Category Archives: Cross-Disciplinary Conversations

GlobalGiving Weighs in on Kiva Issues

February 5, 2008 – 8:21 am

Writing on the GlobalGoodness blog, GlobalGiving co-founder Dennis Whittle quotes my recent post on Kiva.org and adds his own thoughts:

In the financial markets, there are rules that if a particular exchange is unable to execute an order, they must route that order to a competing exchange immediately.

This is from a nice blog post by Sean Stannard-Stockton. He points out that in the nascent philanthropic financial markets, there is no obligation to re-route donors to another philanthropic exchange under similar circumstances.

At GlobalGiving, we have informal agreements with a number of other exchanges, and we do refer donors to partners when it makes sense. This helps us meet our pledge to donors that they will be satisfied with their experience at GlobalGiving. It also helps our partners grow, and it generates goodwill for all involved, which pays off over the long term.

Together with a loose coalition of other philanthropic exchanges from around the world, we have been exploring whether it makes sense to develop a formal inter-operability framework. This framework might include common standards and the ability to automatically fulfill donations referred by other exchanges.

Sean is right: making the non-profit social capital market more effective means that this type of collaboration needs to be accelerated.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropy, microfinance | Comments (2)

Financial Times Philanthropy Conversation

January 30, 2008 – 9:38 am

The first guest column to the Financial Times for the philanthropy series put together by my editor Lauren Foster, was published recently. Rick Cohen, a national correspondent for Nonprofit Quarterly and former executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, is the first author. He takes on the presidential candidates’ commitment to philanthropy.

Throughout the New Hampshire presidential primary, non-profit activists questioned the candidates about their commitment, if elected, to promote charity and philanthropy.

Barack Obama said he would create a social entrepreneurship fund to support innovative, non-profit projects. Rudy Giuliani endorsed continuing federal tax deductions for charitable contributions and overall favourable tax treatment for non-profits. Mike Huckabee confirmed that non-profits certainly will have a place in his White House.

Yet most candidates’ past histories of non-profit and philanthropic engagement tell more…

You can read the full story here.

If you are interested in contributing to the series, read my prior post on the project.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Media, Philanthropy | Comments (0)

Information Sharing in Philanthropy

January 23, 2008 – 11:45 am

I wrote a post a while ago called Paul Brest Needs a Blog (Paul is the head of the Hewlett Foundation). I’ve been an advocate for more people in philanthropy to start blogging in general. In the above mentioned post I wrote:

So why should foundations blog? It seems to me that the imperative is not for them to embrace technology so much as it is for foundations to join and begin to drive the online philanthropy conversation. [But] it is the two-way flow of information that blogs encourage that is important, not blogs themselves.

Even so I’ve noted recently that some people feel that I’ve pushed blogging rather than information sharing. As the conversation we’re all having unfolds I think it is important to take a step back and make sure we haven’t missed the forest for the trees. I wish I had expressed my thoughts with more clarity.
When Phil Cubeta recently asked why nonprofits should blog, astute reader Michele Moon asked:

I’m not entirely sure why it’s blogging, in particular, that’s the focus of discussion, especially because it’s now considered a little bit old-hat, Web 1.5. What is it about the format that makes it so essential to transparency and its tyrant? Is it actually blogging you want to see - personal, real-time updates and editorials, followed (if you’re lucky) by people who read, comment, and sometimes stick around to converse?… Why should it be blogging that we aim to do, or is that shorthand for more complicated online interactivity?

I’m guilty of using “blogging” as short hand for information sharing. I’ll stop making that mistake.

When economists speak about efficient markets they are talking about a situation where money flows to the organizations that can put it to the best use. Widely available, robust information is a critical factor for a functioning efficient market. Recently, in a conversation with Phil Buchanan and other readers on this issue I wrote the following (you can find the full thread here. The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently highlighted the conversation):

In an efficient market, investing is a zero sum game. Maximum returns are generated globally so the only question is matching an investor’s risk/return preferences. In inefficient markets, higher returns accrue to more “effective/smarter” investors. In a public benefit market, since all returns accrue to everyone, investors should desire an efficient market within which they could align their social investments with their personal values/goals.

