The great irony of the transformative health care reform legislation passed in 2010 is that although the law promises access to care for 30 million Americans, it relies on an outdated structure woefully ill prepared to serve them. Constrained resources, flawed economics, rising costs—how can a health care system under so much strain survive such an expansion? The answer will be found in creativity.

Over time, the most dynamic health care institutions have boosted their creative metabolisms, so to speak, with promising methods for vetting new ideas and technologies. More recently under Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has become known as a budding innovator, too—and none too soon, given the magnitude of the challenge it confronts.

Like all institutions in this era of reform, HHS is leveraging the entrepreneurial experience of people like Park to reinvent how it does business. But as Park explains, HHS is aiming for more: “We are trying to do things in government that will facilitate entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector. Think of it as meta-entrepreneurship.”

The department can be thought of as the largest, most important health care institution in the country. As the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid, it in effect picks up more than 47 percent of the nation’s health care tab. Private insurance companies also look to the HHS for benchmarks that help them establish their own pricing. And the department’s newly created Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation is now responsible for creating new payment models, such as systems to pay physicians’ salaries instead of fees for service. HHS plays an equally significant role as a health care regulator, too.

What happens at HHS will therefore help shape the course of the entire industry. As they endeavor to create a culture of innovation inside and outside the government’s bureaucracies, Park and his colleagues are learning important lessons for the field.

AN ELEPHANT LEARNS TO DANCE

When Silicon Valley entrepreneur Todd Park joined HHS as chief technology officer (CTO) in August 2009, the department was the least likely of government institutions to be described as nimble or creative. It certainly did not look innovative. As the health reform debate reached a crescendo, HHS was more often described as a bloated elephant.

Part of this perception owed to its size. HHS is a colossus, housing 10 of the nation’s major domestic policy administrations, including three of its largest: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Administration for Children and Families. HHS has 73,000 full-time staff, which is roughly equivalent to the payroll of Cisco Systems. It also has an authorized annual budget of $902 billion. Its spending authority is 50 percent larger than the 2011 general funds of all 50 states combined.

Big bureaucracy was foreign territory to Park. He had captured the Obama administration’s attention as the co-founder of Athena Health, an early health information technology startup specializing in revenue cycle management for medical practices. When Athena Health debuted on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2007, the then 34-year-old Park became a multimillionaire and an instant symbol of Silicon Valley success.

Back in fall 2009, it was far from certain that Congress would pass a health reform bill. But Park’s move to HHS hinted that the department was about to undergo some radical change of its own. To start with, until Park agreed to become its CTO, the job had never existed at HHS. It turned out that Park’s superiors, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Deputy Secretary William Corr, had an unusual take on the new role.

“When I got here my boss told me, ‘Todd, you’re a change agent, and your job is to originate initiatives that will help HHS harness the power of data and technology in innovative ways to improve health,’” Park recounted in an interview. This was not the traditional CTO mandate. “The title is a bit of a red herring—I’m really an entrepreneur-in-residence,” Park explains, slipping into his Silicon Valley dialect.

An entrepreneur-in-residence, or EIR , works under the tutelage of a venture capital firm and is typically expected to source new deals, form a new company, or help manage an existing company in the firm’s portfolio. Inside a bureaucracy as complex as HHS, succeeding as its lonely EIR was prone to be even more difficult than managing its IT systems might have been. But Park had little time to dwell on this fact.

A lesser-known mandate of the health reform bill of 2010 was a requirement that HHS build a consumer service that could help consumers “take control of their health care.” The goal was to make information more accessible to average Americans.

It was a vague but daunting objective. To put a finer point on it, the law required that a new Web portal provide details about prices and coverage for every public or private insurance plan on the market. The portal should also explain confusing topics like tax credits and reinsurance programs to small businesses, and it should educate consumers about how the labyrinthine insurance industry works. Later it would add preventative care advice, too. To a technology entrepreneur, the product might have been described as a Yahoo! for health insurance.

Only days after Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to reform the health care system, the task of building such an all-encompassing portal landed on Park’s desk. Sebelius gave her new CTO just three months to build it. Even by Silicon Valley’s adrenaline junkie standards, three months to get from concept to launch was extremely tight.

“No one thought we could do it,” Park says. “It was like, ‘There shall be this site and it shall allow any American who walks up to it to get all the information on every insurance company in America—and good luck!’” In perfect bureaucratic form, Park’s HHS colleagues didn’t actually expect him to deliver it. “They expected us to launch with a placeholder [site],” he says.

By the time they set to work, Park’s team had just 75 days to launch the portal. On July 1, 2010, HHS debuted HealthCare.gov, and it was anything but a placeholder site. Consumers found an intelligent engine that, on the basis of responses to a few questions, could deliver a customized overview of insurance plans. They could toggle through Web pages to compare thousands of plans for their benefits, participating providers, and eligibility requirements. The portal was also interactive, regularly asking users how HHS might improve the site.

The response was a groundswell. Since it launched, 5.7 million people have visited HealthCare.gov. If simple when compared with inventing a faster microchip, the portal is nevertheless an innovation that has helped transform HHS from a remote bureaucracy into an accessible presence in the lives of millions of newly engaged health care consumers.

FIVE RULES FOR INNOVATORS

Building successful innovation projects like this inside such an unlikely institution, and in so short a time, wasn’t an accident. Park has developed a tried-and-true set of rules that guide his work.

“I wouldn’t say we have a system yet, but there are things we are doing that are meant to be systemic,” Park says. He breaks down his method into the five standard operating procedures that follow. (See “Todd Park’s Rules for Innovators” below.)

RULE #1: Downsize Your Idea. Step one is to decide on the right projects to pursue. Park uses an easy-to-remember, two-part filter: First, the project must have the potential to generate a significant impact that furthers the organization’s mission. Second, the project must be small enough for just five people to tackle.

“Start with the institutional mission or the high-level goal,” says Park, “and then ask yourself: What are the [individual] things most likely to produce a big ‘delta’ against that goal?” The smaller things with the largest mission impact are the projects you should take on.

At HHS, the high-level goal was to help consumers take control of their health care using technology and data—again, a mission both vague and grand. The information portal, however, was a comparatively small idea that had the potential to deliver a lot of bang for the buck in advancing the high-level goal. It was also much simpler to execute than, say, a full-scale software application, which would have required a more complicated information technology architecture, much more code, and many more people.

RULE #2: Form Small Teams. Once you’ve downsized your grand mission into a realistic project, form a core team of no more than five people. Call it “The Rule of Five.” Go larger than five, Park cautions, and the incremental costs of full-time employees outweigh the benefits of the teamwork. “You just cannot get more than five people to think like a single brain,” Park says. Core teams of 10 or 20 are simply too big to think collectively or to track what’s going on.

Now, Park doesn’t think that groups of five can accomplish everything. Some projects need worker bees to get things done. For example, Park added 15 researchers to pull together the data about insurance plans for the portal. Park thought of them as contractors, but he confined ownership over the project to a core unit of five, including himself.

Projects also need the right mix of people. People outside the Beltway know that the best way to organize an innovative effort is to have the strategy people, the technology people, and the operations people all blended together on one team. “Employees one through five should be really hard to tell apart,” Park says. “They are all like [Navy] SEALs—people who can be called upon to do any of the necessary tasks. They are always in the same room, and they are all focused on the same question: ‘What does the customer want?’”

RULE #3: Spend Time with Your Customers. When first asked to explain his methods at HHS, Park responded tartly: “I can tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t do a focus group!” Instead Park and his team spent their time conducting “deep dive” conversations with real people.

Big organizations often hire consultants and market researchers to compile enormous research reports. Park believes that innovators are better served when they skip expensive, formalized research and instead spend lots of time asking customers questions like “Would you use this product?” and “Do you like it better this way, or that way?”

People cannot want what they do not yet know. “A focus group would never have come up with the Internet or e-mail,” Park says. “All the focus groups in the world will not help you discover the customer’s inarticulable preference.” He says focus groups are great for assessing incremental improvements to existing products, but they are useless for identifying opportunities to create breakthrough innovations that people don’t yet know they desperately need.

RULE #4: Identify the Minimum Viable Product. Innovators commonly make the mistake of trying to do too much, too soon. They try to build a space shuttle instead of a glider. Finding your “minimum viable product” means building the smallest possible offering that will still deliver value to the customer.

“The probability that your first idea is the right idea is incredibly low,” says Park. Athena Health’s first business plan was to manage medical practices. But this wasn’t the product that doctors needed. Doctors really wanted a smarter, easier way to collect payments from insurance companies, so Athena Health transformed itself into a provider of revenue cycle management services.

