Category Archives: Transparency

Guest Post: Rich Polt

November 19, 2008 – 10:07 am

By Rich Polt

When Louder Than Words signed on to help FORGE with PR, my promise to Sean was to blog openly about the process and the issues that we encountered – understanding, that what we were embarking on was an experiment in the purest sense of the word. We’re now about two weeks into this experiment, during which time we’ve had several conversations with members of the extended FORGE team and started reaching out to colleagues in the media. I want to spare you the play-by-play and will dive right in to an issue that has been stymieing this group – IMAGE.

Here’s the million dollar question: What image is FORGE projecting at this very moment? And the natural follow-up question: Is this image helpful or hurtful to FORGE’s goals?

Mahatma Gandhi said “be the change you want to see in the world.” It’s a wonderful quote (particularly for the nonprofit sector). It means that change begins within each of us, and we must lead by example. When it comes to effective communications, a similar principle applies. Project the image you want others to see. Project confidence and passion and your audiences are more likely to be moved by you. Project confusion and self-doubt, and guess what your audience will see?

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that people or organizations be disingenuous in order to manipulate audiences. This is the slippery slope that the PR sector walks on, and one of the reasons why people don’t hold “spin doctors” in high regard. What I’m talking about is a best-practice in leadership. In the same way that Sir Ernest Shackleton maintained a disposition of optimism in the face of overwhelming adversity, an organization and its leadership must act as beacons of strength to engender confidence in those who surround it, particularly during tough times.

Now there is a difference between optimism and denial. Shackleton was optimistic but he was also honest with his men. In my view, vocal introspection is an admirable trait. It’s a sign of tremendous leadership and maturity when someone like Kjerstin can say “We’re in trouble, and I don’t have all the answers.” This was the spirit of Kjerstin’s early blog posts and the spirit in which the nonprofit community rallied around FORGE. This was also the spirit that I believed would interest the media because it was so refreshingly transparent. In fact, it was this very dynamic which grabbed the attention of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Meredith May and led to her recent story about FORGE.

But over the last few weeks, the public discourse has drilled down into the inner-workings of FORGE with much greater detail. And during this time, media interest has been tepid. Most want to monitor the situation (through these blogs) to see what happens. So what I’m wondering (out loud) is, has all the public blogging that we’ve been doing collectively made you – the readers who are following this saga – care more or less about the organization? Has your image of FORGE changed over the last month, and if so how?

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (4)

FORGE: In Kjerstin’s Own Words

November 18, 2008 – 5:42 am
By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (1)

FORGE Goes “Mainstream”

November 17, 2008 – 12:16 am

When Kjerstin Erickson decided to start blogging about FORGE’s problems on the Social Edge website, her board discouraged her. It was actually a pretty dumb idea by traditional standards.  But Kjerstin was actually doing something that to her generation (she’s 25) seems completely natural. She was living her life online.

I’m not of Kjerstin’s generation, I’m about half a generation ahead. But I’m close enough that when I read her very first blog post about her situation, I said that her blog “just became The Most Important Nonprofit Blog”. There was no doubt in my mind that Kjerstin had just embarked on an incredible journey.

I think that what Kjerstin is doing is important. Important in the kind of way that we’ll look back on in a couple years and cite her decision to go radically transparent as a precursor to the way the nonprofit field evolved. That might sound crazy, but I’m not alone. Today, the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the FORGE story. There are thousands of stories of struggling nonprofits right now. Meredith May at the SF Chronicle picked up Kjerstin’s story because of her decision to go transparent.

By Meredith May:

Like many social entrepreneurs caught in the economic crisis, Kjerstin Erickson is lying awake at night wondering if her tiny nonprofit is going to survive.

But in an unorthodox move, the 25-year-old decided to blog about her charity’s financial problems - despite warnings from board members that she’ll send her remaining donors fleeing…

…After Erickson began blogging last month on the Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge Web site, an interesting thing happened.

Her story went viral after it was picked up by the Tactical Philanthropy blog, and the social entrepreneur community took her on as an experiment in “radical transparency.”…

…Now, socially oriented financial analysts, nonprofit consultants and public relations firms offered to help her pro bono. Among them:

– Some top search engine marketers in New York have challenged themselves to raise $100,000 for FORGE in 100 days by coming up with innovative ways to direct more online traffic to the point-and-click giving on FORGE’s Web site.

– A family foundation in the Bay Area has offered to give FORGE $10,000 if it can raise $20,000 from its donor pool.

– Nonprofit consultant Curtis Chang has agreed to prepare a free sustainability plan for FORGE through his San Jose company, Consulting Within Reach…

…”The story of FORGE has yet to be told,” said Erickson, who is optimistic she will be able to turn things around.

“The goal of all of this is not just that FORGE recovers, but we come out a lot stronger because of it and learn the lessons we need to learn - and that everyone learns with us.”

