KaBOOM! connects dollars and volunteers from corporations, such as Target, Snapple, and Home Depot, with communities in need to rally around a single tangible goal: the building of a kid-designed playground in one day. Community members and volunteers get to see the fruits of their labor right away (hence, KaBOOM!), creating an “achievable win,” as Hammond calls it, and a vivid sense of potential. During the past 15 years, KaBOOM! has been one of the fastest growing nonprofits in the United States. It now has an annual operating budget of more than $20 million. It has raised more than $200 million and harnessed a million volunteers to create more than 2,000 playgrounds primarily in low-income communities, a remarkable track record.

Hammond’s account of his emergence as a passionate and visionary social entrepreneur is inspiring. After growing up in a group home and dropping out of college, he describes how he found his calling in the service movement. He developed KaBOOM!’s innovative program and business model, established an upbeat organizational culture, instituted quality control standards for program replication, and nurtured the organization’s expansion. He reveals how he learned to delegate, and he refreshingly admits to just “winging it” at times and making some pretty big managerial mistakes. Hammond describes how he “turned a mission into a movement” by increasing advocacy efforts and freely sharing tools and expertise through online social networks to enable others to construct more than 1,600 do-it-yourself playgrounds.

Hammond identifies “cascading transformative change” in communities as KaBOOM!’s intended impact and writes that “we measure our success by looking at what happens after we leave.” He notes that an impressive 86 percent of the sites are maintained and that the planning and building process helps foster stronger communities. His point is that it matters how children use the playground and how community members continue the momentum and join forces to organize other efforts. Yet most of the evidence in the book about KaBOOM!’s longer term social impact is anecdotal. The statistics on outputs and the stories about positive community change are compelling, but the book would be even richer with more thorough documentation.

Hammond writes that “no single individual or organization can do enough on its own” and praises his senior team, board chairs, and other groups. Nevertheless, the story would have benefited from more detail about and insights into how the board and executive staff shared leadership and worked to make tough decisions, set priorities, and allocate scarce resources. Likewise, Hammond says little about co-founder Dawn Hutchison, the unfolding of their respective roles, and her departure from the organization. More also could have been written about how KaBOOM! has participated in coalitions with other leading organizations in the field, such as Playworks, which sends trained play coaches to urban low-income schools. The book’s subtitle—How One Man Built a Movement to Save Play—is individualistic, not collective.

Hammond makes a strong case that play is a necessity, not a luxury. While reading the book, I took a walk in a neighborhood outside of Detroit at sunrise, while children were still asleep. I noticed a nice playground that had a sandbox full of shovels, pails, and toy trucks. The kids in the community had not taken their playthings home, but left them there as a shared resource—the essence of social capital. Later that day, the playground was bustling with children who were exploring, sharing, refereeing, engaging, and inventing. Hammond explains how play teaches children how to practice adult roles. It enhances cognitive and physical development, creativity, and cooperation. And it helps prevent childhood obesity.

This book goes beyond children’s play. By reading it, social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders, along with the funders, investors, and advisors who support them, will get some solid, practical advice about how to grow a social enterprise, adapt programs and operations along the way, and amplify impact.

Paul Connolly is chief client service officer of TCC Group, a management consulting fi rm that provides strategy, evaluation, and capacity-building services to foundations, nonprofit organizations, and corporate community involvement programs.

That’s far from the end of the story, however. Inspired by what happened when people were given a voice in Kisumu, GlobalGiving has continued to fine-tune its strategies for soliciting and making sense of the stories people tell about the projects intended to help them. For nonprofits and potential donors, “this helps you see what you’re doing through the eyes of the beneficiaries,” explains John Hecklinger, chief program officer for GlobalGiving.

Listening to stories may seem simple, but turning this into a method for monitoring development work has meant drawing on fields as diverse as complexity theory, behavioral psychology, and technology. Although GlobalGiving’s typical partners are grassroots organizations with small budgets, the storytelling project has garnered grant support from the Rockefeller Foundation because of potential benefits across the development sector. “There are thousands of small organizations that will never be able to afford or manage typical monitoring and evaluation functions,” says Nancy MacPherson, managing director of evaluation for the Rockefeller Foundation. “This could be a way to help smaller grantees be more systematic.”

The big goal, Hecklinger adds, is helping organizations get to better results more quickly. “We hope this leads to much faster and earlier detection of successes and failures to make the marketplace work better,” he explains. “It’s a way to create an organized and convenient mass of information that helps everyone from donors to beneficiaries make better decisions about what gets funded and what gets done.”

MAKING SENSE OF STORIES

David Snowden, a Welsh cognitive scientist and founder of a UK-based firm called Cognitive Edge, acknowledges that storytelling “is kind of in fashion with a lot of organizations.” Gathering heartwarming stories for their emotional appeal is not his aim. Rather, he’s interested in analyzing what he calls “micro-narratives.” These are the snippets of conversation we exchange while waiting in line at the supermarket or talking around a village campfire. They turn out to be quite useful for providing a snapshot of what’s on people’s minds.

Over the past decade, Snowden has developed a system for gathering and making sense of large quantities of micro-narratives. Listening to soldiers’ stories can improve troop safety in combat zones. Sales representatives’ stories can yield important insights for marketing. Until the GlobalGiving project came along, however, this approach had never been applied to development work.

Central to the Cognitive Edge approach is the conviction that storytellers are best qualified to interpret what their own narratives mean. Snowden has devised a simple system that enables people to put their stories into context. For example, if people are sharing stories about justice in their community, they might be asked whether a specific example is more about retribution, restitution, or revenge. They show how their story relates to those three potentially intertwining meanings by placing a dot on a triangle.

Cognitive Edge’s proprietary software, called SenseMaker, then turns this raw information into data that can be visually represented and analyzed to reveal patterns. With large volumes of data, the result “is like a 3-D landscape,” Snowden says. “You are able to see patterns, attitudes, and belief systems,” as stories form clusters around particular topics. The data can be filtered according to the storyteller’s gender, age, or other variables.

Irene Guijt, a Dutch consultant in organizational learning and evaluation, discovered Snowden’s work just as she was finishing her doctoral dissertation. As a method of generating fast feedback in the development sector, she saw this as “the best of both worlds. You get the value of stories and the merit of statistical analysis so that you can see patterns.” She envisioned how this information could shape community decision making “and lead to more innovation. It’s not a bunch of stories sitting in a dead library.” Guijt brokered introductions between the Rockefeller Foundation, Cognitive Edge, and GlobalGiving, and was soon part of a pilot project to test the storytelling approach in Kenya.

LEARNING FROM THE FIELD

Marc Maxson directs evaluation for GlobalGiving (and was also the bumper sticker-wielding visitor to Kisumu). He’s eager to develop better evaluation and monitoring methods for the 1,000 organizations that are GlobalGiving partners. Most operate on slim budgets with small staffs. Few have ever experienced a formal program evaluation. The handful that have been evaluated, he adds, have most likely never seen a copy of their own reports.

The storytelling approach can drive down the cost of evaluation to about 5 percent of more traditional methods, Maxson estimates. It’s also a way to gather community feedback—positive or negative—and share it quickly. “You don’t have to wait years for formal evaluation. This makes it cheaper for everyone to be effective.”

During the pilot year of the storytelling project in Kenya, Maxson saw “a 180-degree turn” in how grassroots organizations view monitoring and evaluation. “Instead of thinking of this as something that happens from the outside—from above—now it comes from within the community,” he says.

Maxson worked with local nonprofits to recruit native Kenyans who would gather stories from people they already knew in the community. Paid “scribes” underwent brief training in how to gather stories and have people interpret them. What motivates people to share their stories? Story sharers were entered into a lottery for a chance to win $100. Beyond that, says Hecklinger, “they have to see a value—that something might change as a result.”

Scribes were encouraged to ask deliberately open-ended questions. For example: “Tell us about a community effort that was successful (or one that failed).” Some stories that bubbled up spoke to broad community concerns, such as crime or jobs. Others were more specific and set the stage for follow-up by local service providers.

One cluster of stories mentioned the Trans-Nzoia Youth Sports Association (TYSA), a GlobalGiving partner that provides a range of services—school fees, uniforms, nutrition, and medical care—to children in the Rift Valley of Kenya. “A lot of the stories were about violence by police against youth. The organization’s goal has been to keep kids out of trouble,” Hecklinger says, “but now they are considering new strategies to work with the police as youth advocates.” Similarly, TYSA’s efforts to protect the rights of children got little mention in most stories, even though that’s a major emphasis of programming. “It is a gap we are seeing, a gap between our service and the community’s awareness,” explains a TYSA staffer. Storytelling doesn’t necessarily present a solution, Hecklinger notes, “but it can help organizations develop a hypothesis.”

The 2,500-plus stories collected in Kenya cited the work of more than 200 organizations. Many were previously unknown to the GlobalGiving team. Through stories, Hecklinger points out, “you detect what’s going on in your network and also outside it. You find out what you didn’t even know to ask.” As a result, some new organizations have been invited to join the GlobalGiving platform. “If you want to replicate innovation in the field,” he adds, “you have to be able to find it first.”

MORE TO LEARN

The eclectic team working on this effort agrees that there are more lessons to be learned. With a second round of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, new projects are under way in Uganda and, soon, Tanzania to gather more stories and fine-tune best practices.

To share lessons learned, GlobalGiving has published an online guidebook called the Real Book for Story Evaluation Methods, coauthored by Maxson and Guijt. Among their conclusions: Community feedback needs to include multiple perspectives—those who have received services as well as those who haven’t. It needs to happen fast, so that feedback can be applied quickly to make improvements. It needs to generate action to make story sharing worth doing. And participants must be open to surprise—and willing to learn what they didn’t expect to learn.

GlobalGiving is working on strategies to make sure that stories collected will get back to the communities as well as to potential donors. The organization’s online platform will soon be updated with maps to show story locations, along with narrative feedback on individual project pages. Meanwhile, the role of technology to accelerate story gathering is still being worked out. Unreliable Internet connections in Kenya made Web-based tools impractical during the pilot. Eventually, there may be a role for SMS texting using mobile phones.

Guijt hopes to introduce the storytelling approach to other contexts, such as tracking values across the cotton supply chain. Already, she has a sense of where storytelling is appropriate and where it’s not. “This works best in situations where there is room to adapt en route. If you’re talking about a five-year program that’s set in stone, forget it. But if you anticipate a lot of obstacles between A and B and are willing to make changes along the way, then this approach becomes interesting,” she says.

Maxson ends her book with this advice: “Keep listening and keep sending these messages back and forth so that the people with the cash hear from the people in the grass of every grassroots project.”

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

The 20 essays are all by writers under age 40. Some are practicing artists, others are arts administrators; there are essays by academics, management consultants, bloggers, screenwriters, educators, and, in one case, an MIT-trained physicist who hosts the Discovery Channel show Time Warp. Clapp wants to disseminate these viewpoints because he believes that the arts sector is in crisis—that it “suffers from an insecurity complex and operates from a position of fear.”

The most compelling essays are those that call for reform in how arts organizations are run, are supported, and engage artists and audiences. Some authors criticize arts programmers for their insularity, funders for their cautiousness, marketers for their conventionality, and arts educators for their dogmatism. Others write about the mismatch between abundant arts programming and a shrinking audience.

In the first essay, Brian Newman, former CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, declares that the nonprofit arts sector is grossly overbuilt and woefully undercapitalized. As a result, it is incapable of coping with the way technology has altered how individuals create, share, and participate in arts experiences. His bitter medicine for the sector is to admit that more arts groups need to merge and “many more organizations need to be shut down entirely.”

In her essay “Please Don’t Start a Theater Company!” Rebecca Novick encourages artists to “operate as bands do—coming together to play a few gigs, then dissolving as people’s interests diverge.” Novick implores established arts organizations to invite younger artists to bring innovations to their institutions, and she warns funders to “stop advising young artists to replicate the standard nonprofi tmodel.” David McGraw, a professor of arts entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa, also criticizes foundations that reward arts organizations for longevity rather than creativity. Like Novick, he suggests that more support go to artists who create multiyear projects.

