Some colleagues of mine are giving a webinar tomorrow on end-of-year digital fundraising. Check it out.

I couldn’t be more excited about holiday fundraising for my nonprofit clients this year. I cut my teeth as a fundraiser with direct mail, and in direct mail you basically have two to five pieces you drop for the season and cross your fingers. In digital, the strategies are more nuanced, the data is richer, and execution is just a hell of a lot more fun.

And Newhall, Miller, and Davis are all scary smart, so definitely check out their webinar.

After watching the 60 Minutes takedown of Greg Mortenson I picked up Jon Krakauer’s excellent Kindle book Three Cups of Deceit. The book does a great job at chronicling a Mortenson’s snowballing deceptions.

A big part of the Central Asia Institute story is the long list of board members and staff who’ve quit in protest. After trying at length to influence Mortenson and the rest of the board, these folks realized that they weren’t being effective and left, leaving behind stern notes that inventory the organization’s problems and chastise Mortenson.

In their positions I can hardly say I’d do differently. But it’s important to note that in the case of the Central Asia Institute, as in other, less high profile situations, good staff and board leaving in protest actually concentrated and amplified bad behavior. Before Krakauer’s expose, the stinkers left running the show had free reign to do whatever they wanted!

In a couple of weeks I’m going to give a talk called “How to Save the World with R.” It’s going to be at for DC useR Group and co-located at the Predictive Analytics World Conference, so if you’re nearby you should definitely check it out.

Ever since I saw this blog post from David Smith, inspired by Megan Price at Benetech, I’ve had the “save the world with R” idea lodged in my head and have been trying to unpack it, mainly because I’m a big fan of R and because I’d like to think that am (on my better days, with humility, in my small way, etc.) in the world-saving business.

If these words interest you also, I’d like to hear from you, especially if you use R in a way that could understood as saving the world. Please leave a comment or send me an email at michael.milton @ gmail.com. I’d like to collect as many ideas and stories as I can to show how people use R to improve the world.

For the purposes of the talk the idea of “saving the world” will have two characteristics.

Saving the world can:

1. Consist of small gestures (but it doesn’t have to). Does your work with R make a small dent in a big problem? Then you’re saving the world, and I want to hear how. An aggregate of small impacts is a big impact.
2. Encompass a wide range of values. Is your work with R meaningful and world-improving, even if not everyone understands why or how? Analytics is a sort of storytelling, and I’m collecting stories.

Actually, I’d say that these two characteristics apply not just for the talk, but for all cases of saving the world.

So please let me know if you have a perspective on how R can be or is being used to save the world, and please let me know if you yourself are a part of those efforts.

Are you saving the world using R?

I’m really excited to be leading an online course on Google Apps for Business, which starts tomorrow. It’ll be every Tuesday for the next five weeks and starts at 11 AM PT.

Sign up and participate for free at http://training.oreilly.com/googleapps/. The course is going to be highly interactive, and O’Reilly is offering a pretty delicious bundle of free content to participants.

The course is being produced by creativeLIVE in partnership with O’Reilly Media, and we’re going to cover the full range of capabilites of Google Apps that are of interest to businesses of all sizes.

I’ve been putting the course together over the past couple of months with my friend, editor, and co-host Brian Sawyer, along with author, visionary, and Head Firsty extraordinaire Beth Robson. It’s going to be a blast… hope you can join us!

Wow, I just finished reading Craig Mod‘s fascinating post on using Kickstarter to raise funds to reprint his book. Everyone who works in fundraising should check it out.

I’d like to add a few points about why this and other Kickstarter projects are such good fundraising opportunities and how these successes look next to classic nonprofit fundraising techniques.

Kickstarter makes giving personal

Craig doesn’t say this in his blog entry, but there can be no doubt that a large part of the success of the project stems from the credibility he and his collaborator Ashley Rawlings have. If you know their work you know they’re not going to drop the ball on this project.

So people funding the Kickstarter project are motivated by more than seeing a book re-released. They want to fund Craig’s and Ashley’s re-release of a book. And many, I suspect, just want to fund Craig and Ashley doing good work of any sort. Who wouldn’t want to bet on a winner?

This personal dimension of fundraising may be the most important factor in the selection of deserving projects. It becomes more complicated as projects and organizations scale up, but it worked elegantly in this project.

People love restricted giving

In fundraising parlance the restricted/nonrestricted gift distinction corresponds to whether gift is for a special project or whether it can be used for whatever project or program the recipient sees fit. For better or worse, all else being equal, people prefer to give restricted gifts for projects. Doing so gives them a more concrete sense that their dollars are going directly to fund what they want to see happen.