You can read the whole story here.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy, nonprofits | Comments (3)

Paul Brest Has a Blog

November 13, 2008 – 5:24 pm

A year ago I wrote a blog post for the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled “Paul Brest Needs a Blog” (Paul is the president of the Hewlett Foundation). So you can imagine my pleasure when I sat down to lunch with Paul today and he told me he had just this morning written his first blog post!

Paul is now writing on The Huffington Post. His first post is titled Strategic Philanthropy:

I’ve just participated in a vigorous debate about at a meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable. My critic was William Schambra, a distinguished thought leader in philanthropy, who directs the Bradley Center on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C….

…Mr. Schambra’s second objection is that a strategic philanthropist requires an applicant to describe his or her own goals and strategies before funding the organization — a process he sees as inconsistent with what might be called the “wisdom of communities” (my term, not his). In his view, community organizations are close to the ground and know how to meet the needs of their constituents better than any philanthropist does. He regards a funder’s requirement that an applicant describe goals, strategies, and the like as meddlesome.

Sure, most applicants would prefer to take the money with no questions asked. But among organizations doing the same kinds of work, some are more effective than others. Achieving social change requires philanthropists to direct money to the organizations that use it most effectively. Whether an organization is housing and feeding the poor or improving educational outcomes or advocating for or against gay marriage, a philanthropist has every reason to ask whether it has a sound strategy and a good track record as well as good leadership. The alternative is to sow hundreds of seeds without ever finding out which take root and flourish.

I’ve left a comment on the post. If you care about foundations engaging in the online conversation, I hope you go leave Paul a comment keep reading his blog.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Giving Blogs, Information Sharing, Philanthropy | Comments (0)

Time Warp

November 13, 2008 – 10:21 am

Sorry for the lack of posts. I’m back to work after 25 hours of travel back from Dubai (with a 12 hour time shift). I feel a bit lost in the space-time continuum!

I’ve been posting about FORGE to the exclusion of everything else. The story has generated enormous interest and I think we’re all learning something. But I’m going to try to start working other narratives back into my daily posting. But don’t think I’m forgetting about FORGE. I continue to get new inquires from people interested in helping or donating to FORGE and I’m meeting again with Kjerstin later this month.

Thanks to everyone who has offered to help or simply shared some advice.

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

Promises vs Hope

November 10, 2008 – 9:29 pm

Curtis Chang has a new post up on the Social Edge website regarding working with FORGE. The World Economic Forum has ended, but I’m staying on in Dubai for vacation with my wife. I have lots to write about, but I’ll hold off for another day. Today I’m going to the souks.

So onto Curtis’s post:

You have to hand it to my client. I challenged her to make her case for why FORGE should matter to the collective nonprofit sector. And she responds by throwing down a regression analysis. She’s making me feel like I’ve time warped back 15 years ago, when I was a Head Teaching Fellow in public policy classes at the Harvard Government Department reading essays from very bright students.

So in that same classroom spirit, I’m going to grade her response from my perspective. I do so partially in jest. It is certainly not because I ultimately think of myself as her teacher or superior (any consultant who conceives of himself as either of those roles for his client is both arrogant and a poor consultant). In fact, the more I get to know her and her achievements, the more I am in awe.

But I’m going to grade her response because I want highlight this critical issue: how FORGE must communicate its indispensability, both during this crisis and in the near future. Kjerstin and I have already talked about these points over the phone and she essentially agrees with my perspective. So, I’m sharing this here as part of our ongoing committment to let you in on our working relationship.

Overall, I’d give her effort a “reluctant “B.” “Reluctant,” because there is so much of her vision that is brilliant and deserves a sheer A+; but in the end I think she only half succeeds in what she needs to do.

The essence of FORGE is inspiring and paradigm shifting: to turn refugee camps from “warehouses of misery” into “incubators for social development.” This is just the kind of bold thinking needed in Africa. It is the job of any consultant to respect and nurture that kind of boldness.

But it is also my job as a consultant to take that bold vision and – without quashing it – discipline and translate it into organizational effectiveness. And even though I haven’t gotten deep into my research on FORGE’s sustainability plan, it is already quite obvious to me that more effective communication of its message will be critical.

There’s a lot of work that FORGE will need to do in terms of the mechanics of communication that I’ll discuss this in the future. But for now, I want to concentrate on the effectiveness of the message itself.

Promise vs Hope

I set up the “exam” as one in which she had to show why FORGE was deserving of a collective bailout. The two questions were:

* What damage to the collective are we averting with a collective bailout of FORGE?
* What collective good – even if it is in the future — are we seeking by working for FORGE’s survival?

A simpler - and probably more elegant - way to frame my twin questions was that I was asking her to communicate what she could promise us right now and what we could hope for in the future.