The potential for philanthropists to be heroes or villains is a clear theme here. In an essay co-authored by Ian Moss and Daniel Reed, an arts blogger and a management consultant, technology is hailed as a 21st-century arts funder’s best friend. They argue that a “guided crowdsourcing” approach to arts funding would vastly expand the number of artists and the amount of artistic product that could be evaluated. If grantmakers harness the wisdom of crowds, they argue, philanthropists may be able to make funding decisions that are not only more informed, but more equitable as well.

Although some of the 20Under40 authors believe that dysfunction in the traditional nonprofit arts sector can be remedied, others are ready to abandon the nonprofit paradigm altogether. Elizabeth Lamb, a curator in Portland, Ore., presents a case study of successful online art stores and a gallery and apparel shop that have taken a customer-centric approach to their programming.

Reinventing the arts and arts education is not just about new business models. In the collection, there are punchy essays about the way art school students are graded, why contemporary dance is losing its expressive power, and why 21st-century arts educators should teach computer programming.

Of the 20 selections, several cover old ground in predictable ways: testing in schools means less time for arts classes; preschoolers need art too. Although much of the book is dedicated to expressing frustration with the status quo, there is a high level of optimism about the future. That optimism is grounded in a faith that technology can be used much more creatively; that nonprofit and for-profit business models can be successful; and that Gen Xers and Millennials are going to get their art fix with or without established arts organizations.

Although the anthology showcases a rising generation of arts leaders, two established leaders make cameos. Diane Ragsdale, a former arts program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, laments that “what’s killing this field is that people are beginning to leave it. People make it into large institutions and get stuck in middle management jobs with no access to power and no opportunity to try new things.” This critique is echoed by arts consultant Eric Booth: “We talk a good game about collaboration and openness to new ideas in the arts, but the input from our younger professionals is neither sought nor honored as regular practice.”

20Under40 puts new ideas from younger professionals on the table. Now the question is: Who will pick them up?

Marc Vogl is a program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation managing grants to San Francisco Bay Area arts organizations and developing strategies to promote next generation arts leadership. Vogl served on the Obama Campaign’s Arts Policy Committee, and was the 2010 recipient of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Award.

Each week, an estimated 85 percent of radio listeners in Rwanda tune their radio dials to the soap opera Musekeweya (New Dawn). Using a Romeo and Juliet plot to symbolize Hutus and Tutsis, the program teaches listeners how to prevent ethnic violence, embrace reconciliation, and heal the wounds of the past.

In 1994, radio-borne hate propaganda helped prompt a Hutuled genocide of 75 percent of the ethnic minority Tutsis. Within three months, the genocide wiped out 10 percent of the Rwandan population — some 750,000 victims. Now, Musekeweya is reclaiming the radio to help survivors live together again.

“Musekeweya helped me calm down,” says Kennedy Munyangeyo, a 36-year-old filmmaker from Kigali who lost his two brothers, several uncles, and a sister to the genocide. “I used to think that we should react by hating the people who did the genocide, but after a year of listening to the show, I realize that if someone did a bad thing, the answer is not to react by doing more bad things,” he says. “For this country to go forward we need to be honest and free in our spirits and minds.”

Created by the Dutch nonprofit Radio La Benevolencija, in conjunction with some of the foremost psychologists, traumatologists, and university researchers in the United States, Musekeweya was first broadcast in 2003 on the government- controlled Radio Rwanda. Local Rwandans write the stories, and a cast of 35 Rwandan actors read the parts in Kinyarwanda, the country’s main language. Today, Musekeweya can also be heard on privately owned radio stations in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each week, soap coordinator Aimable Twahirwa receives up to 120 letters from fans. The show is so popular, he says, that parents are naming their children after the characters. And at a recent festival, more than 10,000 fans showed up to meet the actors. “The actors, they are like small gods here,” he says.

Yet the listeners are not just worshipful followers. Instead finds a recent study, they are more likely than non-listeners to stand up to authority and to voice their own opinions. This kind of civic leadership can stop the slide toward genocide, says psychologist Ervin Staub. “Genocide is a societal process,” he notes. “It takes not only bad leaders, but also followers and those who stand by and do nothing.”

The Science of Civility

Musekeweya crackled onto the airwaves at a crucial moment in Rwandan history. In the late 1990s, 1.5 million of the country’s 8 million people were accused of participating in the genocide. The legal system and prisons were not prepared for this influx of cases, so community leaders created some 10,000 village tribunals, or “gacacas.” After judgment from a jury of their peers, convicted participants could reduce their punishments through communal labor.

Because the genocide was so vast, convicted war criminals were also the neighbors, coworkers, and in-laws of the innocent. “The accused would soon be free and returning to these villages, and it was very traumatizing to everyone who lived there,” explains George Weiss, founder of Radio La Benevolencija.

At that time, Staub, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts, and Laurie Pearlman, a traumatologist at the Headington Institute in Pasadena, Calif., had just finished a three-year reconciliation training program in Rwanda. Their seminars reflected Staub’s theory of the origins of genocide: It begins with scapegoating, leading to destructive ideology, and then culminates in actual violence. He describes his research in his book Roots of Evil.

“Government and nonprofit leaders at our workshops wanted us to reach a wider audience,” says Pearlman. “Because radio is the main means of communication in Rwanda and people listen together in large groups, we decided to develop a radio program.”

At the same time, Weiss, an Austrian filmmaker of Jewish descent living in the Netherlands, had just finished reading Staub’s book. It prompted him to start working on a television series to counteract hate speech and violence in Bosnia.

Weiss met Staub and Pearlman in 2001 to consult on his TV series. By the end of the conversation, they had convinced Weiss to come to Rwanda and create a similar program for the radio.

Weiss raised $1 million from the Dutch and Belgian foreign ministries and the United Nations. He then created the nonprofit Radio La Benevolencija Humanitarian Tools Foundation and set to work on a script with Staub and Pearlman. “We come up with the story line, but the actual episodes are written by Rwandan writers who make it culturally credible,” Staub says.

Everyday Heroes

Musekeweya’s plot centers around two villages: Muhumuro and Bumanzi. Muhumuro is less fertile and prosperous, and resents Bumanzi for receiving land with good soil from the government. Muhumuro residents also contend that the land is rightfully theirs.

These tensions between the villages mirror the situation that led to the 1994 genocide. Also mimicking real life, disputes over inheritance, intermarriage, and irrigation in the soap opera further inflame the grievances between the two villages, culminating in revenge attacks, village burnings, and, ultimately, killings. When a progressive youth group brings in wise elders, the animosities dissipate and the two villages come up with a crop-sharing plan. Writers keep the episodes rolling with political intrigues, love affairs, and new disputes.

A thread running throughout Musekeweya is that everyday fear and instability—arising from poverty, health problems, relationship woes, and other sources—can lead to people to think in terms of “us” and “them,” and then to blame “them” for one’s own problems while blindly banding together with “us.” This thinking then escalates to intergroup hostilities and violence. Characters on the show who resist these tendencies by intervening in unjust activities, critically examining authority, and healing trauma become the show’s heroes.

One such character is Batamuliza, played by Monica Uwingabiye, a 35-year-old high school teacher whose father was Hutu and mother was Tutsi. Like the rest of the cast, she reads her lines one Sunday a month at the studio. The job hasn’t made her rich, but it has made her feel purposeful. “I like changing people’s minds,” she says. “I lost my younger three sisters, brother, and my father. This is a history we have to figure out how to live with,” she says.

New Norms

Yet people’s minds are not changing—at least not in the ways that psychologists usually expect, finds Elizabeth Paluck, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University. For her doctoral thesis at Yale University, she helped the original Radio La Benevolencija design team evaluate the soap’s impact after its first year. She divided 480 Rwandans into two groups, one that listened to the soap and a control group that tuned in to a health program.

Paluck found that although the Musekeweya listeners’ personal beliefs and feelings had not changed, what they thought everyone else believed and felt had changed. In other words, their perceptions of the social norms were different. Specifically, they believed that marrying across ethnic lines, questioning authority, and expressing genocide-related psychological distress were more socially acceptable than did the control groups. Because social norms govern so much of human behavior, this finding is a sign that the soap opera is having its intended effect, says Staub.

Indeed, Paluck witnessed behavior change firsthand. As a gift for their efforts, participants received the radio and cassette tapes used in the study. People in the control groups unanimously decided to hand over the radio to the village elder to regulate its use and collect money for batteries. In contrast, the soap opera groups voted for a group-share plan or to have one of the study participants regulate the radio’s use. “That tells me that something changed in that public space that made them comfortable saying something unpopular,” says Paluck, who published her findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Who keeps the radio may seem like a minor matter, but in Rwanda, it’s a big indicator, says Staub. “An aim of our program is to moderate respect for authority, because over-strong respect for authority is one of the steps that led to the Rwandan genocide.”

Rwandan culture is showing other signs of change, says Pearlman. “When we started our work in Rwanda, there were one psychologist and two psychiatrists for a country of 8 million people,” she says. “One thing we encountered was people thought traumatized people were crazy. Now I see a lot more empathy.”

Even outside of Rwanda’s borders, Musekeweya is having an effect. Surrendering rebels at the Rwanda-Congo border cite the radio program as their No. 1 reason for giving up the fight, relates Weiss. More broadly, Roma groups in Europe have approached him about creating antidiscrimination radio soaps in their countries, and Weiss would also like to bring similar programs to Bosnia and Israel. Radio La Benevolencija is also contemplating a television series template that could be used in different contexts. That way, when the threat of violence looms, the team would be ready to go.

“The so-called international community sits back and never does anything when there are early signs of genocide,” says Staub. “Yet they could do something before the violence happens, at much less cost in human lives and money.”

Meredith May is an award-winning feature writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. She also teaches journalism at Mills College.

Wolcott was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s, one of several photographers employed by the New Deal agency to document the impact of the Great Depression on the lives of Americans. Wolcott, along with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and others, created some of our nation’s most iconic images. But Wolcott never became as famous as some of her contemporaries. That’s because, after taking several hundred thousand photographs over three years, she met a man, put her camera down to start a family, and did not pick that camera up again for almost 50 years.

Paul Hendrickson, the author of Looking for the Light, summarizes Wolcott’s life as “a story about an artist who stopped, who let go of that gifted magical thing inside her until it was too late and the gift was lost. And yet in spite of this fact she was able to make her survival a grace, not just a dour necessity.”

My work, as the founder of Share Our Strength, has focused on hunger and poverty, which is why I’ve always been interested in the era of documentary photography that did so much to bring those issues to public attention. The human drama that Hendrickson conveys about the choices and trade-offs that Wolcott made has universal relevance and was riveting, but what I really took away from the book was a new way to see.

Reading Hendrickson’s richly textured descriptions of Wolcott’s photographs was like watching a magician’s sleight of hand up close and still wondering how he pulled it off. I would look at a photograph, read Hendrickson’s words, and find more than a dozen things my eye had missed. About one photograph of what I saw only as a man sitting in a general store, he writes: “It’s the swirl of that old cane chair, and those lard buckets with their metal bands, and the Compeer snuff cartons behind him, and the way he’s got that five cent cigar cocked, and the popped buttons on his vest … and the flecks of ash on his shiny gabardine.”

About another photograph, of parishioners peeling tomatoes for a 1940 church summer picnic, he writes: “I’ve wondered about the way these good church ladies … are wielding their knives. The knives are too much out in front of them. It doesn’t seem natural. I think they’re afraid some of the juices from those delicious late-summer Big Boys and Beefsteaks are going to splash down their fronts and soak through to their Sunday dresses.”

Looking for the Light taught me to pay attention, that details matter, and that like both Wolcott and her biographer, we all have the power to bear witness. We have the power to go and see and feel and share what we felt. When we do this we often say we’ve been moved. Taken literally that implies starting in one place and ending up in another. It is the basis of all social change.

Bill Shore is the founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit working to end child hunger in the United States. He serves on the board of directors of the Timberland Company, College Summit, and Venture Philanthropy Partners. From 1978 through 1987, Shore served on the senatorial and presidential campaign staffs of former U.S. Senator Gary Hart. From 1988 to 1991, Shore was chief of staff for former U.S. Senator Robert Kerrey.