Knowing that the first product is likely to be insufficient, Park recommends instead going to market with a stripped-down offering that your customers can begin to use right away. Then collect feedback—and iterate, iterate, iterate to improve the product from there.

This approach also reinforces Rule #2. When you engage customers early in the process, you increase the odds of delivering what they need, which increases the odds of success.

RULE #5: Impose Deadlines of 90 Days or Less. If inertia is the enemy of the incumbent, urgency is the innovator’s friend. The best way to sustain a sense of urgency, Park says, is to impose deadlines on your project of 90 days or less.

Imposing short deadlines gets you to market sooner, which gives you an earlier chance to uncover and fix your product’s shortcomings. Aggressive deadlines also have the added benefit of enforcing discipline. When a team has just 90 days to show results, it is less likely to let anything distract it from that goal. The team can achieve incremental progress as well, which keeps everyone motivated.

If you think your project requires more time to launch, you haven’t thought small enough. Go back to Rule #1.

THINK SMALL, DEMAND SPEED

You may have noticed a pattern here. All of Park’s five operating procedures are mutually reinforcing. In the end, they come down to achieving bite-size yet outsize results quickly. They have nothing to do with the physical environment your team works in, or with the technology tools they use. “Just putting [your staff] in a building with translucent walls and giving them iPads isn’t going to make them innovative,” says Park. But by following his guidelines, the process of innovation itself can be scaled.

Since building the health care portal, Park has gone on to lead even larger projects successfully. For instance, the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) is a public-private program to help local leaders and public health workers more clearly understand, and improve, the performance of their community health systems. Web tools mine HHS data on the regional use of resources, rates of avoidable hospitalizations and readmissions, the prevalence of diseases within communities, and the determinants of disease, such as access to healthy food.

The project originated as a plan to build, in-house, the largest-ever health data map. Park and his team quickly realized their original goal was too big to be a glider, to borrow his catchphrase. HHS released the data to the public and let outside coders do the heavy lifting instead.

Next, Park expanded the CHDI project into a national Health Data Initiative (HDI). Another joint effort between HHS and the private sector, HDI aims to spur entrepreneurs to develop consumer software and smartphone applications that tap into government health care data. Once secreted away in hidden databases, these data troves are also now available to anyone at HHS affiliate websites like Health.Data. gov and HealthIndicators.gov, and through sites operated by private sector partners like Health 2.0.

In the last year, Park has sponsored HDI “code-a-thons” in San Francisco, Boston, and Bethesda, Md., working together with Health 2.0. Hundreds of developers have produced dozens of new tools, including 45 applications that Park claims “present real, viable business models.”

As it both innovates internally and fosters public-private projects like these, HHS is setting its sights on a transformation of health care. Its work, in turn, demonstrates valuable lessons for entrepreneurs in all environments.

“It is absolutely possible to innovate in a way that is replicable,” Park concludes. “The modus operandi is to come up with an idea, find three to five people to make it real, form a virtual startup around them, and run the thing like a Silicon Valley operation. This is the polar opposite of how large companies function. It is anathema to how government functions. But if HHS can do it, anyone can do it.”

Carleen Hawn is co-founder and CEO of Healthspottr, a networking organization that connects health innovators. Formerly, she was an associate editor at Forbes and a senior writer and West Coast bureau chief for Fast Company.

Corning is adamant that the unfair distribution of power and wealth among and within societies is at the basis of existing and impending crises: climate change, nuclear proliferation, peak oil, water and food shortages, financial meltdown, social unrest. But Corning’s book is not a treatise on the global crises resulting from turbo-capitalism. The Fair Society, instead, is a rigorous attempt to reconcile the science of human nature with the pursuit of a fair socioeconomic system. The questions raised in his book—Is justice a social obligation or the interest of the stronger? Are we inherently just or selfish? Are capitalism and socialism fair? What are the central features of a Fair Society?—have been the central preoccupations of philosophers such as Plato, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Kant, and Marx.

The importance of these questions cannot be overstated. For the last 30 years, socioeconomic policies at the national and global level have been dominated by free market fundamentalism, an ideology based on the assumption that people’s primary motivation is the pursuit of profit. In most established democracies, this doctrine has guided the macroeconomic agenda of both conservative and liberal administrations, or what Gore Vidal called “the two right wings” of the “Property Party.” It also has directed the global economic policies of international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, with disastrous social and economic effects for the developing world.

Working from the presumption that all people are inherently selfish, the proponents of free market fundamentalism have argued that their doctrine is the only public philosophy that works. It is a pity that countless studies, some of them quoted in Corning’s book, show exactly the opposite. To be sure, the science of human nature is far from conclusive. Existing evidence largely indicates that people are at times selfish, competitive, and unjust and at other times altruistic, cooperative, and fair. More important, cross-cultural research shows that our sense of fairness and unfairness is largely shaped by the social and environmental circumstances in which we live.

In the last chapters of the book, Corning proposed a “biosocial contract” to develop a fair society in the United States and around the world, which he describes as a “collective survival enterprise” able to satisfy the “primary needs”: thermoregulation, waste elimination, nutrition, water, mobility, sleep, respiration, physical safety, physical health, mental health, communications, social relationships, reproduction, and nurturance of off spring. A fair society, the author argues, can be created through policies aimed at promoting full employment, ensuring a living wage, strengthening welfare services, reforming the private sector, and developing a more equitable tax system. Corning argues that this biosocial contract can overcome the limitations and unfair qualities of both capitalism and socialism. Capitalism, he believes, is too unequal to allow poor people to meet their basic biological necessities, and socialism is too indifferent to meritocracy and innovation.

Corning’s proposal, I am afraid, is likely to be dismissed by both free market evangelists and the so-called moderate liberals. The former will judge it as an attack on their narrow conception of freedom; the latter will disregard it as a pie-in-the-sky idea. Corning’s proposal is necessary and on target, but at least two observations can be made. First, it is too reductionist to depict most human actions as motivated by what Corning calls the “underlying survival challenge.” There is more to life than satisfying our primary needs. Our existence has some deeper, more creative meaning than mere survival and reproduction.

Second, although Corning’s idea for a fair society is depicted as something new, the author admits that it is largely based on “a society that more closely resembles what already exists in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden.” Although northern European countries can be considered models of social capitalism, they are far more social than capitalist. It is curious that Corning does not address this fact. Is it too controversial to be acknowledged?

Still, it is refreshing to hear a public intellectual like Corning call for the pursuit of a fair society. Many will surely be skeptical about this proposal, or simply view it as sheer utopia. But the real utopia is the belief that the current social system can proceed unchanged.

Roberto De Vogli is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His research focuses on how globalization, economic inequalities, and psychosocial factors affect health and health inequalities in developed and developing countries.

The 960 million poorest people on the planet—or three quarters of the 1.3 billion who make less than $1.25 per day—are now in middleincome countries, says Andy Sumner of the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, United Kingdom. What happened is that “most of the world’s poor live in a relatively small number of countries, countries like India and Nigeria, which have become richer in average terms” and recently graduated from low-income to middle-income status, Sumner says. “But at the same time, poverty doesn’t seem to have fallen much.” The new wealth hasn’t been broadly distributed.

Back in 1990, it was true that poor people (93 percent of them) lived in poor countries. In such a world, ameliorating global poverty is more straightforward, Sumner says: “It’s about aid and resource transfer.” But when most poor people live in countries with substantial domestic resources, giving money isn’t enough. It “pushes development in ultimately a more political direction,” he says.

Traditional donors and international NGOs may move “toward thinking about how they can support progressive forces of change,” Sumner says. It is now even more important to “build up and support the expansion of local civil society in developing countries, so that local NGOs can call their own governments to account.”

Fragile middle-income countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan may still benefit from development assistance, but governance and domestic taxation and redistribution policies are becoming more important. Emerging powers such as China and India (which give aid to other countries) are less and less likely to need or even want aid, and more likely to be concerned with coherence in policies on trade, migration and remittances, climate negotiations, and tax havens.

Sumner’s analysis broadens the question of how to ensure a better world, says Nancy Birdsall, founding president of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. “As fewer and fewer countries are poor in average terms and house fewer and fewer of the world’s poor, should what used to be aid money go toward what are now increasingly called global public goods?” Perhaps the next step is “dealing with problems like climate change, or the need for more agricultural research, or health technologies that could be deployed in poor countries but less poor countries as well,” Birdsall says.

A careful look at world poverty throws a lot of conventional wisdom into question. To really help the poor now, says Sumner, “the first thing is to think about development way beyond aid.”