I feel that Kjerstin’s piece was a good at hope, but weak on promise. And it didn’t need to be that way…

…Promise is what you can deliver. Hope is what you can inspire.

As a social entrepreneuer, you need to communicate both. And sometimes, you need more of one than the other…

…What potential investors are looking for

I’m emphasizing this promise versus hope distinction because Kjerstin needs to be very, very long on delivering specific promises and short on inspiring hope right now. If things break her way, she’s going to get air time before more and more audiences the next couple of months. Her real audience in all those cases will be potential investors. For potential investors evaluating FORGE these days, hope is heavily discounted. They want specifics. They want deliverables.

Indeed, the suspicion that Kjerstin has to combat among potential investors is that FORGE somehow got into this deficit by being unrealistic, dreamy eyed, recent college grads. The more she talks about lofty, seemingly unreachable hopes — instead of the real concrete achievements happening in the field right now – the more I’m afraid she’s going to confirm that suspicion for this crucial audience.

Which would be tragic, because I believe she has so very much to talk about.

Read Curtis’s full post including his discussion of the lessons social entrepreneurs can learn from Michael Jordon and Spike Lee here.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (9)

Is it Time to Donate to FORGE?

November 9, 2008 – 12:09 am

In the last post, Sara Hall laid out a critique of FORGE’s fundraising strategy. Sara first reached out to me confidentially, but quickly was willing to go public (and Kjerstin was quick, as always, to give her support to the critique being published).

Sara made three core points 1) Transparency should not be a higher objective than the quality of a nonprofit’s operations 2) FORGE’s board has failed to support the social media fundraising strategy though their own donations and 3) The online community owes it to FORGE to evaluate the social media fundraising site and either make a donation or give FORGE feedback as to why they are not donating.

Point one I agree with and addressed in a prior post. Short summary: I think transparency SHOULD be celebrated for its own merits becasue it is so rare, but it is only a precondition for donors to effectively evaluate nonprofits, not a sufficient condition to engage their support.

Regarding point two, it blows me away when nonprofits do not have 100% of their board financially supporting them. In a world with limited transparency, it must be assumed that the board has the best view of what is going on within a nonprofit. If they are not providing financial support, as a donor I am uninterested in providing my financial support. It may be that FORGE’s board all made direct gifts instead of supporting projects (It appears from FORGE’s website that the project budgets do not include FORGE’s operational costs, so somebody needs to fund FORGE’s costs and the board would be a natural supporter of these costs). However, at least from a public perception standpoint, I agree that board members should have funded the projects to some degree.

Sara’s third point brings up the question of donating to FORGE. Should the Tactical Philanthropy Community be financial supporting FORGE now? That’s a decision for each person to make, but I will say that I have not yet personally made a gift to FORGE. Remember, FORGE is telling us that they are in trouble. Supporting FORGE if they are eventually unsuccessful in closing their budget or raising the funds needed to retrofit their fundraising strategy would seem to be a waste. However, the Tactical Philanthropy Community has mobilize a number of resources for FORGE’s benefit. Personally, I’d like to see Curtis’s report to FORGE before making a final decision to support the organization financially. In addition, assuming that a viable strategy is identified, I think that the most useful way to support FORGE will likely be to participate in some sort of organized fundraising campaign in which the support of the online community can mobilize additional resources and hopefully trigger support from institutional foundations.

So I’d like to tie together Sara’s first and third point. Transparency IS something that should be celebrated for its own merits. But it is NOT enough to merit financial support of an organization. However, transparency can generate conviction from donors that an organization has a viable strategy for success and this merits donations. Therefore I do not see any disconnect between the online community celebrating FORGE’s transparency, but (for the time being) watching the “reality TV” unfold from the sidelines. However, if at the end of this saga, FORGE proves themselves worthy of our financial support I hope and expect that the online community will put their cash to work.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (5)

FORGE & New Philanthropy Advisors

November 8, 2008 – 11:29 pm

A few days ago, Sara Hall of New Philanthropy Advisors contacted me to share her opinion of FORGE. I facilitated a conversation between Sara and Kjerstin and they have agreed to allow me to post Sara’s thoughts here.

Sara Hall is a partner at New Philanthropy Advisors where she connects foundations and individual donors to high quality non-profit organizations. Just over a year ago she was instrumental in bringing key funding to Forge for the development of its new social marketing website. She joins the conversation to give her thoughts from the funding perspective.

By Sara Hall

Though I am heartened by the extraordinary interest Forge has received in the last three weeks and applaud Sean, Curtis, Rich, and the many others who have pledged to help, I am troubled by the online community’s lack of focus on what seems to me to be obvious. In celebrating Kjerstin’s “radical transparency” about Forge’s fiscal crisis while failing to look closely at the state of Forge’s fundraising efforts, information available to anyone visiting its website, we seem to be saying that an organization’s transparency is a higher objective than the quality of its operations.

