But a conversation yesterday brought back to me a dynamic that I’ve been observing for many years: the role of boards as conservators.

A little background.

Yesterday I made my bi-annual trek to life portfolio company New Directions to discuss life in the nonprofit sector with their clients. New Directions clients are accomplished people in business or the professions who are designing the next stage of their life journeys.

My portion of the conversation was “The rewarding and confounding world of the nonprofit sector,” which is partly nonprofit 101 and partly DEEP THOUGHTS.

A fellow “interpreter of the sector” was the Executive Director of a capacity building (smallish, $500K budget) nonprofit. He mentioned that for the last two years he had been a co-executive director, a leadership team that resulted from a merger. He mentioned that the other ED was winding up his term and he would soon be the sole ED. When I asked how the co-directorship worked for him, he shared he really liked the arrangement, but his Board just wasn’t comfortable with the shared leadership model.

Boards as Conservators

At first a bit surprised by this tale, it reminded me that many boards are naturally suited to their role as conservators.

Here I’m using conservator in its definition as someone who conserves or keeps safe. Like a custodian, guardian, or protector.

The words we use to describe board duties — like prudent, loyalty, care, fiduciary — imply moderation and caution. Another word I might use would be  “conservative.”

In my experience, most Boards of Directors are loathe, and rightfully so, to take big risks. In their conservator role, boards put the breaks on reckless spending. Because boards usually reflect the mindset of the communities they serve, they often restrain choices, decisions or actions that could put their organization ideologically too far in front of the constituencies and communities they serve. I’ve seen boards wisely put the kabosh on ill-conceived public policy actions that could threaten public good will.

When conservator = ill-conceived road block

Too frequently, however, the conservator role of boards holds back innovation.

Staff often find themselves far ahead of their part time leadership volunteers when it comes to mission implementation. As the professionals, they interact with their peers and seek out new research and best practices. They are immersed every day in the work, thinking what comes next, how can I do this better (or at least we hope they are).

But their board members aren’t. They have other lives, other jobs, other concerns that take precedence. Few, if any, are traveling in the same professional spaces. They only know what is, and may have no clue about what might be and why that is important. So when staff bring forward these big new concepts, it takes time for board members to digest them.

Many years ago I was Director of Development and Communications at Plan International USA. During my tenure, we launched a soul searching strategic planning process. For a number of reasons that included maintaining our standing among our peers and funders, a commitment to fostering better international understanding, and our need to deepen the global understanding and thus the retention of our donors, staff were interested in expanding our fledgling development education programming and making it an important, though always small, part of our program mix.

A small cadre of academic board members were extremely resistant to the idea that we could educate donors through such a populist (for lack of a better word) approach to development education. After many frustrating conversations, the Board chose to delete development education from the strategic plan, sending it back to committee for discussion and reconsideration at a later date. Needless to say, staff were extremely frustrated (angry?). Ultimately, after many more months of give and take, we finally found a compromise that enabled us to proceed forward, albeit in very tiny steps. (Outcome: Our new, grant-funded development education program was hugely successful and achieved the strategic objectives that underpinned our initial reasoning).

Now, more than ever, we need our boards to look forward with vision, radical rethinking, insatiable curiosity, and the judgment to know when conservatism is called for and when disruption is essential.

While more organizations are ripening to the idea of doing business somewhat differently, I’m still finding too many boards oblivious at best and resistant at worst to newer ideas — like  joint ventures with other nonprofits. While due caution is needed for big changes like mergers or subsidiary relationships, others –like outsourcing financial management or the case I described above of co-directors — seem to be resisted for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately, these dynamic and perilous times require us to reconsider all historic assumptions and brutally question every aspect of the way we do business. Now, more than ever, we need to maximize the energy and resources that go into serving our communities and constituents. We can no longer assume that something that worked well enough in the past has any hope of surviving the future.

I don’t know if this is possible. Do you?

The workshop will focus on how this climate presents unique opportunities for this sector to become more intentional about strengthening the nonprofit and philanthropic infrastructure.