The philanthropic capital markets are highly inefficient. Far more inefficient than any for-profit marketplace.

Therefore, it seems to me that making the philanthropic capital markets more efficient should be the number one priority of large funders who desire to be effective…

I’m not arguing that the public will make better decisions than the “experts”. I’m saying that efficient markets will produce better outcomes than inefficient markets. In the for-profit world, inefficient markets are great for “expert” investors because they can exploit superior information to generate outperformance of investment returns. But these inefficient markets reduce the total returns in the market by preventing capital from flowing to the best performing investments.

What I’m saying is that unlike in the for-profit market, “expert” philanthropist enjoy no advantage from superior information. The returns they generate accrue to the public, and so no “outperformance” is possible. Instead, they should be interested in the total market functioning at a higher level, since that is the only way to increase the social return on investment that accrues to everyone.

This is the challenge we face as a field. How can we ensure that the $300 billion that is given to charity each year is flowing to the organizations that can put the money to its best use? The key will be our ability to supply market participants with widely available, robust information. Blogs are one tool in this work. There are many others.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Effective Giving, Evaluation, Foundations, Giving Blogs, Grantmaking, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Open Source Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropic Technology, Philanthropy, Transparency | Comments (18)

Consilience in Philanthropy

January 17, 2008 – 12:39 pm

I wrote a post for On Philanthropy that appears today. You can read the story here.

Have you ever heard someone say, “We need to get out of our silos and work together”? The silo effect is one of those over used metaphors of the business world, but the issue it raises is real. In short, silo thinking refers to a situation (common in most organizations) where people do not communicate across departments.

In large private foundations, there has long been a silo effect across program and investment staff. But recently, some foundations are trying to overcome this barrier and encourage the two departments to work together.

I believe the key to unlocking the potential of philanthropy is to break out of our silos and embrace consilience. Consilience means “unity of knowledge” (or more literally the “jumping together” of knowledge). The phrase was popularized by famed biologist Edward O. Wilson in his aptly named book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. What consilience recognizes is that every field of study captures only a snapshot of reality. While economists might believe that economics is the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, the fact is economic theory does not actually describe reality until you begin to take into account the biological, psychological, and sociological behaviors of humans. Even then, a broader systems approach is needed to understand how the market affects the environment and human culture, as well as the moral implications of market outcomes.

Today, philanthropy is faced with the coming together of traditional models of giving with market based social good production. While this systems based approach to philanthropy is promising, too often it seems that…

You can read the full article and leave comments at On Philanthropy by clicking here.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (0)

United Way on Google Finance

January 10, 2008 – 9:57 am

After reading a United Way blogger’s reaction to my prediction that UW would develop an industry standard, narrative outcome measurement form and my discussion of Google Finance, I’ve started a discussion thread on the Google Finance page for United Way.

The United Way’s focus on Outcome Measurement is wonderful. I wish  there were more resources like the ones you list at http://www.unitedway.org/Outcomes/  elsewhere on the web. I was wondering if someone at United Way could  explain to me a little bit about how your organization thinks about  qualitative vs. quantitative evaluation of nonprofits. It seems to me  that quantitative metrics are probably easier to measure, but less  valuable than more difficult to measure qualitative outcomes.

Any help you can provide in thinking through this issue would be  wonderful. Thanks!

FYI: While the Red Cross has stopped posting to the thread I started on their page, I understand from sources that they are taking the questions about their effectiveness quite seriously.

I wonder how the United Way will respond?