Many months ago, Forge made the decision to shift funding sources. Instead of relying on student volunteers and their friends and families to provide funding for camp projects, Forge decided to create a social marketing website similar to Kiva, DonorsChoose, and GlobalGiving, which have attracted thousands of donors and substantial buzz. The decision was well thought out and the fit appeared to be excellent. Forge offers a portfolio of projects where aggregated small donations could change the lives of many disempowered individuals with compelling stories. Forge’s past and present staffers and former volunteers are young tech-savvy social networkers with a wide web of friends and supporters who would want to be part of the Forge community. Kjerstin made a compelling case for the new website which would become an important component of Forge’s operation and the sole source of funding for Forge’s raison d’être–the camp projects..

The Forge website was completely revamped over a number of months and, after delays, launched in June of this year. As of November 8th, nearly six months after launch, twenty-five fundable projects are posted and described on the Forge Website. Here’s the discouraging news: of those twenty-five projects eight show no contributions whatsoever, and seventeen are funded or partially funded, but the funders for those seventeen projects are almost exclusively Forge staff, and overwhelmingly Forge’s Director of Development, whose donations of approximately $10 per project seem to be made to get the ball rolling. Out of the total of thirty-four contributions listed, twenty-three were from Forge or its three current paid staff members, and only eleven were from outside contributors.

First a question, then a proposal for what we can do to help. Question: where was Forge’s board in the almost six months since the site was launched? Why hasn’t every single member of the Forge board made a donation online, and each member found at least ten friends to make a donation? After all, donations start at $5. Is Forge’s board committed to Forge’s success? How are they demonstrating that commitment? And where are Forge’s former volunteers, the “alumni” listed on their website? Out of over sixty, have any, other than current staffers, pledged even $5? Not only have they apparently failed to pledge, they have clearly failed to tell their friends about Forge, an organization where, presumably, they learned important lessons, had formative experiences. If each of the more than sixty alumni had told at least ten friends, I’m guessing that the website’s project page would radiate a whole new energy.

Forge has risked everything on the social marketing fundraising model, yet the people who most should be stepping up out of obligation (the board), or enthusiasm (the alumni) are almost entirely absent as donors, and, incidentally, as participants in the public dialogue on how to help Forge get out of its fiscal crisis. Why? Is it because they weren’t asked to participate? Is it because the mission now fails to compel them? Is it because the “ask” on the website doesn’t stimulate the kind of enthusiasm necessary to move potential donors to action (both in terms of funding, and in terms of spreading the word about Forge to their own social networks)? We can’t know the answers to these questions, but I believe Forge should make it a priority find out.

Now the proposal. If hundreds, maybe thousands of online readers are following Forge’s unfolding drama, described by blogger Marie Deatherage of Meyer Memorial Trust as “something really exciting happening on the Internet that …deserves the rapt attention all nonprofit organizations, foundations and donors,” then each reader will do Forge a service by going on the Forge website and practicing what is as useful a form of transparency as Kjerstin’s blog posting on October 17th: give Kjerstin your unvarnished feedback. If, after exploring the website you haven’t been moved to pledge at least $5, take ten minutes to figure out what didn’t work and TELL KJERSTIN WHAT YOU THINK. If you didn’t make a donation, go to Kiva, DonorsChoose, or GlobalGiving and see what they’re doing. How are the projects presented? How is the “ask” structured? If you’re engaged, what about the site engages you and encourages you to spread the word to your social network? If the Forge site didn’t engage you enough to open your wallet, how can it be made more engaging? Above all, don’t “make nice” in your feedback to Kjerstin. Don’t be the kid in class who says the other kid’s speech is great because you don’t want to hurt her feelings.

Kjerstin deserves your honesty; Forge deserves your honesty; all the refugees waiting for funding so they can live better lives deserve your honesty. If the site is great, then get out your credit card and dedicate all your holiday gift money to giving your friends and family gifts of Forge project support (way more gratifying than another decorative candle or pair of gloves). If it doesn’t move you, if you haven’t whipped out your credit card and told at least five of your friends about this cool organization, tell Kjerstin why and make specific recommendations. And once your recommendations are in evidence on the site, tell everyone you know about Forge. Put your social network where your mouth is.

I hope we’ll do more than simply tune into the blog exchange as if it were an exciting tennis match or, as Marie Deatherage said of the postings, “way better than reality TV.” I also hope that we’ll see that “radical transparency” though laudable, should not divert our attention from issues of good management. Kjerstin’s blog of October 17th should be seen as a cry for guidance from the non-profit community, which has responded with interest and compassion. From the funding side, however, any potential major donor moved enough by Forge’s plight to visit the website will likely be deterred by what they see there: Forge’s board, past supporters, and current friends seem to have abandoned the mission and left the refugees depending on Forge waiting, waiting, waiting. Haven’t they had enough waiting in their lives? Let’s not only watch the unfolding drama, let’s help Kjerstin give it a happy ending.