As a few of the grantmakers have been overly focused on mergers as the solution in these tough economic times, the discussion will highlight other opportunities shy of merger for collaboration and consolidation of management services.

Last Thursday I was chatting with a consultant colleague whom I’ve recruited to be on the panel.  She was recounting her own work facilitating mergers and how these experiences have left her convinced that mergers are often not worth the time and expense that goes into them. She was pointing out that mergers usually require costly consultation and legal services and amazing amounts of time and energy from the staff and board. Rarely did they result in more income to the new entity. While eliminating program and operational redundancies were positive outcomes of some mergers, there are other methods of achieving those same results.

I was agreeing with her that different types of consolidations — e.g.  parent/ subsidiary arrangements or the development of management service organizations — offered more opportunities for nonprofits to increase time and energy devoted to mission while improving the quality of financial and administrative services, and maybe even reducing costs  (or at the very least, decreasing inefficient or ineffective deployment of skills to task). We’ve both been participating in efforts here in RI and elsewhere to get the word out to nonprofits of all sizes of the other options worth exploring.

Barely do I hang up the phone when another colleague forwards me a copy of David LaPiana’s latest article, Merging Wisely, published in Stanford Social Innovation Review.  In the article LaPiana makes the case that funders shouldn’t necessarily be putting pressure on nonprofits to merge. Other forms of partnerships, including parent/subsidiary integration, management services organizations, joint ventures, might be much more effective.

I’ve personally been asking many of my strategic planning clients to at least imagine the possibilities these partnerships might present. I think you’ll find the article worth reading.

Thank you so to my colleague and friend Jane Arsenault of FioPartners for forwarding this report.  (If you are interested in nonprofit alliances and haven’t read through Jane’s 1998 book Forging Nonprofit Alliances, you’ve been missing one of the pioneering works on this topic).

“Outsourcing back-office services…” is a study conducted by the Management Assistance Group for the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation of Washington, D.C. It confirms through a study of Meyer grantees, industry experts and other literature what many of us have been thinking about, wishing for and experimenting with for a number of years.

Among the findings:

• Outsourcing may present an opportunity for small organizations to improve their back office.
• There may be new for-profit business opportunities in providing these services.
• Because of their small size and lack of spending on any back office, outsourcing doesn’t offer immediate cost savings for most small organizations. But the report goes on to say that it could help free time for more focus on program and strategy.
• Outsourcing needs to be approached cautiously by both organizations and their funders.

Large nonprofits and nonprofit networks have been outsourcing many back office functions for years. In our experience, small nonprofits haven’t been profitable enough for for-profit businesses to service. The lack of money to be made providing these functions has been a real barrier to the development of many services from which small organizations could benefit.

And small organizations simply haven’t had the time, expertise or money to solve this problem for themselves.

Across the country, larger nonprofits are stepping up to provide some of these services. All types of creative arrangements have been developed that don’t force small organizations to merge and thereby dissolve the important, close constituency and localized advocacy work that so many of our smallest nonprofits provide.

With the current economic crisis and a renewed interest in exploring nonprofit joint ventures, the time may finally be right for a thousand flowers to bloom in this area.

I hadn’t thought about kaleidoscopes in years until I received one as a gift for presenting a workshop at a fundraising conference. Instead of creating designs from shapes embedded in the kaleidoscope itself, this one made fascinating patterns out of whatever you were looking at.

So what do kaleidoscopes and great fundraisers have in common?

Both are really good at creating many beautiful new designs from one starting point.

In this challenging economic climate, nonprofit fundraisers have to be as resourcesful as they possibly can be to make better and stronger connections with donors. As fundraisers, we are always on the lookout for donors whose dreams and desires are a perfect match with our organization.

Sometimes that match is pretty straightforward, as when a loved one is stricken by a disease and family members give to the organization that is working to find a cure. Or the guidelines of a foundation are a perfect fit with our programs.

Often, however, the match isn’t immediately obvious and requires us to do some mental stretching. A very philanthropic individual I knew gave money to a figure skating association, a community service organization, a library, and other seemingly unrelated institutions. Was there a common thread? Yes, he loved young people and gave to programs that helped them flourish.