Unsurprisingly, nonprofits really like unrestricted gifts. It would be hard to pay for an organization that did more that a couple of things using restricted dollars exclusively. And nonprofits that provide an ongoing service are engaged in a process rather than a project. For these groups it’s reasonable to say, “We do x, y, and z. You know that someone needs to do these things, so give us money that we can use at our discretion to keep these processes running.”

It’s exciting to be involved in a special project with a concrete outcome. So I’d predict that the Pre/Post will have an easier time raising restricted funds for specific projects than unrestricted funds for the more general pursuit of quality publishing.

Kickstarter demands honesty from solicitors

If a Kickstarter project does not secure pledges equal to or greater than the target amount, then no donor pays.

This gives the seeker of funds an incentive to set her target honestly. If it really costs you $1000 to do a project, but you think you can raise $3000, so you set your target to $2000, and you raise $1900, then you receive $0. There you were, on track to receive double the cost of your project, and now you have nothing.

On the flip side, you’d be nuts to set your target to lower than the anticipated actual cost of the project. You’d be lying to your friends, and if the campaign was a success you’d have to figure out how to make up the difference.

Craig’s campaign revenues exceeded his target, and he suggests that a takeaway from this experience is that one shouldn’t be shy about setting one’s target high. I’d say to set it at the high end of your range of likely costs. Go higher and risk losing everything. You can always start a new project if the goodwill you discover in your fundraising exceeds what you’d expected.

In nonprofit capital campaigns, fundraisers go to great lengths to set accurate targets for timing and funds raised before they go public about their initiative. One reason is that they begin collecting cash from donors before the end of the campaign, unlike what you have in Kickstarter, and it’d be painful and embarrassing to have to return money.

Doing so would show that you weren’t competent enough to research your campaign adequately before beginning. On the other hand, a Kickstarter campaign goes public before anyone puts up any money. So perhaps the more money you want to raise, the more certainty you need before you go public, the less likely that Kickstarter would be a suitable platform.

There’s lots of great “Ask” data in Kickstarter

Asking for the right amount of money and setting the right giving tiers is a big deal in fundraising, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time designing tiers for different organizations and creating models to assign gift-maximizing “Ask” amounts to donors in light of their donation history (and myriad other factors).

Kickstarter projects provide a great resource to show where people tend to end up along an ordinal spectrum of ask amounts. They’re worth researching and pondering, no matter what sort of fundraising you’re doing.

Final thoughts

Craig Mod’s project is really cool and illustrates a style of giving that lots of people find attractive. I don’t see a Kickstarter model supplanting most classic forms of fundraising yet, but you’d be nuts not to experiment with it.

The data that best shows what people want to support would be a record of what they actually support, and experimental fundraising projects on Kickstarter are a great way to create that data.

Several weeks ago my illustrious friend the nonprofit capacity building consultant extraordinaire Christie Lewis suggested that I get in touch with the nice people at the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington to talk about nonprofit analytics, and since then I’ve given two presentations to their development roundtable on how to use analytics for fundraising.

Analytics is a big field with huge potential for nonprofits, and in my presentation I go high-level and discuss a few preliminary ideas about how analytics should fit within the development enterprise (there may be a book in there some day). I hope you enjoy it!

Recently O’Reilly released my new book, Head First Excel. The book goes into advanced topics in Excel but is really about teaching Excel beginners how to use the software to solve big problems.

How this book is different: The Excel part

I wrote this book with a specific idea about what it means to be good at using Excel. People who know Excel know formulas. And by “knowing formulas,” I mean that these users know a bunch of different functions, they know how to make those functions work with each other, and they know how to find new functions when the functions they know aren’t sufficient to solve their problems.

If you want to get good at Excel, you need to master formulas.

And if you want to have fun with Excel, formulas are the way to do it, too. It’s enormously gratifying to write just a line or two of code that makes your data sing, or to make data do or say something that your colleagues never thought possible. It’s also gratifying to take someone else’s spreadsheet — something consisting of an elaborate soup of formulas — and figure out how it works.

You can use Excel without being a formula master, but the power of Excel is in its formulas, and I’m so excited about Head First Excel because it will take total formula newbies and help them develop into masters. The book assumes you know nothing, but by the end you’re doing seriously heavy stuff with spreadsheets. Here’s the chapter list:

1. Introduction to formulas
2. Visual design
3. References
4. Change your point of view
5. Data types
6. Dates and times
7. Finding functions
8. Formula auditing
9. Charts
10. What if analysis
11. Text functions
12. Pivot tables
13. Booleans
14. Segmentation

Plenty of the chapters aren’t explicitly about formulas, but every one of them has you practicing this crucial topic at some level. And what surprised me so much about other books on Excel is that they don’t ask you to practice formulas. You’d think that something so fundamental to getting good at the program would receive more treatment.