And then Creative Capital staff kept asking her, “When are you coming in to talk with us?” Kron demurred, saying: “I’m fine. Really.” Privately, she fretted about wasting her time “on help I didn’t need,” she says. When she heard that the organization was planning a retreat for its artists, all Kron could think was, “Leave me alone.”

The plot changed when Kron discovered that there was more money in the pipeline—up to $50,000, available at milestones in the life of her project. This unusual cash flow wasn’t the whole story. As her three-year fellowship unfolded, Creative Capital offered Kron a range of career-boosting benefits, including help with marketing her work and practical advice about budgeting.

Kron went on to earn a Tony Award nomination for Well, the autobiographical play produced while she was a grantee, and today credits Creative Capital with taking the “beggar mentality” out of arts philanthropy. Instead of offering her a handout, she says, “they put real capital into my career.”

During its first 10 years, Creative Capital has pumped $14 million into 324 projects from a range of artistic disciplines. Grantees have gone on to earn prestigious awards, from Academy Award nominations to Guggenheim Fellowships, and have exhibited their work in the most selective venues. Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, considers Creative Capital “the premier artist support organization in the country,” and has pledged $15 million from his foundation to underwrite the organization’s next decade.

Just as important as Creative Capital’s grantmaking is its willingness to bust myths. From the organization’s perspective, there’s nothing noble about starving artists. Nor is creativity harmed when artists get more businesslike about financial planning, marketing, and strategic goal setting. Longtime CEO Ruby Lerner says her organization works with artists at “catalytic moments,” helping to spark ambitious, provocative projects and build sustainable careers. “We want our artists to leave us stronger than when they came in,” she says.

BEST AND WORST OF TIMES

Two seemingly unrelated circumstances set the stage for Creative Capital. First came the culture wars of the 1990s, with conservatives up in arms over federal support of controversial artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Barbara DeGenevieve. In response, Congress slashed the National Endowment for the Arts’ budget. “That left a huge vacuum,” Lerner says, for funding for what she describes as “adventurous projects.”

At the same time, new money was bubbling up from the dotcom boom. “With extra cash sitting around,” Lerner recalls, foundations could take new risks. Meanwhile, newly minted millionaires wanted to have greater impact than the usual philanthropists. “The venture philanthropy movement was just burgeoning,” Lerner says, “but nobody was taking those concepts into the cultural arena. So this would be our experiment.”

Start-up funding for Creative Capital came from the Warhol Foundation. Crossing the country, then-president Archibald Gillies convinced other foundations and “a handful of brave and curious individuals” to join the cause, Lerner says. In 1999, Lerner signed on as Creative Capital’s president and CEO, and got busy building a better model for supporting American artists. just-in-time help

Lerner started by questioning the value of “just churning out money to people. What are we doing by putting more projects out into the world without the resources to maximize their potential? It’s easy to give away money,” she concluded, “but hard to give it away well.”

Lerner and colleagues set out to craft a new approach—starting with the application process. Creative Capital favors open applications instead of the more exclusive nomination process that many funders use. Artists apply with a specific project in mind rather than asking for general support. Unlike most grant processes, Creative Capital’s expert reviewers off er constructive feedback even to those who are not selected. And there’s no shame in trying again. Lerner estimates that 40 percent of successful grantees “are people who have applied to us before.”

Indeed, selection panels have learned to look for what Lerner sums up as “readiness.” Along with possessing talent and a strong portfolio, qualified applicants “must be at the point where they are able to take advantage of all the other things that we offer. And if we miss the moment, even slightly,” Lerner adds, “we can see the difference.” Creative Capital’s approach has four parts, reflecting the organization’s systems thinking: (1) support for the project, totaling up to $50,000 over three years; (2) support for the person, with consulting to build skills for managing finances, speaking in public, and handling myriad other aspects of an arts career; (3) support for the community of artists, with retreats to bring together grantees from diverse disciplines; and (4) engagement with the public. Exactly how the model plays out, however, varies from one artist to the next. a leap ahead

In hindsight, multidisciplinary artist Chris Doyle can see that he was poised for growth when he entered the Creative Capital fold. The organization decided to fund the Brooklyn artist’s project called Leap: videos of New Yorkers projected on the facade of a Manhattan skyscraper so that the larger-than-life images seemed to jump into the night sky. Creating the installation involved photographing and interviewing more than 400 people.

“This was a big step forward for me in scale,” Doyle says. “I was having growing pains. I needed help thinking about strategic planning, budgeting, all these things that Creative Capital offers help with.” He adds “I wasn’t particularly comfortable speaking to people,” a disadvantage when dealing with the press and public. Once Creative Capital selects an artist, the organization finds out exactly what kind of support he or she needs. It gets personal. The organization doesn’t hesitate to ask how much artists pay for rent or if they have retirement plans or health insurance. “These things are all related to productivity,” Lerner says. “We want people to have long and productive careers.”

Kron admits that the conversation can be uncomfortable. “A lot of artists don’t have the stability that is normally labeled as ‘mature adult life,’” she says. Creative Capital consultants guide artists through budgeting, long-range planning, marketing, and other career-building processes. “There’s no shame if you don’t move through the world like an investment banker,” she says. “Here are people who can sit down and talk with you about these things and not think you’re stupid or irresponsible.”

This straight talk encourages artists “to lose the mythology” about the business of art, Lerner says. But the organization leaves artistic decisions to grantees.

To fine-tune its artist support services, Creative Capital has listened closely to grantees’ concerns. Many artists, it turns out, get nervous about premieres, which can be a triumph or a moment of missed opportunity. To tilt circumstances toward success, Creative Capital arranges stakeholder meetings with artist, producer, publicist, “and anyone else responsible for the success of the project,” Lerner says. Artists come to the table with cash, courtesy of Creative Capital, to buy ads, suggest promotional events, or make other strategic decisions that are usually out of the artist’s hands. “This is really new,” Kron says, “and almost unbelievable.”

SHARING THE WEALTH

Along with thoughtfully investing in individuals, Creative Capital has also built a stronger arts community. Retreats bring together artists from diverse disciplines, and they have become “the biggest information swap meet in the cultural sector,” Lerner says. Doyle says he has gotten to know artists he otherwise would not have met, setting the stage for future collaborations. “I can draw a tree of all the projects I’ve done [since Leap],” he says, “and they all connect back to Creative Capital.” Retreats are also a hot ticket for producers, gallery owners, and others in the field.

As the organization has matured, it has looked for ways to reach artists outside the elite circle of grantees. Professional development workshops, typically led by Creative Capital artists and emphasizing the self-management message, have reached an additional 2,200 artists across the country. Doyle says leading the workshops gives him a way “to give something back,” both to the larger community and to the organization that has shaped his career.

The handful of Creative Capital artists who have made significant amounts of money from their projects, including Kron, share the wealth by returning a small percentage of their profits to the granting organization. Payback is part of the Creative Capital deal, although only a few projects ever reach this stage. Nonetheless, Lerner says, “I’m proud that payback is in our design. People often say it’s great because it makes the artist accountable. But the arrangement also makes Creative Capital accountable to the artist,” she says, “and that’s truly radical.”

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

Partnering with the International Center of Photography, Johnson & Johnson recently sent five photographers to document the company’s charitable projects around the world. Portland, Ore. based Toni Greaves photographed Sports Without Barriers, as well as 23 other organizations. She hopes her photographs inspire their viewers as much as these organizations inspired her.

Together with his brother Christofer, a videographer, Wagner has invested “eight years, 4,600 miles, and $30,000” to make Mister Rogers & Me. The film was inspired by a chance encounter with the late children’s television legend, who challenged Benjamin Wagner to pass along a message about the value of all that’s “deep and simple.” The brothers don’t know if their film will ever earn back a dime, but they have learned that generous strangers are willing to help them get to the finish line.

The Wagners are among a fast-growing group of artists, musicians, writers, and other creative types who are going directly to the public to underwrite their dreams via an online fundraising platform called Kickstarter. It off ers a space to pitch ideas to people willing to kick in a few bucks, without asking for payback or a share of ownership rights. Within four months of launch, the site had raised about $600,000 for more than 100 projects.

CEO and founder Perry Chen says Kickstarter offers an answer to “the tremendous funding problem most people have.” Kickstarter invites folks with good ideas to post videos and other media to tell their own stories. Project creators must ask for a specific amount of money by a deadline that’s no more than 90 days away. They’re encouraged to off er incentives— your name on a film credit or a private concert in your living room—to sweeten the deal. But all ownership remains with the artist. Then the countdown begins, along with viral marketing via Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. If artists reach or exceed their goal, they keep the cash (minus 5 percent to Kickstarter). If they don’t, not a penny changes hands.

The all-or-nothing scheme builds in drama, with projects typically getting the most action in the hours just before deadline. Equally important is the safety valve this arrangement creates. “If you’re not fully funded, you won’t get the money,” Chen says. “That way you won’t have a group of people who expect you to do what you’ve promised, when you don’t have enough money to do it.”

Kickstarter is already creating new conversations about value. Incentives offered to potential donors may not cost much to make, “but have real value to the audience, whether it’s products, services, or experiential stuff ,” Chen says. Emily Richmond, for instance, asked the Kickstarter community to chip in $8,000 to help her sail around the world. Eleven donors who gave her $5 apiece will get origami sailboats, but five who pledged $125 can look forward to receiving coconuts in the mail. “We live in a gray area,” Chen says, “somewhere between patronage and commerce.”

As for the Wagner brothers, their documentary project raised $10,796 by the Sept. 19 deadline, $796 more than they asked for. That’s enough to buy time in “an actual editing space, not after-hours on a laptop,” Benjamin says, and finish the film. He thinks Mister Rogers would approve. “Kickstarter is all about being good neighbors. It’s about people saying, ‘I believe in what you’re doing—and I’ll pitch in.’ ”

Unfortunately, as a recent survey of arts participation in the United States indicates, demand did not keep pace with the growth of the sector. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reports that between 1982 and 2008, adult attendance declined in almost every art form: ballet attendance was down 31 percent, opera was down 30 percent, classical music was down 29 percent, nonmusical theater was down 21 percent, and jazz was down 19 percent. And the rate of decline has accelerated in most of these disciplines in recent years.¹

Not only is the number of people attending fine arts events falling, the median age of those who are attending is getting significantly older. According to the same NEA report, between1982 and 2008 the median audience age rose from 37 to 46 for ballet, from 43 to 48 for opera, from 40 to 49 for classical music, from 39 to 47 for nonmusical theater, from 28 to 45 for jazz, and from 36 to 43 for art museums. The numbers are even bleaker for season ticket holders. The Metropolitan Opera, for example, reported that the average age of its subscribers rose from 60 in 2000 to 65 in 2005.

Some arts leaders have convinced themselves that fine arts audiences have always been gray, but that isn’t true. As recently as 1964 the median age of performing arts audience members was 38. In the seminal book Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, published in 1966, economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen write: “Older people (those over 60) are the scarcest members of the audience relative to their numbers in the urban population in the United States. In a word, audiences are young.”²

Other fine arts leaders claim that attendance has fallen because people don’t have time to attend a lengthy ballet or opera. On the contrary, studies indicate that many Americans actually have more leisure time now; they are simply choosing to spend it differently. Between 1965 and 2003, leisure time increased by 7.9 hours per week on average for men and by six hours for women. Unfortunately, most people aren’t using those additional hours to patronize the arts. Time diary studies show people on average spend only 10.2 minutes per week participating in fine arts activities, or just under nine hours per year. ³

Why then, are fine arts audiences getting smaller and older? Dana Gioia, former NEA chairman, paints a sobering but accurate picture. “The primary issues facing the American arts at present are not financial. They are cultural and social. We have a society in which the arts have become marginal. We are not producing another generation of people who attend theater, opera, symphony, dance, jazz, and other art forms.”⁴

Cultural Chasm

Not unlike newspapers, automotive companies, and record labels, many fine arts organizations have failed to adjust to the radical social, cultural, and technological changes that have taken place in the United States during the last few decades. In fact, many arts organizations did just the opposite, catering to an increasingly aging and conservative group of mostly white subscribers and donors.

