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Recently, in my public speaking, I’ve been talking about Kiva.org and why Kiva is like a “gateway drug to social investing”. The fact is, most people are not sitting around wishing that they could make high impact social investments. When Kiva was formed, it was not designed in reaction to a large group of everyday people who were looking for a simple way to make small loans to impoverished people in the developed world. Instead, Kiva built a model that was incredibly compelling and hooked everyday donors into the world of microfinance, which until Kiva was a social investing practice reserved for institutional grantmakers.

How did Kiva do it?

Well one model of what makes ideas spread is outlined in the book Made to Stick, by Chip & Dan Heath. The model is called SUCCESs and it lays out six principals of what makes an idea “sticky”. It is amazing how perfectly Kiva, which is one of the “stickiest” ideas in social investing, follows the SUCCESs model.

Simple: Simplicity isn’t about doing little things. It is about focusing on a core message. Kiva offers the simple premise that you can lend money to aspiring entrepreneurs in impoverished countries and help them improve their lives.

Unexpected: To get attention, you need to do something unexpected. Kiva’s pitch is that you can lend (not give) your money, get it all back and still make the world a better place.

Concrete: While the Red Cross says that they “help prepare communities for emergencies and keep people safe every day”, the home page of Kiva asks you to make a $25 loan to a specific person with their photo and bio.

Credible: According to the SUCCESs model, credibility comes from “human-scale statistics and vivid details”. Kiva’s website is overflowing with information about all their historical loans so that a first time visitor can quickly see specific borrowers and lenders and reams of fully paid back loans.

Emotional: People care about people, not numbers. The Chip brothers argue that people care more about self-identity than self-interest. Again, the home page of Kiva features a constantly updating profile of Kiva lenders, with short bios and their answer to the question “I loan because…”. After a few minutes clicking around their website, potential lenders will run across an existing Kiva lender whom they identify with.

Stories: Kiva borrowers keep a journal that explains to the lender how they’ve used the loan and how things are going. A lender is first presented a story about the individual requesting the loan and then given story updates as the borrower deploys the loan.

Kiva isn’t a freak accident. It is a masterfully executed, “sticky” idea.

We tend to spend a lot of time talking about what sort of giving is effective. But there is another issue facing philanthropy. During the last 100 years, charitable giving has run at about 2% of gross domestic product. Making philanthropy and nonprofits more effective isn’t going to change that number. Making philanthropy and nonprofits “stickier” is the key. Bumping giving from 2% to 3% would trigger a $150 billion influx of money into the social sector. That’s real money. That’s the kind of number that is thrown around when wars are started, banks are bailed out, health care is reformed. What if that kind of number was channeled towards effective philanthropy? What if giving went to 4%?

If you care about effective philanthropy, then you need to care about making effective philanthropy “sticky.”

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But I just got the following email from Ken Berger, CEO of Charity Navigator (published with his permission):

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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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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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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• We could run short mini panels, which every 15-20 minutes would swap places with moderator chosen audience members.
• 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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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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By George Overholser

• Someone recently defined nonprofit “mid-caps” as organizations with revenues in the $5 million to $25 million range.

We need to keep in mind that the definition for for-profit mid-caps is 200 times as big:  revenues in the $1 billion range.

This matters because there are metaphors flying around that we need our nonprofit mid-caps to provide more financial disclosure to the “capital market”, just like for-profit mid-caps.

This is the equivalent of asking a guy who owns a couple of pizza restaurants ($5 million in revenues) to begin publishing detailed quarterly public reports of his financial and quality assessment results.  Problem is, his office is the kitchen table, and he needs to get up at 6am every morning to roll the dough.

Wall Street is the wrong metaphor for an online “nonprofit capital market”.  Wall Street only works for companies that are literally hundreds of times bigger than typical nonprofits.  Wall Street companies get easy access to equity, precisely because they are already so advanced that they can afford to provide exceedingly high levels of financial transparency.  But the vast majority of firms (for-profit and nonprofit alike) are nowhere near the size required to afford the cost of making these types of disclosure. That’s why the vast majority of firms are capitalized privately, by intimate investors who get to know them personally.

Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that strategic equity-like investments should be made based on the snippets of data that an exhausted executive director posts on a web site.

If information is to be shared online, the better metaphor is Amazon.  The better information to share is more akin to marketing information than to investor information.  Keep it simple:  What am I buying with my donation?  What gets done as a result?  What does it cost?  And… for those very few that have gone through the arduous and expensive process of scientifically documenting impact, yes, what is the impact?

DonorsChoose is a great example of this.  Check it out:  a highly intimate and transparent giving experience that has no need to share information about the financial health of the DonorsChoose enterprise, management team, strategic plan or theory of change.

Simply “asking harder” for information does not address the issue.  The problem is not one of candor.  Rather, the data does not exist, and cannot be afforded by such small and stressed-out organizations.  Asking harder merely adds to the trauma.

If a prospective investor comes along, who is prepared to write a big equity-like check, then have a face-to-face meeting, so that real due diligence can take place.  In the meantime, I would love to see online marketplaces focused on products and services… like Amazon and DonorsChoose!

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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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My objection to Martin feeling guilty about making a non-optimized charitable donation focused on the need for empathy in philanthropy to not be displaced by logic. But Dan took the argument a step further and argues that ignoring the empathic urge undermines philanthropic effectiveness.

Dan brings up the role of the emerging discipline of behavioral economics in helping us understand how people actually behave rather than how we think they should behave. Behavioral economics is a favorite topic of mine and one that I think can lead to great insights in philanthropy (I’ve just downloaded the eBook Dan points to).

As I work to craft the Tactical Philanthropy track at the Social Capital Markets conference, I want to follow up on the suggestion of Duke University’s Ed Skloot to include a session about what philanthropy can learn from behavioral economics. But I’m at a bit of a loss about how to structure such a panel and focus the conversation.

Do you have any thoughts about how to create a fantastic panel discuss about the intersection of behavioral economics and philanthropy? If so, leave a comment or shoot me an email!

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