Andy Sumner, “Global Poverty and the New Bottom Billion: What if Three-Quarters of the World’s Poor Live in Middle-Income Countries?” Institute of Development Studies, 2010.

“These firms have agreed to do something above and beyond what’s required by law,” says Jodi Short, an associate law professor at Georgetown University. But is that promise any more than window dressing? Short found that when firms commit to policing themselves, they do in fact have better compliance outcomes—under certain conditions. “There are things regulators can do to promote the meaningful implementation of self-regulatory commitments,” she says. In particular, watching them is more effective than warning them.

Looking at hundreds of industrial facilities subject to the Clean Air Act across the United States between 1993 and 2003, Short showed that surveillance of self-auditing firms increases compliance, whereas overt threats decrease it: Those companies that started self-regulating only when the EPA said it would punish them did not improve compliance outcomes. Coercion reframes self-regulation from a question of corporate honesty to a cat-and-mouse game, says Short, and “you can’t sustain voluntary regulation without a certain amount of non-calculative motivation—motivation to just do the right thing.”

The practice of imposing compliance auditing as a part of enforcement action settlements has become widespread across a range of fields, Short says. But her research shows it doesn’t help—a finding that field experience confirms. “For a self-audit to be effective, you really need to have major senior management buy-in,” says James Salzman, the former European environmental manager for S.C. Johnson, now a professor of law and environmental policy at Duke University. “And senior management buy-in is more likely if it comes organically than if it comes at gunpoint.”

This is not to say that sanctions aren’t important. “There’s a lot of data to suggest that big sticks lead to better compliance,” Salzman says. But it is regulators’ watchful eyes more than their shaking fists that make firms follow through on self-policing promises.

Short’s findings suggest an important role for social movement activism. As the idea of a “corporate conscience” spreads across industries—from occupational health and safety to industrial food processor inspection to financial auditing—one of the most important motivators is visibility. Activists offer “another source of surveillance,” Short says. “They can provide another set of eyeballs.”

"Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel, Making Self-Regulation More Than Merely Symbolic: The Critical Role of the Legal Environment, Administrative Science Quarterly, 55, 2010."

To drive this agenda forward, President Obama launched the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, an idea first presented in a spring 2008 Stanford Social Innovation Review article. The office is charged with helping the federal government identify and invest in the most innovative, effective community solutions and to partner with philanthropy to make faster, more lasting progress on our nation’s challenges. The office also helps create tools to invest government resources for greater impact, enlists other sectors to help government tackle the nation’s challenges more quickly, and creates a more favorable policy environment to support innovation and evidence-based solutions.

With the launch of the office, some were justifiably skeptical about whether government could be a good partner in finding and investing in innovation. Others were concerned that philanthropy’s independence could be compromised. And still others were concerned about the agenda becoming partisan.

These concerns have dissipated somewhat as the social innovation agenda has taken shape. Although government lacks the flexibility and tolerance for risk that are critical to innovation, government investments can be structured to fund evaluation and support scale, both of which are critical in later stages of the innovation cycle. Foundations have carefully navigated their partnerships with the government, focusing on areas of common interest and leveraging limited philanthropic dollars to enhance government action. And because the underlying principles and strategies for the agenda have appeal for both Democrats and Republicans, the agenda has not become partisan. The ideas are neither ideological nor political: The goal of the agenda is to have greater impact with limited government resources; to learn from and invest in what is working in communities around the country; to catalyze action rather than assume government has the answers; and to use greater competition and other market mechanisms to foster innovation and implement lasting solutions.

WHAT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED

After two years, there are a number of encouraging signs that this social innovation policy agenda has helped make the federal government a more effective partner and has created a policy environment that is conducive to greater innovation and more effective solutions. Below are three examples:

The Social Innovation Fund. The Social Innovation Fund (SIF), based at the Corporation for National and Community Service, was created by a bipartisan majority of Congress and signed into law in April 2009. The fund is designed to give government a tool to identify innovative, evidence-based solutions, to help these solutions build more proof points, and to spread these solutions to other communities of need. Because government is not experienced in identifying innovation, SIF grants of $1 million to $10 million go first to intermediary organizations, such as Jobs for the Future, which are responsible for selecting innovative organizations in communities across the United States. In July 2010, SIF awarded grants to 11 intermediary organizations, which then selected local subgrantees around the country. Unlike many other federal grant programs, the SIF makes evidence of impact a criterion for investment. In addition, foundations are critical partners in this new investment strategy: For every dollar invested by the federal government through the SIF, intermediary and community organizations must match funding from private sources. The Obama administration has created other innovation funds, such as the Investing in Innovation (i3) program at the Department of Education, and has proposed two funds at the Department of Labor. But all could be vulnerable to funding cuts by Congress, despite the fact that they invest in programs with evidence.

Prizes and Challenges. For years, federal agencies in science and technology have used prizes to encourage creativity and solutions to specific problems. Despite their success, agencies focused on human services had been reluctant to use this strategy, probably because the problems are more interconnected and the solutions harder to develop. Given the magnitude of the challenges in these areas, however, the Obama administration developed several model prize competitions in human services areas, including a prize for community colleges, one to reduce childhood obesity, and another focused on stimulating small and medium enterprises globally. Building on this, in December 2010, Congress granted clear authority to all federal agencies to conduct prize competitions, underscoring that this is an important and legitimate tool for idea generation.

White House Council for Community Solutions. In December 2010, the president created a White House Council for Community Solutions, made up of leaders in philanthropy, business, academia, and the nonprofit sector, to identify and help catalyze the most effective community solutions, especially those focused on engaging young people in the workforce. Often these kinds of White House councils focus on policy recommendations; this White House council will focus especially on supporting and catalyzing action in communities, underscoring the administration’s belief that progress on tough social challenges depends on concerted community action.

WHAT IS NEEDED NEXT?

In just two years, significant progress has been made on the social innovation policy agenda, especially given the enormous economic and foreign policy challenges facing the Obama administration. To build on the momentum, a number of steps need to be taken.

First, the philanthropic sector needs to better define and communicate its role in partnership with government. For decades, foundations have worked with the federal government on initiatives, including the Welfare to Work Partnership in the Clinton administration and the Malaria No More initiative in the Bush years. Recently, however, foundations have done even more to leverage their limited dollars—playing a critical and effective role in shaping efforts to spur innovation and direct more federal dollars toward evidence-based solutions. Foundations also played a critical role in providing research and data to help design new federal government innovation initiatives, especially around prizes and challenges. Going forward, philanthropy needs to clarify its role, so that limited philanthropic dollars continue to be spent in the most highly leveraged way. Because philanthropic dollars are dwarfed by federal government spending on most social issues, foundations should continue to allocate resources strategically: investing in risky, early stage innovations that are not appropriate for taxpayer dollars; matching public dollars to advance foundation priorities and goals; investing in building evidence of impact to help smaller initiatives become eligible for larger federal investments; supporting learning and knowledge exchange among federal grantees; funding reports and analysis that provide the substantive content to guide the design of national policy initiatives; investing in advocacy campaigns to shape federal policy; and creating incentives for local community leaders to collaborate around a common goal.

Second, the federal government needs to repurpose existing funding streams toward more innovative solutions that have evidence of impact. Given the budget constraints at both the federal and state levels, government must be able to do more with fewer resources. In too many instances, programs currently funded by government do not have sufficient evidence that they are working. In some instances, federal dollars should be repurposed to conduct the evaluations necessary to justify continued commitment of taxpayer dollars. In other instances, federal funding should be ended for programs that are simply not working and redirected to programs that do work. One critical way to accomplish this would be to create more innovation funds in federal agencies, modeled on the SIF or i3 programs. Another option would be for the federal government to use, where appropriate, pay-for-success structures to provide incentives for programs that focus on critical outcomes. The Obama administration’s FY 2012 budget includes language to allow federal agencies to pilot social impact bonds, similar to those being tested in the United Kingdom.

Third, the federal government needs to eliminate barriers and create incentives, with philanthropy, for innovative organizations and community leaders to collaborate. Across the country, too many high-impact organizations are working in isolation. Although they are having an effect on the lives of the people they serve, their work is not being leveraged or adopted by others for a larger impact. Too often federal and state funding streams flow in a way that encourages this kind of isolated activity. Given the reach of the federal government, it can do more to eliminate these barriers to collaboration and partner with philanthropy to stitch together isolated successes to achieve greater collective results.

Michele Jolin is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a member of the White House Council for Community Solutions. She served as senior advisor for social innovation at the White House in 2009-10.