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Effective Giving, Impact Measurement, Philanthropic Technology, Philanthropy, Transparency, nptech | Comments (3)

Rebooting Nonprofit Evaluation Debate

January 7, 2008 – 9:46 am

A lively debate about nonprofit evaluation and metrics has been raging in response to my request for input on my meeting later this week with Google.org. However, the conversation has splintered into a debate over whether a systematic, “metric” driven process of scientific measurement is needed, or whether the frame of scientific measurement is “an epistemologically impoverished frame” through which to understand nonprofit evaluation.

I personally believe evaluating nonprofits is mostly about evaluating their output (the social good they produce). Since it is difficult (impossible?) to quantify this output, I think the focus on metrics as a framework for evaluation is misplaced. Metrics can be used, but they should be designed on a case-by-case basis for each situation. That being said, I think the conversation has fallen into the trap of being constrained by historical frames of reference.

I want to have a different conversation.

I’m interested in what information is available to donors who want to evaluate a nonprofit and which of this information is useful. Google.com is mostly a resource that points to information; they don’t tend to create a lot of their own content. So if we imagine a future version of the nonprofit data inside of Google Finance, I don’t imagine it will be some new metric that we design. Instead, it will point to existing information on the web. When I first wrote about nonprofit info in Google Finance, I said I hoped they would not display Charity Navigator ratings (although I would support them noting if a nonprofit had a zero or one star rating since I do believe that a Charity Navigator rating at this level is a significant red flag)

So the conversation I want to have is what information do readers think that donors should consider when evaluating a nonprofit? Then secondly, where or how can this information be captured online so that it can be displayed in Google Finance?

Open Invitation to Foundation Employees

I realize that if you work at a foundation, you may not want to jump into a conversation that involves telling another foundation what to do. However, the conversation we’re having here is really important and would not be complete without the input of the army of program officers (ie. Nonprofit evaluators) that read this blog. So please consider commenting anonymously (just let us know you’re a program officer) or comment publicly and realize that we’re having a broad conversation about nonprofit evaluation that goes beyond Google.org and Google Finance

Open Invitation to Nonprofit Employees

A conversation about nonprofit evaluation would not be complete without the input of the nonprofits being evaluated. What information do you, as nonprofits, what donors looking at when they evaluate you? It could be that someday the Google Finance website about your organization becomes the top ranked search result on google for your nonprofit. What do you want on that page?

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Grantmaking, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Social Media, Transparency, nonprofits, nptech | Comments (70)

Philanthropy Conversation Wants You!

January 4, 2008 – 9:09 am

Rather than post today, I’m going to point you back to this post and encourage you to join the growing conversation in the comments section. I think the topic of this conversation is the most important issue facing philanthropy today. The fact that this conversation is centered around Google adds time sensitive relevance to the subject, but the subject matter at hand is far bigger than Google. The issue is how can we improve the available information about nonprofits so that the $300 billion+ donated to charity each year can flow to the best nonprofits. Improving the flow of philanthropic capital will completely transform the nonprofit sector and you won’t believe what we as a sector will be able to accomplish.

So click here and add your voice to the mix. Philanthropy needs you.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Effective Giving, Grantmaking, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Social Media, Transparency, nptech | Comments (2)

What to Measure and Why in Philanthropy

January 3, 2008 – 12:24 pm

I’m meeting with someone from Google.org next week to talk about what kind of information I think they should make available about nonprofits in Google Finance and other ways that Google.com’s mission statement to “organizing the world’s information” can be directed at the Third Sector.

In preparation, I’d like to spend some time speaking as a community about this issue. I encourage you to leave comments or email me your thoughts.

In response to the thread I started on the Google Finance Red Cross board about how effective they are, I got a comment from Leyla Farah of Cause + Effect public relations:

One item I’d offer: a measurement of “average cost of impact” - in other words, the organization’s total budget divided by the total number of people (or animals, or acres of land) it’s benefited within a specific time period. That metric would (1) force each organization to provide a definition of how it helps people (etc.) - and (2) force it to account for all the costs associated with providing that help.

