Archive for the ‘100 Things We've Learned’ Category
Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 10, 2010 in 100 Things We've Learned, Fundraising
In How we got the grant – Part I, I started telling you the story of how one organization overcame a long history of rejections to finally receive a grant from a very desired funder.
To quickly summarize:
The international child sponsorshop and development organization I worked for had tried and failed many times to receive a development education grant from the US Agency for International Development.
We learned that one of the reasons for this was that our donor-to-sponsored child and family communications were not taken seriously by the funder and undercut our credibility.
We initiated a process to explain the theory and practice behind our communications program to USAID. As a result of that, the door opened a crack.
Our first three lessons learned:
- Get involved with your colleagues
- Find out what funders think about you
- You have to have and discuss a theory of change
That’s were I left off. On to the next set of lessons.
So, I now had the task of designing a development education program that would win funding and achieve our desired mission impact.
Lesson Four: Build your new program on your existing assets
Because our experience showed that people-to-people contact helped North Americans care about other parts of the world, we knew our development education program could take advantage of our 50 year history of direct communications. Our office was rich with the stories, photos, drawings and reports from sponsored children, their families, our international staff and town or village leaders. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 3, 2010 in 100 Things We've Learned, Fundraising
Back in the 80s, I was director of development and communications for the US affiliate of an international child sponsorship organization.
Keeping the advertising, invoicing, fundraising, and donor stewardship running was an expensive investment for an organization that relied primarily on monthly giving from tens of thousands of donors.
While that funding model was clearly our strength, it also lost us donors who determined which organization they chose to support solely on the basis of overhead ratios. Because we didn’t have lots of low-fundraising-cost government grants and commodities passing through our books, our overhead costs were already slightly higher than our colleague agencies that did.
(Note: Why overhead ratios tell only a tiny part of the story).
In particular, we had our eye on “development education” grant funds awarded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Those funds supported programs that taught US audiences about global issues, especially those facing the world’s most poor and vulnerable people. We wanted to expand our outreach in this area but those tight overhead ratios were stopping us.
We also saw that those agencies that received USAID development education grants seemed to have a “more favored” status than those of us who didn’t. We wanted to be in the “in crowd.” Being “in” often led to more media exposure, more opportunity for partnerships with our colleagues, and, ultimately, more donors and more funding to support our programs overseas.
But year after year (before I arrived), our proposals kept getting rejected. And we couldn’t understand why.
And to put the frosting on the cake, we kept hearing the funder and our non-sponsorship colleagues talk about the need to personalize international development for US citizens by sharing the stories of communities and families overseas.
But but but… each and every day, we were sending very real and personalized stories about those very same communities and families to tens of thousands of donors in the US.
What were we doing wrong?
Lesson One: Get involved with your colleagues
Luckily, my boss was determined to shift the perception of our agency in the eyes of his international colleagues. So he became very active in the US international development community. He joined committees in strategic networks. He lobbied our international program staff to participate in the US as well. He brought onto our Board of Directors individuals with international development expertise and got them involved in those networks as well.
Through those activities, he also got to work with and come to know the staff in the development education division at USAID. And that’s how we learned what was wrong with us.
Lesson Two: Find out what funders think about you.
Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that child sponsorship organizations like ours — the ones that invested in active communications between donors here in the US and their sponsored families overseas — were not seen by many of their colleagues as serious international development organizations. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 4, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Communicating, Fundraising
Last week I received a very lovely recognition from an organization for which I have been a very active member for just over 20 years.
I was named a Partner in Philanthropy during our state National Philanthropy Day celebration. I was invited to the luncheon, had my photo and bio in the program, received a lovely pin, and was invited on stage with the other Partners who were being recognized that day by nonprofits they had served.
As I arrived at the check-in table, I received a name tag, pretty recognition pin, my table assignment and a recognition certificate in a folder.
When I opened the folder to view the certificate, my heart sank.
My name was misspelled.
While I tried to resist it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the gift I was being given had been selected for someone else. Like the time I opened a present anticipating something very romantic and found a rice cooker instead.
And this organization — I even served as its board president not that long ago.
I admit it. I’ve got a thing about my first name. I’ve never been particularly fond of it. The only thing that has redeemed my name for me is its spelling. So when I see Gayle mistakenly spelled Gail, I feel particularly rebuked. I can’t help it.