As a result, many fine arts organizations have lost touch with the new American zeitgeist. The leaders of these arts organizations often have outdated perceptions about who lives in their communities, what those people value, and what role the arts and their organizations do—or do not—play in their lives. Rather than acknowledging that they are out of touch, many arts leaders have engaged in what Edward Cornell calls “bending the map” or “trying to make reality conform to [their] expectations, rather than seeing what’s there.”⁵

The reality is that America has undergone vast changes in recent decades. Cities and towns have become more ethnically diverse, but the leadership, boards, and staff s of most arts organizations remain predominantly white. The suburbs have boomed, but most art still happens in the city, where performances end around 11 p.m., making the hour-long commute home exhausting, no matter your enthusiasm for art. Ticket prices have increased astronomically, while the income gap between the wealthy and poor has widened. And why pay between $85 and $185 to attend live theater when talented writers, directors, and actors are now producing bold and ambitious television programs like The Wire, In Treatment, and Mad Men?

Young adults’ taste for the fine arts has waned, in part, because arts and music classes have been all but eliminated at most public schools. Other Americans are turned off, not by the art form itself, but because the arts are seen as elitist and exclusive. And then there’s the havoc that technology has wrought. Americans live in an increasingly free, time-shifting, do-it-yourself culture. Fully half of all teens have created a blog or Web page, posted original artwork, photographs, stories, or videos online, or remixed online content into their own creations.⁶ People listen to an entire album online before purchasing it and can watch many of their favorite movies and television programs at their leisure on their computer or iPod touch.

For a growing number of Americans, particularly young ones, showing up at a prescribed time, paying a hefty admission fee, and spending an entire evening passively watching a performance in a dark and sacred venue, where even the crinkling of a cough drop wrapper is enough to elicit glares from the patron next to you, feels more akin to penance than an enjoyable way to spend an evening.

Recreating the Institution

No arts organization is guaranteed perpetual relevance simply because of the size of its endowment, the permanence of its buildings, its preeminence in a city or region, or its historic accomplishments. To say that there is an intrinsic value in art is not to say that there is an intrinsic value in arts institutions. Too many arts organizations behave as if their mission is to sustain and preserve the institution rather than to create or showcase art that matters to people. When audiences decline, too many arts leaders ask, “What’s wrong with these people?” What arts leaders need to ask is, “Are we willing to make the necessary changes in our mission and practices to attain, maintain, or regain our relevance?”

That’s what Peter Gelb did when he became general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006. He declared that if opera didn’t become more accessible, it was heading for extinction.⁷ Among the many things he has done to retool the Met is to hire contemporary theater directors to enliven the productions, commit to producing more new works and fare for families, develop a discount ticket program, stream performances in Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza, and launch high-definition simulcasts in movie theaters around the world.

Arts leaders may be tempted to think that the solution to dwindling audiences lies in better marketing, but if arts organizations are going to survive, they have to put more than the season brochure on the autopsy table. Organizations need to rethink who they are, why they exist, what value they create, which people they need to reach and how they will reach them, and what the meaningful measures of success will be. Arts organizations need to shift away from conceiving of themselves as powerful gatekeepers to humbly embracing their roles as enthusiastic brokers, helping their communities to engage with art and artists in meaningful, joyful, and diverse ways.

The good news is that there are a number of fine arts organizations that are succeeding by doing things differently. I have distilled the best of their work into seven practices: Focus on Impact, Create Social Networks, Let the Art Dictate the Space, Set the Art Free, Cultivate a Young and Diverse Audience, Let People in on the Action, and Become an Arts Concierge.

Focus on Impact

Arts organizations and their funders have spent the better part of the last two decades focused on metrics that gauge the organization’s size, such as the number of performances and programs offered, the total contributions raised, box office revenues, or the number of tickets sold. Instead, arts organizations need to begin focusing on metrics that gauge the organization’s impact on its patrons, such as frequency of attendance, the curiosity to learn about the art form and the ideas encountered, the depth of emotional response, or the quality of social connections made.

One person who is focused on creating art that matters is choreographer Elizabeth Streb. In 2003, she opened a performance space in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., called SLAM. Instead of creating a church-like space that patrons visited once a week for a sacred experience, Streb opened the doors and let people come in anytime to watch rehearsal or use the restroom. She added popcorn and cotton candy machines and let people walk around and eat food during the performances. Streb noticed that her patrons wanted to join in, so she installed a trapeze and began teaching people how to fl y, developing classes for preschoolers to adults. Performances largely feature the professional company, but Streb also features her students in the shows.

Streb doesn’t need to advertise her performances because she has created a robust social network that drives ticket sales. There is a palpable energy and familiarity in the room—people know each other and interact in the space as they would at a backyard barbecue. People come back to the performances time after time and the “initiated” (particularly the kids) delight in showing newcomers the ropes, both literally and figuratively. The experience is participatory, not transactional. Streb’s success is measured not when the ticket gets sold at the box office, but 30 minutes after the show when everyone is still lingering, buzzing, and talking with one another and the artists. Streb is cultivating true fans—a diverse group of people who are deeply engaged, enthusiastic, and loyal—and in the process is creating a community cultural center that matters to Brooklyn.

Create Social Networks

Watching longtime subscribers and major donors at the opening night of a performance or an exhibit, it’s clear that they are well acquainted and that seeing one another is as important as seeing the art on the stage or the walls. Newcomers to the arts, however, often feel like outsiders. Very few arts organizations do much, if anything, to help foster social networks among their patrons, and yet this could be even more important than the quality of the art in determining whether people show up to a performance or return for another.

The 2006 New Zealand Arts Survey found that the No. 1 reason (given by 29 percent of respondents) why people said they were attending more arts events was that they had someone to go with.⁸ The survey also noted that when participants in the “low attendance segment” were asked why they are attending more often now than they were three years ago, this segment (more than the others) identified the need to be encouraged by their social network to attend.

One arts organization that has successfully built and fostered social networks is the Foundry Theater in New York City. In 2008, the Foundry produced Open House, a two-person play that examined the long-term impacts of the escalating costs of real estate on New Yorkers and the growing anxiety over housing costs and neighborhood change. The play took place in two dozen apartments across all five New York boroughs, which the Foundry located through an “open call.” When patrons bought their tickets, they signed up to see the performance at one of 24 residences around the city.

I signed up to see Open House at an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Before the performance started, I mingled with the actors, production staff , and the other 30 or so patrons and heard the history of the apartment from the owner and host of that night’s performance. At the end of the performance, everyone was invited to stay and eat, drink, and talk. When the entire project was over, the Foundry invited all of the people who had opened up their homes—representing a wide array of New Yorkers—to a dim sum party. Not only did these generous city dwellers break bread together, but friendships were formed.

Let the Art Dictate the Space

For nearly three decades, the vast majority of capital spending in the arts has been used to construct ever more grand and expensive museums, concert halls, and theaters. Perhaps there should be a moratorium on this type of spending, with money instead redirected to convert existing spaces so that they are better suited to the ways contemporary artists are presenting their work and that encourage a more dynamic interaction between artists and audiences.

Diane Paulus, the new artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., has developed Experience A.R.T. She plans to renovate the organization’s black box space to become the fi rst theater in the country that has a club venue as its second stage. At Club Zero Arrow cell phones can be turned on and audience members will be allowed to take photos and make videos and recordings, and post this content and their comments on social networking sites, all while experiencing the live theatrical event.

Another innovative performance space is New York’s 3LD Art & Technology Center, a space designed to allow all types of artists to work together and perform using a variety of new media technologies. In the spring of 2008, the center hosted a series of performances of Fire Island, a piece about relationships on the bohemian barrier island off Long Island. The production incorporated panoramic film footage on enormous concave and convex screens that enveloped the space and that was deftly edited against a live performance, featuring actors who performed their scenes in and around audience members who drank wine and sat on blankets and beach chairs throughout the open space.

Sometimes, the best approach is not to create a permanent performance space at all. The National Theatre of Scotland made the bold choice when it was launched in 2006 not to build a facility, but instead to bring the theater to people all across Scotland and beyond. Since then, the theater company has performed for more than 406,000 people, on three continents, in 74 productions, done in 101 different locations.

Set the Art Free

To reach a broader audience, fine arts organizations need to create free and low-cost ways for people to sample and share art with others in the same way they sample and share music, videos, and photographs on the Web. It is important for fine arts organizations to make their performances easily available online, but it is just as important for the patrons of that organization to be the ones who promote the performances. If I encourage my friends to buy a song or a video, it means a lot more to them than if an organization does so.

Indie rock bands have long used albums and CDs as loss leaders to generate attendance at their live concerts, where the band makes most of its money. Now, more and more individual artists are giving their music away online as a way to generate awareness, build a fan base, and develop an audience for their live performances. Some fine arts organizations have begun to use the Internet to showcase performances. On the Boards, a contemporary performing arts organization in Seattle where I was managing director several years ago, recently received $750,000 from the Wallace Foundation to launch OtBTV—a pilot program offering full-length, high-definition experimental performances online.

Most arts organizations, however, have not yet embraced the online culture. The American Composers Orchestra (ACO) performs mostly new and experimental classical music. On Oct. 13, 2006, I attended an ACO concert that included a new composition and video. I recently went online to find a recording of the piece, but I was not successful. If the ACO had recorded and posted the performance online, allowing people to sample a three-minute clip for free or download the entire piece for $2, I would have e-mailed at least a dozen people the day after the concert and said, “Go to the Web site and check out this fantastic piece.” If even only 10 percent of the audience had spread the word, imagine how many more people from around the world would have seen the piece than the several hundred who were in the New York concert hall that night.

Cultivate a Young and Diverse Audience

Many fine arts organizations focus too much of their attention on their existing subscribers and audience members, most of whom are older and white. If these institutions are going to survive in the long run they must begin cultivating a much younger and more ethnically diverse audience.

When Irene Lewis arrived at Baltimore’s Centerstage Theater in the early 1990s as the new artistic director, the theater was primarily producing works by white playwrights, performed by white actors, for white audiences. The population of Baltimore, however, is two-thirds African-American. Lewis determined that Centerstage was not serving the community and made a commitment to produce two or three plays a season that were written by African-American playwrights or were about the African-American experience. Despite angry subscribers and financial consequences, the theater stayed the course. Today, 15 years later, the African-American plays generate the highest attendance and revenues.

Under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic gradually updated its programming, focusing more on contemporary classical music. Challenging the sentiment and bucking the experience of many U.S. orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic demonstrated that new music can sell tickets. According to Salonen: “If you want to reach a young person who has not learned classical music at home or in the schools, the best repertory is 20th-century repertory rather than Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven. Just because of the familiarity of the sound world, something like ‘Le Sacre’ gives you a sense of recognition, even if your only point of reference is rock music. It doesn’t belong to the establishment; there is no political or class difference.”⁹

Let People in on the Action

More often than not, arts organizations seem to underscore the distinctions between the professional arts and the amateur arts, and as a result often leave people feeling mystified and unworthy, rather than curious and eager to join in. Some fine arts organizations, however, are beginning to demystify the artistic process.

Four years ago, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre launched First Look 101, in which they invite 101 patrons to join them at important steps of developing a new play. Most arts organizations offer behind-the-scenes opportunities only for major donors. First Look 101, however, is affordable ($45 for students and $75 for others) and open to anyone. The three-month program gives people the chance to attend an unrehearsed table reading, the first day of rehearsal (including designer presentations), a rehearsal involving blocking and scene work, a technical rehearsal (when elements such as lights and sound are incorporated), and then a final performance.

Some fine arts organizations are using the Internet to involve patrons. In 2006, New York’s Museum of Modern Art invited anyone to create a video to accompany a short audio piece by avant-garde multimedia group the Residents. The museum then selected 11 videos and posted them on YouTube, where the public could comment and vote for their favorite video. From the public’s feedback, MOMA ultimately determined which videos to screen at the museum.

Other professional theater companies are inviting amateurs to share the stage. New Zealand’s Auckland Theatre Company created Open Call to cast Taming of the Shrew. Ten people were selected through a nationwide audition open to anyone aged 18 to 25. One reviewer called it “the most vibrant, engaging and truly alive 90- odd minutes of theater I have ever witnessed from Auckland Theatre Company.” And some organizations are putting the power of programming in the hands of their patrons. In the People’s Opera contest, Chicago Opera Theater lets its patrons (for $1 per vote) select among three options and program one of the slots in its season. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic have begun to let patrons use their cell phones to vote for which encore they want to hear.

