From our vantage point here in the US, it can be easy to forget that many women around the world experience profound discrimination every day without protection of law. And millions of girls and women experience rape, domestic abuse, genital mutilation, and other forms of violence against women, regardless of where they live.

If you are at a total loss for an action to commemorate this day, you can add your voice to a petition being circulated by Amnesty International USA asking the United Nations to develop a stronger agency for women. You can find that petition here.

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.

Dear Gayle and Jon,
I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the Workshop “Getting the Most from your Annual Appeal” that you gave on Oct. 8th for the Land and Water Partnership at the Audubon Society of RI.  I think that our letter was not as good as what you had presented, but it was a big improvement from previous ventures.

But the proof is in the pudding, right?!
So, the bottom line, proof of the pudding is that last year we raised $31,365 through 88 gifts with our single page, tear off and send back approach.

This year, we received 173 gifts for a total of $62,570 for our two page, bulleted, story telling approach to support stewardship with the envelope provided!

So, we are giving you a ’soft’ credit (as they say in our business!) for doubling our gifts!  We are so grateful!

I think Jon got me when he said he knew there were some people who just threw these letters in the trash, but for those who really care and want to know, give them something worth reading.  I know many of our members in the land trust are the latter types, and I appreciate so much that you brought this to my attention.

I truly appreciate a good teacher, and this deserves recognition all its own. Many heartfelt thanks from the South Kingstown Land Trust!

Ever,

Claudia E. Swain
Director of Development
South Kingstown Land Trust

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Claudia, We’re blushing! But how could anyone resist those gorgeous Scottish Highlander cattle!

Thank you so for sharing this with us and letting us share your letter with our readers. You can read the full letter here.

And continued good fundraising for the South Kingstown Land Trust. Local land trusts like yours absolutely prove the Margaret Mead quote:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

One of the conditions I always query for is whether the board has any clear objectives for what it plans to accomplish over the coming year (or longer).

Board meetings are not in and of themselves meaningful work. I’ve attended a lot of meetings where I’ve left thinking “really, did they need me here for that!” Usually all I did was listen to reports where there was no action required. And any decisions before us were pretty inconsequential and didn’t really rise to the level of board work. A year of meetings like that and I’d be surprised if you had any attendance at all.

Every board can benefit from a set of annual objectives. I’d put the usual suspects on that list:

• providing performance feedback to your Executive Director
• setting with your Executive Director his or her goals and objectives for the coming year
• reviewing and approving the audit and other critical monitoring of the health of the organization
• recruiting and electing a high quality board

All of these are important fiduciary obligations of any board.

But what is the added value, the real difference that your board will make?I’m not talking about the volunteer contributions of individual board members, but the collective entity that is The Board (that corporate entity that sits around the table at a board meeting).

If you’re at a loss for value based objectives, try framing your board work around these questions:

• What questions about our organization’s future and its societal impact must we answer this year?
• How will we demonstrate our accountability to the community in whose interests we are acting?
• To whom are we accountable now? Is that whom we should be accountable to?
• How do we know that our organization is really making a difference?
• What will truly shift the landscape for the problems we address?
• What might we imagine on the horizon that we should already be preparing for?
• What is our ideal relationship with other community partners? What do they want from us? How do we know? What are we prepared to do?
• Do we have a clear definition of organizational health? Are we sufficiently resilient?

In our Toolbox, you’ll find a sample Board Meeting Plan and a sample set of Board Objectives to help jumpstart your thinking.

Even better, who about devoting a major agenda item at your next meeting to answer these questions: What must the board accomplish this year? What value must this board bring to our organization?

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:

1. Get involved with your colleagues
2. Find out what funders think about you
3. 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.Our staff routinely oooed and awed over  some dazzling art and images on 8 1/2 x 11 inch or A4 paper that serendipitously came through our doors en route to sponsors.

What if we did something with art produced by children in our program countries? Let our kids tell their own stories, through their art and through their descriptions of the scenes they were sending.

Oh yes, one more thing. Our development education program wouldn’t be built around an in your face story of poverty or helpless victims. We wanted to share the real stories of daily life, told by real children living those lives.

Lesson Five: Bring something new to your funder’s portfolio

One of the things that we had noticed about the development education projects that had been previously funded was that the majority were aimed at high school or middle school students. After a while, the projects sounded very similar.

We had also learned that USAID staff weren’t interested in continuing to fund projects that seemed to be duplicates … after all, once a high school lesson plan had been created by one organization, couldn’t it be used by others?

We took that to heart. We had this great art and these first hand stories of individual children, their families and their communities. So how could we use the art to reach a new audience? And who would appreciate it the most.