The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the White House Council for Community Solutions, the Corporation for National and Community Service, or the US government.

Most successful foundations and nonprofits understand the importance of advocacy. Over the last decade, foundations have put more resources into advocating for the policies they believe in, with some notable successes. Yet grantmakers have often hesitated to plunge in. Sometimes they worry about appearing too political or partisan. But more often they hesitate because effective advocacy is difficult, and evaluating whether various approaches are working is even harder.

That is not the case when it comes to service delivery programs—such as well-baby clinics or job-training classes—where foundations, universities, and government agencies have developed sophisticated tools for evaluating the effectiveness of these efforts. The tools range from controlled experiments, to extracting from experience best practices that can be adapted from one successful program to another, to a more malleable form of evaluation based on assessing the theory of change underlying an initiative. The development, refining, and implementation of these tools constitute a growing industry.

Unfortunately, these sophisticated tools are almost wholly unhelpful in evaluating advocacy efforts. That’s because advocacy, even when carefully nonpartisan and based in research, is inherently political, and it’s the nature of politics that events evolve rapidly and in a nonlinear fashion, so an effort that doesn’t seem to be working might suddenly bear fruit, or one that seemed to be on track can suddenly lose momentum. Because of these peculiar features of politics, few if any best practices can be identified through the sophisticated methods that have been developed to evaluate the delivery of services. Advocacy evaluation should be seen, therefore, as a form of trained judgment—a craft requiring judgment and tacit knowledge—rather than as a scientific method. To be a skilled advocacy evaluator requires a deep knowledge of and feel for the politics of the issues, strong networks of trust among the key players, an ability to assess organizational quality, and a sense for the right time horizon against which to measure accomplishments. In particular, evaluators must recognize the complex, foggy chains of causality in politics, which make evaluating particular projects—as opposed to entire fields or organizations—almost impossible.

If foundations embraced the judgment-laden character of the effort—rather than giving up on advocacy or feeling they are falling short when their evaluations lack the scientific patina of service delivery program evaluations—the benefits would be profound. Funders could structure programs, often involving multiple unlikely bets, in ways that are more likely to succeed. Advocates could feel comfortable changing course as necessary. And foundations would be more likely to take chances on big efforts to change policy and public assumptions, rather than retreating to the safer space of incremental change.

ADVOCACY IS DIFFERENT

The word advocacy is in many ways a misnomer. Funders do not, for the most part, give organizations money to simply fly the flag or make the case for a particular policy. Their goal is to change actual social, policy, and political outcomes. And ultimately, advocacy efforts must show progress toward those outcomes. But the relationship between the work to create those outcomes, and the actual results or signs of that progress, can be elusive, because advocacy by its nature is complicated and its impact often indirect.

Consider, for example, the campaign for US health care reform. The effort that culminated in 2010 was the result of decades of work, including a previous, high-profile failure in the early 1990s, waves of state-based reform, and numerous incremental efforts at the national level. Advocates invested hundreds of millions of dollars in initiatives ranging from media campaigns encouraging television producers to include stories of the uninsured, coalition-building projects, university- and think tank-based research, and grassroots initiatives. The basic outlines of reform policies were worked out well in advance, in advocacy groups and think tanks, which delivered a workable plan to presidential candidates. Important interest groups who could block reform, such as small business, had been part of foundation-supported roundtables seeking common ground for years. Technical problems had been worked out. And tens of millions of dollars had been set aside as long ago as 2007 for politically savvy grassroots advocacy initiatives targeted at key legislators. After a very long slog, the outcome was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Now consider the effort in the United States to pass legislation to control global warming, which in many ways resembled the strategy to pass health care reform. Advocates of cap and trade engaged in what can only be called a mammoth effort, over more than a decade. Among other things, environmentalists drew on the services of a former vice president who made an Oscar-winning movie, spread their message for more than a decade across a remarkable span of media (up to and including children’s cartoons), corralled a wide range of well-funded environmental groups to support a single strategy for reducing carbon (cap and trade), and attracted substantial support from large businesses. The movement used every trick in the book (as well as creating some new ones), and the result was legislation that never made it to the floor of the US Senate, with the very real possibility that action will be delayed by years, if not decades.

Most advocacy efforts look more like the push for cap and trade than like health reform. That is, even the best designed and resourced initiatives usually fail to achieve even the more modest of their goals. The American political system is profoundly wired for stasis, and competition for limited agenda space is fierce. In an overwhelming percentage of cases, organizations fail to get substantial traction on their agendas for change. Conversely, items often wind up on the political agenda by random and chaotic routes that may have little to do with advocacy campaigns. If it is hard to know whether advocacy played any part in a policy outcome, it is harder still to know whether any particular organization or strategy made the difference. The fact that in 2010 Congress passed health care reform and not global warming legislation may have been mainly a function of dumb luck, rather than an indication of which advocacy campaign was better executed. Or it may tell us more about the enthusiasm or skill with which the campaign was implemented, rather than the general applicability of its tactics or strategies.

Despite the number of groups that will present themselves as the decisive force behind any legislative accomplishment, no successful advocacy effort is the result of any one organization or initiative. Health care legislation, for example, owes its passage to many efforts. Some were far from government, such as the academic work at Dartmouth College that showed how escalating health care costs could be contained while improving services. Some weren’t directly focused on health care at all, such as political organizing around a broad progressive agenda and candidates.

When specific forms of advocacy—an aggressive grassroots campaign, or a behind-the-scenes, cross-partisan strategy involving paid lobbyists—receive credit for changes in policy, advocates adopting those strategies in the future may claim the strategies themselves are a marker on the road to success. But tactics that may have worked in one instance are not necessarily more likely to succeed in another. What matters is whether advocates can choose the tactic appropriate to a particular conflict and adapt to the shifting moves of the opposition.

Sometimes the most effective effort might be a disruptive innovation that does not follow known strategies. Consider MoveOn.org, for a time one of the country’s most effective multi-issue advocacy organizations. But for years after its establishment in 1998, the organization attracted skepticism, because its primary strategy—repeated, small actions by members—was so different from the organizational membership model previously considered the standard of success.

Disruptive innovators may require a long period of trial and error, during which the policy landscape, and what strategies work within it, may change significantly. For example, when the Tax Reform Act of 1986—an iconic example of unlikely, bipartisan success—was passed, the political climate in Washington, D.C., was characterized by extremely weak parties, strong congressional committees and subcommittees, significant room for bureaucratic and interest group entrepreneurship, and pervasive cross-party coalition building. Best practices based on those conditions would make little sense in today’s national policy process, characterized by polarized, highly disciplined political parties.

Advocacy efforts almost always involve a fight against a strategic adversary capable of adapting over time. Practices that once worked beautifully get stale once the losers figure out how to adopt the winner’s strategy or discover an effective counterstrategy. There was a time when bombarding the Congress with phone calls was an effective way of exercising influence by indicating mass support, but it became nearly useless once everyone did it. Strategic litigation was a genuinely disruptive innovation in the 1970s but declined in impact as its targets developed their own organizations and figured out ways to push back against public interest lawyers. The declining returns on political tactics that are a result of the repeated, competitive nature of advocacy makes it almost impossible to evaluate advocacy strategies against the metric of best practices.

EVALUATING ADVOCACY IS HARD

Similar resources and advocacy strategies, therefore, can generate very different results. Sometimes political outputs are reasonably proximate and traceable to inputs, but sometimes results are quite indirectly related and take decades to come to fruition. Some advocacy efforts have a specific goal in mind, but in other cases the objective is broader and the benefits are reaped by groups other than those who paid the costs. Any effort to evaluate advocacy must be able to account for these and other complicating features of the terrain of policy and institutional change, but these facts in themselves can’t help us evaluate advocacy. Indeed, they are more useful as guides to what not to do.

When evaluating service delivery programs, such as food banks and after-school enrichment programs, it is relatively easy to establish benchmarks to measure a program’s effectiveness. By and large, most organizations are able to show some visible progress toward reaching their goal every day (even if it’s just one hungry person getting breakfast). But the chaotic, nonlinear character of policy agendas means that funders cannot pretend to know where they are in the process. Most of the time, very little seems to be happening. As University of California, Santa Barbara, sociology professor Verta Taylor points out in her classic study of the women’s movement, a cause can remain in “abeyance” for decades, but if the fires are kept burning, it’s possible to get things moving when conditions become more permissive.¹

These long periods off the agenda can be broken quite abruptly and without warning. That is why it is important to continue to fund and pursue the quiet work—such as the long process of slow persuasion and litigation that led to the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2010—even when attention is elsewhere. If one doesn’t, then opportunities may be missed when the political weather changes.