Resourceful development professionals have the uncanny talent of making lots of successful matches – from the easy fits to the mental stretches. The ability to see the many facets of our organization and our donor’s interests – like looking through a kaleidoscope – can open many more donor checkbooks.

Here are a few tips for developing your own kaleidoscope vision.

1. Listen to see what your donors care about.

I can’t say enough about listening. When we get too wrapped up in pitching our organization, we can’t hear what a donor wants.

The executive director of a youth service organization wanted to upgrade a corporate donor from a modest in-kind gift to a major sponsorship. At an exploratory meeting with the CEO, the executive director spent the better part of five minutes pitching the organization and one particular sponsorship opportunity.

He wasn’t igniting any interest.

The development director then asked this corporate CEO a simple question: “What community projects are you working on?”

The CEO opened up. He explained how his company was exploring the idea of building playgrounds in inner city neighborhoods – something the youth service organization had a history of doing, but hadn’t mentioned. Suddenly, a match seemed inevitable. The company was excited to provide a corporate sponsorship that included building a city playground – and eventually went on to become one of the organization’s biggest supporters.

2. Look deep into your existing programs.

Just like a prospective donor, you’ll be more passionate about your organization if you see the work first hand. You’ll be better informed too. It’s hard to comprehend the complexity of your organization if you don’t get up close and personal with your program staff, your projects, and especially the people you serve.

A successful fundraiser I know recently took a position as the major gifts director for a hospital. In her first few weeks on the job, she arranged an intensive training program for herself:

“I wanted to meet everyone and see EVERYTHING: operations, autopsies, the emergency room, even the kitchen. I asked hundreds of questions so I could know how we made a difference and what our needs were. Not only did I feel more confident I could explain our work to a prospective donor, but I also knew I’d be better at finding giving matches. An added benefit — because I showed that I cared, I made lots of friends on our staff who are now willing to help in fundraising when I need them.”

3. Look beyond the usual funding suspects.

Arts groups look for arts funders. Senior groups for donors to the elderly. But sometimes it makes sense to look beyond the category in which your organization falls.

A small neighborhood organization heard that the Environmental Protection Agency had funding available for urban environmental projects. As they weren’t an environmental group, they easily might have dismissed this particular funder.

But with some research, the group discovered the EPA had funded vacant lot clean-ups similar to the programs they were already running. With a bit more detective work they discovered that garbage dumped in vacant lots frequently contained materials that the EPA would consider pollutants or even hazardous waste.

By understanding that vacant lot dumping was as much an environmental problem as it was a community development one, they were able to get funding from EPA to develop a more comprehensive program to prevent illegal dumping and clean up vacant lots.

4. Be creative about seeing the connections.

If your vision is too narrow, it’s easy to overlook opportunities.

A statewide organization located in the capital city ran a number of fee-based education programs for school kids. A prospective business donor only funded projects in the northern town in which it was located.

At first glance, there didn’t seem to be the opportunity for a match. But with a little more exploration, the business was pleased to donate the program fee and busing costs of a local school so that three fifth-grade classrooms were able to participate in this education program.

5. See where you fit in the big picture.

Locally-based organizations and nonprofits in small population states often have a hard time attracting regional or national funders. But if you can put your work into a much bigger framework, you may open doors that looked closed at first.

For example, an AIDS service organization from a small east coast city was alerted to a request for proposals from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Five grants would be awarded nationwide for prevention work with young people in minority communities.

At first this organization didn’t think they had a chance competing with major population centers like San Francisco or New York. But they knew they had one of the highest HIV infection rates in the U.S. and that many immigrants from countries with high incidences of AIDS settled there first before heading to big cities like NYC. By articulating their connection to the bigger picture, they were able to win one of the five grants.

6. Look at yourself through someone else’s eyes.

Have you seen the optical illusion of two faces and the vase? If you look at the image in black, it forms two profiles looking at one another. But if you look at the white space between the faces, you can see a vase. Some people see the faces right away but have a hard time seeing the vase. For others, it’s just the opposite.

