work of Youth Villages. Youth Villages, which helps emotionally troubled children through a wide range of residential- and community-based treatment programs in 11 states, rigorously tracks all of the children it serves, during their treatment and often for two years after they discharge. In the words of CEO Pat Lawler, “The state…shouldn’t be buying beds; they should buy outcomes, successful outcomes.”

First Principles
We can help other nonprofit leaders achieve similar success if we refocus on the first-order question, “To what end?” To do that, we need to remember why we’re engaging in a discussion of outcomes in the first place: to help nonprofit leaders to be more effective—that is, to deliver greater benefits to those they serve. Doing so will provide the basis for the accountability we all seek.

Mario Morino, a former software entrepreneur, is the chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners, based in Washington, DC.

Posted by Samantha Penabad

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Third Sector Grit

Grit, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary, is a “firmness of mind or spirit, unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger”.  Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson or the movie The Red Balloon were the stories of my childhood that got to the essence of “grit”.  Recent movies like Life Is Beautiful, Shawshank Redemption and Slumdog Millionaire are examples of modern stories that outline that grit is still popular.

The nonprofit sector is great for many reasons, but one of the main reasons for its greatness is what I term, “Third Sector Grit” and it lives out every day to the many stories of unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger.  It is a quality that is overly abundant and at times minimized in the face of “innovation”.  Third Sector Grit is most times not the stories of the sector’s executive leaders; more often it refers to those community champions in each nonprofit who do not have the larger titles but who are individuals that the organization could not move forward without.  I would venture to say that the definition of Third Sector Grit are the individuals and stories in each nonprofit that showcase its most valuable asset, the ‘firmness of spirit and unyielding courage in the face of the hardship’ toward fulfilling its mission.

I led an organization through a merger a couple years ago and we were discussing the immersion of staff between the organizations.  Through this process some staff cuts were planned for and nearly every staff member within the organization fought tooth and nail for a long-term administrative assistant.  This person came to resemble the heart and soul of the organization and when the others described her, they described the many courageous acts that she had taken, without recognition, putting herself in very difficult circumstances.  She lived and bled the organization and if Third Sector Grit was in the dictionary, her picture would be right there, smiling.

Recently I attended an event with many corporate social responsibility leaders throughout the United States.  Networking with several beforehand, they spent much of their time talking about the amazing stories of their grantees or their site visits they had made to “the field”.  They called them their “war stories”.  The ensuing luncheon peppered various inspiring tales about their work with their nonprofit partners.  Nearly every conversation outlined Third Sector Grit and it served as one of the major motivating forces behind this convening of these corporate philanthropy leaders.  If I could have bottled Third Sector Grit, I would have sold it by the truckload.

Third Sector Grit is the main motivating force to why I work in the sector.  I have many stories and love to share them.  From the boxing coach in Washington State who used his pet orangutan to build relationships with young people to the two former drug dealers who turned their lives around following the death of a family member to start a touch football league to the counselor who works with lonely seniors each Saturday in the back room of an Embers.  Talk to most in the nonprofit sector and you will get Grit stories all day.

As part of my regular blog postings with the Stanford Social Innovation Review, I will periodically feature a “Third Sector Grit” story.  If you have one that you would like to share, please feel free to send to me as I may highlight.  My e-mail is john@cuidiuconsulting.com Look forward to hearing from you!

John Brothers the Principal of Cuidiu Consulting, a Senior Fellow in executive leadership with the Support Center for Nonprofit Management, and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Wagner School for Public Service. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard.

Posted by Samantha Penabad

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Your reactions to “A Failure of Philanthropy?”

According to the article “A Failure of Philanthropy,” helping the poor is supposedly a main goal of philanthropy. Yet research shows that most charitable dollars do not go to serving the underserved.  The author, professor Rob Reisch argue that tax incentives and public policy need to change to ensure that more money goes directly to helping the poor.

What are your reactions?

Posted by Perla Ni

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Foundations and accountability

A recent scholarly conference on “Foundations, Accountability, and Transparency in a Democratic Society” sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund raised once again the long-standing issues of accountability in the foundation world. The primary focus of the conference was the tension that has existed since the emergence of private foundations at the beginning of the 20th century,between the private nature of foundations (as “private preserves and none of the public’s business”) and their public character as influential players in a democratic society and therefore appropriately subject to democratic control.