I also use my middle initial L. Routinely. And given the organization that was honoring me, an extra special touch would have been to include the ACFRE credential after my name.
But I’ll shake it off. (I did bring it to the organization’s attention that day. They promised to send me a new certificate. I’ll let you know when it arrives.)
Unfortunately, mine was not the only misspelled name that day. My co-honoree for the organization, who was also a table sponsor, saw her name misspelled as it was projected on the screen with other sponsors. And a dear departed colleague would be rolling his eyes to have seen his name misspelled on screen for the scholarship award given in his memory.
Accidents do happen. I’ve made them myself (it’s a plague to locate all the typos in these columns).
As a fledgling development director, I misspelled the last name of a board member in my first annual report (which had been proofed by others). The misspelling was also a pet peeve of this board member. Like me, he frequently saw his name misspelled. It was tiresome and maddening to him to have to re-educate each new staff member who might have occasion to spell his name.
I’ve worked hard to get names spelled correctly ever since.
So please take the extra time to spell it right. It really does matter to your supporters. We’re not always so forgiving.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 1, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Communicating
Providence started enforcing curbside recycling a few weeks ago.
The new rule is that you won’t get your trash picked up unless both of your recycling bins are on the curb when the trash trucks come by. (A blue one for glass, cans, and plastics and green for paper)
The city began promoting its new policy in September thinking it would give householders plenty of time to get ready before the November 2 start date. Public service announcements were sent to the media, the Mayor held a press conference, school kids were notified, and brochures were distributed to our homes.
Trash collectors even pasted an informational bumpersticker onto every city-issued big green trash barrel, figuring that had to get our attention when we hauled in the barrel at night.
The big day arrived and everyone should have been prepared – right?
Wrong.
Throughout the city, trash was left on the curb wherever there were no recycling bins. Officials reported that trash pickup went down by 63% — which should give you some idea of how many people ignored or weren’t aware of the new policy.
City Hall and City Councilors were flooded with calls from angry residents. A movement was started to reverse the policy (it wasn’t). Over 3,000 bins were sold in two days.
Residents were outraged! Why hadn’t they been told of the new policy?
It takes a lot of repetition to get a message through.
I was prepared for November 2nd. I knew about the city’s “no bin, no barrel” program. But then again, I read the local daily newspaper.
I also listen to my local public radio station, read most of my mail (or at least open the envelopes), and even take in the garbage can once in a while.
(Yes, some gender roles do die hard ).
But what probably made the biggest difference in my awareness?
I ALREADY RECYCLE!
You selectively pay attention to what you care about
As I’ve written earlier, we’ve been recycling for many years. We’ve faithfully sorted our household recyclables since we had access to curbside recycling.
As a colleague reminded me in a conversation a few weeks ago, I’m more likely to pay attention to news about the things that I’m interested in.
As I was already interested in curbside recycling, it wasn’t hard for my personal antenna to pick up the communications about the proposed policy change.
But as my fellow residents confirmed, householders who weren’t interested in recycling didn’t pay any attention to the City’s attempts to warn them, even when the notice was placed right under their noses where they couldn’t miss it.
So, what makes you think that you’ve done enough to communicate with your own constituents?
Whether you are trying to educate me about a community issue, hope to turn me out for a special event, or are trying to get me to renew my annual membership, don’t underestimate what it will take to get my attention.
If you think that you have sent too many communications, like the recycling program demonstrated, you might want to think your strategy through one more time.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on November 25, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Effectiveness
In the national rush to accelerate nonprofit collaboration and consolidation, we shouldn’t lose sight of the goal.
At the end of the day, nonprofit collaborations, joint ventures, mergers, or whatever should produce a better result for their community than what any individual organization might achieve working alone.
A few benefits:
- Fiscal sponsorship enables a group to focus on the challenges or needs in its community — the reason it was started – without having to staff finance or payroll departments. In turn, the fiscal sponsor enables valuable mission-related programs to flourish while it puts its excess administrative capacity to better use and gains the additional revenue from the small fee it charges to provide these services.
- Each member of an advocacy coalition realizes the political power of a larger group, or benefits from working with more knowledgeable partners, or doesn’t need to repeat the mistakes their colleagues have made. And often the coalition itself becomes attractive to funders who might have been out of reach, leveraging new resources for its members to advance their missions.