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

Tactical Philanthropy Community Delivers

November 6, 2008 – 9:05 pm

Kjerstin’s newest problem is prioritizing all her new resources. We’ve all been introduced to Louder Than Words and Consulting Within Reach who are live blogging the pro bono work they are doing for FORGE. But behind the scenes has been a flurry of additional activity. Offers of longer term consulting, foundation introductions, social media expertise, nonprofit financial analysis have all come pouring in. So have inquires regarding various levels of interest in donating (both large and small amounts) to FORGE.

Personally, I am going to make a donation to FORGE. A number of other people have told me they will too. Reader Tony Wang has suggested that The Point, a fundraising widget that allows people to pledge an amount that only gets released if a larger total amount is pledged be used in this effort. I think that donating to FORGE makes sense if we believe that 1) enough short term funds will be delivered in order to close the budget this year and 2) enough long term funds are delivered to build FORGE’s fundraising capacity to match their impact model so that we’re not having this discussion next year.

The Point offers a clever concept. As a donor without knowledge of how other donors are behaving, I might only be willing to make a small donation. But if I know that my pledge will only be release if the rest of FORGE’s donors step up and raise enough to hit the targets, I personally would give significantly more.

So let’s speculate for a minute. Let’s assume that FORGE needs $100,000 to close the budget and $100,000 to build fundraising capacity and maintain a reserve. Remember George Overholser’s concept of “Build vs. Buy”? The general idea is that some donors are customers who “buy” social good with their donations. Some donors are investors who give money to “build” a nonprofit so that it can become sustainable and deliver more social good in the future.

I imagine that there are foundations out there like Skoll (who runs Social Edge where Kjerstin blogs) and Case (which has been very involved in “citizen philanthropy” and online giving) and Hewlett (where president Paul Brest has written about the potential of a “online philanthropic information market”) and Meyer Memorial Trust (which wrote on their blog that the FORGE story “deserves the rapt attention all nonprofit organizations, foundations and donors”) who might possibly be interested in the story unfolding around FORGE. But no one wants to fund a dying nonprofit.

Ever been in a situation where nobody wants to go first, but once the first person moves everyone follows? What if various groups of donors stepped up with “buy” or “build” donations that were contingent on other “buyers” or “builders” playing their role? Could this really happen?

I think it could.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Foundations, Philanthropy | Comments (1)

Should FORGE Be “Saved”?

November 6, 2008 – 1:26 pm

Transparency can be rough. FORGE’s consultant Curtis Chang, who has agreed to full transparency, posts a thoughtful and probing post on whether his client deserves to be “saved”. Wow.

You can read the full post on Kjerstin’s blog Forging Ahead:

By Curtis Chang

…in this strange experiment in transparency we’re conducting here, I as the consultant find myself asking very publicly a peculiar question about my client:

“Should WE try to save it?”

Now, note the pronoun. I’m not asking whether ANYONE should try to save FORGE. I’ve been on the case for less than a week, but I can already tell that FORGE is a worthwhile cause for any given individual. So, of course, Kjerstin should try and FORGE’s donors and volunteers should try.

But the amount of public attention showered on this situation is raising this to a different level than the feelings and conscience of an individual. More seeds of such a sector wide effort are being sown: Skoll was already invested, Sean Stannard-Stockton (a philanthropic thought leader) was next, I joined, Rich Polt (a leading nonprofit PR expert) was not far behind, and we’re getting more offers daily.

Yet we haven’t had a robust discussion yet about whether such a collective, high profile bailout plan is the right thing to do. Should WE really try to save FORGE?

Or to put it in more personal terms, I feel at peace about how I’m individually donating my time and expertise. That donation is focused on providing the “foxhole prayer”: the long term plan FORGE will follow if it survives this crisis. Theoretically, I have only committed to delivering that plan and it’s not my responsibility to help FORGE survive.

But I’m also human. Four days in and I already want it to survive (and also wouldn’t have taken this gig if I didn’t have something of that feeling already). And, to continue our transparency here, my wife and I plan on also donating some money towards FORGE’s short term crisis.

But even with the mission creep of my heart already starting (which darn it, I just knew was going to happen) that still doesn’t mean I should be advocating for a lot more resources to be devoted to this rescue effort. My choice doesn’t automatically mean that FORGE should suddenly become the sector’s recipient of choice. And yes, while FORGE gets an “A” for transparency, that doesn’t mean it should get the teacher’s undivided attention for the rest of the class…

…So, we need compelling answers to at least two big questions:

* What damage to the collective are we averting with a collective bailout of FORGE?

* What collective good – even if it is in the future — are we seeking by working for FORGE’s survival?