Become an Arts Concierge

One of the biggest challenges U.S. consumers face today is that they have too many choices. People can pick from more than 100,000 DVDs on Netflix, more than 2.5 million books on Amazon, and more than 10 million songs on iTunes. To sort through the clutter, companies are developing ways to help people make more informed choices. When someone buys a book on Amazon, for example, the Web site often encourages the purchase of another book by the same author or about a similar subject.

Many communities have developed calendars of arts and culture events, but very few communities or organizations have gone the next step and helped people figure out which event they might most enjoy attending. In fact, ever since subscriptions became the preferred method of selling tickets, organizations have tended to tell the public: “We’ve got eight shows this season and they are all fantastic!” The shows may all be pretty good, but it is doubtful that everyone will be equally interested in all of them. By not helping people make informed choices and find the shows that they are most likely to enjoy, organizations increase the likelihood that people either will decide not to attend any performance, or if they do attend, will not have a positive experience and will become disengaged.

Arts organizations need to stop trying to sell everyone the same package of performances, and instead become arts concierges: responsive, reliable, and trusted friends who help customers make decisions about what performance to see. Arts organizations could even cross-promote each other’s products and services. Like Amazon, a theater Web site could nudge patrons to try other performances they might enjoy based on their current selections—for instance, “Diane, since you bought two tickets to a performance of Edward Albee’s The American Dream, you might also be interested in buying tickets to Christopher Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong and People Who Love Them at our partner theater. Purchase tickets to both shows now (you can pick your dates for the Christopher Durang play at a later time) and you will receive a 15 percent discount on your entire order.”

There are organizations across the United States that are experimenting with becoming an arts concierge. One example is an effort funded by the Mellon Foundation called Project Audience, which is aimed at helping develop the next generation of technology and practices that would support collaborative strategies among arts organizations to build arts participation within their communities.

Be Creative

There is no simple formula that fine arts organizations can follow to engage people. Podcasts plus Facebook plus $10 tickets does not equal success. Instead, leaders of arts organizations need to be brutally honest about the state of affairs and boldly adapt to them. Phelim McDermott, cofounder and co-artistic director of the London theater company Improbable, put it well when he said: “Improvisation as we practice it is less about being quick-witted and wacky and more about embracing paradoxical skills. These include the ability to be courageous and decisive while at the same time open and vulnerable to whatever happens around you. We work on developing the ability to be humble, not armored, in the face of unexpected events.”¹⁰

What do successful arts organizations, such as those highlighted in this article, have in common? First, their artistic leaders are involved in and deeply committed to their transformations. Second, they do not behave as if achieving artistic virtuosity and being relevant to the community are competing or mutually exclusive goals. They are pursuing excellence and equity. Third, they had the courage, capacity, and willingness to adapt.

A 1965 Rockefeller Brothers Fund report, The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects, states: “The arts are not for the privileged few, but for the many. Their place is not on the periphery of daily life, but at its center. They should function not merely as another form of entertainment but rather should contribute significantly to our well-being and happiness.” America didn’t fulfill John D. Rockefeller III’s vision in the 20th century. We have the opportunity to do so in the 21st century, but only if we embrace and become engaged in the social, cultural, and technological changes that are occurring. _

Notes

1 National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Participation 2008: Highlights from a National Survey, June 15, 2009.

2 William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966.

3 Andrew Taylor, Cultural Organizations and Changing Leisure Trends, A National Convening, Online Discussion, and White Paper, June 2007.

4 Alicia Anstead and Dana Gioia, “The Gioia of It All,” Inside Arts, August/September 2006.

5 Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

6 Pew Internet & American Life Project, The Majority of Teen Internet Users Create, Remix, or Share Content Online, November 2, 2005.

7 Carol Pogash, “Opera Hits a High Note: Student-Outreach Efforts Tap Technology,” Edutopia, October 2008.

8 New Zealand and the Arts, Attitudes, Attendance and Participation in 2005.

9 Alex Ross, “Becoming the Next Bernstein (Or Boulez),” The New York Times, November 27, 1994.

10 Phelim McDermott, program notes for the production of Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha, directed by McDermott and co-produced by the Metropolitan Opera and English National Opera.

Diane E. Ragsdale is associate program officer for the Performing Arts program at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Before joining the foundation, Ragsdale worked more than 15 years at several music, theater, dance, presenting, and fi lm organizations, including as managing director of the Seattle contemporary performing arts organization On the Boards. She is an avid arts attendee and sees between 100 and 150 performances each year. Her viewpoints are not necessarily those of the Mellon Foundation.

Across the country in Pasadena, Calif., Colleen Nelson had a different problem. As a media consultant, she had steady work with MGM Film Studios. But, working from home, she felt isolated.

Both women eventually found their way to the Freelancers Union, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based nonprofit that provides self-employed workers with health insurance, retirement plans, community events, and political representation. Unlike most employee benefits in the United States, which are tied to particular companies, the Freelancers Union’s offerings can travel with independent workers from job to job and from project to project.

Through the Freelancers Union, Kelly purchased health insurance for herself and her family. She also met an accountant at a tax workshop, and improved her Web site “2,000 percent” after attending a union-sponsored Web design seminar, she says. Meanwhile, Nelson began collaborating with likeminded union members in Los Angeles. “The Freelancers Union provides a sense of stability knowing that there is a place to go to get help, contacts, ideas, and other resources,” says Nelson. “It’s daunting working on your own.”

Today, 26 percent of U.S. workers are self-employed as Web designers, software developers, financial advisors, artists, writers, musicians, and consultants—to name a few occupations. This number is up from 19 percent in 2006, reports Kelly Services Inc., a Troy, Mich.-based staffing service. The rise of the free agent economy is allowing more and more people to be their own bosses, liberating them from the confines of a traditional offi ce. It also allows companies to cut costs to meet changing market demands.

With the freedom and flexibility of self-employment, however, come the trade-off s of stability and job security. Freelance paychecks can be erratic. Freelance contractors must pay out of pocket for their own health insurance and retirement plans, and they rarely qualify for unemployment. To meet the needs of the growing freelance workforce, Sara Horowitz created the precursor to the Freelancers Union, called Working Today, in 1995. (The organization still conducts research and policy analysis.) In 2001, she launched the first version of a new union, the Portable Benefits Network, which was renamed the Freelancers Union in 2003. The Freelancers Union is not just another labor organization. Instead, it updates classic trade unionism with the modern impulses of social entrepreneurship, supporting itself largely with fees for services. At the same time, the Freelancers Union reveals its trade union spirit by working through political channels to secure better conditions for independent workers.

By making the right innovations at the right time, the organization now has some 115,000 members from all 50 states. And in the last 18 months alone, its membership has grown by 86 percent. For her efforts to create a new social safety net, Horowitz won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1999.

“The Freelancers Union is writing new rules for the new workforce,” says Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, a nonprofit that supports social entrepreneurs, including Horowitz and her organization. “Sara’s great insight was to recognize that the social safety net that followed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal no longer meets the needs of the freelance workforce.”

Union Business

Horowitz comes from a long line of labor organizers. Her grandfather was vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York, and her father was a union lawyer. “I came to social entrepreneurship accidentally,” she says. “I grew up in a completely lefty family where being an entrepreneur was a dirty word.”

As a union organizer and union-side lawyer, Horowitz spent 1995 at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, rethinking her own assumptions while earning a master’s degree in public policy. She came to believe that existing labor laws and regulations didn’t fit the freelance economy. The old union model that offered standardized packages did not meet the individual needs of such a diverse group of workers.

“I kept thinking if you want to build the next union movement, what will be the killer app that will get it moving?” Horowitz explains. “The No. 1 issue was health insurance.”

To provide access to health care as well as dental, disability, and life insurance, the Freelancers Union uses the bulk purchasing power of its many members, which opens doors and drives down premiums. Discounts are available nationwide for such health-related needs as vision care and dental care. The union also provides otherwise unobtainable access to disability insurance.

In the state of New York, the Freelancers Union even set up its own insurance company last January, drawing on $17 million of grants and loans from a coalition of businesses and philanthropies. Individual costs for insurance range from $140 to $350 per month, depending on the size of the deductible. In comparison, average monthly premiums for other self-insured New Yorkers are in the $800-$1,000 range.

The organization also unveiled a nationwide 401(k) retirement plan for its members in April 2009. Milliman Inc. serves as the plan administrator; Charles Schwab Trust Company serves as the trustee. Members enrolled in the plan can elect to invest in 12 professionally vetted and monitored funds or target-date funds. To promote regular savings, the plan also offers automatic withdrawals from freelancers’ checking accounts. There is no minimum investment, and the monthly $11 fee will go down as more members join. Further, union members can adjust their contributions for free to accommodate the feast-or-famine cash flows that independent workers often experience.

Although the Freelancers Union’s “goals and intent are profoundly the same” as those of traditional unions, “our business and organizing models are profoundly different,” says Horowitz. For instance, unlike most U.S. unions, which support themselves by collecting membership dues, the business-minded Freelancers Union earns revenues by charging fees for its many services. The organization then reinvests all its earnings into new initiatives, education, and advocacy.

This year, the Freelancers Union expects that its revenues will exceed $75 million. The nonprofit has been sustainable since 2006, meaning that its revenue-generating activities cover the costs of its mission- centered projects. Still, the organization seeks grants for the start-up costs of some new initiatives. “We’ve created a hybrid ecosystem,” Horowitz says.

The Freelance Future

Also unlike traditional unions, the Freelancers Union does not negotiate salaries or organize strikes. It does, however, work with politicians to win better protections for free agents. A recent advocacy triumph for the Freelancers Union came on March 23, 2009, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he would seek a new federal unemployment benefit for freelancers, who make up 15 percent of New York City’s workforce. The Freelancers Union designed the proposed Unemployment Protection Fund, which would require the federal or state governments to match $300 for every $1,000 a Freelancers Union member voluntarily pays into a designated fund. Members could draw upon these funds to pay for college tuition, housing, education, or other needs in case of unemployment.

“Freelancers lack any safety net to fall back on during hard times,” Bloomberg said in a speech to the Economic Club of New York. “If a company lays you off , you can collect unemployment. But if you’re a freelancer and you lose all your clients, good luck.”

Horowitz’s organization is improving upon old union models by exploiting the power of the Internet. The Freelancers Union provides an online portal of benefits and unites individual members within and across geographies. Through the organization’s Web site, workers can find copywriters, legal advisors, and babysitters in their extended community, creating even more opportunities to meet clients and make money. They can also orchestrate online and offline meetings. Niche communities within the network unite to discuss such topics as mental health, insurance premiums, taxation policy, and résumé writing. The union’s online presence also allows its members to advocate on their own behalf by signing petitions, organizing political events, and joining together to meet politicians.

Next up for the Freelancers Union is an online credit union where freelancers can save money as well as receive loans, says Horowitz. “We are also going to start really engaging in the policy debate,” she says. “Washington, D.C., is the city of ‘can’t-do-ism’ but we have built a ‘can-do’ model and an institution that reflects that perspective.” In addition, the organization aims to build “real roots” in five cities, establishing bases of support for members as it has in New York City.

“Freelancers need a creative organization to help them develop good benefits, stability of employment, and job security,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “The Freelancers Union has had some success, and I would expect to see more."

Amy Wilkinson is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Business and Government and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is writing a book about new paradigms in leadership.

The current recession has left few nonprofits unscathed and has hit theaters particularly hard, reports the most recent communiqué from the Johns Hopkins University Listening Post Project. “But nonprofits are responding with incredible courage, creativity, and conviction,” says Lester M. Salamon, lead author of the communiqué and director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University, which guides the projects.

To take the temperature of the U.S. nonprofit sector, the Listening Post Project regularly surveys more than 1,400 local nonprofits. In its most recent survey, the project found that 83 percent of its 363 respondents were feeling some financial pinch, with close to 40 percent describing their stress as “severe” or “very severe.” A “perfect storm” of declining revenues, increased costs, shrinking endowments, and reduced cash flows is to blame for their financial discomfort, write Salamon and his coauthors.

