Great panel at the Washington Post yesterday, as America’s Charities convened its #GivingUndertheInfluence symposium to discuss trends in workplace giving and growing roles of millennials and digital networks. I was honored to join Marc Johnson, vice president of digital strategy in the Studio/Online division of APCO Worldwide; Heather Lofkin Wright, national director of community service for PwC; and George Weiner, president of digital cause consultancy WholeWhale along with moderator Marcia Bullard, chairman of America’s Charities and a founding editor of USA Today.

It was a wide-ranging discussion that touched on generational issues, demographics, giving patterns, online marketing, philanthropic trends – and some common sense advice and solutions. In prepping for the panel I was struck with the quality of America’s Charities’ white paper, Snapshot, which reveals some of the latest research on trends and strategies around employee engagement and giving. Two years ago, Howard Greenstein and I authored a white paper plumbing some of the same trends under the auspices of New York University’s Heyman Center for Fundraising & Philanthropy, Wired Workforce, Networked CSR. The new report advances the ball significantly and shows just how much younger workers – particularly so-called millennials born after 1980 – are changing the world of workplace giving and networked philanthropy. I highly recommend Snapshot to CauseWired folks.

Meanwhile, here’s the excellent Storify stream created by America’s Charities to capture the #GivingUndertheInfluence conversation yesterday:

]]> http://www.causewired.com/2013/04/millennials-networks-philanthropy-and-giving-at-work-givingundertheinfluence/feed/ 0 http://www.causewired.com/2013/04/millennials-networks-philanthropy-and-giving-at-work-givingundertheinfluence/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Causewired/~3/afGb6W0fbHo/ http://www.causewired.com/2013/04/gates-experts-share-top-social-media-advice-for-nonprofits/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:40:14 +0000 Tom Watson http://www.causewired.com/?p=906

Very nice for CauseWired to be included in this guide from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Written by Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, the post focuses on key strategic imperatives for nonprofits and causes as they consider the social graph. Here is CauseWired’s contribution:

It’s very easy to jump into social media, but if you’re an organization with a track record in a certain sector – or an ambitious social enterprise – some patient listening at the beginning will pay off. Spend time getting to know the voices, the issues, people with big followings, the funders, and the competition. Make Twitter lists, join LinkedIn groups, like some key Facebook pages. Make some notes and see where the channels are. Then let your voice be heard. And this advice always applies – even organizations with big followings and social media operations shouldn’t just broadcast. They should listen, be respectful and generous, and be part of a larger conversation.

You can read the whole article here – very much worth doing.

Benjamin Franklin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1731, a 25-year-old Philadelphia printer set out to solve a problem – one that affected the future of his industry and the social good. Despite innovations in technology, popular books still cost too much for the average citizen. Yet getting more books into circulation would clearly increase interest in his own craft, and lead to a better informed public, including his own friends and colleagues. This young pursuer of a double bottom line created a unique social venture – and he used crowdsourcing to fund it.

The model was simple, really. A total of 50 subscribers invested 40 shillings each to start a circulating library. They all agreed to further invest 10 shillings more every year to buy additional books and to help maintain the library. They adopted a Latin motto – Communiter Bona Profundere Deum Est – which translates as “To support the common good is divine.”

The social entrepreneur was Benjamin Franklin. His social venture was The Library Company of Philadelphia. And the crowd that funded his social venture was the famed Junto, a loose coalition of smart young Philadelphians interested in the public good in the first half of the 18th century. Their self interest was greater access to a wider variety of books; Franklin’s was in printing them. And the society itself benefited from a better educated, better informed core of leading citizens, many of whom would one day fund and lead the founding of a much larger social venture – a republic.

Of course, crowdsourcing is everywhere these days. It’s a term meant to signal the evolution of passive social media to more active financial participation. And it takes advantage of technological advances and the growth of networks that can be used -in the form of “crowdfunding” – to drive causes, raise money, fund projects, and create new organizations. Yet it’s really an adaptation on an old and trusted technique – asking friends to support a project, and they will ask their friends, and so on. Franklin’s “crowd” was a small group of young Colonial elite – today, hundreds may fund a film or a cause through Kickstarter or IndieGogo, a journalism project through Spot.us, or a band’s appearance through GigFunder. And the “crowd” can support small entrepreneurs in the developing world via platforms like Kiva‘s, fund school-based projects through DonorsChoose, or back international projects of impact through GlobalGiving.

