The Coalition for Buzzards Bay got much better results by spreading nets in many different waters when they set out on their own New Bedford-based quest: to grow membership by more than 50 percent over  two years. The Coalition started in 2009 with 5,200 members. A generous donor offered them $500,000 if they could add 3,000 new members before December 31, 2010.

“He wasn’t kidding,” said Mark Rasmussen, the Coalition’s Executive Director of his anonymous donor. “He made it clear: if we missed the target, we wouldn’t get the money.” Last week, my colleague Anne Garnett and I sat down with Mark just a few blocks away from the Seaman’s Bethel and other opening scenes of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to find out how the Coalition met the challenge, won the prize and set a new direction for its future. Here are some lessons:

• Share the drama. “It’s wonderful – and frankly a bit scary – to have a challenge like this,” said Mark in his 2009 announcement. The compelling $500,000 challenge and the possibility of failure helped excite and engage the Coalition family and the general public.
• All hands on deck. Volunteers moved mountainst to get targeted mailings out the door, saving thousands of dollars. Board members stepped up, ransacking their Rolodexes and buying gift memberships. That commitment brought other friends and members in on the project.
• Know what you are counting. The goal was member numbers, not member dollars. The Coalition already had clear criteria for counting individual members (family memberships count as two members) so everyone, including the challenge donor, knew the score.
• Make it easy. Any donor of $10 or more ($30 for families) who opts to be a member is a member. That low price point made it easy to say “yes.”
• Try everything. Mark handed us a pie chart with 12 slices breaking out where the members came from. Their traditional Bay swim and newer Bay bike ride accounted for 42 percent of the new members. The rest were spread over 11 separate member recruitment projects.
• Recruit the friends of your friends. As noted, the Coalition got the biggest boost just by offering a member option to riders, swimmers and their sponsors. Mark has been pleasantly surprised to find event sponsors responding well to direct renewal requests this year.
• Go grassroots. Who loves the Bay? Boaters and shellfishers for sure. Volunteers moved mountains to merge and purge records from 18 coastal communities. Personalized mailings to these two groups of public permit-holders snagged 13 percent of the total new member catch.
• Let people help. The owner of Not Your Average Joe’s restaurant created an entire promotional effort on his own, including hats, table cards and personal appeals from servers as well as mini-matching gifts of $5, to encourage diners to add membership dues to their dinner check. That brought in an astounding 550 members in just five weeks.

The Not Your Average Joe’s campaign added to a late surge that put the campaign way over the top in the later months of 2010. The Coalition wound up adding about 3,600 new members by the deadline, blowing the doors off their goal.

Spreading efforts across a dozen different initiatives required a lot of work from staff and uncounted volunteer hours. In hindsight, we can see that the top five member acquisition strategies recruited just enough members to achieve the 3,000-member goal. But going in, no one could have told the Coalition which five would work.

Conventional direct mail would not have worked. Even if it somehow managed to mail to every one of the approximately 115,000 households in the Buzzards Bay watershed, the Coalition would have spent a fortune. And at standard response rates of well under one percent for new member acquisition by mail, they would still have fallen far short of the goal.

Mail did play a large role, but guerilla marketing tactics, such as data-mining town lists of marine permit holders and using volunteers for mailings yielded higher returns at far lower costs than conventional DM. The Coalition also needed both face-to-face transactions (events, the restaurant and the Coalition store) and online payments (particularly the swim and ride) to make the whole goal.

Putting the matching gift aside, the Coalition hasn’t made a ton of money on $10 memberships. But that was never the point. Consider the value of having 25 percent of the population of a coastal town like Marion, Mass., as members when the Coalition has business with local government.

As with any new donor campaign, the Coalition looks to the long-term value of its 3,700 new members. There’s nowhere for a $10 member to go but up. Of course, that assumes these easy-come members won’t go away just as easily. Donna Cobert, the Coalition’s Director of Membership, doesn’t think that will happen. Renewals have been strong in 2011, she says. Now she’s working on the 2011 member challenge, a member-gets-member campaign, to close in on 10,000 members by the end of 2011.

We couldn’t have said it better, Joan. Philanthropy as love of humankind. Philanthropy as democratic obligation. Philanthropy as justice.

To each of you for stepping up every day to shape our world through voluntary action in philanthropy, we add our own great big THANK YOU.

I want to thank Ben Klaskey of Philanthropy Reports for putting it all together in such an engaging way. Thank you Ben, for letting me share “Know Your Sector” with our readers.

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“Dear Jonathan and Gayle,

“In 1997 a man named Roger Whiting came to you with a story about a Tanzanian woman named Alice Mnaku, who dreamed of going to college but could not afford it. Thanks to your sage advice, Roger went on to found Growth Through Learning. It is lessons he learned from Cause & Effect that has enabled us to become the successful non-profit we are today. This year alone, GTL granted 317 scholarships to bright girls from poor families in East Africa….”

Roger Whiting was a retired insurance man from Worcester, Massachusetts. With no background in international development or education, Roger devised a simple and direct response to Africa’s poverty that has, in the years since 1997, also proven to be profoundly life-changing for hundreds of young women. We were sad to learn that Roger passed away in May of this year. But we are pleased and proud to know that we played a part in setting Growth Through Learning on the path to success.