How accountable should foundations be? The first challenge in answering this question of course is defining what “accountability” means for foundations: Accountable to whom—their donors? their grantees? the IRS? the public at large? And accountable for what,performance? responsiveness? achieving equity? advancing social creativity? Neither the historical origins nor the legal status of foundations provide unambiguous answers to these questions.

The current version of the debate between private and public purposes of foundations can be found in discussions of the recent recommendations of the Independent Sector Panel to the Senate Finance Committee (too much circling of the wagons?); the Council on Foundations’ action in censuring the J. Paul Getty Trust for its failure to disclose information (too mild/too harsh?); and foundation payout requirements (to increase or not?). Rob Reich’s cover essay in the current issue of SSIR raises the issue in yet a different way: Should foundations be encouraged or compelled through mandates or incentives to give preference to organizations that pursue the democreatic ideal of social equity? All of these questions return to the fundamental issue of whether there should be greater public control over foundations in a democratic society. What do SSIR readers think?

Posted by Chris (Solspace)

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More on Mergers, Ms. Miller!

“Let’s go for two, Clara Miller,” I said to myself, paraphrasing the famous words of legendary Cubs first baseman Ernie Banks. Ms. Miller, CEO of the Nonprofit Financial Fund and featured speaker at a luncheon sponsored by the Donors’ Forum of Illinois, was advocating for one change: foundations should stop funding line items on nonprofit budgets and start funding results. I agreed with Ms. Miller but that one change wasn’t enough. A second change she could have added was: Foundations should start funding alternative strategies to increase results. One strategy I particularly believe that foundations have overlooked is nonprofit mergers and alliances.

Nonprofits that wish to grow their social impact may be able to do so much more efficiently and effectively through a well-targeted merger with another nonprofit, than staying as a stand-alone writing grant after grant. Foundations know this. So why aren’t we seeing a growing trend in funding the costs of nonprofit mergers and alliances? I believe it’s because of two reasons: 1) the sector does not have sufficient knowledge of the potential of the strategy to increase results; and 2) foundations do not understand how to underwrite and sell these types of strategies to their boards. It’s been my experience that foundation staff fully agree with the need to fund nonprofit mergers, but it is foundation boards that find mergers and their costs (i.e., due diligence) antithetical to the mission of foundations.

But why would that be? If foundations are truly interested in outcomes, then the strategies utilized by nonprofits to achieve these results would not matter. Whether the approach is fundraising to double the output of a well-executed employment program or merging two aligned employment agencies together, the important issue is: Did they get the intended results?

Nonprofit merger strategy is still in the dark ages despite the efforts of pioneers such as David LaPiana and Thomas McLaughlin. The lack of dedicated funding for merger costs, professional training in merger strategy, and (most importantly), public knowledge about completed mergers translate into a lack of infrastructure to support this useful strategy. Without the infrastructure, nonprofits will not be able to utilize the strategy to its maximum potential.

We need two changes in the philanthropic sector: start funding results and start funding new strategies to get more results. Foundations need to step up to the plate and create dedicated funding for nonprofit mergers and alliances and help build an infrastructure to support the strategy.

Jean Butzen, Mission Plus Strategy consulting, specializes in mergers and alliances in the Chicago area.

Posted by Katie Harrington

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Issues That Matter

This post is about nine issues that matter to you—whether you work in a nonprofit public benefit organization, are a philanthropic funder, or happen to be a commercial technology company that serves those markets. Now, even if I do say so myself, “issues that matter” is a pretty gutsy title. Matter to whom? When? Why?

These trends matter to other people as well, but for other reasons. I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to talk to you. My goal is to raise up some questions you might not know you’ve been harboring, shift some of the ways you think about issues so that you consider a new side to them, and—most importantly—point out some patterns between issues and ways that they are dynamically linked that may explain why you feel like time is too short, information too plentiful, and decisions require too many variables.

Here are the issues that matter:

• Demographics
• Groups
• Ownership
• Mobility
• Markets
• Price
• Forms
• Time Frames
• Alignment

And here is why these things matter:

Demographics Matter
I’m going to start here because people matter. According to the 2000 Census, the U.S. is older, larger, and more diverse than it has been at any other point in time.

How many people reading this are caring for your kids and worrying about, or actually caring for, your parents?

Age matters. An increasing old population affects jobs, taxes, social needs, volunteering rates, and philanthropy.