This week, my colleagues Marcia Stepanek, Howard Greenstein, and I will begin our second year of teaching “The Wired Nonprofit,” a master’s degree course at New York University’s George Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising. The class focuses on the use of social media and networked technology to serve nonprofits, foundations, and social causes. We’ll be talking about the big platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, LinkedIn – and how can we can we make them work for us. It’s crucial that organizations – and those training to lead them – understand the future of networked philanthropy and fundraising, we believe. But it’s just as crucial for those today’s wired philanthropies to understand the connection to what has always mattered in gathering support for important social causes: that personal connection, good communications and story-telling, the importance of impact on those the cause serves, and the plan for getting it right.

In the pursuit of those verities, our students could do worse than to study the early crowdfunding techniques of Benjamin Franklin. He invented crowdsourced philanthropy – heck, Franklin largely invented American philanthropy. He was the leading technologist of his day, and a man who was intimately familiar with the top media technology of his time and in building social networks. Franklin used that social network – in the form on subscriptions, his own circle of leaders called the Jun-toe, and the printing press to raise funds for the first fire department, the first public library, a public meeting house, a university, a public hospital.

Franklin understood how fundraising – wired or otherwise – really works. He knew it challenges and its limits. This passage from his autobiography could be required reading for aspirational nonprofit executives and fundraisers:

The Rev. Gilbert Tennant came to me with a request that I would assist him in procuring a subscription for erecting a new meeting-house. … Unwilling to make myself disagreeable to my fellow-citizens by too frequently soliciting their contributions, I absolutely refused. He then desired that I would furnish him with a list of the names of persons I knew by experience to be generous and public-spirited. I thought it would be unbecoming in me, after their kind compliance with my solicitations, to mark them out to be worried by other beggars, and therefore refused also to give such a list. He then desired that I would at least give him my advice. “That I will readily do,” I said I; “and, in the first place, I advise you to apply to all those whom you know will give something; next, to those whom you are uncertain whether they will give any thing or not, and show them the list of who have given; and lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of those you may be mistaken.”

This is exactly how we work in philanthropy and nonprofits and social entrepreneurship – and it’s how we work both online and offline. There is usually no shortcut in fundraising, creating a cause, building an organization. Success often centers on the will to ask. Be “full of courtesy, full of craft,” Franklin once advised via his alter ego, Poor Richard.

But he also had another saying that will undoubtedly ring true 250 years later to fundraisers and social entrepreneurs everywhere: “An empty bag cannot stand upright.”

Cross-posted from Tom Watson’s Social Ventures blog at Forbes.

Cross-posted from my Forbes column:

Flip the calendar, start a new tax year. Double down on changing the world. That’s about the simplest New Year’s resolution for a social entrepreneur or nonprofit leader. Every January doesn’t require a new strategic plan. Sometimes you need to just keep things on track. But I’d still urge everyone who leads or supports a social enterprise in a major way to take a bit of time to re-examine the assumptions that underlay your definition of success.

For me, that’s going to start with vocabulary. I’m going to start with one word that makes virtually every powerpoint presentation, strategic planning document, and board retreat briefing book I’ve ever seen. It will appear in every hot nonprofit book title released this year, and will adorn every company’s plan for corporate social responsibility. Solo social entrepreneurs working in the philanthropic equivalent of the start-up garage will over-use it – and so will the heads of the world’s largest NGOs.

I speak of “scale.”

If there’s a single most over-used term in the social sector, this is it. Every business plan, every strategic plan, every five-year timeline talks about “reaching scale.” Usually, this simply means “size.” And that size is related to either a population, a geographic area, or a societal problem that “reaching scale” – aka size – will allow an enterprise to serve more completely. And let’s face it, size is really a euphemism for “budget” – which itself is just one click upstream from “fundraising.”