A senior center had a small, drab thrift shop that didn’t raise much money. While it was located in a college town, the center never really considered it would be of interest to college students so it never bothered to connect.

When a new director was hired, she was able to see the possibilities in the thrift shop. She approached the fashion merchandising program at a local college and offered the thrift shop as a class project. The students were excited at the chance to gain some real merchandising experience and volunteered their time to design attractive new window and floor displays for the shop. (And of course, college students love second hand bargains.)

Not only did the thrift shop start raising a lot more money, but the students recruited their friends for other volunteer work at the senior center.

7. But don’t make it up.

While I urge you to be creative about finding new connections between potential donors and your organization, don’t try to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. It never benefits your organization, your donor or philanthropy to misrepresent the work you do. Don’t try to pass a program off as something it is not.

Your success in fundraising ultimately depends on your reputation as being worthy and trustworthy of support.

So get out those kaleidoscopes to start finding the possibility in your organization.

We invite you to share you stories of how you successfully reimagined your giving opportunities.

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You can find an email or  printer ready version of this post in the Articles Section of our Tools for Change library. Just click here.

A version of this article first appeared in Contributions Magazine.

• Does each nonprofit have an obligation to our whole sector to create satisfying experiences that regenerate volunteers?

• Are poor volunteer practices not only driving people away from the offending organization but also souring volunteers against any volunteer service in the future?

These are some of the questions provoked by an intriguing article in the article “It Ain’t Natural: Toward a New (Natural) Resource Conceptualization for Volunteer Management” in the August 2009 edition of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly .

While the title screams academia, the ideas raised by the authors  Jeffrey L. Brudney of Cleveland State University and Lucas C. P. M. Meijs of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, deserve serious discussion and wide exposure within our sector.

Citing a a study done by the Corporation for National and Community Service, Brudney and Meijs warn that “a staggering one in three Americans evidently dropped out of volunteering between 2005 and 2006.” They note that other studies document similar problems in other countries.

The authors suggest that nonprofits in general are too preoccupied with recruiting volunteers and don’t pay enough attention to retaining them.

I’m sure you’ve heard someone lament (and maybe even have said it yourself): “we can’t find enough good volunteers.”

What if, the authors suggest, instead of treating “volunteer energy” as a resource with an inexhaustible supply, we  perceived volunteers as a resource that could actually run out?

How would our behavior need to change?

I find this concept incredibly intriguing, especially because it fits very nicely into my”we’re all in this together” framework of civil society.

Imagine that you are a first time volunteer. You’ve been thinking about doing something good for your community so you’ve found your way to a volunteer job through family, friend or volunteer center.  You’re excited, but a little unsure of your role and how you might contribute.

It’s likely that it may take quite a while before you hear from the organization at all. Or, they contact you quickly but they don’t really have any volunteer needs right now. No one takes the time to find out what skills you have or what else you might have to offer.

Or maybe they have a job, but in reality it is pretty undefined. You are assigned to a staff member (or another volunteer) who simply doesn’t have the time to train you and makes you feel as if you are in their way. You never really get a good idea of what you should be doing  or how to do it successfully.  And you just have this gut feeling that the job they handed you probably isn’t very important if no one can take the time to get you started.

Maybe your experience is somewhat different. Maybe you are a pretty secure self-starter who doesn’t need a lot of direction. Or maybe you arrived as part of a larger group. You can jump right into the task and successfully complete your assignment with minimal supervision. And you feel pretty good about what you’ve accomplished and are ready for the next task.  But once you’re done with that assignment, it’s as if you’ve never been there. No thanks. No call backs. End of connection.

What would you do if this described your volunteer experience over and over again? My guess is that you’d likely give up on volunteering and go do something more personally satisfying, like spending time with your family or shopping with friends.

When one organization treats a volunteer badly, they are likely to lose that volunteer. But imagine what happens when thousands of  volunteers have negative experiences at organization after organization. Eventually, it’s simply not worth volunteering any more. No reward. Been there. Done that. Over.