Duh! How about art teachers? Or elementary school kids? No one had developed a program for them yet.

But would it work?

Lesson Six: Consult the experts to ensure strong program design

Because we didn’t have experts on staff who were elementary school educators, curriculum designers, artists or art teachers, we sought out expertise locally and nationally to help us think about the program design and the use of artwork. What we came up with, with their advice, was a development education program for 4 and 6th graders (because that’s were they were studying international issues in our potential pilot schools), multi-disciplinary to fit the elementary school model, and based on the art and stories of children in our program countries.

We knew that we also had to build this expertise into our proposal design, so we included funding for a curriculum consultant who would also be the project manager and funding for an expert on art and teaching. We also added two advisory councils, one to select the art that included art teachers and an artist from Ghana who had recently relocated to our area, and a second teachers advisory group of those who would be interested in piloting the project and helping us test activities.  And of course, a few individual with international development expertise.

Lesson Seven: Build internal support and ownership

Of course, the program wouldn’t work without the buy in of a number of our field directors who had to secure the art work. We also had a few university professor board members who thought the whole idea was foolish because who could teach a subject so complicated as  international development through pretty pictures? (And they doubted our ‘teaching” ability)

We found at least six or seven field directors from different parts of the world who loved the idea and were willing to work with us to get children in their area producing work about our themes: family, school, work, food, fun, home. We offered to cover the cost of any art materials and shipping that they needed as we knew this wasn’t in their budgets. They sent us what turned out to be very modest expenses which we included in the project budget.

We weren’t able to convince our skeptical board members that this approach would work, but we were able to get them not to oppose our seeking out the grant. Whew.

Lesson Eight: A creative presentation sometimes helps

As we were pulling the project together, we needed to call it something. With some brainstorming by my staff and others in our office, my team finally decided on a name for the project that was both intriguing and captured its purpose. We decided to call it : See me, share my world.

(Yes, there were many in the office who felt the name was too long. But we came to love it anyway).

Because this was an art project, we knew we absolutely had to have some art in the proposal to help the reviewers understand what we were trying to do. So we found a wonderful drawing with a child’s explanation of what it was about and made that the cover of our proposal. We asked for $140,000 over two years, to be matched 100%, (largely through inkind).

And we sent the proposal off. And waited. And waited.

WE GOT THE GRANT.

Postscript:

The project was a great success all around. Our field staff told us that the art projects energized their schools and unleashed creativity they hadn’t seen. Teachers loved the project. Our local art museum featured the work from one of the countries in a small exhibit.

Two years later we were also awarded the next grant that we applied for. This one was designed for public libraries, highlighting literature art and artifacts from the countries we served, to spark a North-South dialogue on environmental issues (that was in 1990) called “Our Piece of Land is Small.”

Then I left to take a position at another organization.

Not too long after our second project completed,  USAID approached the organization directly and asked it to design a development education/research project that tested the impact of targeted education materials on its sponsors. The ultimate grant fantasy — have a funder approach you about a project. You can find a short article on that research published in 1998 by The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

“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.

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.Yep. It didn’t matter so much about our programming on the ground.  Our donor communications were seen as purely “marketing” or “fundraising” and thus we not credible.

While this stung us terribly, finally, we had an opportunity for a breakthrough.

Lesson Three: You have to have and discuss a THEORY OF CHANGE

So, we decided we needed our USAID colleagues to understand better the what and why’s of our donor communications program. We were sure if they did, they would have a different opinion of us.

You see, one of the reasons that USAID was funding development education was to build more support for international aid. Leaving government aid aside, individual giving overseas rarely reaches 3% of all philanthropic dollars contributed in the US.

Yet, among the 400 largest US charities, you’ll find many child sponsorship organizations.

Why is that?

Remember that cliche that readers are only interested in local news? (Sadly, you only have to look at the very first news stories coming from the Haitian earthquake to find the truth in this).

Over 50 years of experience demonstrated the power of child sponsorship to motivate people to give by connecting them with images and stories of real people that they could learn about and maybe even communicate with.

So we had invested pretty heavily in our communications program. It included:

• an annual photo of the sponsored child and his or her family
• an annual profile of that child and family and their local community
• a description of the country, economy, and culture of the regional and country in which the family lived
• quarterly updates from our field staff describing their programs or interesting challenges in that community
• four to six updates from the child and/or family, written with the help of dedicated field staff, an offering a glimpse of daily life.  (This was the most controversial part, but a story for another forum)
• the ability of donors in the US to send correspondence back to their sponsored family, sharing a glimpse of life in the US.
• Specialty information, particularly about the world’s religions and their practices.