I’ve fallen victim to the blind pursuit of scale, and have found myself stranded on an endless and unattainable quest for a mythical philanthropic Valhalla. It’s not that scale is a bad concept; it’s that is endlessly misused. So here are five typical aspects of the scale conversation that I’m going to pay more attention to in 2013:

1. Scale doesn’t just mean gigantic. Great ideas are everywhere, exceeded only by the societal problems that need solving. But plenty of worthy nonprofits, start-ups, foundations, and social enterprises aren’t going to get to what the public commercial markets think of as scale. There will be very few Googles or Facebooks, and very few signs along the nonprofit freeway for “One billion served.” Small and impactful is fine. Changing lives in one town or city is great. Good work that is measurable – and fund-able – is the real Holy Grail, not getting to the status of Big-Ass Nonprofit Inc. So perhaps instead of thinking “big,” we should think “deep.”

2. Scale doesn’t always mean efficiency. Yeah, I know – there’s a guy on your board who works as the COO for a major multinational. His boss, the company’s founder, is in the Forbes 400. It’s all about efficiency for those guys. The bigger you get, the lower your cost-per-unit is. And the whole thing can be digital besides. They wrote it all down for you on a cocktail napkin at the holiday luncheon, right? Well, forget it. Yes, there will be a handful of social sector start-ups for whom vast efficiencies – ask their operational systems – are the special sauce. But in general, you’re not moving units. You’re serving human beings. You’re changing lives. You’re improving something. And quality matters. In my consulting work, I’ve counseled more than one nonprofit that grew more inefficient with scale – they added on programs based on opportunity until their mission became a jumble, and soon the year-to-year goal became more about preserving the institution instead moving the needle for the people it served.

3. Scale’s kissing cousin is fundraising. You can’t grow without funding. And unless I’ve missed something, the U.S. rate of supporting philanthropic ventures with donations has bobbed just south of two percent of GDP for about … well, forever really. Through good times, and bad times, and worse times. U.S. giving may be the highest in the world, but it’s steady. And social venture “investing” is still small as well, so even with a double bottom line, you’re looking at a potential capital pool that’s many times smaller than it is for a company making widgets, digital or otherwise. If you want to be the new Red Cross, you’re going to have to find a channel for raising tens of millions of dollars – even if your idea is the best in the world. Philanthropy and social enterprise are part of a marketplace. So remember, the sky is not the limit – there’s a ceiling up there. If you’re projecting “scale” in your strategic planning, keep those spreadsheets in the realm of reality. Gandalf’s not going to knock on your door.

4. Scale takes a long time. Like decades. Back in the 90s when I covered Internet start-ups, every founder seemed to have an “eBay of” plan – as in, “we’re going to be the eBay of pet supplies.” That was always closely followed by “….when we get to scale.” And sometimes, the combination of super-heated capital markets and well-executed ideas can indeed lead to the kind of overnight scale eBay represented. But I haven’t seen that in the social space – not even once. For nonprofits or social purpose companies, it takes longer – and for good reasons. For one, the main goal is to help people or change society – that’s both harder to accomplish and more difficult to measure than the sales of this year’s smart phone model. And for another, there is little institutional liquidity in the social capital marketplace – organizations rarely merge or acquire other organizations. What creates big hits quickly in the commercial world isn’t generally available ton nonprofits. So the real winners are the enterprises who stick it out, grow over time, weather the storm, and build a wider base of support.

5. Scale doesn’t guarantee real impact. Say what, you say? Surely, the larger and more widely accessed an organization’s services, the greater the impact, right? Not necessarily. That’s because impact is the slippery fish of the social sector. It’s too easy to be drawn into a one-dimensional measurement of success: straightforward metrics like poverty rates, homeless people on the streets, graduation rates, cure rates, and the like. And those standards are clearly important. But because the underlying reasons for those factors – aka the reasons why we’re measuring them in the first place – can be so manifold and multifaceted, it’s a challenge for every social enterprise to draw a true bead on the target of impact. That’s why a good social venture adjusts its measures over time – and resolutely closes down efforts that aren’t working, even while trying new solutions. The ground is always moving, after all. And the pursuit of quality should rate as highly as the race for size.

I’ll still speak often of scale in 2013 – to clients, in my writing and public speaking, and in my work. But I’m vowing here and now not to get caught up in its more mythical aspects. I’m giving those up this year. And it’s a lot easier than another new diet, anyway.

Yes, that’s (intentionally) a very wide beat and I’m digging it immensely. Here are the first dozen Social Ventures columns – hope you become a regular reader.

Assange Launches Agenda-Driven Show on Putin’s Network: First Guest Is Hezbollah Chief

Springsteen’s Causes: Shifting Views of The Promised Land

The Masters and Augusta: Where’s the Outrage (and the Network)?

