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Yesterday I pointed to CNBC's lack of knowledge of nonprofit evaluation. In this post Dan Pallotta points to CNN's sensationalization of compensation issues in the nonprofit sector.
Philanthropy Daily Digest
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In Support of Panel Discussions
My request for input on ways we could structure the Tactical Philanthropy track at the SoCap conference so that we move beyond potentially boring panel discussions has generated some solid, supportive ideas.
But I just got the following email from Ken Berger, CEO of Charity Navigator (published with his permission):
Ken writes:
My basic assumption is that people come to panel discussions at least in part because they want to hear the views of the panelists (at least I do). When it goes otherwise I find myself frustrated that in the push for participatory process, we minimize the valuable nuggets of wisdom we can get from good presenters.
Along those lines, I believe short presentations by panelists are of value. Red and green cards in the audience would piss me off by the way. Again it is false participatory process rather than meaningful feedback. Yes we want audience participation and engagement but we also want panelists to share their knowledge in some substantive way. Good old fashioned Q&A after brief presentations work. If the problem is boring speakers, then don’t invite them next time based on audience surveys post the presentation.
Finally, I find those supposed informal discussions in a round table fashion another false effort at informality and homeyness. It does not allow a panelist with knowledge to provide depth of information. Everybody get’s little sound bites and the audience again is left hanging.
What do you think? Frankly, I agree that poorly executed panel alternatives are worse than a traditional panel. The real question is what does the audience want? A number of you will be attending SoCap. How do you want to see the sessions structured?
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Best Philanthropy Speakers
In light of my last post looking for how to structure the most engaging conference sessions, I have another question.
Who are the most amazing, dynamic and engaging speakers you’ve ever seen talk about philanthropy, the social sector and social capital markets?
Too often, people end up on panels or giving presentations because they are experts. But the fail the communication challenge and end up boring their audience.
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Remixing the Social Capital Markets Conference
A month ago we announced that Tactical Philanthropy Advisors was partnering with the Social Capital Markets conference to produce a Tactical Philanthropy track at this year’s conference. I subsequently offered up a list of eight panel concepts and received outstanding input from many of you on which panels were of most interest. We’re now preparing to finalize the topic lineup, which will be a modified version of the original list and will feature some reader suggested topics that were not included in our first draft.
But the most consistent and challenging reader input we receive was a series of suggestions on how to change the format of the conference. We heard loud and clear that people are sick and tired of traditional panel discussions. So the organizers of the conference have given their go ahead for me to change up the format of the Tactical Philanthropy track.
Today I’m back to ask for your input on a better conference format. If you’ve ever been bored in a conference session even though the topic was of interest to you, we want to hear from you. The social capital markets are simply too exciting to have the life sucked out of the topic by boring presentations.
A few things we’re thinking about:
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We could run “panels” which consist of two people who have been told to bring their A game and give a killer, short presentation (a la TED) and then go immediately to a strong moderator running audience driven Q&A.
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We could leverage the expert audience that SoCap attracts and have a moderator run a facilitated conversation with the audience rather then make the panelist the center of attention.
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We could hand out red and green cards to audience members and have them raise the green card to show agreement and the red card to show disagreement while the panelists are talking. This real time feedback would help the moderator focus in on topics that needed to be more deeply explored.
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We could skip any sort of prepared remarks by panelists and instead let the audience create a list of questions and topics at the beginning of the session. The moderator would then use the audience created agenda to run the panel.
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We could run structured debates instead of panels. We could bring in two panelists to argue a specific proposition and defend their point of view from audience questions.
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We could run short mini panels, which every 15-20 minutes would swap places with moderator chosen audience members.
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We could focus on producing actual work. Rather then simply discussing, for example, the most important non-financial metrics in nonprofit analysis, we could work with the audience to produce a top five list that could then be the focus of additional post conference conversations.
Now its your turn. I’m looking for specific ideas for how we structure the Tactical Philanthropy track. Just as your thoughts on topic concepts fundamentally shifted our thoughts, I’m looking to you to structure the Tactical Philanthropy track so that each session grips the audience’s attention and spurs people to action.
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CNBC on Obama’s Charitable Giving
On Friday, the Obama administration announced the charities that would receive the $1.4 million that president Obama was awarded when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Interestingly, CNBC, the leading financial news channel looked to cover the news and brought on Chronicle of Philanthropy staff writer Ian Wilhelm to talk about the picks.
What transpired was interesting because CNBC thought they had a “gotcha moment” when they pointed out the overhead expense ratios of some of the organizations were not perfect according to Charity Navigator. They even singled out College Summit, one of the most well regarded education charities, to ask about its seemingly low percent of revenue going to fund programs.
To Ian’s credit, he quickly pointed out that many people, even Charity Navigator, do not believe overhead expense ratios are the best way to evaluate nonprofits and do not capture how effective they are.
The video clip is interesting because it demonstrates how woefully ignorant the financial news media is about philanthropy. Considering philanthropy is a $300 billion a year industry and nonprofits book $1.5 trillion in revenue each year, the financial news media is dropping the ball on a major segment of the economy.
(Full disclosure: I’m on the advisory board to Charity Navigator helping them launch a new rating methodology.)
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Philanthropy Daily Digest
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Larry Blumenthal, formally social media guru at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, explains why babies and drunks are good at falling down stairs and the lessons this offers to foundations wanting to deploy social media.