I love that the authors challenge us to rethink our  attitude about volunteers. They suggest that each organization has a societal obligation to keep volunteer energy flowing, to ensure the sustainability of the resource, to “attract people into volunteering and keep them volunteering over the [course of their lives].”

Volunteers are not put on this earth to be used and discarded by one organization.

Each of us are responsible to each other for the volunteers who come under our umbrella. Though our own organization may only need a volunteer for a particular assignment, our society needs that volunteer to keep volunteering over their lifetime.

In the authors’ world, a truly “regenerative” approach to volunteering produces fruitful outcomes for nonprofits and creates rewarding volunteer experiences that matter to our communities and keep volunteers volunteering. Who can’t sign on to that!

Gayle

P.S. Now, to really get your blood flowing, imagine applying this same concept to our board recruits.

The Sustainability Formula is based on an analysis of TCC’s Core Capacity Assessment Tool.

The formula is:

Leadership + Adaptability + Program Capacity = Sustainability.

I really liked this framework (though I think there might be a few missing pieces of the definition, for example, how about something around longevity? Or resilience as in – the ability to bounce back from adversity).

I’m working on a project now with the Rhode Island Foundation’s Initiative for Nonprofit Excellence that enlists an organization assessment tool by the Marguerite Casey Foundation that is framed around the 4 Core Capacities developed by TCC. So I was particularly interested in reading this report.

But my really amazing discovery was captured in one small paragraph at the bottom of page 2. It talked about nonprofit lifecycles and offered a framework that I hadn’t bumped into before. The stages went like this:

“Stage 1: Core program development

“Stage 2:  Infrastructure development for the purpose of taking programs to scale

“Stage 3:  Impact expansion which is defined as community leadership that changes the systems and policies that affect an organization’s ability to achieve its mission.”

I was floored, I have to admit it. One of those AHA! moments.

Some people have AHA! moments by finding the wreckage of the Titanic on the ocean floor. I have them when I discover amazing new organizational frameworks or research nuggets that challenge our sector’s core assumptions. (Or when I eat some really fabulous dark chocolate)

This was SO MUCH MORE VALUABLE than the typical “Start Up, Growth, Maturity, Decline/Renewal” lifecycle model I see so often. This was a lifecycle framework that was MISSION-focused.

Be still my beating heart.

As someone who tries to pay attention to new literature on nonprofits, I kept scratching my head on how I could have missed this gem. So of course I went on a Google journey to find more details about this model.

After a nonproductive search on TCC Group’s own website (though there are lots of interesting publications there), I ended up on The Philadelphia Foundation’s website where I found the article “Characteristics of High Performing Nonprofits based on Organizational Lifecycle.” Which I spent time reading.

That article referenced a 2005 BoardSource publication, Navigating the Organizational Lifecyle: A Capacity Building Guide for Nonprofit Leaders I had seen the book as a subscriber to BoardSource but I never ordered it because I figured it was just the same old same lifecycle framework. That will teach me to assume!

Yes, you may be asking about now, other than alerting your readers to all these great resources, what is the point of this blog entry?

Okay, here it is.

I regularly encounter individuals, usually good-hearted souls, who have done little research on best practices about how to build a great nonprofit. Or how best to build effective programs that address the problems or needs they’ve taken on. I’m always curious, when there is such great stuff out there usually for free, why they didn’t take the time to look.

Maybe they’ve taken to heart the old adage about curiosity killing cats and been scared away?

My problem is just the opposite. I rarely have difficulty finding really valuable information – besides Google, I’ve got great colleagues and Twitter to keep me busy.

No, my problem is trying to tear myself away from the next great read.

So, a word of advice: Try some research. You can learn a whole lot by looking, to paraphrase the great Yogi Berra.

I had to stop my car so as not to miss all of Terry Gross’s interview with Anderson on NPR’s Fresh Air Wednesday, July 8th.

Now bear with me as I share a bit of my un-edited thinking as I was listening to the interview. (Why is it that I can’t resist exploring complex analogies on Friday afternoons?)

