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.

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.

The William and Fora Hewlett Foundation has teamed up with McKinsey and Company to start a conversation about building a “stronger nonprofit marketplace.” The proposal is outlined in their report “The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap.” They would like to get your feedback.

The problem that many funders and donor advisors want to solve is how to steer philanthropic dollars to the “strongest and most effective nonprofits.” They’d like to see some intermediary that could measure nonprofits based on their social impact. They are concerned, and rightly so, that the reduction of nonprofit effectiveness to percent of revenues spent on programming used by sites like Charity Navigator do a disservice to both nonprofits and to donors.

In principal, I’d welcome attempts to shift philanthropic dollars out of the ivory towers and into the streets. We need to expose more individuals of wealth to the full range of nonprofits that need their help but will never afford giant development departments (or even medium sized ones, for that matter). I’m also pretty sure than many more organizations would get “stronger” pretty quickly if funders invested in building a serious fund development capacity in those organizations.

As you know, I am absolutely dedicated to steering nonprofits to a razor sharp focus on intensifying their societal impact. But I also know that on virtually any big issue, it is pretty unrealistic to expect that a single nonprofit will change the world by itself.

So, I get very nervous when someone comes along and decides that it’s necessary to restructure the sector and believe that they’ve got such a scoop on nonprofit effectiveness that they can set themselves up as the arbiters of donor giving. Here’s why:

• Only a limited few organizations can directly show their impact on societal outcomes. Some schools perhaps. But how do we measure the creation of beauty or knowledge sufficient enough to pop into a rating system ? Or how about the prevention of harm? Developing meaningful measurement indicators of societal impact for these types of nonprofits have stumped evaluators for decades.
• How many organizations can we say are solely responsible for some long-term outcome, independent of the other players in their system? Even the most polished policy shops I know give due credit to those noisy, rag tag activists from struggling grassroots nonprofits  who help to define the middle ground or even hit the home run themselves after years of stalled action. How does a rating system address collaboration, synergy and large networks, planned or not?
• Most of these models are devoted to a goal of helping nonprofits “scale up.” The concept discounts the vital role of some of the most local nonprofit organizations. Any advocate worth their salt will tell you how essential it is to have people with legal standing in neighborhood organizations or local environmental groups who can oppose individual zoning changes or troublesome permits.
• How does risk and failure fit into this model? Don’t we also need to fund noble experiments that may fail at first but perhaps succeed at a later time or in another place? (Think of all those business entrepreneurs who go bust two or three times before they launch the killer ap.)
• And how do we avoid success based on hype, personal charisma or self-promotion, which I’ve personally seen sway even the smartest funders and researchers again and again?
• If a recent Bridgespan report is an indicator, too many funders and other otherwise really smart people still don’t get that raising significant philanthropic dollars requires serious investment in fund development capacity over time, especially if you are not a founder who was born into the upper classes or can’t access government dollars to fuel your growth.

I happen to think that the real holes in this project deserve more than the box on page 56 of the report called “Unintended Consequences.” I suggest to the authors that they try modeling their system using those troubling “unintended consequences” and the others that I named above, rather than seeing them as exceptions to be dealt with later.

Having lived through the “planned philanthropy” of the historic United Way model that shut out environmental, advocacy, arts, civil liberties, human rights, reproductive justice and other organizations that I personally hold dear, I think I’d rather live with the messiness of the marketplace.

Read the report. Add your voices to the listserve.

While I champion the call to service, I’ve been concerned for many years that the definition of volunteering and service has been too narrowly drawn and that what we should be encouraging is civic participation, in all of its many forms.

Here are a few examples of civic participation that don’t always get counted when the discussion turns to “community service.”

We’ve had a lot of snow here in RI over the last few weeks. My wonderful neighbor Doug, who owns a snow blower, has surprised us by pushing his blower well beyond his front walk to blow a path up and down the street that lets kids and grownups walk safely to the bus (and saves us quite a bit of shoveling as well). I think Doug’s gesture is an excellent example of civic participation… which I would define as actively contributing to the shared life of his community. You might just call it neighborliness, but that neighborliness multipled hundreds of thousands of times over knits our country together.