While Phil Cubeta of Gift Hub scolded me for focusing on metrics:

Paradise Lost versus Gone with the Wind. What metrics do we use to determine which is better? Some subject matter requires judgment, taste, discernment, even wisdom. We have movie critics, book critics, educators to help us make more discriminating judgments. Before we cry ourselves hoarse over metrics, we have to ask whether philanthropy is more like art or more like business. The call for metrics can be a bullying move by the half educated to impose their MBA logic on a sector whose reason for being is that it stands in contrast to both government and business. As the old saying goes, “Do not attempt to cure what you do not understand.” Stressing metrics, Sean, is in terrible taste. You paint yourself as Barbarian.

Personally, I’d like to state that I don’t intend to stress metrics as being valuable unto themselves. However, I do think that all things in life can be judged, at least in each person’s personal view, as being bad, good, better and best (I’m sure there are some exceptions, but you get the point). I think it is critical that we find ways to judge nonprofits so that philanthropic dollars can flow to the organizations that do the most good in the world. To me, funding the best of what is available is far more important than trying to invent the next big thing. I think that information about nonprofits is what is needed and this is why I care about nonprofits being in the Google Finance portal.

As a professional investor in for-profit companies, I can tell you that there are very few (none) golden metrics that allow you to comprehensively judge one for-profit against others. Even very widely used metrics like “price to earnings ratios”, “dividend yields”, “profit margins”, and “earning growth rates”, have been show in practice to be very useful, but not in any way adequate to judging the superiority of one investment choice vs. another on their own.

In my Philanthropy Predictions for 2008 that I wrote for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, I made one reference to measurement:

A United Way-authored outcome-measurement template will be adopted by the sector as the standard format for nonprofit organizations to report on their effectiveness. The narrative-driven form will soon be available for download from the home pages of many nonprofits.

Note that I suggest a “narrative-driven form”. If you read analyst reports on for-profit investments, you’ll see a lot of numbers and metrics, but the heart of the report is a narrative about the company.

This brings me to an excellent comment from the thread mentioned above from an anonymous “young staffer”:

If I may carry the Paradise Lost vs. Gone with the Wind analogy a little further, I think it raises some interesting points.

The first is that there are plenty of potentially relevant metrics with which one could back up one’s a claim for each work’s superiority: their longevity in years, the number of universities that include them in introductory freshmen humanities courses (as a proxy measure of their centrality to our cultural canon), a RottenTomatoes.com-style survey of critics. I can even imagine poor grad students counting allusions to them in last year’s bestsellers.

Relying solely on any one of these potentially valid measures, however, would obviously leave you wide open to criticism for the flaws of your methodology and the limits of the analysis. To construct a strong argument for your preferred choice, one could use both the metrics and qualitative measures. Same goes for nonprofits - the measures are neither perfect nor complete, but that is not the same as nonexistent.

I think the other point is the difficulty of comparing apples and oranges. Let me reframe the question as “Paradise Lost” work of literature vs. “Gone with the Wind” work of film. Both are widely-considered seminal works in their mediums. It’s not hard to imagine metrics, like those above, that could easily distinguish each as a leader within its respective medium. It is much harder, however, to compare them very convincingly across mediums. An author and a film buff might reach very different conclusions about which one matters more in today’s culture. Their distinctive values and tastes will influence that decision.

The same, I think, is true for nonprofits. Too universal a measure like “average cost of impact” might not be helpful for identifying whether a great afterschool program in New York or a great community health program in Uganda is better. The costs and the measures of impact are on different scales. But metrics certainly might help you identify each within its field as the seminal nonprofit. From there, one’s values and tastes might be expected to guide your choice.

So there you have it, a good beginning to an important conversation. If there was a single webpage, like this one for the Red Cross, or this one for Cisco Systems, that contained all the information you would like to see when you wanted to examine a nonprofit for the first time and decide if you might want to support them, what information would you like there to be on the site?