Advocacy strategists, conditioned by funders, are accustomed to presenting a plan of action in which a large change is preceded by interim goals and achievements. A plan to achieve nationwide reform on a key issue might have as interim goals the passage of state ballot referenda, a specified number of co-sponsors for legislation, or passage of an incremental reform. An organization that can present a plan for advocacy with a well-marked path to success seems like a business with a coherent plan pointing to profitability, and thus the safest bet for strategic grantmaking. Such a project can be evaluated as to whether it is achieving its projected interim goals.

But successful advocates know that such plans are at best loose guides, and the path to change may branch off in any number of directions. Interim achievements, such as the passage of a state ballot initiative, can be idiosyncratic victories. Incremental legislation often satisfies politicians that they have dealt with a problem while exhausting the capacity of grassroots advocates to keep pushing forward. Given the competitive nature of advocacy, such early under-the-radar successes may even have the unintended consequence of mobilizing the opposition, making later change more difficult.

Successful advocacy efforts are characterized not by their ability to proceed along a predefined track, but by their capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. The most effective advocacy and idea-generating organizations, such as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or the Institute for Justice, are not defined by a single measurable goal, but by a general organizing principle that can be adapted to hundreds of situations. Rather than focusing on an organization’s logic model (which can only say what they will do if the most likely scenarios come to pass), funders need to determine whether the organization can nimbly and creatively react to unanticipated challenges or opportunities. The key is not strategy so much as strategic capacity: the ability to read the shifting environment of politics for subtle signals of change, to understand the opposition, and to adapt deftly.

The US system of government is characterized by parallel, loosely coupled agenda-setting processes at work simultaneously at different levels of government and across institutions. In sharp contrast to service delivery programs, then, advocacy projects cannot realistically experiment in one place in the hopes that successes can be scaled up. Successful advocacy projects must simultaneously pursue opportunities at the local, state, and federal level, as well as across governmental institutions. Sometimes these efforts need to be organized into a well-coordinated network, whereas in other cases they are best left uncoupled, pursued as a portfolio of distinct bets on the assumption that donors have little or no idea which strategy is likely to be successful. Under such conditions, it makes sense to evaluate the portfolio as a whole, not the individual projects.

Successful efforts to change public policy often require grassroots as well as elite strategies, because opposition in either quarter could derail the idea. For example, decades of work within the medical profession built elite support for comparative effectiveness standards to ensure appropriate treatment, but with no grassroots effort, it was effectively mischaracterized as “death panels.”

Building advocacy projects that cover a range of political institutions and processes means that massive amounts of effort will seem wasted, because most will be unconnected to the final outcome. This waste, however, is unavoidable, because neither funders nor the organizations they support can know which strategy will be effective ahead of time.

Because funding is finite, there can be a tendency to view issues and advocacy efforts as if they are in competition for a limited amount of political capital or public attention. But success on one issue often builds a foundation for others by creating a sense of political momentum, restoring faith in government, establishing a precedent, or creating habits of cooperation within legislative institutions. Even failure to achieve an identified goal can leave energy and momentum to achieve the goal in other ways. The massive push for the Equal Rights Amendment, for example, fell short in its constitutional goals but led to change through the courts that realized much of its larger ambitions.

Issue domains that may seem quite distinct in a donor’s mind are rarely so in politics. Because issues spill over from one domain to another (issues of poverty affect health and education), particular issues are almost impossible to disentangle from general ideas and broader governing philosophies. Consequently, the fortunes of issue-specific mobilization may be due to actions conducted within that domain, but they may be reinforced by mobilization in another domain entirely, by generic, ideological activity, or by more neutral scholarly research. For example, over the past decade, efforts to reform K-12 education have focused on innovations such as charter schools and performance pay for teachers that are often opposed by teachers unions. The perception of teachers unions as powerful and intransigent was then transformed into a backlash against all public employee unions, manifested most recently in the proposals to end collective bargaining in Wisconsin and other states.

That is why it is difficult to accurately attribute the success of any advocacy project to a particular organization (or even issue-specific network). External effects of organizational activity (benefits created by one organization that are reaped by another) are pervasive in advocacy in a way that they are not in service delivery programs. Evaluators are faced, therefore, with the challenge of capturing all the benefits that an organization is generating, as well as preventing it from taking credit for benefits that are produced by others or that are due to good fortune rather than skill.

EVALUATING ADVOCACY

Despite these many challenges, there are ways grantmakers can effectively invest in and evaluate the success of advocacy campaigns. One thing grantmakers can do is to use a spread-betting approach to making grants. A spread-betting approach invests in a wide range of organizations, strategies, scenarios, and even issues. Failing to fund the seemingly quirky, unproven strategy that turns out to be appropriate to the circumstances is just as big a loss as funding something that does not work out. Spread betting, therefore, requires that funders have an organizational culture that does not punish even a considerable number of failures, so long as they are balanced over the long term by a few notable successes.

Grantmakers should also focus on the aggregate return on investment of their entire portfolio of grants, not the success or payoff of any one grant. An investment in an issue in which no action has occurred, even for a long time, may not be a bad use of resources. But this will only be clear when a particular issue is judged in the context of a range of other bets put down by the donor. Only then can a donor have a sense of whether his resources are generating what investors call “alpha”—excess returns over the average. Portfolio evaluation, by averaging out a number of investments over a longer period of time, also prevents the risk of over-attribution of success or failure to factors that are entirely exogenous to the activities of those they are investing in.

Funders should evaluate their portfolio of investments using the longest feasible time horizon, recognizing that the political process does not end after a piece of legislation passes or a court decision is handed down. It allows for the assessment of what University of Virginia political science professor Eric Patashnik calls “policy durability”—whether a reform actually sticks or creates a platform for further change.² Some reforms, such as airline deregulation and tradable permits for sulfur dioxide emissions, generated powerful reinforcing dynamics that kept the policies from being clawed back, even in the face of initially strong opposition. But other changes that seemed momentous at the time, such as the Tax Reform Act of 1986, unraveled bit by bit over the years. Viewing policy enactment as only one step in a much longer process focuses donors’ attention on what really matters—whether a policy sinks deeply into society and political routines. Funders may not be able to wait for years after reforms pass to judge whether their investment was worth it. But at the very least they should consider the possibility of reversal (or extension) in their evaluations, and evaluate the strategies of advocates by whether they have a plausible plan for protecting what they have won.

Some policy changes matter because they change the playing field on which subsequent action can occur. For example, the state welfare reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s did much more than change policy in the states where experiments were carried out: They altered the entire debate and emboldened policymakers to try more ambitious national changes.

In many cases, policy changes have political feedback as one of their primary objectives. Investment in green jobs, for example, when it emerged as a policy priority in 2005 or so, was billed by its supporters as a “strategic initiative” that, in addition to being good policy, might create a lasting labor-environmentalist alliance, mobilize voters around an optimistic economic vision, put a bright face on the tough choices of carbon pricing, and create a message of reduced oil dependence—not just create jobs and improve the environment. To some extent, the idea achieved those goals even as the policy itself fell short. Libertarians’ litigation on issues like school choice and property rights was designed to detoxify their brand among racial minorities, along with achieving substantive policy and legal goals. The long-term effects of policy change on the character of politics can be at least as important as those that are produced by the policies themselves.

EVALUATE THE ADVOCATES

We have argued that grantmakers should evaluate the success of advocacy efforts by thinking of them as long-term, portfolio-based, and inclusive of diffuse and indirect effects. We would now like to take this argument one step further—making perhaps our most radical suggestion—that funders may be better off eschewing evaluating particular acts of advocacy, and instead focus on evaluating advocates. We believe that the proper focus for evaluation is the long-term adaptability, strategic capacity, and ultimately influence of organizations themselves. This is the grantmaking model that the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation used to help create the Center for American Progress and ProPublica, and that the Walton Family Foundation uses to promote educational competition.

Evaluating advocacy organizations means paying close attention to the value they generate for others, rather than only focusing on their direct impacts. For example, the Center for American Progress’s Campus Progress and The American Prospect’s writing fellows program focus a great deal of effort on developing the talent of their younger advocates, writers, and activists. As a result, these organizations regularly lose their younger staff to more prominent organizations. Although this approach doesn’t add much direct value to the two organizations, it does create enormous value for the larger ecosystem. In this instance, the advocacy evaluator needs to understand that in some cases staff turnover reflects organizational success, not failure.