How this book is different: The Head First part

The style of Head First books, as you can see from the free sample chapters for each book, is colloquial and visual. But don’t imagine for a second that this means the content is simplistic. The style makes the books very highly optimized for learning. You pick up concrete skills in a fun but inexorable way as your progress through the book.

We who write and publish these books believe that the difficulty people experience learning technical topics comes not from the difficulty of the topics of themselves but rather from poor presentation by the teachers. Head First Excel is a 448-page book that’s designed to be read straight through without the reader ever getting bored or frustrated.

I started off as a fan, reading Head First books back when I read the first edition of Head First Java as a theology student (long story). During the past several years O’Reilly has published a whole mess of Head First books, and they’re all fantastic. Last year I wrote Head First Data Analysis, so Excel is my second Head First book.

I hope you enjoy Head First Excel. Being able to use this software’s powerful features is one of the most important skills you can have in business, and frankly I don’t think I’ve made an important decision in my life or career without firing up Excel first.

Several weeks back I was thinking about how the Bible is taught at seminaries, and on a lark I decided to check out the website of a big school 200 miles from my apartment in Texas: Dallas Theological Seminary. I wondered, who are the people who teach Bible here? As I looked through their bios, something surprised me. By my count, 26 of their 29 Bible professors received degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary.

Interpretations of this statistic will vary. I don’t know anyone who works at DTS, but I suspect that their Bible faculty would say that they their professors were chosen because they are the best scholars in the field, and that nearly all of them have DTS degrees because DTS is the best school in the field. Someone with views like my own, on the other hand, would suspect that the statistic reveals an extreme form of insularity, with older professors all having come up together and having taught the current crop of younger professors, creating a strong network of mutual reinforcement for a static set of ideas.

I might be wrong. Anyhow, the DTS website piqued my interest, so then I looked at the websites for every single seminary in United States and recorded the names of all their Bible professors as well as where those professors got their various degrees. I compiled the data, and here it is:

Seminary Data April 2010

I haven’t had a chance to analyze the data, except to rough up an adjacency matrix that I plotted in Rgraphviz (see the image above). But this particular visualization doesn’t say much to me (aside from “Rgraphviz == awesome!”), and I have lots of fiddling to do with the data before I can draw any conclusions.

To the extent that this stuff interests you, from the perspective of either analyzing the data or checking it for accuracy, I’m eager for input and advice. I’m sure I made some mistakes when I drew up the data, which took a long, long time, and I’m sure that there are many out there better at analyzing this sort of data than I am.

What I’d really like to know is whether and how seminaries cluster together in terms of their Bible professors. I got a M.A.R. degree at Yale Divinity School (where my Bible grades were awful, BTW), and I imagine that Dallas Theological Seminary-trained scholars would have a hard time getting a gig at Yale, and vice versa. If this is true, the data won’t say why — the reasons could be geographical, or ideological, or denominational, or of course theological — but I’m interested in seeing how the schools group. Can we see, for example, that people trained at “liberal” schools tend to teach at “liberal” schools, and the same for “conservatives”?

(Note that many of the numerous caveats about this data and its potential usefulness can be found in the document linked above.)

Your thoughts?

Like Scott Berkun, I was a philosophy major (and write for O’Reilly), so I was excited to see his Ignite talk on what you need to know about philosophy. It doesn’t hit the points that I’d necessarily make, but it’s worth checking out, as no doubt will be his promised forthcoming blog entry on the subject.

My two cents: What everyone wants to do is kick ass, so here’s how to do it — philosophically — in three simple steps.

1. State the philosopher’s position more clearly than he does

Philosophy is usually slow, careful, explicit argumentation, so if you want to argue with a philosopher you need to go down the long road of thinking through his position fully. It’s unphilosophical to argue with an oversimplification or parody of his position. Philosophers aren’t supposed to beat up straw men.

By stating the philosopher’s positions better than he does, you signal that your own argument engages his argument on the correct terms. You want the person you’re arguing with to agree that you can state his position with precision and sympathy.

The “more clearly than he does” part is a way of kicking his ass even before you start your refutation. You can do it nicely, of course.

2. Refute his position

He started from premises and, through a series of honest cognitive moves, reasoned his way to a conclusion. If you have a really good reason to believe that some element in this progression is wrong, and that removing that element causes the position to collapse like jenga blocks, here is where you state that reason.

Ideally, you’d find a bunch of contestable areas in the argument you just articulated. If one doesn’t stick, you’ve got another. Oh, and you should also state (and refute) plausible counterarguments to your own position before the other guy has a chance.