Google.org owes me nothing and anything I tell them might be ignored. But on the other hand, I will deliver the message that we co-create over the next week in this discussion. Someone from one of the largest (and oldest) foundations has already asked me to pass on their offer of help to Google.org after reading my posts on the subject. I do think that any effort that you the reader put into this discussion will be heard by the powers that be at Google.org, even if they do not take action.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Effective Giving, Grantmaking, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Technology, Philanthropy, Social Media, Transparency, nonprofits, nptech | Comments (37)

Results Only Work Environments in Philanthropy

December 19, 2007 – 9:00 am

The runner-up in the One Post Challenge was An Evacuation of the Ivory Towers by Trista Harris, in which she argued the merits of foundation program officers going office-less and working in the field full time. In the article, she wrote:

Flexible work schedules and telecommuting have become commonplace in many for-profit organizations, but a Minnesota company has taken flexibility to the next level with the results-only work environment. Best Buy, an electronics retailer, has given its employees full control of how, when, and where they work. A guiding premise is that “work is something you do, not somewhere you go.” This means that employees take conference calls while fishing and start project planning after their kids go to bed. This new model has decreased turnover but, more important to our conversation, has improved productivity by 35%.

The people behind Best Buy’s transformation of their work environment are Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Their book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It is due out in April 2008. Intrigued by Trista’s post, a member of Cali and Jody’s team emailed me the following:

As you might have guessed, ROWE is a very polarizing concept. People love it, and embrace it, or hate it, and are vocal about it.

We’ll support you in any way we can, would welcome the opportunity to post about it, and go into more detail about how it could work in a variety of settings, not just the corporate offices of a retailer.

We get emails from churches (Why do I have to be in a church on Sunday from 9am to 10am to pray?), High school students (If I’m an A student, why do I have to sit in class?) non-profits (Shouldn’t I be paid for the “good” I do? Not the hours I spend in the office?, and all kinds of corporations (I hate my job, help?)

We loved the revolution analogy, because ROWE was created at Best Buy from people buried in the organization, and when C-level people are pitched the idea, they shoot it down.  (after the Business Week cover story ran we had half of the Fortune 500 companies call or email us)

It’s a grass roots movement, and little revolutions are going to be happening in companies, foundations and non-profits all over the world. (Germany, Scandinavia, the UK and Australia are FASCINATED with ROWE).

You can learn more about Results Only Work Environments at www.CaliAndJody.com. I think Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It might just become the hot book of 2008 with the foundation set.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Effective Giving, Foundations, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (0)

Financial Times Philanthropy Conversation

December 18, 2007 – 8:54 am

Lauren Foster is my editor at the Financial Times (I write a monthly column about philanthropy for her). I think that Lauren is building the philanthropic coverage at the Financial Times to a level that is going to make it a must read paper for the philanthropic field. Check out their recent Global Philanthropy special to see what I mean.

Now Lauren is doing something new. Something I think is really important. I’m proud to say that the One Post Challenge had an influence on how Lauren decided to frame her now project. Thanks to all of you that worked so hard to make the OPC a success. I encourage you to forward Lauren’s invitation to anyone you know who might want to submit something, or better yet submit something yourself!

The Financial Times is inviting submissions for thoughtful, illuminating commentary from philanthropic leaders. The bylined contributions should not only express the views of the author but also seek to provoke conversation. Email a one paragraph proposal to lauren.foster@ft.com. Suitable ideas will be commissioned at +/- 850 words for publication in the Weekend FT’s “Wealth at the Weekend” page (published length may vary). The FT’s Wealth page will regularly feature opinion pieces by esteemed guest writers - be they from private foundations, public charities, non-profits or advisories – in an effort to create a forum that fosters debate and encourages the dissemination of information and ideas.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Media, Philanthropy | Comments (2)

Google Nonprofit Pages Feature Foundations

December 14, 2007 – 11:45 pm

The Google Nonprofit pages feature large private foundations as well as nonprofits. I can’t wait to see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation discussion board explode once people wake up to this new service.