The best way to evaluate an organization whose influence is extremely diffuse is for grant officers to be close to the political action and thus able to make informed judgment calls on how it conducts its core activities. This was the practice of many conservative foundations, whose staff devoted much of their time to simply reading the primary work of their grantees, rather than asking them to generate problematic metrics and lengthy reports designed solely for purposes of evaluation. Empowered by their boards or donors to trust their own judgment of good, appropriate work, this foundation strategy has been vindicated many times over in the real world of politics and the marketplace of ideas.

Equally important is an organization’s strategic capacity, which can be defined not only as its formal strategic plan, or the wisdom of its senior leadership (two factors that funders tend to focus on), but also the organization’s overall ability to think and act collectively, and adapt to opportunities and challenges. A good organization has a coherent and inspiring internal culture, the ability to consistently identify and motivate talented people, acquire and process intelligence, and effectively coordinate its actions. Effective advocacy organizations—such as Planned Parenthood, which recently maneuvered through a significant shift in their political alliances on reproductive rights—have a record of innovating and reorganizing when their tactics don’t work as well as they once did.

Yet another way to measure an organization’s quality and influence is through “network evaluation”—figuring out its reputation and influence in its policy space. Although this is probably the most important form of knowledge, it is also the most difficult to acquire. Where organizations are in competition with each other for resources, peer evaluations may be too harsh. When organizational leaders have close personal links, their assessments are likely to be too generous. And of course, all advocates have profound incentives to overstate their own importance.

Participants in a policy network may be hesitant to share accurate information with outsiders with whom they lack ongoing relationships, such as consultants hired by the foundation. Advocates may reveal their challenges only to those whom they trust profoundly. Nonetheless, members of policy networks generally do develop reasonably accurate assessments of which of their peers they listen to and trust, who does good work, and who policymakers take seriously. What donors are really looking for is network centrality—which actors play vital roles in issue networks. It is not too difficult to use network mapping to figure out these connections. The real art of advocacy evaluation, which is beyond the reach of quantitative methods, is assessing influence, which is what funders are really paying for.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD EVALUATOR

Advocacy evaluation is a craft—an exercise in trained judgment—one in which tacit knowledge, skill, and networks are more useful than the application of an all-purpose methodology. Evaluators must acquire and accurately weigh and synthesize imperfect information, from biased sources with incomplete knowledge, under rapidly changing circumstances where causal links are almost impossible to establish. There is a natural temptation to formalize this process in order to create at least the appearance of objective criteria, but it is far better to acknowledge that tacit knowledge and situational judgment are what really underlie good advocacy evaluation, and to find evaluators who can exercise that judgment well. It’s the evaluator, rather than the formal qualities of the evaluation, that matters.

If scientific method is an inappropriate model, where can grantmakers look for an analogy that sheds light on the intensely judgmental quality of advocacy evaluation? One possibility is the skilled foreign intelligence analyst. She consumes official government reports and statistics, which she knows provide a picture of the world with significant gaps. She talks to insiders, some of whom she trusts, and others whose information she has learned to take with a grain of salt. In many cases, she learns as much from what she knows are lies as from the truth. It is the web of all of these imperfect sources of information, instead of a single measure, that helps the analyst figure out what is actually happening. And it is the quality and experience of the analyst—her tacit knowledge—that allows her to create an authoritative picture.

The best intelligence analysts are really applied anthropologists. They study a particular culture, in a particular place, that works differently in practice than it does on paper. Cultures are often characterized by a “hidden structure” that is largely invisible to outsiders and sometimes poorly understood even by insiders. Many cultures actually develop a lack of transparency precisely to prevent comprehension by outsiders. Discovering how a culture works requires one to create networks of informants and use research methods such as participant observation. This requires trust, which may take years to develop.

What marks a good intelligence analyst, and a good grantmaker in the field of advocacy, is the ability to penetrate those opaque surfaces to detect patterns of influence. Foundations engaged in advocacy need to build this capacity internally, strive for substantial continuity (and thus institutional memory) among those who possess these skills, and respect the value of trained, subjective judgment in making key decisions.

The characteristic features of the terrain of politics—chaotic agenda setting, pervasive misinformation, overlapping responsibility—mean that no one metric can capture the reality of influence. Donors do themselves a disservice by even looking for one. Only by trying to make sense of policymaking activity through the simultaneous application of multiple ways of knowing can donors get closer to finding out what they need to know.

A longer version of this article is available at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation website.

Notes

1 Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance,” American Sociological Review, 1989: 761–75.

2 Eric Patashnik, Reforms at Risk, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Steven Teles is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author and co-editor of several books, including The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of Law.

Mark Schmitt is a senior fellow and director of the fellows program at the Roosevelt Institute. He was previously executive editor at The American Prospect, director of policy and research at the Open Society Institute, and policy director for former Sen. Bill Bradley.

Much has changed in 175 years. And yet a quick glance at the latest thinking about not-for-profit management and philanthropy reveals some profound differences between the ways American and European practitioners look at today’s major societal challenges.

I went to Stanford University last fall to attend “Leading During Times of Change,” a nonprofit management conference organized by this magazine and the Association of Fundraising Professionals. I was with a group of peers from the Dutch charity sector, leaders in the fields of child welfare, health care, and philanthropic management. We enjoyed an excellent seminar complemented with instructive field visits to nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What probably struck me most during our visit is the almost unquestioned belief Americans have in the value of an entrepreneurial approach to just about everything—and with it, a deep-seated suspicion of anything that smells of government. Hospitals are better off if they are run like health care businesses, with clients rather than patients. Unemployment is best tackled by social entrepreneurs, who help people set up their own (small) businesses. Philanthropy is largely redefined as social innovation. And market failures are often seen as the root cause of societal problems. An entire worldview transpires through these assumptions, a worldview I only partly share.

ACT AS A CATALYST

I believe that the three main actors in society must all pay their dues. Businesses create economic value, provide jobs, and lay the basis for material prosperity. Governments set the stage, create and maintain a level playing field, pass laws, make sure there is an independent judiciary, keep us away from war and crime, collect taxes, protect the weak and vulnerable, and generally look after the public good. Civil society provides the checks and balances that are needed to hold government accountable and businesses transparent. It is that most valued place in democratic society where citizens rally together to pursue a common goal on a voluntary basis beyond the nucleus of their family or the context of their employer or political party.

In my preferred blueprint, civil society organizations are privately funded, to prevent collusion or mission creep; governments leave the provision of commercial services to entrepreneurs; and businessmen mind their business rather than tell us how to live or who should lead. Seen from this perspective, a thriving civil society is a good indicator of the health and wealth of any democracy. For nonprofit leaders, it is important to figure out where you stand in this tangled trio, to determine what type of mission you will try to accomplish and which management principles you will adopt before you frame an issue.

I lead the Dutch chapter of the World Wildlife Fund, an organization that aims to protect the world’s remaining and highly threatened diversity of animal and plant species (what E.O. Wilson calls “biodiversity”). We are not in business. Sure, our returns are measurable, but more in terms of stakeholder value rather than shareholder value. In our marketing and back office, we try to apply good business practices, with distinct value propositions, demonstrable cost leadership, tight budgets, and proper planning. But writing a business plan to save the planet’s biodiversity is not the silver bullet for mission impact. We see our funding and our actions predominantly as catalytic. We try to make as many people aware of the value of biodiversity as we can. We develop solutions with stakeholders from all sectors, and we strive for impact at scale through the adoption of new practices by businesses and the adaptation or introduction of supporting regulation by governments. At the end of the day we are a catalytic actor in society, harnessing public opinion, urging government to adequately protect the public good, and demanding that businesses accept their responsibility to decouple growth from environmental impact.

I would therefore avoid framing the root cause of global biodiversity destruction as market failure. Rather, what we have is a societal failure, the complexity of which demands a coordinated approach by business, government, and civil society alike. Often, it is the latter that acts as the most powerful force for change. And as change agents, we’d do well to seek inspiration beyond the language of business and entrepreneurship.

STICK TO YOUR MÉTIER

What if the language preference for business concepts just reflects a cultural curiosity of American life? I don’t think it is that harmless. Suggesting that sufficient entrepreneurial tools and practices will solve most of society’s ailments is a category mistake. It comes with the tacit assumption that society is better off when social entrepreneurs replace the many functions of government. This is a classic fallacy of development aid. When NGOs start delivering the services many poor governments can’t deliver, they involuntarily aggravate the problem rather than build a solution. Governments spiral into a starvation cycle. If citizens cannot hold government accountable for basic services, for the proper spending of the collective revenue for the public good, then on what grounds would they favor one government over the other in the polls? And what reasons would citizens have to pursue a government career?