Youth matters. The young population affects jobs, taxes, social needs, volunteering rates, and philanthropy.

These trends shape who works, who votes, who needs what, who pays taxes, who draws benefits, who supports whom. They will have strong affects on the much-tauted Intergenerational Transfer of Wealth – which is actually a three-generation phenomenon, rather than two.

Think about the demographics where you live and work. What does your community look like now? What will it look like in 20 years? How will you benefit from the changes?

Groups Matter
At first, this seems a derivative of the demographics issue. The first one is about people, the second one is about what people do together.

But Groups Matter is also about how people do things together, and with whom, and when, and why, and for how long.

Think about this – from a technological perspective on groups (let’s call it social networking). We’ve gone from an arcane academic term to Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to OpenSocial in about two years. Groups are driving users of technology, driving audiences for innovation, and driving forces in our economy.

And people are members of many groups. For different reasons. At different times. No single nonprofit organization or philanthropic effort is going to meet a person’s lifetime of needs. Go back to the question I asked you in the beginning, about kids and parents. Those of you who answered that question with a nod or a moan are members of different groups that fit your identities as (and I’m drawing some generalizations here, feel free to challenge me later) individuals, parents, children, professionals, men, women, religious, volunteers, and ethnic and racial. You use different resources for different goals, drop out of groups when they no longer serve your purpose, and create new groups for new reasons. (I just received an email from a group of neighbors volunteering to clean up the beaches around San Francisco Bay. The group is also raising money to help clean shorebirds. The group didn’t exist one week ago.)

We also know that groups are good at decision making (you’ve heard of the wisdom of crowds) and that diverse groups are even better at decision making.

Groups matter. They matter to us as people, they shape the way we work, give and volunteer, and they matter to us as technology innovators, nonprofit managers, and philanthropists. Groups matter.

Ownership matters
This seems a little bit further away from people and groups, but it’s connected, trust me. For example, groups own things – like the sky, the oceans, and the freedom to create. Entire economic revolutions have occurred in my sons’ lifetimes by companies that built enormously powerful tools – specifically Google and eBay – and own none of the things those tools are used for.

Ownership matters in our digital age. It is changing in our digital age (new versions of copyright and patent law, new expectations for the value of sharing).

Do you know what these little icons on the bottom are?
Social tags – They let you post and click and tag and save content from one place to another. We may “own” something, but in the digital world, it is very hard to control it.

Most of the discussion about this in today’s press is set up as a battle between record companies and musicians, or television networks and user-generated video or, in the case of writers and distributors, it’s set up as a strike. For the rest of us, however, I prefer to think of it as a choice – for your foundation, your nonprofit, your technology company. It’s a choice between business models and the choice is this:

“Will you be more successful building something that is protected and proprietary, and then factoring in the costs of defending it, or will you be more successful building something that gains value as it is shared, and letting it loose?”

Mobility Matters
Part of the reason ownership matters is because not only can digital content live anywhere, it can go anywhere. Think of where you do your work today. Is it at a desk? With a PC wired into the wall? On a wireless laptop?

How about the millions of people who use only their cell phone to make purchases, find out prices, sell their wares, or notify local emergency officials of danger?

What about the foundation executive who says to his CTO, “I’m not lugging my laptop with me anymore – I want everything fed to my Blackberry via a RSS feed.”

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot; it’s not just data that move so easily. People move. Jobs move. Skill sets move. Groups move. Ownership moves.

Markets Matter
Markets matter to social good in so many ways that I could focus this whole post on this issue. I won’t – I’ll just send you to my blog, Philanthropy2173, where I’ve been writing about this literally since I published a book on it in 2004.

For the sake of this discussion, let me say that “markets matter” is shorthand for the changing ways that social goods are produced, distributed and financed, the changing roles of public agencies, and the blurring of revenue sources for public benefit work.

There are three large ways of thinking about how markets matter:

1. President Clinton reminds us in his foundation work and in his book giving, that the capital markets for social good are “underfunded and under-organized.”
2. Capital for social good is now as likely to come from fees for service, government contracts, private investors, social venture funds, or socially responsible investment funds as it is from philanthropic gifts.
3. We are increasingly surrounded by market approaches to social goods – from private companies that manage public libraries to commercial restaurants that focus on job training to double bottom line investment funds.