- In the Chattanooga museums collaboration I wrote about in an earlier blog post, the smaller museums gained from the administrative support and the staff expertise of the largest among them. The staff of the largest museum which was providing shared services found their jobs more interesting. And all the museums and the community gained by creating a lively waterfront populated with thriving, well-managed cultural resources.
When collaboration achieves its goal, the whole adds up to much more than just a simple sum of the parts.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on November 23, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Fundraising
How often have you heard excuses for why a potential donor couldn’t possibly give to your organization or project … before they’ve even been approached!
A typical conversation might sound like this:
Volunteer 1: What about Mr. Potential Donor? I think he might be capable of a larger gift than he’s been giving.
Volunteer 2: Oh no. He’s got a son in college (or substitute another reason such as “just remodeled their house,” or “bought a new boat”) and couldn’t possibly do more right now.
I was reminded of the lost opportunity when we make assumptions of what our donors will or won’t do when browsing through my Sunday newspaper a few weeks ago.
A photo caption caught my eye:
“Home Sweet Home Gala raises $400,000”
Whoa! I had to look again. Yes. It said $400,000. I figured the newspaper must have added an extra zero.
If you live in New York City, raising $400,000 probably sounds like no big deal for a charitable event. But the paper I was reading was the Providence Sunday Journal. The organization was Crossroads Rhode Island, formerly Travelers Aid of Rhode Island, the largest nonprofit provider of homeless services organization in our state.
To put this fundraising total into perspective for you, you’ll need a bit more data about Rhode Island.
- The total state population is just over 1 million, making up just over 400,000 households.
- The largest city, Providence, has a population of just 174,000.
- There are only two Fortune 500 companies in the whole state. And one community foundation.
- The unemployment rate, at 13% in September 2009, is one of the highest in the nation.
Even in a booming economy, $400,000 is a huge fundraising gross for an event in Rhode Island. If I had to guess, it’s probably in the 10 top events in total funds raised.
Very impressed, I had to learn more. So I went straight to the top and called Karen Santilli, the Vice President for Marketing and Development at Crossroads.
“Yes, our September gala raised just over $400,000.” Karen informed me.
No, they didn’t have a Hollywood celebrity or famous speaker, which the other events that raise the biggest money often have.
Seven Years and a Winning Formula
This event started seven years ago when Travelers Aid of Rhode Island changed its name to Crossroads Rhode Island. “The event chair at the time felt strongly we had to do something unique to celebrate the name change and help people remember who we were,” said Karen.
So they put their heads together to create a truly WOW event that would keep people talking and eager to see what they’d do the next year.
Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 27, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Better Boards
Advice to business people joining nonprofit boards.
Congratulations! You’ve just joined the board of directors of a charitable nonprofit.
If this is a new experience for you, you are in good company. Many businesses today encourage their staff to serve on nonprofit boards. You’ll share the experience of board service with individuals from all walks of life.
A few of your fellow board members may already be old hands at nonprofit governance. A rarer few have attended workshops or studied some of the literature on nonprofit board governance.
Many, however, are learning on-the-job…just like you.
… Perhaps your organization provided you with a comprehensive orientation to help you start your work on the board
… Maybe you were teamed with a more experienced director who is serving as your mentor?
With luck, you joined a superb board that’s filled with great role models.
It’s not unusual to feel a little unsure of yourself at first.
You should find the reception welcoming, as most nonprofit staff and directors relish the opportunity to benefit from the business savvy, strategic mindset, professional connections, and access to resources that directors from corporate backgrounds can contribute.
Yet, I frequently hear complaints that all of those desired qualities seem to evaporate as soon as a business person is elected to a board. And I often hear business people describe their frustration with their board service.
So here are a few insights about nonprofits that I’ve realized over the last 30 years — and a few tips to help make your board service more rewarding.
Let me start with the insights.
Nonprofits have a different bottom line.
In business, the bottom line is easy to understand – it’s all about profit. Even if your business advocates a dual bottom line (social responsibility and profit), profit doesn’t take second place.
In a nonprofit, there is no private inurement. The bottom line is the delivery of a public benefit – for example, an artistic contribution, environmental protection, or health promotion.
Determining what that public benefit is, how to deliver it and how to evaluate performance isn’t always easy. Imagine you are on the board of an organization dedicated to the promotion of practices for good mental health. Can you concretely define what success looks like? What evidence would you point to? What changes would your small agency claim responsibility for? These are the challenges that will face you as a director of a nonprofit board.