Yet by deploying smart coping strategies such as conservative financial management, intensifi ed fundraising, belt-tightening measures, and entrepreneurial expansion, almost three-fourths of the nonprofits in the Listening Post study have been able to maintain or actually increase the number of people they serve. Of these coping strategies, says Salamon, entrepreneurial expansion tends to be the least used but most successful. As the figure at right shows, for example, few nonprofits undertook such entrepreneurial feats as starting a for-profit subsidiary, sharing staff with other organizations, or renting out their facilities. But those that did experienced greater financial success than did organizations that stuck to more tried-and-true belt-tightening and fundraising strategies.

The Barter Theatre, for instance, is using several entrepreneurial strategies to weather the recession. “Our budget is about 80 percent earned income because we’re in a region that is so remote and not wealthy, with no big corporate sponsors,” Rose explains. “And so we are forced to earn our way.”

To this end, the organization is launching a national tour of its production of Of Mice and Men, which is expected to bring in $600,000 in 2009, says Rose.

The theater has also adjusted its off erings to the changing mood and makeup of its audience. “From the standpoint of programming, we went for what I call ‘comfort food,’” he says. “And we’re actually having a record season. We’re doing The Wizard of Oz, which we would normally stay away from. We usually appeal to adults, not families, and we do theater that’s a little more challenging. But we knew we would be relying on local audiences rather than tourists.” The theater is also avoiding more depressing productions, says Rose: “If you are having a tough life,” as people are during this recession, “you want to escape it in the theater.”

The theater’s need to earn revenue may actually protect it from the recession, suggests Salamon: “Fundraising strategies that involve commercial income are better than charitable income.”

Despite its uptick in activity, the theater has had to make some difficult sacrifices. “We had to cut half a dozen personnel, and we’re also using fewer freelancers,” says Rose. “And so a lot of us are working a lot harder.”

Although cutting back on staff and staff time may be a good coping strategy in the short term, says Salamon, “I’m not sure that I would recommend it for the long term.” More generally, he says, “while nonprofits have been able to protect clientele and continue services [during the downturn], we are at real risk of pushing organizations beyond the breaking point.”

“No matter where your eye turns, there’s something cool going on,” says CEO and founder Bill Strickland. “That’s quite deliberate.”

Strickland, a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as a “genius award”) recipient, has spent the last 40 years in the same tough neighborhood where he grew up, honing MBC’s model of community change. And his model gets results: reduced high school dropout rates, increased college admissions, and adults placed in jobs that lift their families out of poverty.

Now, Strickland is spreading MBC’s lessons far beyond Pittsburgh. Funded in part by a $1 million grant from the Skoll Foundation, MBC has planted off shoots in San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Grand Rapids, Mich., and plans to launch another in Cleveland later this year. In so doing, MBC has refi ned the art and technology of replication. Central to MBC’s replication technique is helping communities tailor the model to their unique needs and preferences, rather than exporting its Pittsburgh formula wholesale. The nonprofit has also nailed down a clear order of operations for developing new sites.

Equipped with proven replication strategies, Strickland has set his sights high. His goal is to launch 100 arts and technology centers in high-poverty urban settings across the United States, and another 100 around the world. That would create the critical mass to “change the conversation” about what education should be, he says.

Local Flavor

Strickland’s replication strategy used to be showing a slideshow to anyone willing to watch. A charismatic speaker, he inspired plenty of listeners. But the lag between inspiration and action frustrated him. “I didn’t know how to shape what we’d learned in Manchester and package it into a concept that could be effectively rolled out on a grand scale,” he relates in his autobiography, Make the Impossible Possible.

That changed when community leaders in San Francisco asked MBC to help them start their own education center. After several years and more than a few false starts, the doors of the Bayview Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology (BAYCAT) opened in 2004.

“That’s when we started talking about what it would take to [replicate] in a more organized way,” explains Georgina Gutierrez. She is vice president of the National Center for Arts & Technology (NCAT), a separate nonprofit dedicated to disseminating MBC’s model. With funding from the Skoll Foundation, MBC hired the Bridgespan Group to prepare a replication business plan. “That caused us to step back and ask ourselves, what do we have in Pittsburgh that could be planted like a seed in another city?” she says. The Pittsburgh team also sought advice from friends of the organization, including J. Gregory Dees from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and James Heskett from Harvard Business School. These far-reaching discussions eventually led to the establishment of NCAT in 2007 as a separate nonprofit under the MBC umbrella.

As Strickland and company became more deliberate about replicating, they distilled the Manchester model into four nonnegotiable goals for every new center: (1) A world-class environment for learning; (2) Ambitious arts programming for at-risk youth; (3) Job training for adults, calibrated to the needs of local employers; and (4) A culture that values poor people as assets, not liabilities.

NCAT then decided to leave the details of how to pursue these goals to each community. Communities fund and operate their centers as independent nonprofi ts, although all are affi liated with NCAT. As a result, the four existing centers look quite diff erent, though “they all share the same spirit,” Strickland says. “You feel very hopeful in any of these spaces.”

Rules of Engagement

Strickland hasn’t stopped giving his famous slideshow, which opens with the story of how a high school art teacher transformed his own impoverished life. “That’s where the interest usually starts,” says Dolores Sewchok, interim vice president of NCAT. “Somebody hears Bill speak and gets inspired.” To accelerate what happens next, NCAT has developed a formal replication process. The first phase is cultivation. “This is where we make sure the community really understands what this will take,” Gutierrez explains. Typically, interested parties travel to Pittsburgh to see MBC’s operations firsthand, and NCAT staff get acquainted with their potential partners.

Moving to the next phase—feasibility—requires potential partners to sign a formal consulting agreement with NCAT at a cost of $150,000. If a new organization is not yet formally in place to manage fundraising and other tasks, a local foundation might serve as the convener. “This is where we fi nd out, are they really ready for this? Is there a need for the kind of programs we can bring,” Gutierrez says, “and is there enough focus on those needs to raise the money required for solutions?”

The feasibility phase takes from 12 to 18 months and includes discussions between NCAT staff and about 100 local leaders. This outreach is time-consuming but necessary to ensure that support for the new nonprofit is strong on all sides, including the school district, corporations, government leaders, and existing nonprofits. The dialogues also reassure existing organizations that “we’re not coming in to duplicate or compete for funding with programs that already exist,” says Lillian Kuri, director of special projects for the Cleveland Foundation, which has been a local convener and major funder of the Cleveland replication. “By spending time on this early,” she adds, “you don’t get opposition later.”

If the feasibility phase ends with a green light, parties move on to a four-year process of planning and implementation, with consulting costs to NCAT of $150,000 annually.

Lee Carter, chairman of the board of the Cincinnati Arts and Technology Center (CATC), says it took his community about two and a half years to establish its program. Now in its fifth year, CATC serves 400 youths annually. Although nearly all of the teenagers in the youth arts program are at risk of school failure when they start, 95 percent graduate from high school on time and 70 percent go on to higher education. Meanwhile, the job training program is mentoring about 100 adults in automotive repair, construction, and health care.

Well-received by the community today, the vision for CATC didn’t grab hold in Cincinnati until people understood that they could adapt the program to their own needs. “The word ‘replication’ was turning people off at first,” says Carter. “But the minute we started talking about adapting instead of replicating, the same people who had been critical started saying, ‘Oh, that sounds like a good idea.’” CATC, housed in a refurbished warehouse, weights its budget toward youth programming because Cincinnati has other adult job training programs. “We don’t need to duplicate that,” Carter says. And instead of selling orchids or jazz albums as they do in Pittsburgh, CATC has devised a different income stream: a team of CATC youth artists that paints Cincinnati-themed storefront murals for a grocery chain.

Leading from Within

Each time a city considers joining the NCAT family, the question of leadership comes up. Stories of MBC and its founder are so closely intertwined that people often wonder, “How are we ever going to find our own Bill Strickland?”

Gutierrez has a ready answer. “We’re not looking for another Bill Strickland. We’re looking for a person who can be disciplined enough to follow someone else’s idea,” she says. The executive director must also be from the local community. Being an artist isn’t required, Sewchok says, but candidates “have to be passionate about helping people who have been left out of other systems.”

NCAT is hands-on about guiding the executive director search. “We have a profile,” Gutierrez says, “but we have learned that capable directors can come from very different backgrounds.” BAYCAT Executive Director Villy Wang, for example, is a seasoned attorney, whereas 27-year-old Luisa Schumacher, the executive director of the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology in Grand Rapids, has a background in political fundraising, nonprofit marketing, and community relations.

NCAT is also very involved in guiding site selection and board development. “Being able to learn from their expertise has helped speed our decision making,” says Kuri. “It’s true collaboration. They aren’t telling us what to do. We use their expertise to fi gure things out together. We couldn’t do it alone.”

Potential new art and technology education centers are now in their early stages in Israel, Rwanda, and Ireland, along with several U.S. cities. “The model may look a little diff erent in these places,” Sewchok says, “but our goal will be the same: bring people together, fi nd common ground, and collaborate for the greater good.”

Suzie Boss is a journalist from Portland, Ore., who writes about social change and education. She is coauthor of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age.

There are consequences to this fi nancial fuzziness. When nonprofits and funding sources are not well matched, money doesn’t flow to the areas where it will do the greatest good. Too often, the result is that promising programs are cut, curtailed, or never launched. And when dollars become tight, a chaotic fundraising scramble is all the more likely to ensue.¹

In the for-profit world, by contrast, there is a much higher degree of clarity on financial issues. This is particularly true when it comes to understanding how different businesses operate, which can be encapsulated in a set of principles known as business models. Although there is no definitive list of corporate business models,² there is enough agreement about what they mean that investors and executives alike can engage in sophisticated conversations about any given company’s strategy. When a person says that a company is a “low-cost provider” or a “fast follower,” the main outlines of how that company operates are pretty clear. Similarly, stating that a company is using “the razor and the razor blade” model describes a type of ongoing customer relationship that applies far beyond shaving products.

The value of such shorthand is that it allows business leaders to articulate quickly and clearly how they will succeed in the marketplace, and it allows investors to quiz executives more easily about how they intend to make money. This back-and-forth increases the odds that businesses will succeed, investors will make money, and everyone will learn more from their experiences.

The nonprofit world rarely engages in equally clear and succinct conversations about an organization’s long- term funding strategy. That is because the different types of funding that fuel nonprofits have never been clearly defined.³ More than a poverty of language, this represents—and results in—a poverty of understanding and clear thinking.

Through our research, we have identified 10 nonprofit models that are commonly used by the largest nonprofits in the United States. (See “Funding Models” on page 37.) Our intent is not to prescribe a single approach for a given nonprofit to pursue. Instead, we hope to help nonprofit leaders articulate more clearly the models that they believe could support the growth of their organizations, and use that insight to examine the potential and constraints associated with those models.

BENEFICIARIES ARE NOT CUSTOMERS One reason why the nonprofit sector has not developed its own lexicon of funding models is that running a nonprofit is generally more complicated than running a comparable size for-profit business. When a for-profit business finds a way to create value for a customer, it has generally found its source of revenue; the customer pays for the value. With rare exceptions, that is not true in the nonprofit sector. When a nonprofit finds a way to create value for a beneficiary (for example, integrating a prisoner back into society or saving an endangered species), it has not identified its economic engine. That is a separate step.

Duke University business professor J. Gregory Dees, in his work on social entrepreneurship, describes the need to understand both the donor value proposition and the recipient value proposition. Clara Miller, CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, who has also written wonderfully about this dilemma, talks about all nonprofits being in two “businesses”—one related to their program activities and the other related to raising charitable “subsidies.”

As a result of this distinction between beneficiary and funder, the critical aspects (and accompanying vocabulary) of nonprofit funding models need to be understood separately from those of the for-profit world. It is also why we use the term funding model rather than business model to describe the framework. A business model incorporates choices about the cost structure and value proposition to the beneficiary. A funding model, however, focuses only on the funding, not on the programs and services offered to the beneficiary.