3. Clean up

At this point most likely he’ll either take exception to your argument or double back to refine his own in a way that undermines your argument.

But say you really do succeed in refuting his argument, even in his mind. He’ll do one of two things: he’ll either restate his argument in a progressively louder way (à la cable news), in which case you might want to consider kicking worthier asses in the future, or he’ll express his gratitude for getting set straight, in which case he’s a mensch and you owe him a beer or coffee to restore harmony in the universe.

Easy, right?

I said that these steps were simple, because they are. But they’re not at all easy. I’ll be honest with you: I’ve only done what I describe above a handful of times. I argue with people all the time, but the formal, careful, slow business of philosophical refutation eats up quite a lot of time and energy.

People who do philosophy are smart, and thorough. So if you have a subject that’s philosophically interesting to you, and if you want to do real philosophy with it, you need to be ready to put in some long hours. Philosophy, done right, hurts.

Philosophy hurts because of its demands on your attention

Doing philosophy makes brutal demands on your attention. Most of the reading is really, truly boring. From the writer’s perspective, it’s hard to be both thorough and engaging. Making it through most classic and contemporary philosophy books is almost an athletic event. It’s just so hard to stay focused, I don’t care how smart you are.

Most of what you read nowadays has been optimized for quick consumption. You’re probably not going to spend more than 90 seconds reading this, for example, so I have to think about how to break up the content so that you get the key points. Philosophers will not do this for you. Philosophy is a long, slow, painful slog.

Here’s how philosopher John Searle describes it.

[Doing philosophy is] murder, absolutely. I compare it … if you really want to know how to do it, you get up in the morning, there’s a large brick wall and you run your head against that brick wall. And you keep doing that every day until eventually you make a hole in the wall. That’s what it feels like.

Maybe you’ve read some philosophy that is dazzling and fun to read. Those qualities are more literary than philosophical. If you go back and read the same stuff as philosophy, you’re going to be back to the slog.

And lest we imagine that this practice is some sort of Western intellectual machismo, here’s the Dalai Lama on a related subject:

In Dharamsala, India, one of the Tibetans practicing concentrated meditation told me that the cultivation of one-pointed concentration was worse than imprisonment in a Chinese jail! (How to Practice, p. 127)

Formation of attention can be formation of character

Which leads us to the question. Why would you subject yourself to all this?

You might do it for a number of reasons. For example, you might have a burning passion for a topic in philosophy. If you care enough, you’ll fight your way through the dry reading (fighting against the authors, really) to get the insights it contains.

Or you could view the powers of attention that sustained study of philosophy requires as an end in itself. The faculty of attention is something you can exercise like a muscle and develop to high levels of function. Here’s William James on attention:

In some persons [attention] is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are ‘lost’ for a moment before they come back to the outer world.

The possession of such a steady faculty of attention is unquestionably a great boon. Those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less nervous wear and tear.

James goes on to say that he doubts that attention can be cultivated in the way that I’m arguing it can.

And not only can it be cultivated, it must be cultivated, because it’s critical that people have the ability to apply profound faculties of attention to real problems. Strong analytic skills applied to worthy problems can improve society. Who do you want to see in the voting booth? The person who can think through issues thoughtfully and thoroughly, or the person who thinks in sound bites and talking points?

I’m not saying that reading philosophy will make you a better person. But you could use it that way if you were motivated to.

People won’t care that you’ve studied philosophy

Take note that the mere fact that you’ve studied philosophy is unlikely to impress people who have not. (In fact, I’ve studied philosophy, and others’ study of philosophy doesn’t impress me either unless I have reason to think that they are good at it.)

Unless they themselves studied philosophy, or unless they have had favorable experiences with philosophy majors, HR types do not value philosophy degrees.

I had a summer job before grad school where my boss, who was trying to determine my wage, asked me whether I had a degree in her company’s field, and I told her my degree was in the field because philosophy applied to everything. She didn’t see that I was half-joking and thought I was insulting her. Things went downhill from there.

This reality is why Scott Berkun shrewdly picked up a CS degree in addition to his philosophy coursework. Still, computer science, like a lot of applied-looking liberal arts majors like statistics and economics, can be done in a philosophical way, since all the big thinkers knew their philosophy. And you should study these fields philosophically, because doing so will make it less likely that you become a slave to their assumptions.

So while philosophy may not itself give you a body of knowledge that people will pay you for, it will cultivate a style of thinking that will always serve you well. I went into philosophy like a lot of teenagers, looking for answers to “meaning of life” questions, and I came out with some halfway decent answers to those questions but also with a profound and unexpected appreciation for intellectual discipline.

Now that I think about it, though, I probably shouldn’t have just told you how to kick my ass.