Markets matter in general. They really matter when considered in the context of changes in the public sector and the independent sector. One reason markets matter is that they remind us to never try to predict changes in one sector – say commerce – without also considering changes in the public and independent sectors.

Price Matters
There is a book out called Strategy of Giving. It has nothing to do with either philanthropic planning or preparing for the holiday gift giving season. It is about the value that is created and attained when products – ideas, designs, music, information—are exchanged for free. In other words, they are given away.

A decade ago this would have seemed like heresy. A decade or so ago the closest example I could think of was the razor blade business. Sell the razor for cheap, make a fortune on the blades. But that’s cheap. Not free.

Then came Google. And FireFox. And MySpace. And Ubuntu. And YouTube. Everything they provide to the user is free.

This takes us back to our point about ownership and markets and that basic business model choice – will what you are doing or selling be more valuable if it is free? Is there a business model that’s about location, ads, or transaction services that might be worth a look?

Or are there other assets – information, networks, and human resources come to mind – that you are hording rather than sharing, and in so doing, limiting your effectiveness rather than strengthening it?

By the way, the book The Strategy of Giving is available for purchase. The price? It’s free. You might also check out Chris Anderson’s new article in Wired - it is all about “Free as the new price.” Oddly enough, the magazine is not free.

Forms Matter
So we’ve looked at individuals and groups. We’ve considered the meaning of ownership, mobility, markets and price.

What about form? If everything so far is really changing – who we are, how we congregate, what we own, where we use it, and how we exchange it with others—it falls to reason that the structures we use to organize ourselves are also changing.

Some of the changes have to do with technological innovation – remote workplaces, telecommuting, PDAs and airplanes that get you across the world in a day. Organizations are more global, flatter, more dispersed, and more creatively chaotic.

Other changes are arriving in the form of regulatory and structural innovation – think of hybrid nonprofits and social enterprises and corporate social responsibility officers. But also be aware of totally new structures, such as Limited Profit Liability Companies (or L3C s) and B Corporations – which are public benefit corporations supported by commercial sales.

Keep your eyes open for continuing new forms of social organization – where the movement meets the flash mob, for example. Or where giving circles, social networks, and financial innovation around charitable vehicles come into play. Keep your eyes open for new forms of giving, new organizations in philanthropy, and new structures for social good.

Time Frames Matter
Ah. Not a minute too soon. These forces work at different speeds:

Technology changes quickly. Organizations? Not so much.

Markets can shift suddenly or steadily survive bump after bump after bump.

Groups can last for 100 years. And then fall apart.

Some of us change jobs and cities frequently; mobility is part of our identity. Others will stay put for as long as possible.

Time frames matter. They are not synchronous across these trends – some move quickly, some are slow. Make sure you know which one you are dealing with, as well as what kinds of forces can accelerate or decelerate the pace you’ve calibrated.

This is not just about work, or giving, or volunteering. This one – time frames – is about everything. Some things you can and should do quickly: assess the role of new competitors, take advantage of a political window, or jump on a opportunity to be with your loved ones.

Other things will need more time and should be given it – strategic mergers, the pursuit of social justice, and the time spent reading with your children.

Make sure your time frame makes sense. That’s what really matters.

Alignment Matters
New forms of action. New prices and markets. New ways of moving and owning and sharing information, innovation, and ideas.

Just make sure there is some alignment across them, OK?

With so many choices in form, groups, markets, platforms and pricing, nonprofits, foundations and technology companies should be constantly adjusting their strategies to make sure their efforts are aligned.

We’re seeing this in the attention to mission-related investing as foundations seek alignment across financial assets as well as their intellectual and human resources.

We’re seeing this in the way savvy nonprofits are using their volunteers, social networks, fundraisers, and blogs.

We’re seeing this as individuals try to align their full financial portfolio with their values; that means their philanthropy, political giving, and investing.

Without alignment, really, the rest of this will be chaos. Consider your choices. Play to your strengths. Put power behind all of the oars in your boat and make sure they are all pulling in the same direction.

Take them all together –

1. demographics
2. groups
3. ownership
4. mobility
5. markets
6. price
7. form
8. time frames and
9. alignment. (If I were Julie Andrews I’d burst into song right now)

Somewhere in that mix is the cause of, and the answer to, your big organizational questions, your time and information challenges, and, perhaps, even something for yourself. There you have it. Nine issues that matter, and why.

Posted by Katie Harrington

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