All nonprofit executives can use our 10 funding models to improve their fundraising and management, but the usefulness of these models becomes particularly important as nonprofits get bigger. There are many ways to raise as much as $1 million a year, some of which can be improvised during the process. Once organizations try to raise $25 million to $50 million or more each year, however, there are fewer possible paths. The number of potential decision makers who can authorize spending such large amounts of money decreases (or you need to get them en masse), and the factors that motivate these decision makers to say “yes” are more established (or cannot be as thoroughly influenced by one charismatic nonprofit leader).

Our research of large nonprofi ts confi rms this. In a recent study, we identified 144 nonprofit organizations—created since 1970—that had grown to $50 million a year or more in size.⁴ We found that each of these organizations grew large by pursuing specific sources of funding—often concentrated in one particular source of funds—that were a good match to support their particular types of work. Each had also built up highly professional internal fundraising capabilities targeted at those sources. In other words, each of the largest nonprofits had a well-developed funding model.

The larger the amount of funding needed, the more important it is to follow preexisting funding markets where there are particular decision makers with established motivations. Large groups of individual donors, for example, are already joined by common concerns about various issues, such as breast cancer research. And major government funding pools, to cite another example, already have specific objectives, such as foster care. Although a nonprofit that needs a few million dollars annually may convince a handful of foundations or wealthy individuals to support an issue that they had not previously prioritized, a nonprofit trying to raise tens of millions of dollars per year can rarely do so.

This is not to say that funding markets are static; they aren’t. The first Earth Day in 1970 coincided with a major expansion in giving to environmental causes; the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 led to a dramatic increase in support for international relief; and awareness of the U.S. educational crisis in the late 1980s laid the groundwork for charter school funding. Changes cannot be foreseen, however, and, hence, can not be depended on as a source of funding. In addition, these changes were the product or culmination of complex national and international events, not the result of a single nonprofit’s work.

Earl Martin Phalen, cofounder of BELL, an after-school and summer educational organization, captured the benefits of such intentionality well, summing up his experience for a group of nonprofit leaders in 2007. “Our fundraising strategy used to be ‘let’s raise more money this year than last’ and we always were unsure of where we’d be. Then we got serious in thinking about our model and identified an ongoing type of government funding that was a good match for our work. While it required some program changes to work, we now predictably cover 70 percent of our costs in any locality through this approach.”

TEN FUNDING MODELS Devising a framework for nonprofit funding presents challenges. To be useful, the models cannot be too general or too specific. For example, a community health clinic serving patients covered by Medicaid and a nonprofit doing development work supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development are both government funded, yet the type of funding they get, and the decision makers controlling the funding, are very different. Lumping the two together in the same model would not be useful. At the same time, designating a separate model for nonprofits that receive Title I SES funds, for example, is too narrow to be useful.

In the end, we settled on three parameters to define our funding models—the source of funds, the types of decision makers, and the motivations of the decision makers. (See “Identifying the Models” below.) This allowed us to identify 10 distinct funding models at level that is broadly relevant yet defi nes real choices.

It is interesting to note that there were several funding models we thought we might fi nd, but didn’t. One possible model was nonprofits supported by earned-income ventures distinct and separate from their core mission-related activities. Another possible model was nonprofits that operated on a strictly fee-for-service model in either a business-tobusiness or direct-to-consumer fashion, without important supplementary fundraising (from members or prior beneficiaries) or underlying government support. Although there are some nonprofits supporting themselves with such funding approaches, they were not present among the large nonprofits that we studied. It is our belief that these types of approaches do not lend themselves to large-scale, sustained nonprofit advantage over for-profit entities.

What follows are descriptions of the 10 funding models, along with profiles of representative nonprofits for each model. The models are ordered by the dominant type of funder. The first three models (Heartfelt Connector, Beneficiary Builder, and Member Motivator) are funded largely by many individual donations. The next model (Big Bettor) is funded largely by a single person or by a few individuals or foundations. The next three models (Public Provider, Policy Innovator, and Beneficiary Broker) are funded largely by the government. The next model (Resource Recycler) is supported largely by corporate funding. And the last two models (Market Maker and Local Nationalizer) have a mix of funders.

1. HEARTFELT CONNECTOR Some nonprofits, such as the Make-a-Wish Foundation, grow large by focusing on causes that resonate with the existing concerns of large numbers of people at all income levels, and by creating a structured way for these people to connect where none had previously existed. Nonprofits that take this approach use a funding model we call the Heartfelt Connector. Some of the more popular causes are in the environmental, international, and medical research areas. They are different from nonprofits that tap individuals with particular religious beliefs, political leanings, or sporting interests, who come together to form organizations in the course of expressing their interests. Heartfelt Connectors often try to build explicit connections between volunteers through special fundraising events. The Susan G. Komen Foundation is an example of a nonprofit that uses the Heartfelt Connector model. Established in 1982, the Komen Foundation works through a network of 125 affiliates to eradicate breast cancer as a life-threatening disease by funding research grants, by supporting education, screening, and treatment projects in communities around the world, and by educating women about the importance of early detection. The foundation’s mission has a deep resonance with many women, even though its work may never benefi t them directly. Between 1997 and 2007 the Komen Foundation’s annual fundraising grew from $47 million to $334 million. The average individual donation is small, about $33, but the foundation’s fundraising efforts have been driven by its ability to reach out to an ever-widening base of support. Its major fundraising vehicle is the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. The foundation and its affiliates hold about 120 running races each year that draw more than 1 million participants. These events not only allow individuals to give money; they also engage volunteers to put together teams, solicit funds, and participate in the race day experience. Nonprofit leaders considering the Heartfelt Connector funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Have a large cross section of people already shown that they will fund causes in this domain?
   • Can we communicate what is compelling about our nonprofit in a simple and concise way?
   • Does a natural avenue exist to attract and involve large numbers of volunteers?
   • Do we have, or can we develop, the in-house capabilities to attempt broad outreach in even one geographic area?


2. BENEFICIARY BUILDER Some nonprofits, such as the Cleveland Clinic, are reimbursed for services that they provide to specific individuals, but rely on people who have benefited in the past from these services for additional donations. We call the funding model that these organizations use the Beneficiary Builder. Two of the best examples of Beneficiary Builders are hospitals and universities. Generally, the vast majority of these nonprofits’ funding comes from fees that beneficiaries pay for the services the nonprofits provide. But the total cost of delivering the benefit is not covered by the fees. As a result, the nonprofit tries to build long-term relationships with people who have benefited from the service to provide supplemental support, hence the name Beneficiary Builder. Although these donations are often small relative to fees (averaging approximately 5 percent at hospitals and 30 percent at private universities), these funds are critical sources of income for major projects such as building, research, and endowment funds. Donors are often motivated to give money because they believe that the benefit they received changed their life. Organizations using a Beneficiary Builder model tend to obtain the majority of their charitable support from major gifts. Princeton University is an example of a nonprofit that uses the Beneficiary Builder model. The university has become very adept at tapping alumni for donations, boasting the highest alumni-giving rate among national universities—59.2 percent. In 2008, more than 33,000 undergraduate alumni donated $43.6 million to their alma mater. As a result of the school’s fundraising prowess, more than 50 percent of Princeton’s operating budget is paid for by donations and earnings from its endowment. Nonprofit leaders considering the Beneficiary Builder funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Does our mission create an individual benefit that is also perceived as an important social good?
   • Do individuals develop a deep loyalty to the organization in the course of receiving their individual benefit?
   • Do we have the infrastructure to reach out to beneficiaries in a scalable fashion?
   
   
3. MEMBER MOTIVATOR There are some nonprofits, such as Saddleback Church, that rely on individual donations and use a funding model we call Member Motivator. These individuals (who are members of the nonprofit) donate money because the issue is integral to their everyday life and is something from which they draw a collective benefit. Nonprofits using the Member Motivator funding model do not create the rationale for group activity, but instead connect with members (and donors) by offering or supporting the activities that they already seek. These organizations are often involved in religion, the environment, or arts, culture, and humanities. The National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF), which protects and expands wild turkey habitats and promotes wild turkey hunting, is an example of a Member Motivator. It attracts turkey hunters, who collectively benefit from NWTF’s work and therefore become loyal members and fundraisers. Local NWTF members host more than 2,000 fundraising banquets each year, raising about 80 percent of the organization’s annual revenues. These banquets provide multiple donation opportunities: entry tickets (which cost about $50 each and include an annual membership); merchandise purchase (averaging more than $100 per attendee); and raffle tickets (generating about $16,000 per banquet). NWTF’s national headquarters supplies raffle prizes and merchandise to sell at these banquets. Each banquet clears an average of $10,000 after expenses. A significant portion of the money raised is dedicated to land and turkey conservation in the community from which it was donated. Nonprofit leaders considering the Member Motivator funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Will our members feel that the actions of the organization are directly benefiting them, even if the benefit is shared collectively?
   • Do we have the ability to involve and manage our members in fundraising activities?
   • Can we commit to staying in tune with, and faithful to, our core membership, even if it means turning down funding opportunities and not pursuing activities that fail to resonate with our members?
   
   
4. BIG BETTOR There are a few nonprofits, such as the Stanley Medical Research Institute, that rely on major grants from a few individuals or foundations to fund their operations. We call their funding model the Big Bettor. Often, the primary donor is also a founder, who wants to tackle an issue that is deeply personal to him or her. Although Big Bettors often launch with significant financial backing already secured, allowing them to grow large quickly, there are other instances when an existing organization gets the support of a major donor who decides to fund a new and important approach to solving a problem. The nonprofits we identified as Big Bettors are focused either on medical research or on environmental issues. The primary reasons that Big Bettors can attract sizable donations are: the problem being addressed can potentially be solved with a huge influx of money (for example, a vast sum can launch a research institute to cure a specific illness); or the organization is using a unique and compelling approach to solve the problem. Conservation International (CI), whose mission is to conserve the Earth’s biodiversity and to demonstrate that humans can live harmoniously with nature, is an example of a nonprofit that uses the Big Bettor funding model. CI’s ability to identify locations around the world where protecting an area of land can have a significant effect on preserving global biodiversity helps it attract donors who are willing to contribute large amounts of money so that they can have an important and lasting impact on protecting the Earth. The majority of CI’s contributions come from a few large donors. Nonprofit leaders considering the Big Bettor funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Can we create a tangible and lasting solution to a major problem in a foreseeable time frame?
   • Can we clearly articulate how we will use large-scale funding to achieve our goals?
   • Are any of the wealthiest individuals or foundations interested in our issue and approach?
   
   
5. PUBLIC PROVIDER Many nonprofits, such as the Success for All Foundation, work with government agencies to provide essential social services, such as housing, human services, and education, for which the government has previously defined and allocated funding. Nonprofits that provide these services use a funding model we call Public Provider. In some cases, the government outsources the service delivery function but establishes specific requirements for nonprofits to receive funding, such as reimbursement formulae or a request for proposal (RFP) process. As Public Providers grow, they often seek other funding sources to augment their funding base. TMC (formerly the Texas Migrant Council), which supports children and families in migrant and immigrant communities, is an example of an organization that uses the Public Provider funding model. At its inception in 1971, TMC tapped into the federal government’s Head Start program to fund its initial work, helping children prepare for school by focusing on the bilingual and bicultural needs of families. As TMC grew, its leaders sought to reduce its dependence on this one funding source and to identify other government funds. TMC now receives funding from a variety of federal, state, and local government sources. TMC has expanded from Texas into seven additional states and is offering new programs, such as literacy, prenatal care, and consumer education. Nonprofit leaders considering the Public Provider funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Is our organization a natural match with one or more large, preexisting government programs?
   • Can we demonstrate that our organization will do a better job than our competitors?
   • Are we willing to take the time to secure contract renewals on a regular basis?
   