Just before the election, I was invited to a note writing event for the Obama campaign. About 20 women or more showed up to write handwritten notes to potential voters in other states. I also made phone calls in rooms filled with dozens of volunteers who were energized about the campaign. While this year may have been particularly noteworthy for the numbers of new volunteers, every year citizens from all ends of the political spectrum volunteer on campaigns for city council, mayoral, state representative, school committee and countless other offices. They stuff envelopes, canvass door to door, call neighbors, raise money, act as poll watchers… yet so rarely do we acknowledge their contributions.

I have the great honor of devoting my life to my work with nonprofit organizations. Every day I am inspired by individuals who have devote a giant portion of their lives to improving the communities where they live — whether their neighborhoods, towns, or the greater world. Yes, many are paid, but most of the people I meet could never be adequately compensated for the energy they spend each day improving society.

I want to honor the residents who show up at the community forums — people who aren’t often part of a particular organization, but take it upon themselves to get involved. I want to honor the civic participation that brings people out to stand vigil against unjust wars or to organize their neighbors against polluters, or the spirit that makes people volunteer to serve as union stewards, or to form the local crime watch, or raise money to build the neighborhood playground, or even just those who give a call or run an errand now and then for an elderly or infirm neighbor.

It is this spirit, the idea that we are not silos, but that we have a responsiblity to each other, that propels civic participation and makes us a great country and a great people. While Dr. King said “everyone can be great because everyone can serve,” I’m pretty certain that his idea of service was the broad, all encompassing kind.

Senator Claiborne Pell and Gayle Gifford 1981

It’s not often that I get weepy over the death of a politician. But I couldn’t help tearing up when I heard New Year’s Day that former Senator Claiborne Pell had died. While he served Rhode Island for six terms in the Senate, he truly was a Senator for all of us, a man who believed in public service as a noble calling, and had faith in the power of civility and diplomacy. He worked tirelessly for international peace, human rights, education, the arts and scholarship, the environment and historic preservation.

He was quirky, the way we like our politicians in RI. Known for his frayed cuffs and collars, his summer seersucker suits, he was a patrician beloved by the working class, interested both in science and UFOs and ESP. He defined his Senate job as “translate ideas into action and help people.”

The national press is noting his role in creating the Pell grants which provide financial aid to US college students and his leadership in creating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. As a alumni board member of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, I have cherished his leadership and support for both the arts and scholarship.

But not enough is being said about Senator Pell’s work in support of the environment, human rights and nuclear disarmament. He was always extremely proud of his role as a junior senator in the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and of its subsequent role in crafting numerous treaties to limit nuclear weapons. Senator Pell always noted for us his leadership on the Seabed Arms Control Treaty to keep nuclear weapons off the ocean floor and would site that treaty as evidence of the power of international diplomacy and cooperation.

Rhode Island and international peace activists had a true champion in Senator Pell. He came to vigorously oppose the Vietnam War. In the middle 70s and 80s, I remember? Senator Pell as a frequently featured guest, often speaking to peace activists at spaghetti dinners in church basements. RI had an extremely active network of peace and justice organizations at that time with which I was actively involved, including the RI chapter of the Mobilization for Survival, the RI office of the American Friends Service Committee, and Women for a NonNuclear Future. Senator Pell’s door was always open. He was one of the earliest supporters of a nuclear weapons freeze and the RI congressional delegation was the first in the nation to endorse such a freeze.

Senator Pell and his staff members were activists on human rights. He led the passage of the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988 in the US Senate as a result of the Saddam regime gas attacks on the Kurdish population of Iraq. As a volunteer with Amnesty International USA, we received assistance on a case of a disappeared Czechoslovakian from his valued staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Peter Galbraith, how Ambassador Galbraith.

Senator Pell was an environmentalist and a supporter of historic preservation. When I worked at Save The Bay in the early 90s, Senator Pell and Senator John Chafee were supportive trustees (honorary council). For many years Senator and Mrs Pell hosted our annual fundraising gala on the lawn of their modest Newport RI ranch house on a stunning sight overlooking the ocean. While this sounds modest, it was quite a disruption for them including a tent large enough to hold 1,000 people, negotiations with neighbors,? parking, down to the port-a-potties on their property.? (WIth an on-going tribute to Save The Bay’s splendid major gifts director Anne Garnett who made this magic happen).