Just like business start-ups, new nonprofits face an uphill struggle for survival and growth — and with far less access to start-up investment capital. Only yesterday, Gayle and I met a whole roomful of passionate volunteers and staff at the New Roots Providence consultant fair, many of them seeking guidance in their start-up processes.

What might this new generation  learn from a file we closed in 1997? We dug deep into Gayle’s hard drive and had a long talk with Alex Marthews to find out. Here are a few lessons in growth from Growth Through Learning:

1. Keep it simple. Growth Through Learning does one thing well: it pays fees at a few carefully selected secondary schools for girls from poor families in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The organization has generally avoided expanding the scope of its program or geographic area . With tremendous population growth predicted for all three program countries, running out of work is the least of GTL’s problems.

2. Tell real stories. Two stories really matter here. One is the story of an African girl whose life is transformed by education. The other is the story of an American whose own life is changed by compassion. Alice and Roger were the first characters in this story, but there have been hundreds of girls and donors since then. GTL staff or volunteers personally collect the story of every single girl during annual visits. This story is both familiar and totally new each time it is told.

3. Keep it personal. Roger’s generosity of spirit  and his enthusiasm burned bright. By sharing his story face to face, starting from his personal network of friends, Roger patiently built a widening circle of loyal donors and board members that slowly but steadily enabled him to expand scholarships from just a handful of girls helped, to dozens, and now hundreds, every year.

4. Make your own luck. No one could have predicted two game-changing gifts that came to Growth Through Learning, including a $1 million bequest that has essentially solved the problem of paying GTL’s current very lean overhead. But we could easily predict that they would never have come about without Roger’s persistent effort at steps 1, 2 and 3 above.

Our thanks to Alex Marthews for taking the time to contact us and share those learnings and also for honoring Cause & Effect, with a link to the Growth Through Learning site.  I’ll revisit what Alex shared about the uses of stories in a later posting.

The Infrastructure Collaborative was a collaboration of grassroots land trusts, watershed organizations and technical assistance providers in Rhode Island that started in 2004 and is just wrapping up. With support from Third Sector New England, they formed a learning network to consider how they might pilot a model for sharing services that could improve the administrative and fundraising capacity of small conservation nonprofits.

Throughout, all of the members learned a lot about the challenges of building capacity in very small nonprofits. Rather than crafting a typical final report to a foundation, they decided instead to share their experiences in the form of a case study so that others could benefit as well.

Some of the lessons learned:

• In the smallest organizations, capacity is in individuals and their institutional knowledge, not organizational systems. When inevitable transitions occur, built capacity can quickly be lost. Attention must be paid to building sustained people capacity somewhere in the network. Transitions often occur at a rate that prohibits capacity building.

• Small groups need either a large organization with significant built capacity already on their team or they will need a much larger cash investment to buy what they lack.

• Small nonprofits live in the moment, focused on the urgent needs that caused their formation. Rarely planning for financial or operational sustainability, at the extremes they can be alternately overwhelmed by or overlook even key short-term administrative tasks.

• Leadership matters. They never would have moved forward without the steady guiding hand of their two lead organizers.  At the same time, leadership changes among the members shifted organizational commitments.

• Hiring staff and vendors is always risky, even with very diligent screening. A bad selection can thwart the best plans, undermine confidence in a project and create fatal delays in implementation.

• Research and development investments need to be much bigger to allow experimentation, buy better solutions, and include enough cash to fail, learn and recover. The investment needed for small nonprofits to launch back office services was much larger than they anticipated.

I think you’ll find their experience very interesting.

(I’ve been participating in the project on and off since its inception. In the early years, I was a volunteer representing the RI chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which was interested in improving the way it supported very small organizations. Later, I provided some training and technical assistance in fundraising and helped them reflect on what they learned — including helping them draft this final summary of their work.)

“The bottom line is that hazardous ingredients that have not been tested for long-term health impacts, like asthma or even birth defects, are being used in some cleaning products,” said Erin Switalski, executive director of Women’s Voices for the Earth. “Consumers have a right to know if they are spraying their kids’ high chairs with toxic chemicals. Without full ingredient disclosure from these companies, there’s simply no way to be sure.” (From SustainableBusiness.COM)

Unfortunately, you won’t find WVE listed at a big rating sight like CharityNavigator because they don’t meet its income levels (less than $500,000 in public donations, $1 million total budget). Yet. (that’s where you can help.)

Thankfully, a number of smaller private foundations understand the essential role that an organization like WVE plays in knitting together women’s health and environmental concerns.

Despite its small size, WVE has played an important role in getting manufacturers like OPI and Clorox to clean up their products.

I’ve seen this passionate band up close and can testify to its worthiness and its leanness. It could use a lot less of the lean. And more of your green.

Please don’t assume that just because an organization isn’t showing up on a rating site that it automatically should be excluded from your consideration. Dig deeper. You’ll find some real treasures out there.

Curt was my boss at Save The Bay when I worked there from 1990-1995. He had just been named Executive Director and I was his first hire as Director of Development & Marketing. We were good partners and worked closely together.