Keep in mind that what is needed here are a different set of answers than the ones Kjerstin provided earlier about the strengths of FORGE’s work. At this point, I am confident that FORGE does good work. But does it do indispensable work?

I hate to call out my client in such a public fashion, but Kjerstin and I agreed to precisely this kind of open dialogue.

I believe what happens next in this collective experiment depends on how Kjerstin answers that question. And it may be that the survival of her cause depends on how you feel about her answer.

Like I said, I know I’m supposed to be involved. But is everyone else?

Read the full post here.

I think the collective good will be served if FORGE survives (or maybe even if this experiment in transparency plays out, but FORGE does not survive…) because of the boost it will give to transparency. I wrote about this yesterday. One of my favorite commenters left a note on why transparency is so fundamentally important to the sector:

Young Staffer:

This isn’t all that different from how we think about transparency in both democratic institutions and in market systems. Neither system works to it’s “best” ability (maximizing social welfare) unless people have the information needed to make informed decisions.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (3)

Guest Post: Rich Polt

November 6, 2008 – 1:06 pm

Rich Polt of Louder Than Words is one of the consultants working pro bono for FORGE due to FORGE’s commitment to transparency. I’ve been acting as a kind of resource broker for FORGE and have made the one stipulation that anyone who engages with FORGE via the conversation unfolding here, do so in a transparent way. All reports and advice will be shared with the broader community.

Here’s Rich’s first report:

By Rich Polt

A quick introduction … my name is Rich Polt. Five years ago I started a boutique PR agency in Boston called Louder Than Words. For those of you who have been following the FORGE saga, Sean recently recruited us to participate in this bold experiment in the power of social media. Together with my colleague Erica Salamida, Curtis Chang of Consulting Within Reach, and potentially others TBD, we will contribute our time, insight, and our rolodex (do those actually still exist?) in an effort to help FORGE get beyond its current fiscal woes and on to a path of sustainability and continued impact. Well that’s the goal at least.

So you understand the spirit from which our advice comes, allow me to briefly elaborate on our agency’s work. Louder Than Words works with any organization (for profit or nonprofit) that is mission-driven and doing good in the world. Our role is therefore to help clients “communicate good.” We do this through strategic counseling, messaging development, and constituency outreach (often the media). Early this year I blogged on Philantopic (a great site from the Foundation Center) about communicating impact. I said that most organizations fall somewhere along a continuum of appealing to the mind (with data) and appealing to the heart (with imagery and stories). As I said at the end of my post: “I’m certainly not advocating for stories without data or data without stories, but I do believe that to truly convey impact among diverse and widespread audiences we need to appeal first to the heart.” If you’re interested, the entire post can be found here. I also wrote a related blog on this site here.

It’s this belief in the power of inspired communications that serves as the foundation for the work we do. From our perspective – and many a reporter’s perspective – there is nothing better than an inspirational story filled with highs and lows, overcoming obstacles, serendipity, and happy endings. When I read Kjerstin’s post and dug further into FORGE’s Web site, I was floored by what she and her team had been able to accomplish in such a short period of time – with such limited resources. What I immediately saw was the many inspirational stories that FORGE can already tell through its work with refugees, and the other compelling story that is unfolding before our very eyes as the organization struggles for its very survival. This is why I was drawn to FORGE; why I was compelled to write my initial comment; and why I eagerly volunteered our time to help affect this process.

In the coming days and weeks we will be blogging about our interactions with Kjerstin and team. In the spirit of this experiment, we will be transparent about the process, and open to critique from the community. Our next post will be about our initial conversation with Kjerstin and Curtis in which we discussed FORGE’s messaging. Stay tuned…

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

I Want YOU at the Forum

November 4, 2008 – 2:28 pm

The first Tactical Philanthropy Forum is being held in San Francisco. While I’m honored by the huge interest in the event, this blog’s readership is not concentrated geographically and so the vast majority of readers don’t have the option of participating… But there is a way.

I will now begin accepting online videos with questions posed to Paul Brest and Bill Somerville. Just record a video clip no longer than 30 seconds, upload it to any of the video portals listed below and email me a link to the video. A collection of the videos will be played at the Forum for the guests to answer live. We’ll also be recording and posting video of the entire Forum event here at Tactical Philanthropy in the days after the event.

The Tactical Philanthropy Community usually comes up with better ideas that I do, so if you have your own thoughts about how to use the video content just let me know. If anyone watched the CNN/YouTube presidential debates, you know that some people got very creative.