I thought I’d go ahead and post a question to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation discussion board. You can find the thread here. I’ve reprinted my question below. I look forward to their response.

To the Hewlett Staff,
I live in California and have a two year old son and a four year old
daughter. I’m very interested directing some of my philanthropic
resources to improve K-12 education in my state. I see from your
website that you have a program focus on Improving Public Education in
California. I’m particularly interested in the third “strand” of this
focus, which you describe as “supporting innovative approaches to
improving the quality of academic instruction in the state’s
demographically diverse public schools.”

I’m personally at a loss to identify how I might donate my money to a
nonprofit which is improving the quality of academic instruction in
the state. I realize that picking a four star nonprofit from Charity
Navigator doesn’t make any sense, since improving education likely
requires extensive program evaluation and educated staff (both
categorized as overhead).

Would you mind pointing me in the direction of a few nonprofits that
your program staff believes are worthy of my donation? If you wouldn’t
mind linking to some of the research you’ve performed to come to your
conclusions, it would make me feel better to not just be following you
blindly.

I look forward to partnering with you in your efforts to support
education. While my donations might pale in comparison to your annual
grants, I know a ton of other parents who would be thrilled to donate
time and money to your grantees if they felt that doing so would
actually do something to improve education.

-Sean Stannard-Stockton
TacticalPhilanthropy.com

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Effective Giving, Foundations, Grantmaking, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Transparency, nptech | Comments (1)

Philanthropy Reading

December 4, 2007 – 5:02 pm

Google Analytics lets me see a lot about how people interact with Tactical Philanthropy. The number of comments and emails I get is one form of feedback. So is data like the most read posts, the posts that people spent the most time reading, and a number of other metrics. So without passing any judgment on the following list (or those posts left off it), these are the entries to the One Post Challenge that ranked highest across a series of web analytic metrics. If you missed any of these, click through and give them a read.

Guidestar for Sale: An argument for Guidestar selling out to Google or another online giant. Guidestar CEO Bob Ottenhoff responded in the comments.

Why Young Alumni Don’t Give: An examination of the generational differences between young alumni and university development departments. Points out that mailing donation requests to digital native alumni who don’t have a checkbook or even own stamps is not a very good strategy.

An Evacuation of the Ivory Towers: A proposal for foundation program officers to get out of their offices and become office-less (in order to better understand the communities they serve). People in the comments section loved the idea.

The Burden of “Burden of Disease”: An examination of the problems that certain metrics looked at by foundations can have on nonprofits that don’t fit the metrics’ assumptions.

Foundations Should Be More Like Public Companies: An argument for why foundations need to imitate public companies in the areas of public disclosure, customer service, and shareholder vs. stakeholder responsibility.

Charity Navigator’s Vital Mission Hides Flawed Rankings: This post makes a theoretical argument for the flaws in Charity Navigator’s model and shows evidence of how competing systems base on similar data return widely different results. This post was highlighted on the Chronicle of Philanthropy website.

Are We Killing Our Grantees?: Authored by a program director at the Lumina Foundation, this post wonders if foundations and other donors are giving too much money to certain nonprofits.

Volunteers Who Do Not Show: A rant from a volunteer program coordinator about volunteers that flake out on their commitment and what to do about it. This post was also featured on the Chronicle of Philanthropy website.

Why Philanthropy Should Embrace Controversy: A post from a family foundation employee arguing that viewing philanthropy as a nice thing to be celebrated rather than a controversial subject matter to be debated sells short the actual importance of philanthropy.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in One Post Challenge, Philanthropy | Comments (2)

And The Winner Is…

December 4, 2007 – 8:58 am

Surprise, surprise, the post $500 For Your Nonprofit won, no… absolutely dominated, the One Post Challenge. Regarding whether the post actually furthered the online philanthropy conversation, I will note that a number of people who were drawn to Tactical Philanthropy to vote for their charity stuck around and commented on other posts.