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"Nonprofits are heroes, not unskilled hired help, and they need to start owning their role and championing their worth," writes Todd Cohen as he reflects on new study showing nonprofit status makes people think an organization is less competent than for-profits.
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Curmudgeonly Comments: Online Capital Markets for Nonprofits?
This is a guest post from George Overholser of the Nonprofit Finance Fund. This post follows the bullet point format George used when he wrote the Bullet Point Manifesto guest post last year.
By George Overholser
- Someone recently defined nonprofit “mid-caps” as organizations with revenues in the $5 million to $25 million range.
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Philanthropy Daily Digest
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Nathaniel Whittemore grades president Obama's Noble charitable giving. He's gets some A's and some F's.
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New research shows our heads are filled with "mirror neuron" that make us empathetic. Some people have more than others.
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President Obama announces the nonprofits that will receive his Nobel prize money. It will be interesting to see if an analysis of these picks gains traction.
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Social Solutions is hosting a webinar with Paul Tough, the author of "Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America" which will examine how you can use the lessons learned by Harlem Children's Zone.
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I'm not the only one thinking about the relevancy of behavioral economics to philanthropy. Stanford's Center for Social Innovation just hosted a day long event on the topic.
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What Drives Philanthropic Success?
Peter Frumkin is the author of Strategic Giving, an excellent book that I reviewed last year. Earlier this week, Peter wrote a post on the Philanthropy Central blog calling into question some of his own assumptions about what drivers are most important to successful philanthropy.
Peter wrote:
…I am increasingly troubled by a recurrent worry. It is a worry about what actually drives philanthropic success.
Let’s define two categories of philanthropic processes. The first is technocratic, rationalistic, and ordered: It includes program positioning and issue research, alignment and coordination across initiatives, logic model drafting, white paper or concept paper development, proposal reviewing, adapting and applying new information technologies, program evaluation design and implementation, and all the other day-to-day professional work that goes into modern philanthropy…
Now consider what might be called the more humanistic, interpretive, and adaptive work in philanthropy, which really comes down to judging the capacity, character, resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of the people who seek philanthropic funds. This is the kind of ill-defined and untheorized work that comes down to judgment and gut assessment by the donor of the person sitting across the desk from them. Call this Category Two work.
Now to my worry: What if Category One philanthropic work really only explained a small part of philanthropic effectiveness and social impact? What if Category Two work explained a vastly larger percent of outcomes? If this were a social science morel, we might ask what the r-square statistics of these two types of philanthropic work are if the dependent variable is effectiveness. The r-square statistic ranges between 0 and 1 and tells us how much variation in the dependent variable is attributable to changes in the independent variable (here, that would be Category One and Two philanthropic work).
My concern is that the growing philanthropic industrial complex—made up of consultants, researchers, trainers, and advisors—believes, earnestly believes, that the r-square statistic for Category One work is high, perhaps up to .75, and this justifies the substantial amounts of money invested in building up and supporting this work. But I have come to doubt this assumption over time and now think the r-square statistic might actually be very low for Category One work. I am more and more of the belief that Category Two work has the big r-square and explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit. The problem is that Category One work has an army of salespeople out and about selling tools and frameworks, while there is virtually no infrastructure to support Category Two work.
What I think the field really needs is a systematic guide to the difficult art of assessing the innate ability and capacity of grant seekers to conceive wisely a vision and then actually carry out their plans. If donors cannot judge character and capacity correctly, all the tricks of the philanthropic trade will not help them achieve their goals. What such a guide would look like I do not know, but I doubt the current philanthropic industrial complex has the will to design and deliver it.
This is a dramatic declaration on Peter’s part. Peter is the kind of academic who talks about r-squared statistics in blog posts. For him to write that the “untheorized work that comes down to judgment and gut assessment… explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit,” is a shot across the bow of the philanthropy industry from someone who should more naturally side with the philanthropic process folks.
Personally, I think Peter is right. It isn’t comfortable to believe that the intangible art of judgment and gut assessment is the most important driver of philanthropic success. It would be far easier if we could all just learn specific, repeatable processes, that while complicated, insured that our giving was effective. But I think the evidence from other fields fully supports the importance of judgment over process.
In investing, Warren Buffett has a process, but it is his intangible gift for spotting value that makes him great. If the reverse was true, then anyone who read the vast literature covering the process that Buffett uses could fully expect to replicate his success.
In writing, novelists around the world study the writing styles of the greats. But The Elements of Style won’t make you Ernest Hemingway.
In economics, thousands of men and women run rigorous studies in an attempt to predict how the economy will behave. Yet we know that this process fails them time and again and fails to even adequately explain historical events.
This is not to suggest that process doesn’t matter. In the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell explains the incredibly important role of judgment and gut assessment in expert decision making. But he does not declare process and rigor is not important. In seems to me that systematic processes are necessary but not sufficient building blocks on which to develop effective philanthropy.
Unless we heed Peter’s warning that “judgment and gut assessment… explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit",” all the efforts to build a more effective philanthropy will do nothing more than create elegant mental models that sound great, but fail to make the world a better place.
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Philanthropy Daily Digest
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After his essay last month in which he worried that many efforts to measure nonprofit results have gone far off course, Mario Marino of Venture Philanthropy Partners returns with an essay looking at the "whys" and "whats" to measure rather than the "hows".
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New York City is beginning an effort to encourage city resources to be deployed in data-driven ways. The project includes a number of foundations and a member of the working group who is building it told me they are looking to the impact investing focused IRIS project as a model. New York City spend $4 billion a year on human service contracts.
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