Nonprofits are valued for their prudence, commitment to service and fiscal restraint, yet are expected to produce significant community benefits.
In the for-profit world, business owners are rewarded for taking risks – usually with other people’s money (venture capital). Under-capitalization is warned against. And a personality like Donald Trump is lionized for his opulent lifestyle and forgiven for past business failures.
Not so in the nonprofit world. Here, individuals are expected to make sacrifices for the common good in the name of service. 
Making do with less is a familiar mantra. Pick up a business publication, and the virtuous charities are the ones with the lowest overhead.
Meanwhile, nonprofits are being admonished to “act more like businesses.” In reality, most nonprofits are extraordinarily small, much more comparable to “micro-enterprises.” According to data available through the National Center for Charitable Statistics, over 80% of registered US public charities had annual revenues below $250,000 in 2004.
At these smallest of nonprofits, nominally-paid staff or their volunteer leadership often have limited experience in nonprofit management and resource development — yet they are expected to operate as efficiently and effectively as multimillion dollar, professionally staffed organizations.
It’s surprising that these tiny organizations get anything accomplished at all. But they do! From the neighborhood soup kitchen feeding the hungry to the volunteer land trust preserving hundreds of acres of open space to the volunteer ethnic organization staging an annual cultural festival for 20,000 participants, many tiny nonprofits are making significant and valuable contributions to their communities.
Nonprofits are expected to consult with their stakeholders and to collaborate with their colleagues.
It’s not unusual for business people to comment on the pace of decision-making that occurs at many nonprofits. Change may happen more slowly than they are used to.
Because nonprofits are accountable to their community for doing good, stakeholders (like consumers, funders, politicians) expect to have some say in their functioning. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 26, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Good reads
Sometimes a little reading is a good place to start.
Staff or directors of nonprofit organizations come to us every day seeking our help to improve their functioning. And while I would never discourage anyone from that, I also encourage my clients and prospective clients to do some reading on their own. (Maybe it’s because one of my best friends and my next door neighbors are all librarians!)
I happen to learn a whole lot from reading. It’s one thing that I wish I had much, much more time to do. Thankfully, with Twitter, I now have hundreds of helpers who are out there looking for good reads that they can recommend to their followers. (You can follow me @gaylegifford)
I often start retreats or planning sessions I facilitate with a good discussion about an interesting article that the group was asked to read in advance of the session.
There is lots of really, really interesting stuff out there. So let me just share a tiny few this Monday.
Founders.
I jut got off the phone with the founder of a relatively new nonprofit organization. While the conversation had little direct connection to founder-ness, it did remind me of two of my favorite articles about founders. Both are written from the perspective of colleagues who really honor the extraordinary role of founders, unlike some of the other pieces I’ve read that treat founders as a disease to be cured.
Nonprofit Funding and Financial Issues
There is so much to recommend here, but take a look at anything from Clara Miller of the Nonprofit Finance Fund. I find myself frequently recommending ” The Looking Glass World of Nonprofit Money.”
I’m also very much transfixed by The Bridgespan Group’s study “How Nonprofits Get Really Big” that raises lots of questions about the doctrine of diversification of nonprofit revenue sources.
Program Planning
If you haven’t yet, you’ve got to take a look at The Stages of Change model developed by James O. Prochaska, Ph.D. et al at the University of Rhode Island. While I could have titled this section Making Change, I really think that anyone designing programming should take a look at this five stage model of change before leaping in.
Okay, just a few of my favorites for a Monday. Care to share some of yours?
(Or course, we’ve got a whole library of reads in the Articles sections of our website.)
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 21, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Communicating, Effectiveness, Public engagement
What makes for a genuine process of engaging the public in policy-making?
After a summer of shout fests around health care reform, I’d like to suggest that the typical “public hearing” or even “town hall” process simply encourages this way of behaving.
Most of the problems that we face are pretty complex. In our current adversarial way of policy making, there will always be winners and losers rather than win/wins.
I’ve experienced countless public hearings where, as a member of the public, I have been frustrated and angry at the lack of adequate time to share complex views. Standing at a microphone with just 1-3 minutes to make a comment and with no ability to have a thoughtful conversation with the other side — I can’t imagine what else could be designed to make audience members feel frustrated and angry.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The 7 Characteristics of Meaningful Public Engagement
What is necessary to ensure that the public is meaningfully consulted in policy making?