A Year Later in Japan: GlobalGiving and the Long Road

Obama’s Surprising World Bank Choice: Health Care as a Human Right

Smashing the World Bank Fortress: Sachs, Obama, and the Public Data Challenge

The #StopKony Backlash: Complexity and the Challenges of Slacktivism

The New Networked Feminism: Limbaugh’s Spectacular Social Media Defeat

Giving Days vs. Giving Daze: Looking for Engagement

Murdoch, Assange and the Need to Know

Pinterest and the Hype Factor

Who Are the Social Entrepreneurs?

In making the announcement Sandra Taylor, Senior Director of La Pietra Coalition, and the driving force behind the Third Billion Campaign said, “The evidence is clear: women are the emerging market with the greatest potential for accelerating global economic growth over the next decade. Investing in women will transform their lives and lead to prosperity for their families, their communities and for business globally.” In other words: if women’s economic potential can be successfully harnessed and leveraged, it would be the equivalent of having an additional one billion individuals in business and in the workforce, contributing to the global economy: often referred to as the “third billion.”

The launch of the Third Billion Campaign, which will properly prepare and enable women, in both developing, emerging and industrialized nations,—whose economic lives have been stunted, under-leveraged or suppressed has the support and participation of major global corporations including The Coca- Cola Company, Ernst and Young, Accenture and Standard Chartered Bank, as well as the World Bank.

I’ve watched the La Pietra Coalition (a project of Vital Voices, which encourages women’s leadership around the world) wrangle with creating real momentum for this crucial issue – especially in terms of hard economic data and the world agenda. I’ve taken part in two of the three meetings at NYU’s amazing Villa la Pietra campus in Florence, and the energy and vital ideas on display at those gatherings was inspiring. I think that the significance of the Third Billion Campaign, and those who are supporting it, is an indication of the power of women and the difference they can make in economic growth.

The Third Billion Campaign was a result of work carried out by Booz & Company’s analysis of International Labor Organization data on women in the global workforce. The Booz report determined that approximately 860 million women worldwide are “not prepared” – lacking sufficient secondary education – and/or “not enabled” – lacking support from families and communities – to take part in the world economy. The vast majority of these women, between the ages of 20 and 65 – 822 million – live in emerging and developing countries and the rest – 47 million – live in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Counting female births and those under age twenty, this number will add up to a billion in the next decade.

Beth Brooke, global vice chair of Ernst and Young, does a brilliant job of explaining the importance of the campaign in this Bloomberg TV interview:

How did the once high-flying Wikileaks come to stand for a numbing, endless, victim-shaming slog aimed at somehow keeping Assange from answering the Swedish rape case? How did Wikileaks, which once stood for open government and the use of crowd-sourced online tools to reveal the impartial truth, come to create a cable television interview program featuring Assange on the network created by the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin to, as the Columbia Journalism Review put it, provide “relentlessly negative media coverage of the west—in particular, the United States?” How did an enterprise whose mission demands respect for the truth come to create and distribute a fake opinion column by Bill Keller of The New York Times,with whom Assange has openly feuded? How did an organization that, for a time, prided itself publicly on a strenuous redaction process that worked to safeguard the identity of those who might be endangered by the leaks of sensitive government documents come to dump a massive and unredacted trove of US State Department cables on the Internet with no consideration for the human consequences? How did the creator of Wikileaks find himself holed up in a London diplomatic flat, counting on the goodwill of a country known for its recent crackdown on press freedom to provide asylum?

In short, how did Wikileaks come to be nothing more – and nothing less – than the personal saga of Julian Assange, the man on the balcony in London?

There’s been a big focus over the last week on the legal machinations around Ecuador’s asylum ruling, and arguments over the sexual assault case itself – including some incredibly shameful anti-feminist behavior by Assange supporters like British MP George Galloway and former UK diplomat Craig Murray (as well as the usual troubling lack of concern for the alleged victims by prominent Assange backers like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone), but I’d like to try and pull one major lesson from this tawdry saga – and it’s one that ambitious social entrepreneurs should take note of.

If nothing else, Wikileaks is a clear (and rather spectacular) case of Founder’s Syndrome – that enterprise-killing malady that conflates the original noble goals of a start-up with the imperfect life of one mortal human being who happened to come up with the idea.