Here’s the list of portals that you can post your video to for consideration in this project:

  • Youtube
  • Blip.tv
  • Break.com
  • Dailymotion
  • LiveVideo
  • MetaCafe
  • MyVideo.de
  • Veoh
  • Lulu.tv
  • Vids.myspace.com
  • Vimeo

Don’t forget that a wait list has been started for the Forum now that it has sold out. I’m still hoping to squeeze in some more seats so add yourself to the wait list for first shot at any new seats. I’ll also send you a pre-announcement to the next Forum event so you can be sure to register early if you don’t get into this one.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy, Tactical Philanthropy Forum | Comments (3)

Transparency is Not Enough

November 4, 2008 – 2:11 pm

I just got a call from someone who, while very supportive of FORGE, made the point that transparency is not enough. What is critical is a well run social enterprise. This is a point that I haven’t made clearly enough: I see transparency as a necessary prerequisite for the nonprofit field to develop in a way that allows anyone to know who is running their social enterprise well.

Transparency is NOT enough, but in a world with limited transparency, we need to celebrate transparency on its own. To me, celebrating and rewarding FORGE’s transparency is what this is all about. It may be that FORGE is not a well run organization and it does not deserve our support. If you’ve been reading for the last week I think it is clear that emotionally I would like very much to see FORGE succeed and thrive. But what really excites me is that FORGE’s decision to be transparent means that at the end of this process it is very likely that we can all have conviction around whether or not FORGE deserves our funding.

Transparency is only a tool to better understand which nonprofit are well run. But it is a necassary tool and not the current norm. So while it is not the endgame, it should be celebrate as a worthy goal unto itself until it becomes the norm.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (1)

Curtis Chang Blogging on Social Edge

November 4, 2008 – 8:03 am

Philanthropy isn’t know for moving fast, but things are a little different online. As I wrote yesterday, I first proposed the idea of the Tactical Philanthropy Community providing resources to FORGE last Wednesday. By Friday I had Rich Polt of Louder Than Words and Curtis Chang of Consulting Within Reach officially on board. Other groups are currently in discussions. On Monday Kjerstin had met with Curtis and spoken with Rich. By Monday night, Curtis was blogging on Social Edge about working with FORGE.

I’ve told all parties involved that my one expectation is that everyone will embrace Kjerstin’s lead and publicly release everything relevant to their work with FORGE. Here’s Curtis’s first blog post (and may I say that he’s a natural blogger!)

How I got hooked
By Curtis Chang

I am a sucker for good sea bass.

Last Wednesday, Sean Stannard-Stockton, the influential author of Tactical Philanthropy, invited me out to lunch at one of those nice Asian fusion restaurants in Burlingame.

He waited until my Chilean sea bass - steamed and wrapped in a delicate origami paper box - had arrived and its ginger and garlic aroma was wafting up to my nose.

“I have a proposal,” he said.

He proceeded to tell about Kjerstin’s move to share openly about her financial plight with the online community at the Social Edge. As Sean has written, he felt her act highlighted an important issue for the nonprofit community: namely the need for greater transparency among nonprofit leaders, especially with the donor community.

I immediately warmed to the story. Partly it was agreeing with Sean on the issue of transparency. But I think for me it was even more Kjerstin’s biographical story of dropping out of Stanford (at least for a few years) to start FORGE on a shoestring. Right along there with my love of excellent seafood is my fondness for – and shared embodiment of – a “educational riches to rags” story.

So when Sean asked if my firm could help out in any way, I was predisposed to agree.

I’ll explain more about my consulting firm, Consulting Within Reach (CWR), in some future entry. Suffice it to say it is a group of ten professionals – mostly from Silicon Valley corporate backgrounds – that I recruited to use their skills to serve compelling causes. We specialize in building organizational capacity in areas like marketing, web development, fundraising, strategic planning, and more.

From my experience leading CWR, I wasn’t daunted in theory by her need to raise over $100K by the end of February (really more, if she were to put the organization on firmer footing). For instance, earlier this year we helped one of our clients, a startup nonprofit, raise almost $300K in a four week campaign. So I knew it could be done.

But that kind of concentrated effort requires an “all hands on deck” commitment from my entire team to cover all the organizational areas involved (marketing strategy, production of collateral, and more). We just weren’t ready for that effort on such short notice.

So I proposed another strategy: CWR would compose FORGE’s “foxhole prayer.”

There’s an old saying that “ there are no atheists in foxholes.” And soldiers who have survived near death situations regularly talk about having made vows to God during the crisis that if they survive, they promise they will do X,Y, or Z.

Well, Kjerstin needs a “foxhole prayer.” Because any potential donor considering helping FORGE survive this crisis is going to be asking (silently if not aloud), “What are you going to do so you won’t be back next year asking for another rescue?”

In the next few weeks, Kjerstin needs to be ready with an answer.

That’s where we’ll come in. CWR’s main role will be to outline a long term plan that builds FORGE’s capacity to market, fundraise, and manage itself in a sustainable fashion. If FORGE makes it out of this current foxhole, they – and their donors – will know what they need to do.

And while I can’t promise to raise the money for her, I’ll help out with guidance and support where I can. I can’t jump into the foxhole with her, but I’ll visit regularly.