In our primer Meaningful Participation, an activist’s guide to collaborative policy making which you can download for free here, we set out 7 principles that need to be included in any process.
For citizen consultation to be meaningful, it must be:
1. Broad-based. That is, the process must truly include the full range of interests and positions that are represented. As the Quakers like to say, “everyone owns a piece of the truth.”
2. Open. Anyone who is interested should be aware of and understand how they can contribute and participate. They should feel welcomed. Meeting places should be accessible and well located. Meeting formats should be accessible and understandable.
3. Truthful. It is absolutely essential to ensuring the good faith of the participants that everyone acts in good faith. Accurate information needs to be contributed and analyzed. Important data, even if contradictory to your own views, should be included.
4. Responsive. For people to contribute civilly and in good faith, they need to know that their opinions are in fact being listened to and that they might have the ability to actually help create a better outcome.
5. Deliberative. Whatever the process is, it needs to provide enough time for everyone involved to be able to develop a shared understanding of the problem, to create a common vision of what could be, to be creative about options and to have time to thoughtfully reflect on possible solutions. One shot public hearings with citizen comment aren’t set up for this. People expect to have to demonstrate and shout to get their voices heard. There are better ways to talk to each other.
6. Fair. All participants need to know that they are equally valued and have equal access and input. Not just the highly paid lobbyists, but ordinary citizens.
And finally, the process needs to be
7. Competent. That is, it should result in the best decision being made because hard data was examined, real examples of solutions in action were examined, evidence-based practices were considered.
Whether you are a policy maker or a citizen advocate, you are going to need to work really hard to ensure that the process of developing major policies includes all of these elements. But it is truly worth it.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 19, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Big ideas, Nonprofit Highlights, World News
“The Humanities make us RICH.” Or so goes the sentiment on my morning tea mug.
October is once again National Arts and Humanities Month.It just so happens that I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of the humanities over the last few weeks.
What are the humanities?
According to the National Endowment for the Humanities, as described in the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act:
“The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.”
The humanities are essential to Cause & Effect Inc.
In an evaluation of our work, we asked a colleague to interview a number of our clients. Our clients told her that one of the things that they appreciated about working with us was that we “got it.”
While clients meant our understanding of their organizational challenges, they also mentioned our ability to appreciate and comprehend the complexity of the societal issues that they faced.
In college, I was a geography major (concentration in urban social) with a strong sociology background. Jon was a history major with literature right behind. You might say we studied the humanities.
And while there are days that I long for more of an engineering or science background, I have always been grateful for the systems perspective that college studies helped me develop. I was constantly challenged to consider the interrelationships between political systems, markets, history, culture, art, climate, habitat, food production and more. To this day, we bring that approach to our work with clients – whether we are writing, facilitating strategic planning, or framing a strong fund development program.
The humanities provide the tools that help us make meaning of our world and our lives.
Just over the last few weeks, it seems that I’ve been especially reminded how the humanities manifest in our daily lives.
Last month, Lizzi Ross, the former director of adult programming at the ICA in Boston, spoke to the students in the class I teach at Brown. In describing how she went about designing programming to enable us to appreciate art that isn’t pretty pictures, Lizzi explained that contemporary art requires us to call on our knowledge of history, contemporary culture, literature, art, science and more.
“Ah, the humanities,” I thought.
Last Wednesday, I attended “What Now? 1932 – The Highlander Center Opens Its Doors,” a live taping from Action Speaks Radio. The premise of Action Speaks is to take an “under appreciated day in American History” and look at it through a contemporary lens. That show talked about the popular education approach of the Highlander Research and Education Center, which encourages activists from multiple walks of life to explore their personal experiences and connect them to larger historical and societal issues. “That’s the humanities in action,” I whispered to my neighbor. Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are just a few of the “graduates” of Highlander.
A love of the humanities can be demonstrated beyond textbooks and scholarly works.
Tonight I’m heading to the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities’ celebration of the humanities and their contribution to life in RI. I’m especially excited as I sat on the committee that nominated tonight’s awardees. A lifetime achievement award goes to cartoonist Don Bousquet, whose humorous cartoons have been lampooning Rhode Read More >>
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