   
6. POLICY INNOVATOR Some nonprofits, such as Youth Villages, rely on government money and use a funding model we call Policy Innovator. These nonprofits have developed novel methods to address social issues that are not clearly compatible with existing government funding programs. They have convinced government funders to support these alternate methods, usually by presenting their solutions as more effective and less expensive than existing programs. (By contrast, Public Providers tap into existing government programs to provide funds for the services they offer.) An example of a Policy Innovator is HELP USA. This nonprofit provides transitional housing for the homeless and develops affordable permanent housing for low-income families. Andrew Cuomo (son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo) founded HELP USA in 1986 as an alternative to New York’s approach of paying hotels to house the homeless in so-called “welfare hotels.” HELP USA’s innovative approach to the housing crisis came about in an era when homelessness was a prominent public issue and government funders were willing to try a novel approach. Cuomo gained the initial support of government decision makers by positioning his solution as both more effective and less costly, which was critical during New York’s fiscal crisis. In 2007, HELP USA’s revenues were $60 million, almost 80 percent of which came from government sources, half federal and half state and local. The organization was operating in New York City, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Houston, and Buffalo, N.Y. Nonprofit leaders considering the Policy Innovator funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Do we provide an innovative approach that surpasses the status quo (in impact and cost) and is compelling enough to attract government funders, which tend to gravitate toward traditional solutions?
   • Can we provide government funders with evidence that our program works?
   • Are we willing and able to cultivate strong relationships with government decision makers who will advocate change?
   • At this time are there sufficient pressures on government to overturn the status quo?


7. BENEFICIARY BROKERSome nonprofits, such as the Iowa Student Loan Liquidity Corporation, compete with one another to provide government-funded or backed services to beneficiaries. Nonprofits that do this use what we call a Beneficiary Broker funding model. Among the areas where Beneficiary Brokers compete are housing, employment services, health care, and student loans. What distinguishes these nonprofits from other government-funded programs is that the beneficiaries are free to choose the nonprofit from which they will get the service. The Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership (MBHP), a regional nonprofit administering state and federal rental assistance voucher programs in 30 Massachusetts communities, is an example of a nonprofit that uses the Beneficiary Broker funding model. Since launching the organization in 1991, MBHP has developed a reputation as a reliable provider of housing vouchers for families in need. MBHP is the largest provider of housing vouchers in the Boston area, connecting more than 7,500 families to housing at any one time. MBHP also provides related services, such as education and homelessness prevention programs. More than 90 percent of MBHP’s revenue comes from the small administrative fees the state provides as part of the voucher program. The remaining funds come from corporations and foundations. Nonprofit leaders considering the Beneficiary Broker funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Can we demonstrate to the government our superior ability to connect benefit or voucher holders with benefits, such as successful placement rates and customer satisfaction feedback?
   • Can we develop supplemental services that maximize the value of the benefit?
   • Can we master the government regulations and requirements needed to be a provider of these benefits?
   • Can we fi nd ways to raise money to supplement the fees we receive from the benefits program?


8. RESOURCE RECYCLER Some nonprofits, such as AmeriCares Foundation, have grown large by collecting in-kind donations from corporations and individuals, and then distributing these donated goods to needy recipients who could not have purchased them on the market. Nonprofits that operate these types of programs use a funding model we call Resource Recycler. Businesses are willing to donate goods because they would otherwise go to waste (for example, foods with an expiration date), or because the marginal cost of making the goods is low and they will not be distributed in markets that would compete with the producer (for example, medications in developing countries). In kind donations typically account for the majority of revenues, but Resource Recyclers must raise additional funds to support their operating costs. The vast majority of Resource Recyclers are involved in food, agriculture, medical, and nutrition programs and often are internationally focused. The Greater Boston Food Bank (TGBFB), the largest hunger relief organization in New England, is an example of a nonprofit that uses the Resource Recycler funding model. This organization distributes nearly 30 million pounds of food annually to more than 600 local organizations, including food pantries, soup kitchens, day care centers, senior centers, and homeless shelters. TGBFB acquires goods in many ways. The dominant sources of goods are retailers and manufacturers. It also receives surplus food from restaurants and hotels. In 2006, corporate in-kind support accounted for 52 percent of TGBFB’s revenues. Federal and state government programs provide TGBFB with in-kind goods and money, accounting for 23 percent of its annual budget, which TGBFB uses to purchase food for distribution. Cash donations from individuals make up the remaining 25 percent of revenues, covering overhead and capital improvements. Nonprofit leaders considering the Resource Recycler funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Are the products that we distribute likely to be donated on an ongoing basis?
   • Can we develop the expertise to stay abreast of trends in the industries that donate products to us so that we can prepare for fluctuations in donations?
   • Do we have a strategy for attracting the cash we’ll need to fund operations and overhead?


9. MARKET MAKER Some nonprofits, such as the Trust for Public Land, provide a service that straddles an altruistic donor and a pay or motivated by market forces. Even though there is money available to pay for the service, it would be unseemly or unlawful for a for-profit to do so. Nonprofits that provide these services use a funding model we call Market Maker. Organ donation is one example where Market Makers operate. There is a demand for human organs, but it is illegal to sell them. These nonprofits generate the majority of their revenues from fees or donations that are directly linked to their activities. Most Market Makers operate in the area of health and disease, but some also operate in the environmental protection area (for example, land conservation). The American Kidney Fund (AKF) is an example of a nonprofit that uses the Market Maker funding model. AKF was founded in 1971 to help low-income people with kidney failure pay for dialysis. It is now the country’s leading source of financial aid to kidney dialysis patients, providing (in 2006) $82 million in annual grants to 63,500 kidney patients (about 19 percent of all dialysis patients). Before 1996, health care providers were allowed to pay Medicare Part B and Medigap premiums (approximately 20 percent of total costs) for needy dialysis patients. In 1996, the federal government made it illegal for providers to do this because it might trap the patient into receiving dialysis from a particular provider. The new law left thousands of kidney patients unable to afford kidney treatment. AKF noticed this gap and established a program to fill it. AKF now pays these premiums, allowing patients to continue their treatment. AKF is funded primarily by health care providers and other corporations. AKF is now applying the same principles used in its kidney dialysis program for pharmaceuticals used to treat bone loss. Nonprofit leaders considering the Market Maker funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
   • Is there a group of funders with a financial interest in supporting our work?
   • Are there legal or ethical reasons why it would be more appropriate for a nonprofit to deliver the services?
   • Do we already have a trusted program and brand name?


10. LOCAL NATIONALIZER There are a number of nonprofits, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, that have grown large by creating a national network of locally based operations. These nonprofits use a funding model we call Local Nationalizers. These organizations focus on issues, such as poor schools or children in need of adult role models, that are important to local communities across the country, where government alone can’t solve the problem. Most of the money for programs is raised locally, often from individual or corporate donations and special events. Very little of the money comes from government agencies or fees. Very few local operations exceed $5 million in size, but, in totality they can be quite large. Teach for America (TFA) is an example of a nonprofit that uses a Local Nationalizer funding model. TFA recruits, trains, and places recent college graduates into teaching positions in schools across the country. TFA was founded in 1989, and by 2007 had more than $90 million in annual revenues. The organization relies on its 26 regional TFA offices to raise more than 75 percent of its funding. The reason this works is that TFA’s mission—improving the quality of K-12 education—resonates with local funders. TFA developed a culture in which fundraising is considered a critical aspect of the organization at every level, and it recruited local executive directors who would take ownership of attracting regional funding growth. Nonprofit leaders considering the Local Nationalizer funding model should ask themselves the following questions:
    • Does our cause address an issue that local leaders consider a high priority, and is this issue compelling in communities across the country?
    • Does expanding our organization into other communities fulfill our mission?
    • Can we replicate our model in other communities?
    • Are we committed to identifying and empowering high-performing leaders to run local branches of our organization in other communities?

IMPLICATIONS FOR NONPROFITS In the current economic climate it is tempting for nonprofit leaders to seek money wherever they can find it, causing some nonprofits to veer off course. That would be a mistake. During tough times it is more important than ever for nonprofit leaders to examine their funding strategy closely and to be disciplined about the way that they raise money. We hope that this article provides a framework for nonprofit leaders to do just that.

The funding paths that nonprofits take will vary, and not all will find models that support large-scale programs. The good news is that all nonprofits can benefit from greater clarity about their most effective funding model, and it is possible for some nonprofits to develop models that raise large amounts of money. As mentioned earlier, almost 150 new nonprofits (not counting universities and hospitals), surpassed $50 million in annual revenues between 1970 and 2003.

On the other side of the equation, philanthropists are becoming more disciplined about their nonprofit investing. A growing number of foundations, such as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and New Profit Inc., are investing in their grantees to improve both program and funding models. We hope that this article helps philanthropists become clearer about their funding strategy so that they can support their programs more effectively.

As society looks to the nonprofit sector and philanthropy to solve important problems, a realistic understanding of funding models is increasingly important to realizing those aspirations.

Notes 1 In a November 2008 Bridgespan survey of more than 1001 nonprofits, leaders were asked which of eight different and often conflicting fundraising tactics would play some role or a major role in their approach to addressing the downturn. Nearly half (48 percent) of respondents said that six or more would. 2 For example, see Thomas Malone, Peter Weill, Richard Lai, et al., “Do Some Business Models Perform Better Than Others?” MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 4615-06, May 2006. 3 For an early framework looking at “donative” vs. “commercial” nonprofits, see Henry Hansmann, “The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise,” Yale Law Journal, 89, 5, April 1980. 4 William Foster and Gail Fine, “How Nonprofits Get Really Big,” Stanford Social Innovation Review

William Landes Foster is a partner at the Bridgespan Group, where he advises direct service nonprofits and foundations and leads research on social sector funding. He is a coauthor of “Should Nonprofits Seek Profits?” (Harvard Business Review, February 2005), “How Nonprofits Get Really Big” (Stanford Social Innovation Review, spring 2007), and “Money to Grow On” (Stanford Social Innovation Review, fall 2008).

Peter Kim is a consultant in Bridgespan’s Boston office, where he focuses on growth strategies for nonprofits in the education and youth development sectors. Before joining Bridgespan, Kim worked for Goldman Sachs.

Barbara Christiansen is a consultant in Bridgespan’s Boston office, where she focuses on helping organizations plan for expansion. Before joining Bridgespan, Christiansen was a strategy consultant at the Monitor Group, working with pharmaceutical, biotech, and energy companies.

The winning projects, announced in January, are in various stages of development; but all filmmakers have already identified which social entrepreneurs they will profile and will use their grants (as much as $150,000) either to develop and then film their stories or simply to finish projects already in production. The filmmakers can also draw on the wisdom of Sundance veterans, including Cara Mertes, Sundance Documentary Film Program’s director and the program’s creator, to help them construct their story, edit their film, sign a distributor, and identify additional sources of funding.

The filmmakers and their entrepreneurs will also exchange worlds: Entrepreneurs will attend the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and filmmakers will attend the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.

The contest’s 331 submissions were judged by the likes of CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger), and Skoll Foundation senior advancement officer Sandy Herz. The judges’ criteria included the filmmakers’ talent for storytelling, how well their filmmaking style fits the subject, and the solidity of the relationship between filmmaker and entrepreneur, as determined by interviews with each.

The winning film projects are:

• Back to School, produced by Julia Parker Benello; features Sakena Yacoobi, whose Afghan Institute for Learning has educated Afghan women for the past 12 years.
• Green Shall Overcome, directed by Tracy Heather Strain and Megan Gelstein; about Van Jones, a civil rights lawyer, author of the much celebrated The Green Collar Economy, and founder and president of the nonprofit Green for All.
• Poor Consuelo, directed by Peter Friedman and produced by Paul Miller; features Miguel Sabido, whose use of popular soap operas eases the effects of poverty around the world.
• The Team, directed by Patrick Reed and produced by Peter Raymont; about John Marks and Susan Collin Marks, who help Kenyans produce a soap opera series with taboo storylines that seek to bridge their country’s deep ethnic divisions.
• YouthBuild Documentary (working title), directed by Annie Sundberg; featuring YouthBuild founder Dorothy Stoneman, whose organization gets young people involved in rebuilding their urban communities while gaining job skills and continuing their education.

Mertes expects the films to be released in theaters, distributed as a “Stories of Change” series, or aired on television. Not only are the films that good, Mertes says, but documentary film has also become the hot new genre. “People are looking for ways to understand their world, which has become increasingly complex—and documentaries are extremely effective in helping you do that.” Documentary filmmakers have already focused on social entrepreneurs, Mertes adds. “Filmmakers are attracted to good stories—and you find those with social entrepreneurs.”