It seems to me that some of these characteristics are not alien to, say, the state of California. The world’s eighth largest economy and home to some of the planet’s wealthiest individuals is barely capable of running a balanced state budget, while providing a minimum of basic and affordable services to its citizens, from health care to public schooling. There is tragic irony in this, as some of the world’s most generous foundations, finest NGOs, and best universities are part of the same societal fabric. And I think there is a correlation. When we place so much emphasis on the values of entrepreneurship to the extent that we start defining the poor quality of basic services as market failures, we may begin to think that the conception of a business plan is the mother of all solutions.

To American observers, Europeans may look like strange, egalitarian creatures. I proudly graduated from a public university in the Netherlands more than 20 years ago. Private colleges are still rare. The upside of this is that all Dutch universities, except one, rank among the world’s 200 finest places of learning. The flip side is that none of them is in the top 10. This is a matter of choice, of societal design, if you wish. Access to good quality and affordable higher education for the greatest number of talented young men and women—or intense competition to select the brightest with the biggest wallets. The latter is a good business proposition. The former, I think, is a superior societal alternative.

CEMENT TIES ACROSS SOCIETY

What would a fusion of both value systems look like? I am an admirer of the obsession with scale that is often reflected in the pages of this review. Yet the expectation of what American civil society, or social entrepreneurship, can do to solve today’s complex societal challenges seems to me a little over the top. With this can-do mentality, however, comes an infectious level of ambition and drive. Also, on the fundraising side, I never have met more impressive professionals than in the U.S. philanthropy sector. At the World Wildlife Fund, we manage to rally the support of every sixth Dutch citizen. Nowhere in the 100-odd countries we work in can we count on a bigger level of per capita support. Yet in our efforts to raise funds from “high net worth individuals,” as marketers call rich folks, we have only scratched the surface compared with our American peers.

In an ideal world, I fancy leaders at the helm of thriving NGOs who draw with equal ease from a business toolkit and from longterm, policy-setting practices in the public sector; who develop distinct skill sets for properly managing their organizations in the crossfire of well-resourced, profit-seeking organizations and the generally less affluent guardians of the public good we vote in and out of office; who can credibly speak on behalf of the constituency they represent; and who can inspire millions from all segments of society to safeguard the commons that is often left unprotected by politicians and businessmen.

In my fusion world of Euro-American civil society, we smartly mobilize every penny to support our greater cause. We are open about our failures, but we demonstrate impact at the highest possible scale. We borrow from businesses and business schools, but we do not blindly emulate their tools or practices. And we don’t replace government where and when it fails, but rather seek to cement productive ties among government, businesses, and citizen organizations. We also acknowledge that the holy grail of societal bliss lies not with us alone, but when all societal actors stick to their core while reaching out to cooperate for the greater benefit of all.

Johan Van de Gronden is CEO of the Dutch chapter of the World Wildlife Fund, known in Europe as the World Wide Fund for Nature. Before joining WWF he held senior management positions in the Netherlands foreign service, at the United Nations Development Programme, and in the private sector.

“Most of the women who die in domestic violence in America die after they’ve sought a restraining order, after they’ve called the police, after some interaction with the system,” says Casey Gwinn, president of the National Family Justice Center Alliance (NFJCA).

The system can work better, Gwinn insists, if communities make it easier for victims to access the comprehensive services they need. He helped pioneer the concept of a “one-stop shop” for domestic violence services in San Diego. Since 2002, when police, prosecutors, social service agencies, and nonprofit advocates came together under the same roof at the San Diego Family Justice Center, the city has seen a 90 percent drop in intimate partner homicides. Victims now access a wider range of services, starting with a danger assessment to plan for their immediate safety. Heightened collaboration among agencies has generated system-changing ideas and fostered public-private support. But the most dramatic outcome, Gwinn says, may be this: “Women aren’t dying anymore when they come into our system.”

This wraparound model is spreading as other communities look for strategies to curb domestic violence. It’s an issue that costs the United States more than $5.8 billion annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some 60 independently operated family justice centers have opened, in communities as different as Brooklyn, N.Y., and Sitka, Alaska. New Orleans opened a center after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the patchwork of services that had existed, “and it’s been a bright spot in a community that’s still recovering,” says Director Mary Claire Landry. Similar programs are under way internationally in Jordan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The NFJCA, headquartered in San Diego, has become an engine for replication.

LEARNING BY LISTENING

Gwinn didn’t plan on a career in domestic violence advocacy. In 1985, as a new prosecutor in San Diego, he was “asked to volunteer for the cases that nobody else wanted. I knew nothing about domestic violence,” he admits, and insights were hard to come by. In those early days of the domestic violence movement, policies and practices tended to blame the victim if she stayed with her abuser. A network of feminists who became Gwinn’s advisors and, eventually, his colleagues recognized that change would require finding allies within the system— including men. “I needed their help,” Gwinn says he quickly realized.

Some of the changes that have resulted came from simply listening to victims. “They told us how difficult it was to navigate the system,” Gwinn recalls. “They had trouble understanding the role of police and prosecutors, let alone civil legal services or social services.” Services were geographically scattershot. Many victims simply gave up.

By 1990, San Diego started bringing services together by locating staff from five agencies in the same building. When Gwinn was elected San Diego city attorney in 1996, he used his bully pulpit and city resources to push for a more comprehensive approach. The San Diego Family Justice Center opened in 2002, with staff from 27 agencies—including a special unit of the police department— sharing three floors of a former bank. Co-locating created unanticipated changes, starting with how agencies work together.

Gael Strack, former assistant city attorney, took a collaborative leadership approach when she became the first center director. “She understood how to bring people together when they don’t work for you,” Gwinn says. Simple routines such as a morning meeting got people from multiple agencies talking and, eventually, building relationships. “The magic is not co-location,” Gwinn says. “It’s the processes you put in place to cause people to interact with each other every day.”

Each innovation that emerged has reflected a “victim-centered, survivor-driven” philosophy. “It’s no different from a well-run venture in any consumer-oriented sector,” Gwinn says. “If you don’t know what your consumers want, you’ll never provide it.” Focus groups and exit interviews with clients have helped staff fine-tune services. But each victim decides for herself which services she’s ready to take advantage of.

The first month it opened, the San Diego center served 87 clients. Two years later, it was serving 1,200 monthly. A client named Sally said the program “made an extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing experience bearable.” Adds Gwinn, “We found out, if you build it they will come—and they will keep coming back if you’ve built a safe place that’s responsive to their needs.”

MOMENTUM FOR A MOVEMENT

What began as one city’s innovative idea quickly gained momentum. Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement on national television in January 2003 raised visibility and brought visitors to San Diego from around the world. Later that year, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded $20 million to 15 communities (out of 400 applicants) to start their own centers. The nfjca, established in 2006 and headed by Gwinn and Strack, has become the go-to technical assistance provider for new centers.

In a new book about this movement, Dream Big: A Simple, Complicated Idea to Stop Family Violence, Gwinn acknowledges both the simplicity of the one-stop model and the complexity of replicating it. Each community has to summon the will to get started, he says, along with the vision to adapt the model to fit local needs. A few important lessons stand out:

Form an interdisciplinary community leadership team: Ideally, Gwinn says, the team should include “a visionary, big-picture thinker,” along with representatives from law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office, a community-based advocate, and a survivor of domestic violence.

Learn together: San Diego and other established centers have become learning labs, where visitors can observe best practices. nfjca has produced books, toolkits, webinars, and other online resources to guide everything from hiring practices to client intake procedures.

Plan strategically: Planning to launch a program may take a year or longer. Cleveland, which has engaged nfjca staff for assistance, is close to securing start-up funding from the county after years of lobbying, according to Municipal Judge Ronald Adrine. “We also want to convince the philanthropic community and the corporate community to be part of this and make it sustainable,” he says. “That takes time.”

Adapt to each community: No two family justice centers are exactly alike. Gwinn says local agencies often have to work through “power and control issues, turf battles,” he says, before collaboration can take hold.

DATA TO MAKE THE CASE

Portland’s Gateway Center for Domestic Violence Services, open since September 2010, resides in a homey building, painted yellow with bright flowers blooming outside. But there’s no effort to disguise what happens here. Billboards around the city advertise the brand-new center’s services. “Compared with the confidential shelters, we’re loud and proud,” says Gateway Director Martha Strawn Morris, a lawyer who previously spent a decade working for the county family court.

Heightened visibility brings safety risks, which is why a sheriff’s deputy keeps watch and bulletproof glass shields the reception area. “If we can take some of the shame out of help seeking,” Morris says, the center will get closer to its dual goals of serving the needs of victims and preventing future domestic violence.