I had the good fortune to recently work with his daughter Julia Pell for a short time before her untimely death from lung cancer in 2006. Julia was a founding donor and activist for Equity Action, a field of interest fund of the Rhode Island Foundation for sexual orientation and gender identity issues, for which I served as a consultant. Julia Pell, who came out as a lesbian in the early 1990s, said that her father “always stood up for me. He always stood up for what was right.”

A fitting tribute … may we continue his work in honor of his passing.

In my view, the most unexpected of these factors is the success (and recognition) of old- and new-fashioned community organizing. And this, I think, is where nonprofits badly need to pay attention.

In TIME magazine, Joe Klein describes how an Obama volunteer spent six months gettting to know the folks in tiny Algona, Iowa, before his vital and surprising caucus victory in that state. Klein says “Obama’s decision to expend so much effort on a field organization was quietly revolutionary.” Schmitz notes that the Obama campaign refused to choose between online and on-the-ground organizing. It excelled at both, creating many different online and face-to-face niche communities and ways to participate in political action for Obama.

We know the result. The organizing strategy generated more dedicated volunteers, more cash contributions and more votes than anyone could have imagined. Now President Obama stands to? prevail in the political battles ahead.

What’s Obama’s political campaign got to do with nonprofits? These days, far too little. Hundreds of thousands of? nonprofits have become deeply integrated into the systems serving critical needs like health, education and many others. No longer movements, they have become guardian institutions for the status quo.

The imperative to capture resources to pursue already-settled courses of action means that the constituents’ money has far more value than their ideas or energies. These nonprofits spend heavily on direct mail appeals without investing in the back end to activate or educate constituents as volunteers and advocates. The message to donors here is: “Just send us the check – we’ll take it from there.”

But, the donors, like the voters, are fed up with enforced passivity. We don’t want “input.” We want to do something. Check out Paula Poundstone on NPR this morning. With great humor, Paula expresses my sense of anxious frustration as I wait for the Big Thing that President Obama will ask of us. We just want to help fix things.

Obama won our votes and our contributions because he asked for so much more. However, my guess is that President Obama will be far too busy to offer most of us satisfying opportunities to help save the nation. (Besides, he doesn’t actually know how to fix everything – some of this we need to figure out for ourselves.)

But our nonprofits do offer a vast range of ways ordinary people can help make the needed national change. The energy and optimism is out there to be captured, if only we can rediscover our neglected organizing muscles.

I enjoyed a privileged perch as co-facilitator of Rhode Island’s ?first Poverty Simulation, an exercise created by Missouri Community Action and now being used all over the United States to help the more fortunate understand what the phrase “not making ends meet” really means. During our Rhode Island simulation, held on Sept. 23, 50-odd participants played specific roles as adult or child members of 23 low- and moderate-income households. The incomes and situations are based on reality – these families are mostly the working poor, not the most destitute.

Over four 15-minute weeks each household does its best to?secure income, cash checks, buy food, pay rent, get the kids to school and transact other essential business at 12 sites, including an employer, a bank, a welfare office and a pawn shop. Like real life, the simulation includes bad luck, crime and difficult decisions between, for instance, feeding the kids or paying the rent.

During the short simulated month, I watched our little community unravel. The rules are complicated and obscure. Lines are long. Time is short. A thief snatches unwatched goods and cash and merchants cheat customers. Service providers harden their hearts: everyone has a hard luck story. By week four, our school was empty and our jail was full. This report from ABC 6?gives you some idea of how it went.

After the final whistle, we talked about what had happened. Nearly every family ended worse than they’d begun; only one claimed to have fed their children and paid all their bills each week. Many of our participants work in organizations helping low-income families, yet even they reported new insights into how poverty feels: stressful, depressing, disempowering. Others noted the importance of small gestures of kindness. All of us marveled at how serious and intense this artificial experience became to participants.