I agreed to all this on Thursday, the day after I had lunch with Sean. On Friday, when the folks at Social Edge heard about this arrangement, they thought it would be a further interesting experiment in transparency to share publicly about our process. They asked Kjerstin and me if we would jointly blog during the project.

We agreed but I stipulated that the normal client expectations of confidentiality would then not apply. For instance, if I discovered that FORGE really didn’t have a prayer, well, then I would blog about that. If you’re going to survive by the sword of transparency, you’ve got to be ready to die by it. Kjerstin agreed without hesitation.

So here we are, less than a week after that fateful lunch. I’m not sure how this will all work out and it could easily all blow up on us.

If it does, Sean, you owe me some more sea bass.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (5)

Tactical Philanthropy Community Helps FORGE

November 3, 2008 – 12:47 pm

OK, enough talk. Let’s see if the Tactical Philanthropy community just likes to debate or whether we can accept a call to action.

A quick recap: FORGE is a small nonprofit that works with refugee communities in Africa to help them gain community rebuilding skills. The organization is on the ropes due to a mismatch between their fundraising strategy and their impact strategy. But changing to a model where refugees provided training instead of outside volunteers (a model most international development experts would applaud) they cut off a key source of funds (the volunteers generally raised significant funds from their networks back home in the United States or other developed counties). The executive director Kjerstin Erickson decided to use her blog on the Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge website to embrace “radical transparency” and lay bare her situation.

Here at Tactical Philanthropy I called her Forging Ahead blog “the most important nonprofit blog” due to her decision to go transparent. In a later post I wrote that I was not explicitly advocating for the refugee cause, for FORGE or for Kjerstin, but I very publicly wanted to support the cause of transparency and Kjerstin’s brave decision.

Then the Tactical Philanthropy community kicked into action:

  • I had lunch with nonprofit consultant Curtis Chang of Consulting Within Reach and told him I wanted to hire him to provide an executive summary type report to FORGE on what they should do next. The hook was that the report had to be published on my blog.
  • I then spoke with Victor d’Allant, who runs Social Edge and told him I wanted Social Edge to publish the report as well.
  • Victor upped the ante and suggested that Curtis take on a larger assignment with FORGE and blog about the experience along side Kjerstin on the Forging Ahead blog.
  • Curtis took on the challenge and decided to do the project on a pro bono basis and work with Kjerstin for an indeterminate period of time.
  • Rich Polt, founder of nonprofit PR consulting firm Louder Than Words left a comment on Tactical Philanthropy giving advice to Kjerstin on her PR strategy.
  • I called Rich and suggested that he offer pro bono consulting in a more formal arrangement with FORGE.
  • Rich suggested a larger contract than I expected and he agreed to provide a minimum of 20 hours of free work.
  • Rich than suggested that a large nonprofit that specializes in financial analysis might be willing to offer their assistance as well. He’s on the case.
  • Another Tactical Philanthropy reader has been busy pitching a foundation on why they should consider funding FORGE and sharing details of the pitch with me.

On Friday I met with Kjerstin (my first time meeting her) and told her what I had put together. I told her that if she wanted to accept all of this, the one requirement was that she waive confidentiality with each group so that I and they had the opportuntity to share their side of the story. Kjerstin didn’t even blink before telling me that they could write anything they wanted.

FORGE needs to raise close to $200,000 in order to close their budget and retrofit the organization so that they have the fundraising capacity to run sustainably next year. That’s a fair bit of money for such a small organization and I don’t know if it will happen. It may be that some large foundations who care about transparency will provide the capital to build fundraising capacity if FORGE can close this years budget gap through broad donor support. If some sort of plan like that can be worked out, than a donation to FORGE would be a high impact grant in support of transparency.

But no matter what happens with FORGE, it is all going to play out in public. Whether FORGE is saved or not, Kjerstin has displayed amazing bravery. Any smart foundation or nonprofit should be figuring out how to lure her to work for them should she become available.

So what about Curtis Chang, Rich Polt and anyone else who steps up to help? Sure they will receive some nice publicity, but they will also have to share their own work publicly. I can only imagine that the smart readers here at Tactical Philanthropy will disagree with some of their recommendations even if they approve of most. But here’s the thing, all of this is going to play out live. If you don’t like where things are headed, speak up and you might just change the outcome.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve heard numerous foundations tell me that they are not transparent about their grantee analysis because they do not want to risk hurting the nonprofit. But let’s look at FORGE as an example. Kjerstin knows that criticism can only make her stronger. She wants to learn and get better because she cares about her cause more than she cares about her organization. FORGE exists to help refugees rebuild their lives. Kjerstin is willing to do whatever it takes to help them. Even if that means publicly taking advice from people who might tell her she should do some things differently.

Kjerstin cares about the cause over the organization and so should all of us.

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