Curt stepped down from Save The Bay after  20 years. He has much to be proud of during his tenure there. And Save The Bay has many decades of accomplishments in protecting, restoring and preserving Narragansett Bay and its watershed.

Yesterday, Curt and I were planning to work on a project together. Today, he finally hears about the appointment. My loss, EPA and our environment’s gain. It’s very exciting. Looks like Curt will be joining his wife Patrice on the train to Boston.

We are expecting really great things from you, Curt. I know you’ll deliver.

Big high five, Gayle

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 Islanders for decades. How is this the humanities, you might ask? Through his cartoons, Bousquet has been chronicling the history and culture of Rhode Islanders. I can see future studiers of RI history pouring through his cartoons, in the way we now study a Thomas Nast or Walt Kelly.

The Tom Roberts Prize for Creative Achievement in the Humanities goes to the Living History Program which trains high school students to reenact the history of the 14th Heavy Artillery, Rhode Island’s Black Civil War regiment. In a recent article in the Providence Journal, Rob Goldman, the director was quoted as saying: “I hear; I forget. I see; I remember. I do; I understand.”

According to the Journal article: ” Goldman makes his regiment members ‘do’ the Civil War, and let the learning — about race, culture and class, about equality and morality — happen naturally. [Goldman says] ‘You’re not going to hook kids this way with a book.’ ”

Without the humanities, we end up with a vast wasteland — similar to most AM Talk Radio.

I admit it. I’m a talk radio addict. Talk radio is on in my car and from the moment we wake in the morning till we go to sleep at night. But I just can’t stand listening to AM Talk Radio. No, I’m a National Public Radio addict.

Try as I might to listen to enrich my own world experience, I just can’t stand listening to minutes and minutes of empty content on AM talk radio. Where is the complex historical, social, or cultural content? Where are the journalists, the historians, the sociologists, the philosophers, the artists, the architects, the musicologists, and more that I am treated to each day on NPR stations. I’m just amazed (and saddened) that so many people can listen for hours to the same simpleminded statements over and over again without hungering for some background, some texture, some complexity to the bombast.

So take a moment this Arts and Humanities month to appreciate the humanities. You’ll be much richer for it.

Bloggers around the world are helping to raise awareness and build support for government and personal action to significantly reduce greenhouse gasses which threaten the way humans live on this planet.

I decided to add our blog to this action because I care. Maybe it’s because I live in the Ocean State of Rhode Island and care about the impact that rising sea level and warming waters will have on its coastal habitat, wildlife,  fisheries, and beaches. Or because so many of our clients are working so hard on this issue. Or because I’ve been environmentally aware most of my adult life. Or just because I consider myself a global citizen, accountable to current and future generations.

Why does climate change matter to you?

I recently wrote about the small ways that our household has tried to lower its environmental footprint. See “Green Musings on a Monday.” Hopefully you’ll try some yourself.

I also want to take this occasion to highlight the amazing work of  the clients we’ve had over the last 13 years. These organizations do the hard work needed to restore, protect and preserve the environment.

While it may seem daunting to try to affect climate change at the micro level,  every action matters.

While a local land trust or watershed organization may not be able to stop climate change in its tracks, their work creates healthier ecosystems which may prove more resilient to climate change. Resilient ecosystems are better prepared to resist, tolerate or recover from climate change.

I hope that you’ll take seek out and support some of these critical organizations or similar organizations in your own community.

On this day to build awareness of climate change, we’d like to highlight the good work of:

Aquidneck Land Trust

John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor Commission

Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save The Sound

Grow Smart RI

Knox Parks Foundation

Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management

Rhode Island Land and Water Partnership

Rhode Island Natural History Survey

Narragansett Bay Estuary Program

Nashua River Watershed Association

Natural Resources Conservation Service

Rhode Island Land Trust Council

Save The Bay

Tiverton Land Trust

Wood Pawcatucket Watershed Association

Woonasquatucket  River Watershed Council

Westerly Land Trust

To get the quick story check out this 5-minute video: 

Project RENEW: Transforming Women and A Neighborhood,

The video was made by my colleague and friend David Goldenberg as part of our recent program assessment and planning work with RENEW .

The Pawtucket Police give Project RENEW, a program of the Pawtucket Citizens Development Corporation, most of the credit for a remarkable reduction in visible on-street prostitution, prostitution arrests and calls for service in the Barton Street neighborhood. Rethinking Arrest–Street Prostitution and Public Policy from Nick Horton at the Family Life Center identifies Project RENEW as the most promising model for diverting women from generally useless and very costly incarceration into alternative supports that help women tackle the fundamental problems that drive them into prostitution: poverty, mental illness and addiction, among others.

One lesson we learned was highlighted by the debate over prostitution laws in Rhode Island this year. No one knows a lot about this topic. A lot of people draw sweeping conclusions from brief peeks into one corner of the vast and very diverse universe of sex for pay (and sex for shelter, drugs, etc.). That’s why one major element of the new three-year program plan we helped Project RENEW create focuses on building capacity to gather and share lessons from their own program experience and from the life experience and wisdom of the women they help.