Anderson described how businesses are making money on the Internet by giving things away for free. I was particularly enthralled because the strategy he was describing — give the basic level away for free and then charge for the premium model — seemed to align with the radical museum membership program envisioned by Beverly Sheppard and John Falk in their 2006 book Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New business models for museums and cultural organizations from Alta Mira Press.

In their book, Falk and Sheppard ask why museums (and zoos, et al) discount prices for repeat users and thus receive the least proportional revenue from their best customers. In the commonly used nonprofit membership model, you contribute the membership fee and receive unlimited visits, visitors, discounts on merchandise, first serve on tickets to special exhibits, and more.

What if instead, they posit, the more of the museum that you use, and the more people in your group who use your membership, the more you pay for? Instead of continuing to increase revenues by increasing first time visitors, they suggested that the idea was to convince a “core group of the best customers to come repeatedly … and to pay full price each time they came.” The member pays more, but gets much better value for their higher price by their ability to access enhanced, highly personalized programming and services.

Reading this just three short years ago, the idea seemed both incredibly bold and incredibly fantastic.

Surprisingly, this is precisely the business model Anderson attributes to many successful Internet companies. As a customer, you get to sample the basic version for free online, but you only get the larger, better, bigger premium model for a price. The more you use, the more bells and whistles you grow into, the more you pay.

Anderson says this model works for two reasons:

1. It recruits such large (very large) numbers of free users that a sufficient and profitable number of them convert to paid use.
2. The free users have to love the product so much that they are willing to pay for it. That is, the product has to really deliver great value.

What do you think? Does this model have an application to our nonprofits?

Are you already making it work out there?

In some ways, the “Free” model does bear a resemblance to giving societies which are widely used methods of upgrading nonprofit donors. Give at higher levels and get rewarded with special events, preview parties, and more attention.

Downsides to these clubs can be costly benefits that are hard to maintain, or hard to deliver or do little to deepen the philanthropic intent of and connectedness of our donors to our institutions. Great models deepen donor understanding of mission and cost little more than time and personalized attention. Another danger is devoting your love to the high payer and marginalizing the smaller donor.

Ideas? What lessons have you taken from Internet business models and applied to your nonprofit?

The U.S. was one of the authors of the convention and President Bill Clinton signed it in 1995. But with ratification we would signal our intent to bring domestic law into alignment with the Convention.

According to my little 1989 pamphlet produced by Foster Parents Plan International and Defence For Children International, the rights can be understood through three main lenses:

1. “The right to survival – through the provision of adequate food, shelter, clean water and primary health care
2. “The right to protection – from abuse, neglect and exploitation, including the right to special protection in times of war
3. “The right to develop – in a safe environment, through the provision of formal education, constructive play, advanced health care and the opportunity to participate in the social, economic, religious and political life of the culture — free from discrimination.”

I wonder what would happen if all nonprofits that work in the interests of children started referencing the Convention on the Rights of the Child in their values statements, in their planning and in their communications.

To borrow from the Child Rights Information Network,  how would a shift in our thinking from acts based in charity to activism in defense of international law on the rights of children influence the way we approach our work for kids? Could it shift the perspective of our communities?

I was fortunate to participate yesterday in a webinar led by Heather DeGaetano, Development Director for the Tennessee Aquarium, at the 2009 Conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, RI Chapter.

I sat with rapt attention listening her describe this extraordinary collaboration between three very different museums which are sharing a variety of back office services such as finance, human resources, retail, and information systems.

They have even collaborated on the third rail of nonprofits … you guessed it … fundraising! The three museums working together on a transformational waterfront program raised — hold onto your hats— $120 million in 90 days!

Over and over again I see opportunities for building strong partnerships like this. Joint ventures that don’t require giving up your sole through merger. Partnerships that could emerge organically and not by a forced marriage orchestrated by funders. Sharing back office functions can result in stronger and more competent operations, shared expertise, and even cost savings or revenue generation for providing that support to another.