“As a person who feels like she’s pretty in-touch with these issues, I had so many learnings in the short time I was there,” wrote Kathy O’Donnell, Director of Public Affairs at Citizens Bank later in the day.? “It was so important to walk in another’s shoes, to see their perspective when faced with impossible choices when at the end of the day, they just want a better life for their children…. It was a humbling and moving experience.”

Kathy also hoped that public officials might participate in future simulations, and our team would also hope for many more business leaders, too. Our first group of participants largely self-selected from those already persuaded that poverty is a problem we can solve. Next time (if there is one) we want a lot more participation from the General Assembly and Chamber of Commerce.

I often help organizations serving lower-income families make the case for their programs. To me, the case for helping is a matter of community self-interest as well as morality. But for many of my middle-class peers, the notion that lots of people in our community simply cannot earn enough to pay the minimum costs of food, shelter and health care, no matter how hard they work, just makes no sense in light of their own life experiences. To them, it seems the poor have chosen poverty. Help is not just undeserved, but also futile.

The poverty simulation doesn’t lead straight to solutions. But in about two hours it does lead to understanding on a level no words or data can reach. Poverty is complicated, poverty hurts us as individuals and poverty perpetuates itself. I know that experience is the best teacher. In Savannah, Georgia, the Poverty Simulation is a quarterly event that recruits dozens of business volunteers to task forces on poverty-related issues like housing and transit through Step Up Savannah, a community coalition committed to solving problems of persistent poverty in their community.

Our Poverty Simulation was organized by Social Venture Partners of Rhode Island with help from 11 volunteers like me from the 2008 Delta II class of Leadership Rhode Island and the critical coaching and on-site guidance of Paula Consolini of Williams College, who also lent us the Poverty Simulation kit. Exchange City, an indoor, life-size mini-community where school classes learn about real-life economics and civics, made a perfect venue for our program.

Jon

Though I’ve already referenced this effort in an earlier posting, I wanted to remind you to go the the website of Project Streamline, download a copy of the report and its recommendations, and add your feedback to the discussion.

Some of the things we talked about on our conference call:

The need to rightsize the application process to the amount of the grant.

The need to focus proposal writing on the right stuff, (program and results), and not take up time with excessive paperwork.

The need for better online application processes (ones where you can save your document, copy and paste, print out versions to check, etc).

The need for open source final reports so that our colleagues can learn from our experiences (rather than reports locked in a file cabinet that no one pays attention to).

The report is a good read. It may confirm all of your frustrations. If a fair amount of your revenues come through private foundation grants, it’s well worth your involvement, especially if you have recommended solutions to the problems addressed.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of grants and contracts which nonprofits receive come through the government … which isn’t a beneficiary of this study. But the project sponsors were urged to share the report with government grantmakers anyway as they may benefit from its recommendations.

Last week I facilitated a planning meeting for organizations and individuals working on issues of economic independence for individuals with disabilities. Across the US, programs like theirs are facing enormous funding cuts as state governments face extreme budget shortfalls. These service providers, like those in education, health care, and throughout our system, were extremely concerned about how they would continue to support the people they serve.

Then the conversation shifted. A feeling of hopelessness gave way to a realization that everyone in the room had to come together to completely reinvent the system. They could do this by looking at the resources they did have and finding better, more effective, and interdependent ways of working.

Given hard times, this excerpt from Peter Block’s new book, Community, The structure of belonging, seemed particularly timely.

“Community transformation calls for citizenship that shifts the context from a place of fear and fault, law and oversight, corporation and system, and preoccupation with leadership to one of gifts, generosity, and abundance; social fabric and chosen accountability; and associational life and the engagement of citizens. These shifts occur as citizens face each other in conversations of ownership and accountability.”

What is it that we wish to hold ourselves, not just our leaders accountable for? What is the world we want to live in? What responsibility do we have for creating that world?

“I realized that public affairs were also my affairs. I became active in politics because I saw the possibility, if we all sat back and did nothing, of a world in which there would no longer be any stages for actors to act on.”

With the party conventions opening today with the Democrats in Denver, I couldn’t resist this quote attributed to Helen Gahagan Douglas.