Without further ado here is the victory speech from the author of $500 For Your Nonprofit, the anonymous author of the blog Don’t Tell The Donor.

By “a fundraiser”

When I submitted my entry to Sean’s “One Post Challenge”, it wasn’t my intention to hijack the contest.

Fourteen months ago when I started my Don’t Tell the Donor blog, it was one of only a handful of fundraising blogs. Over the past year, I was initially excited to see so many more bloggers add to the online conversation.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of websites has all too often produced an incestuous conversation. For this medium to reach its strongest potential and serve as a true benefit to the nonprofits we serve, we must find a way to reach out beyond a limited number of fundraisers and foundation staffers to engage directly with individual donors.

As I wrote in my initial post, “blogging is not about talking AT PEOPLE, it’s about making readers part of the story and giving them a reason to be engaged.”

Engaged was a bit of an understatement. Within the first 24 hours, my post generated 57 comments, which by itself would have been enough to win the contest.

Sean himself noted that the deluge of hopeful supporters leaving comments for their cause generated more traffic to the website than his mentions in both the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the New York Times. That single comment proved my point more than the huge number of posts that came in.

…oh, but by the way… there were a heckuva a lot of comments. As I write this now, it looks like there are 683 total comments. I will leave it to Sean to see if he thinks there was any cheating with multiple votes coming from the same IP address (Sean’s note: The voting seems to be valid. Some duplicate voting on both sides, but nothing that would change the outcome)… but here is how I saw the horserace unfold:

A total of ten nonprofits tried to lobby for votes. The early leader, Pride at Work after generating more than 60 votes within the first 36 hours. Thanks to one dedicated activist who was able to use his own site to reach out to more people, Pride at Work built a commanding lead… so much of a lead, they stopped thinking about the contest.

Then, on November 26th, someone who went by the name “Kjerstin” posted comment #75 - the first vote for Forge. That was followed by more than 50 more votes for Forge within the next couple hours… and the battle lines were drawn.

For the last week, votes poured in from both charities. It wasn’t until late on December 3rd when Pride at Work must have thought the voting was over when Forge moved in for their final push. The refugee assistance group poured on more than 250 votes in the final day and won the contest by a final vote (through 683 total votes) by a score of 423-231.

Truth be told, I had never heard of either group when this contest started, but I have learned a lot about them in the past couple weeks… I hope others have. Both groups did an excellent outreach marketing job… and I would suggest that even though I will donate the $500 gift card (Sean’s note: the prize increased to $750 during the contest) I won to Forge, I would like to suggest that Sean award his second $250 award to the second place group in this contest, Pride at Work.

My work here is done. This “fundraiser” is off to run a couple victory laps around the blogosphere. Congratulations to Sean and to Forge (who apparently live about an hour away from each hour). I would encourage other bloggers to organize these challenges… it seems much more effective than those bland carnivals.

Thanks again for letting me be a part.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Giving Blogs, One Post Challenge, Philanthropy, Prize Philanthropy, Social Media, nptech | Comments (3)

Why Philanthropy Should Embrace Controversy

November 30, 2007 – 2:30 pm

This entry to the One Post Challenge comes from “a young foundation staffer”. The author is “a recent college graduate who has interned with an operating foundation, a venture fund at a community foundation, and now a family foundation.”

By  “a young foundation staffer”

The work philanthropists and foundations is inherently controversial.

Decisions to grant money to a particular cause and to a particular organization are always decisions not to give that money elsewhere. No individual and no foundation has enough money to solve all of the problems out there or to even to really fund all the approaches to a particular problem out there. Foundation work and strategies are about decisions: to give in this country or city, to fund short-term or long-term solutions, to prevent the problem or treat the disease, to listen to a community member’s idea or to the expert advice.