What did Heather tell us this collaboration learned? Among other lessons:

• That collaboration can work.
• That good faith and trust are essential elements of strong collaboration.
• That the benefits of their partnership just keep on coming… and run so much deeper than just cost savings or additional revenue. One example, the Hunter Museum of American Art and the Tennessee Aquarium jointly opened new exhibits called Jellies: Living Art. (wish I lived nearby, the photos are fabulous)
• That they can no longer imagine doing this another way.

I was reluctant to write this piece as they’ve been inundated with calls for information and support since the articles came out. But you really don’t need to contact them to understand what they are doing (after all, they have museums to run rather than spending their time fielding questions). Heather’s report, A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, provides a pretty comprehensive description of what’s involved.

Instead of calling the museums, how about calling your own colleagues in your community and asking “if they did it, why can’t we? What can we offer each other? How will this help us be better at serving our communities? What would make each of our organizations stronger and more resilient?”

Know that you know it’s possible, you don’t really need to know a lot about the Chattanooga how. What you need to know is whether this is the kind of collaboration you are willing to say yes to. And then make it happen.

This reminds me of a quote in Boards that Make A Difference by governance guru John Carver that has always stuck in my head. “A crude measure of the right thing beats a precise measure of the wrong thing.”

All this was stirred up for me by the recent buzz within the world of philanthropy for measures to better direct donor giving to “what works.”

There is a real danger in oversimplifying what works.

While I’m completely in favor of focusing the attention of our sector toward processes that produce real community results, I’m wary of reliance on simplistic nonprofit rating systems (e.g. GiveWell) that attempt to duplicate for mission effectiveness the same style of rating formulas that Charity Navigator and others use to rank nonprofits by their financial metrics. We already know that judging a nonprofit solely upon the percentage of program expenses tells us nothing about community results and, in many cases, not even a terribly lot about nonprofit financial effectiveness.

How can we better use the indicators that do exist to influence whole systems change and not just randomized philanthropic endeavors?

There are already some pretty powerful indicators out there. Hats off to the Annie E. Casey Foundation for its funding of KIDS COUNT data nationwide and in every state. (We are very fortunate to count the superb Rhode Island KIDS COUNT among our clients). Or thanks to UNICEF for the State of the World’s Children.

Having data such as this helps us understand where we are starting and helps focus our attention on the progress that we’d like to see made.

Throughout RI, we heard that publishing credible and sophisticated data sets on current conditions has led to significant changes in the way that RI government and nonprofits think about policy for kids.

But in addition to its data, Rhode Island KIDS COUNT is known for researching and bringing forward examples of practices that have been shown to make real progress for children. By bringing all parties to the table, they help entire systems develop legislation, policies and practices that better serve children.

UNICEF articulated GOBI-FFF, now considered the basic elements of child survival, to reduce infant mortality worldwide. (Growth monitoring, Oral rehydration therapy, Breast feeding, Immunizations with  supports from Female literacy, Family spacing, and Food supplements).

Yes, we can and should hold many individual organizations accountable for where they spend their dollars and the quality of their investments. But if we get distracted and only focus our attention on what nonprofits donors should invest in, as a community we distort the massive, interlocking systems changes needed to dramatically move the needle for all.

Funding the best of charter schools won’t change public education as long as charters enroll miniscule numbers of kids. Funding a few individual organizations that adopt child survival isn’t enough to eliminate communicable disease when 100% of kids need to be immunized.

We must hold accountable whole communities, states and countries for the investments they make in the outcomes we profess to desire. Our society must invest in practices at the scale needed to reach every kid or every adult and not just the fortunate few who may win the nonprofit assistance lottery.

While I believe in the power of nonprofits to change lives, I also know that our institutions are a small part of the picture.  The easily measured usually serve as band aids or incubators. It’s a lot harder to measure the efforts of the advocates or catalysts for widescale change.

I’d hate to see philanthropy distracted from enabling big system societal changes. Let’s not invest excessive amounts of energy in measuring and evaluating individual nonprofits in isolation, and miss the bigger systems that need our attention.