The Gateway Center borrows liberally from the one-stop model but incorporates its own innovations. A videoconferencing system connected to the county courthouse enables clients to obtain a restraining order without having to leave the safety of the building. “Victims tell us the courthouse is a scary place,” Strawn Morris says, so she convinced judges to allow ex parte motions to happen here. Gateway staff, called “navigators,” fluent in nine languages and familiar with diverse immigrant groups, work one-to-one with clients to make sure they understand all the available service options. A room reserved for teens feels like a clubhouse, but offers a place to focus on serious issues like dating violence and sex trafficking.

With $1.3 million in start-up funding from the city of Portland, and more support from the county and a federal grant, Gateway Center is on a sound footing for at least three years. But it is already gathering data to make the case for future support. After three years of operating the New Orleans center, Landry has tracked not only a decline in domestic violence homicides but also a drop in repeat offenses. Such numbers help make the case for ongoing investment.

Nationally, centers have sustained support in lean times by drawing on both public and private resources, Gwinn says. A continuing challenge is making sure family justice centers don’t compete with existing nonprofits, such as community-based shelters.

Another challenge is “the difficulty of proving a negative,” acknowledges Judge Adrine, who has seen Cleveland struggle with its own recent spate of domestic violence homicides. “Would these deaths have happened even if we had a program in place? We can’t know that,” he says. But he does know that one homicide costs society more than $2 million, and that’s just the price for prosecuting and incarcerating the perpetrator. A smarter investment, he insists, is offering help to people in crisis “in a place that’s safe and unthreatening.” After visiting San Diego and other centers, he adds, “you can see that this idea is not brain surgery. And you think, gosh, why haven’t we done this before?”

Suze Boss is a journalist from Portland, Ore., who writes about social change and education. She contributes to Edutopia and Worldchanging and is co-author of Reinventing Project-Based Learning.

Research in the 1980s and 1990s showing that poverty was often short-term and not limited to an “underclass” helped motivate social policy shifts away from income redistribution. But it gradually became clear that this view of poverty as transient was partly a result of measurement error, says Peggy McDonough of the University of Toronto. “People over- or underestimate their income,” McDonough says. “Any time you ask people questions about income, the data you obtain are problematic.”

Using more recent statistical methods that take measurement error into account, McDonough and colleagues revealed a more stagnant picture. They looked at transitions into and out of poverty between 1993 and 2003 in the United States and Britain, which are similarly liberal welfare states. “Poverty persistence exists in both societies, but it is clearly more prevalent in the U.S.,” says McDonough. And the risk of staying poor is not equally distributed. Lack of education increases the risk of persistent poverty by 14 times in the United States, but by only 4.5 times in Britain. Not being white quadruples the risk of persistent poverty in the United States, and only doubles it in Britain.

The researchers credit British policy with the nation’s relative social mobility. “British social programs are associated with a 40 percent decline in the proportion of people who are persistently poor, compared to the United States, which has only a 3 percent drop,” says McDonough. “Britain’s stronger safety net, as well as their explicit commitment to reduce poverty, seems to have made a difference.

“I think it all comes down to how you as a society respond to those most vulnerable within it,” McDonough says. “Do you cut them loose and say: ‘You’re on your own—we did it, now you go do it, too’? Or do you say ... we as a society are going to try to mitigate inequalities? It’s a choice of the society, and America has always been more individualistically based than other social democratic countries.”

The distinction may now be fading. Since the 2010 election, Britain “is making deep cuts to social program spending with the David Cameron government,” says McDonough. “It will be interesting to see whether persistent poverty increases in the coming years.”

Diana Worts, Amanda Sacker, and Peggy McDonough, “Falling Short of the Promise: Poverty Vulnerability in the United States and Britain, 1993-2003,” American Journal of Sociology, 116, 2010.

Now Ogden is turning geek activism into a full-time gig. He is part of the inaugural class of 20 fellows in a program called Code for America designed to enlist the nation’s young tech talents in a year of urban service. The first fellows came together in January to start solving interesting technology challenges in four pilot cities that embrace open-source solutions: Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.

Code for America CEO and co-founder Jennifer Pahlka says the organization is intended to address “the real crisis facing our cities after years of cutting budgets to the bone.” She credits longtime friend Andrew Greenhill, mayor’s chief of staff for Tucson, Ariz., for helping her understand the tough issues facing American cities, including their aging workforce and often outdated technology infrastructure. By tapping the skills of a tech-savvy generation that’s accustomed to working collaboratively on open, efficient, and interactive solutions, Code for America aims to make government more transparent and agile about solving urgent problems.

For Pahlka, who previously ran the Game Developers Conference and events like the Web 2.0 Expo, this vision of “Gov 2.0” is a natural extension of the work she’s been doing for more than a decade to build communities around open technologies. Her mentor, Tim O’Reilly, the technology publisher who coined the phrase “Web 2.0,” is a board member and champion of Code for America.

The poor economic climate didn’t deter Pahlka and colleagues from launching a new nonprofit. If anything, she says, the recession “made the need for this more urgent.” Funders apparently agree. By late 2010, supporters including the Knight, Omidyar, and Rockefeller foundations had contributed $1 million. A number of corporate sponsors are also lending support, and high-profile endorsements have come from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and other tech leaders.

The first 20 fellows, selected from a pool of more than 360 applicants, range from fresh-out-of-college programmers to more seasoned web developers. In fact, they’re more seasoned than Pahlka expected. “We thought this would be like Teach for America but it’s turned out to be more like the Peace Corps,” she says. Fellows receive a small stipend in exchange for their effort.

After their year of service ends, Pahlka expects Code for America alumni to become “some of the most forwardthinking, connected people in this space.” By bringing an influx of energy and ideas, Code for America “adds another piece of the puzzle” to help American cities, says Bethany Henderson, founder of another service-year program called City Hall Fellows. “It brings in a population not traditionally engaged in government—the tech crowd—and gives them a way to engage meaningfully.”

Code for America asks city leaders to think carefully about the problems they want help solving. Cities must apply to participate, including a well-defined statement about the challenge they hope to address through technology. Boston, for example, is focusing on improving access to educational data, while Seattle wants to use neighborhood statistics to improve public safety. Winning proposals tend to look for ways to leverage the Web to make cities more efficient, transparent, and participatory. The best ideas will lead to platform solutions, Pahlka adds, “so that others can build on them cheaply. That’s when things will get really interesting.”

People, from sociologists to activists to policymakers, “like to reduce problems like pollution to a single factor, such as race or income. But our findings suggest it’s more complex than that,” and should include traits of the polluting firm, says Grant. “It doesn’t make sense to focus on one particular variable; it makes more sense to talk about these things coalescing in certain ways.”

Grant and his colleagues used data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators on the toxic emissions of individual facilities and their associated health dangers. They appended to these data not only neighborhood characteristics such as race and income, but organizational features like the size of the facility. Then the researchers employed a novel statistical technique called “fuzzy set analysis,” which, instead of simply assuming linear and straightforward causes, allows for the unexpected.

“What we’re finding is that there are multiple pathways to the same dangerous outcome,” says Grant. By changing the framework, Grant and colleagues resolved many of the field’s paradoxes. It’s not that one study is wrong and another is right, he says. “Our study is showing that poverty and minority presence do have inconsistent effects: They are important in some contexts and not in others.”

Each of the recipes for risk that Grant identified validates seemingly contradictory, prior case study findings. For example, one of the most potentially hazardous combinations is a large absentee-owned plant in an African-American neighborhood. Another is a neighborhood with both large African-American and Latino populations—a contributing factor other studies have described as ethnic churning. A third is the interaction between being poor and being African American.

“It’s not race or class, it’s both, and it can be both in different ways in different kinds of neighborhoods and in relation to different kinds of firms,” says Scott Frickel, an environmental sociologist at Washington State University who reviewed Grant’s paper. Frickel thinks the new method “actually gets us a lot closer to what’s really going on out there.”

This is more than just theoretically important. “When you can identify the types of facilities that are dangerous in certain types of communities, that lends itself to some kind of policy remedy,” says Grant. It could help regulators to focus their efforts on the most potentially harmful facilities, firms to focus their improvements on the most efficient pathways, and scholars to focus their research on the most fruitful case studies. “There’s an entirely different way to look at this,” says Frickel.

Don Grant, Mary Nell Trautner, Liam Downey, et al., “Bringing the Polluters Back In: Environmental Inequality and the Organization of Chemical Production,” American Sociological Review, 75, 2010.