In this sense, philanthropy is like voting. We generally want to encourage more people to do it because democracy is healthier when more people engage it in. But stopping at ”more is better” and “any is good” is wrong, deeply misleading, and potentially harmful to society. It is also healthier for democracy if people are informed voters and if people disagree and debate about who should receive their vote. These are tough issues and tough problems; we don’t agree on them and pretending we do is naive. Similarly, while it’s fine to acknowledge that philanthropy is generous and positive, on the whole, we also should acknowledge that it should involve informed decision making and a willingness to engage with the idea that one’s decision could be wrong. And like our government, philanthropy has done a lot of good, but it has done harm too.

Too many times, I think, we try to take the controversy and the politics out of the work by talking only about how “giving is good and generous, etc.” or by trying to boil it down to a science of identifying high impact organizations, and that does a disservice to everyone. Debate in board meetings and amongst staff members and between different foundations and, most of all, in communities should be about more than whether a nonprofit is “well-run”. It should be about whether it is a pressing problem, whether the approach is right, and whether the values underlying it are ones we want to endorse. And we should see that kind of deep probing as healthy signs that the decision makers are thinking about the consequences of the decision to give somewhere (or rather, the decision to NOT give to many other somewheres) and recognizing the valid arguments about why their decision might be wrong.

That’s why, I think it’s too bad that the “$500 for Your Nonprofit!” post didn’t ask people to engage in a conversation about not just what nonprofit, but why their nonprofit. The premise generated responses, but leaving it at that simplifies the nature of philanthropy. One’s vote in that challenge is an implicit decision that an issue is critical and that an organization is the most deserving. We shouldn’t ignore that.

Generosity and empathy certainly inspire the decision to give, and evaluations, assessments, and research of all sorts are tools for helping make the decision. But none of that can take the controversy out of it. And we should be thankful, rather than frustrated or scared, by that reality because it means we’re engaging with how hard and how vital this work is.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Foundations, New Philanthropy, One Post Challenge, Philanthropy | Comments (15)

We Gotta Have Scale!

November 30, 2007 – 2:19 pm

This entry to the One Post Challenge comes from “another nonprofit professional”: “I’m a long-time nonprofit professional (think its a decade now), based in Washington DC, who dances between domestic and international programs.  I focus on economic development empowered by technology and have a serious alergic reaction to trumped up claims of impact, even though I find myself acquiescing to it on occasion.”

By “another nonprofit professional”

We Gotta Have Scale!

That was the call to action today at my humble start-up within a nonprofit, “We gotta have scale!  Funders only respond to big numbers.”

Apparently, even though we would double the beneficiaries in out target market, serving twice as many people as all our competitors combined, our realistic target wasn’t enough.  Because our competitors had so little scale, our numbers would not be impressive on a national level and no one is going to write us fat checks if we didn’t “expand” our beneficiary pool.

I am sure this sounds familiar to anyone working in the nonprofit world.  It doesn’t matter if you speak in hundreds, thousands, or millions, you too feel the pressure to scale.  To conjure new ways to double triple, exponentially increase your beneficiary pool to grab funders’ attention.

But what does “scale” really mean?

Does quantity beget quality?  Is breadth better than depth?  Does it really resonate with you that your organization had a 5 minute or 50 minute interaction with a beneficiary when you know it takes years to really make an impact?

Wouldn’t we all trade in every single million person metric if we could empowering just one community to provide our services in our stead?

Then why do we play this scale game?  Why do I see so many nonprofits heralding the hundreds, thousands, millions served?  McDonalds stopped counting at 99 billion served, moving on to other, better metrics of outcomes, not just activity.  We in the nonprofit world need to do the same.

We need to change the conversation.

“Scale” should be used to describe the depth of our impact.  Not “millions served” but “outcomes of our work”.  Yes, its messy, and it doesn’t fit beneath golden arches, but we’re not, and should not be in the business of mass or fast.  And our message shouldn’t be either.

I want us to face the challenge to scale, all right.  The challenge to scale our impact with each person, not per person.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in One Post Challenge, Philanthropy | Comments (0)