http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en katiejh@stanford.edu Copyright 2009 2009-05-21T19:01:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/making_the_b_list/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/making_the_b_list/ Reem Rahim and her brother Ahmed don’t always agree. But the two cofounders of Oakland, Calif.-based Numi Tea were both skeptical when the nonprofit B Lab approached them about certifying their business as a B Corporation. B—“beneficial”—Corporations use “the power of business to solve social and environmental problems,” according to B Lab’s Web site. Yet Numi Tea had already received organic and Fair Trade certifications, so the Rahims did not understand why they also needed to earn their B Corp bona fides. They questioned whether B Corporation certification was just another marketing fad. And they wondered whether customers would even care that Numi was a B Corp. But as false claims of social and environmental stewardship increasingly cluttered the corporate landscape, the Rahims sought the B Corp seal of approval. “We were concerned about ‘greenwashing,’ or attempts by typical companies to portray themselves as something that they are not,” says Reem. Although different organizations offered environmental, labor, quality, and governance certifications, no one offered a single, independent, comprehensive standard for a company’s overall social and environmental responsibility. As a result, consumers struggled “to tell the difference between good marketing and good company,” explains Jay Coen Gilbert, one… Corporate Social Responsibility 2009-06-23T02:30:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/white_house_digs_innovation/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/white_house_digs_innovation/ When first lady Michelle Obama helped turn a patch of the South Lawn into a kitchen garden for the White House, sustainable foodies savored the moment—and the overnight attention it brought to their “eat local” movement. Social innovators, meanwhile, spent early spring waiting for the Klieg lights to turn in their direction. “Any day now” was the rolling estimate of when the new President would formally announce creation of the first-ever White House Office of Social Innovation. (At press time it was learned that the office would be headed by Sonal Shah, who previously worked at the global development team of Google.org.) Even before the announcement, spirits were high among those who have pushed hard for the creation of this new West Wing office. “This could be a very big idea,” predicts Vanessa Kirsch, executive director of New Profit Inc. Kirsch is also a founder of America Forward, a coalition of leading social entrepreneurs. During the presidential campaign, America Forward lobbied hard for a White House office that would help scale effective nonprofit programs. More cause for optimism came in late March with the passage of the Senator Edward M. Kennedy Serve America… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-05-21T18:01:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_the_violent_death_of_benevolence/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_the_violent_death_of_benevolence/ Players of the video game MadWorld can use their Nintendo Wiis to impale enemies on spikes, gouge out their eyes with street signs, and chop them in half with chain saws. The Mortal Kombat series offers its users similar thrills: ripping foes’ heads from their bodies, tearing their hearts out of their chests, and burning the flesh off their skeletons. Although their producers argue that these games have no ill effects, a new research article shows that violent media blunt people’s altruistic tendencies. In one experiment, for example, participants who played a violent video game took longer to respond to an emergency than did participants who played a nonviolent game. And in a second study, theater patrons exiting a violent film responded more slowly to a woman in distress than did patrons exiting a nonviolent film. “Violent media make people numb to the pain and suffering of others,” concludes Brad J. Bushman, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and the article’s lead author. His coauthor is Craig A. Anderson, a professor at Iowa State University and an expert on media violence. Previous research shows that viewing violent media makes both children and adults more physically… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-05-21T06:01:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_the_volunteer_boom/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_the_volunteer_boom/ Commentators such as former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, contend that Americans who came of age during World War II are the “greatest generation,” shouldering more than their fair share of civic duty and patriotic discipline. Meanwhile, observers criticize the baby boomers—Americans born in the years following WWII—as selfish whiners and disenchanted laggards. But when it comes to volunteering, “this basically isn’t true,” finds DePaul University sociologist Christopher J. Einolf in a recent research article. “Not only are baby boomers volunteering at a higher rate than the cohorts before and after them, but also the sheer size of their cohort means that the number of elderly volunteers is going to double,” he says. “If anything, nonprofits will soon have more volunteers than they know what to do with,” he predicts. Einolf compared rates and amounts of volunteering for three distinct generations: the long civic generation (also called the greatest generation), which was born between 1926 and 1935; the silent generation (so-called because of its small size and relative absence from public discourse), which was born between 1936 and 1945; and the baby boomer generation, that sudden swell of Americans born between 1946… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-05-21T06:01:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/q_a_judith_rodin/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/q_a_judith_rodin/ Judith Rodin heads the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s oldest, most influential, and innovative foundations. Many of the 20th century’s big breakthroughs—Social Security, the Green Revolution, the discovery of DNA, and family planning—can be traced to early funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Today, Rodin is doing her best to keep the Rockefeller Foundation at the forefront of new and big ideas. The foundation continues to fund organizations tackling specific problems like poor health care and environmental degradation. But Rodin has taken a different tack by also funding organizations that are creating new innovation processes—like crowdsourcing and collaborative competitions—which can be applied to solving all types of social problems. In this interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric Nee, Rodin explains the impact that the economic downturn has had on the Rockefeller Foundation and its grantmaking ability. She goes on to discuss in some detail why the foundation is funding organizations developing new innovation processes and which processes are proving most fruitful. And last, Rodin explains how the Rockefeller Foundation is adapting its grantmaking to the new opportunities provided by the Obama administration. Eric Nee: How is the economic downturn affecting the Rockefeller Foundation? Judith… Social Entrepreneurship, Corporate Social Responsibility 2009-05-21T06:01:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_profit_in_nonprofit/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_profit_in_nonprofit/ In 2004, Jessica Jackley set out for rural Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to perform an impact evaluation for the Village Enterprise Fund (VEF), a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit that makes modest grants and loans to small businesses in East Africa. A few months later, her husband, Matt Flannery, then a computer programmer at Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo Inc., came to visit her. As the couple traveled around the country interviewing small-business owners, they talked nonstop about the best ways to help Africa’s struggling entrepreneurs. One year earlier, Jackley had heard Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, give a talk about microfinance. “I reacted with both my head and my heart,” she recalls. “My head said: ‘Microfinance is effective. It’s powerful. It works.’ But the most important part was what my heart said. The way he talked about the poor was beautiful, respectful, and dignified. I didn’t have feelings of guilt and shame like I did after a lot of nonprofit messaging. Instead, I wanted to be there, listening to people’s stories and talking with clients face to face.” Once in East Africa, Flannery and Jackley agreed that they too would facilitate loans… Social Entrepreneurship 2009-05-21T06:01:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_at_a_loss_for_ethics/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_at_a_loss_for_ethics/ New York Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte is famous not only for his phenomenal left arm, but also for his rock-solid integrity. So when he confessed in December 2007 to illegally using human growth hormone following an elbow injury, Dolly Chugh, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, listened closely. “I felt an obligation to get back to my team as soon as possible,” Pettitte explained in a statement. “I wasn’t looking for an edge; I was looking to heal.” What Pettitte revealed in his statement Chugh captures in the laboratory: People are more likely to bend their ethics to avoid a loss—such as letting down their teammates—than to attain a gain—such as extra muscle and the competitive edge that comes with it. Indeed, in a recent series of studies, when Chugh and her coauthor framed identical situations as either a cause for loss or an opportunity for gain, more participants lied and cheated in the former situation than in the latter one. In a laboratory experiment, for example, the researchers cast undergraduates in the role of an entrepreneur who wants to buy a business from a competitor with unknown intentions. Half of the participants learned that… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-05-21T06:01:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_when_swag_backfires/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_when_swag_backfires/ Embroidered T-shirts, discounted tickets, exclusive concerts, and other charity carrots can sometimes rouse people to donate more time and money to nonprofits. But incentives can also stifle giving, finds Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and author of Predictably Irrational. With his colleagues, Ariely shows that when donors’ gifts are public, nonprofits need not gild the lily by offering trinkets—social approbation is reward enough. But when gifts are private, nonprofits should use loot to inspire even greater generosity. “Part of the reason we give is so that others will think better of us,” Ariely explains. “But when the signals are mixed”—that is, when we cannot clearly convey that we are just doing good, because we are also doing well—“we give less.” Conversely, when no one’s watching, we may need a small prize to unleash our inner altruist. To explore how incentives can heighten or hinder prosocial behavior, the researchers conducted a laboratory experiment and a field experiment. In both studies, they gave half of the participants a monetary reward for performing tasks (clicking computer keys, riding a stationary bike) that would lead to donations to charities, and gave the other half no… Philanthropy, Responsible Investing 2009-05-21T06:01:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_color_blindness_is_shortsighted/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_color_blindness_is_shortsighted/ Now that the American workforce is more diverse than ever before, what do we do with the differences? The old-school approach is to pretend that racial and ethnic distinctions either do not exist or do not matter—a worldview called color blindness. As a new psychology study shows, however, “just sweeping race under the rug can be bad for everybody in an organization,” says Victoria C. Plaut, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia and the study’s lead author. Color blindness cloaks difference like the emperor’s new clothes: Everyone can see that race and ethnicity influence people, but no one can talk about it. Rather than making minorities feel comfortable, though, this implicit gag order actually leads them to feel less loyal to their employers and less engaged with their work, find Plaut and her colleagues. In contrast, acknowledging and even celebrating diversity—a worldview called multiculturalism—inspires greater commitment, pride, and conscientiousness among minority employees. Organizations with these “psychologically engaged” workers, in turn, are more productive and profitable and have less turnover than do organizations with a more alienated workforce, previous research shows. To examine how colorblind versus multicultural worldviews affect minority workers, Plaut and her colleagues surveyed 4,915 employees across… Human Rights 2009-05-21T06:01:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_think_passionate/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_think_passionate/ Building a company is so hard that “if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up,” said Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., in a 2000 Fortune article. Investors know this, and so they screen for entrepreneurial passion when deciding which ventures to fund. But not all kinds of passion attract cash, finds a new research article. Instead, cognitive passion—as revealed in entrepreneurs’ preparation, thoughtfulness, and logic— brings the bucks, while affective passion—as evident in facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice—does little to court capital. “There are different levels of passion,” explains Xiao-Ping Chen, a professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business and the study’s lead author. “On the surface level—affective passion—you see whether people are excited, whether their faces light up. A deeper level is their cognitive processes—how much and how deeply they think about their idea. An even deeper level is behavior: Did the entrepreneurs, say, quit their jobs to start their own business? How much of their own money did they invest?” To test whether and what kinds of passion win venture funding, Chen and her colleagues first created scales that observers could use to rate other people’s cognitive and affective passion. (The… Social Entrepreneurship 2009-05-21T06:01:00-08:00