I’ve seen it before, many times, since I started covering tech start-ups with Jason Chervokas at @NY in the 1990s. I’ve seen it in start-ups I’ve been associated with. And heck, I may actually have been guilty of it in the half dozen or more companies and websites I’ve founded myself. One person embodies a growing organization, internalizes all decision-making, roots out those who come to question leadership decisions as “disloyal,” and generally manages on personal instinct and whim, leading to wildly inconsistent detours that pull the enterprise away from its original mission. That person, as Forbes contributor Kevin Ready put it recently, often has ” a deep seated (and mostly unconscious) psychological need to be the center of the operation, and to be recognized.” Sound familiar, Wikileaks followers?

The temptation to hold on, control everything, and “be the face” of the organization is just as tempting for nonprofits and social ventures. Mario Morino, author of the recent Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity and a social investor (and former high tech CEO), put it succinctly a few years back in discussing the evolution of causes: “The hard truth is that many organizations grow beyond the capabilities of their founders and need more and different types of leadership, skills, and broader mission ownership to succeed. This realization—that this time, the needed change falls on your doorstep—is a tough punch to the gut for a founder.”

Read the rest at Forbes.com

Public funders—and eventually private funders as well—will migrate away from organizations with stirring stories alone, toward well-managed organizations that can also demonstrate meaningful, lasting impact.

But Morino, who has preached a mantra of measurability and impact for nonprofits for the last 15 years, is right. And Leap of Reason is terrific resource for nonprofit managers and board members, as well social entrepreneurs, foundation leaders and informed individual donors. A nice story simply won’t get it done.

Nor should it; nonprofit organizations, churches, and foundations are granted an extraordinary privilege in the United States – they exist tax-free in exchange for the social benefits they promise. Increasingly, suppliers of capital to social causes are demanding measurable impact. And Morino (who I’ve known since the mid-90s) points out that this trend will only increase in an era of diminishing public sector spending on nonprofit organizations. Those funders will migrate away – and indeed, I’ve seen this in my work with nonprofits. What Morino calls “managing to outcomes” involves showing real, provable social benefits to those paying the bills – and this goes beyond the raw numbers of people served, to showing how they’re served, and in many cases, the scale at which the organization tackles major social challenges.

I have to say: this kind of thinking can sometimes be frustrating for hard-working nonprofit managers toiling in the trenches in underpaid jobs with over-long hours. Particularly in the social services sector, the managers can rightly say they’re changing people’s lives every day – with programs that may not scale in the investment sense, or provide clear-cut metrics for societal impact. Yet kids get early childhood intervention, young moms get support, addicts get treatment, etc. To these folks, the work is clearly needed – though the philanthropic dollars are increasingly difficult to find.

Morino is aware that some of the management-speak in his book might put off a few readers. “I use the term ‘performance culture’ with some trepidation. I know it’s radioactive for some, especially those in the education field,” he writes. But his chapter on organizational culture really isn’t threatening – it’s inspiring. Morino encourages strong, questioning, creative people in positions of nonprofit management. “In my experience, people who improve, innovate, and adapt are curious souls and self-learners. An organization’s culture should encourage people to ask questions, seek advice, do research, improve what they do and how they do it, help each other, push each other’s thinking, probe, nudge, adapt, look at things from different vantage points. All of these behaviors lead to improvement and innovation for the organization and the individuals who are part of it.”

Leap of Reason is packed with good advice in three sections: Morino’s opening monograph on impact, a framework for planning, and a section with essays and resources for more in-depth reading and follow-up work. As a consultant who often works on strategic plans and development roadmaps, I particularly value the savvy framework section and will undoubtedly use some of the key questions and models there in my work.

Even skeptical, harried nonprofits should spend some time with Leap of Reason for another, very practical reason – it provides clear and actionable insight into the thinking of a prominent major funder, a truly involved philanthropist. Mario Morino has been working on building a more engaged form of philanthropy for a decade and a half, and many foundations and major donors now walk in his footsteps. For that reason alone, Leap of Reason should be on the bookshelf of every nonprofit leader I know. But there’s another reason as well: better-managed, more sustainable nonprofit organizations won’t just be better bets for donors – they’ll be better for the people who need them as well.