We had also just discovered academic research that outlined a five stage model of how individuals became more culturally aware.  That research supported many of our practices and offered a platform to explain our communications to our potential funders.

Which we did. We took a “dog and pony” show down to the development staff at USAID and walked them through our communications program step by step. We answered all of their questions. We presented our challenges very truthfully.

Did we completely convince them? No. But we could see the cracks in their skepticism.

Which was a significant step forward to winning the grant.

For next time … lessons we learned about program development, target audiences and donor portfolios.

In describing the underpinnings of the Internet, Zittrain imagines a society with fewer rules enabling more neighborly acts.

His talks bring to mind the extraordinarily peaceful 15 years of WaterFire Providence, which brings thousands and thousands of individuals out on a summer’s evening to experience this inspirational work of public art and community.

If you need a smile and your heart warmed, take the time to watch this video.

My post on Tuesday, “My worst nightmare is now true, sloppy ratings ratings of nonprofit effectiveness in Hatii,” and a storm of Tweets generated quite a bit of attention.

As Tuesday’s post explains, after my first critique, Guidestar changed their hastily constructed home page listing  Top Ten Relief Organizations Working in Haiti, which I strongly debated the evidence for, to a somewhat more accurate Most Reviewed Relief Organizations in Haiti.

After a long conversation this afternoon with Debra Snider, Guidestar’s VP of Communications and Administration, and Shari Ilsen, Director of Marketing and Outreach at GreatNonprofits, Guidestar made the laudable decision to drop the listing altogether.

Now when you land on Guidestar’s homepage and scroll down, you’ll see Disaster Action Center and encouragement to post a review if you have firsthand experience with an organization working in Haiti. A link takes you to the site of GreatNonprofits.

Why is this so much better?

• Guidestar is no longer implying that simply because 10 organizations received more reviews than 25 others that the reviewed organizations are somehow more worthy of your giving. (My point: Once they call out a top list, even if they don’t say it directly, the donor infers that somehow this list is more special than the rest).

• Dropping   “received the most reviews” eliminated the task of keeping that list revolving and accurate. (It wasn’t.)

• As Guidestar’s intent was to help increase the number of reviews received by GreatNonprofits, this new configuration achieves the same goal without the baggage of implied ratings. I’d also suggest that it is clearer and probably will be more effective at accomplishing that goal.

• Guidestar can still offer the longer informational list they compiled of organizations that are working on relief and recovery (or longer term development) in Haiti, without trying to assess their effectiveness. This doesn’t compromise Guidestar’s valued credibility and keeps up what Guidestar is best known for — providing us with credible information on organizations and educating us about how we can make our own informed giving decisions.

Do I still have concerns about Amazon style rating systems? Absolutely. But we can talk about that at another time.

Thank you, Guidestar (and Debra), for hearing my concerns — which aren’t just my concerns, but include a rising tide of very concerned individuals with deep reservations about intermediary rating systems of nonprofit effectiveness.

P.S. You can also read a quick summary of the controversy in today’s Give and Take, the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s roundup of blogs about the nonprofit world.

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UPDATE from this afternoon: As a result of Tweeting, Guidestar has now changed the title of the list discussed in this blog to more accurately reflect what it is: “Most Reviewed Relief Organizations in Haiti.” If a handful of reviews qualify as “most.”

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Original Post:

I was doing a bit of research today that required me to look up a few organizations in GuideStar.

Imagine my surprise to find on Guidestar’s home page the following list:

“Top Ten Relief Organizations Working In Haiti”

Wow! That’s quite a claim. What was  their criteria for picking these 10 out of all the other NGOs they listed as doing work in Haiti?

Guidestar goes on to say under that amazing headline: “Donors, clients, and volunteers have identified these nonprofits as the most effective working in Haiti.” Hmm.

So I clicked the button “learn more or write reviews.”

When I clicked through, this took me to “Disaster Action Center” which seems to be a collaborative effort of Guidestar and GreatNonprofits.

You may not have heard of GreatNonprofits yet. I hadn’t until they were named in a holiday giving press release put out by a consortium of third party intermediaries that have been setting themselves up as the “go to” rating places if you want the skinny on nonprofit effectiveness. (You can see my rants on this in prior blog posts like “Join a lively debate on rating nonprofit societal outcomes” or others under the effectiveness tab.)

GreatNonprofits invites donors, clients and volunteers to do little reviews of the nonprofits they support or have benefited from. Anyone can go online and write a review and choose the number of stars they’d like to give to that nonprofit. Kind of like the ratings on Amazon.

So I clicked through to read the reviews of some of the organizations that were listed by Guidestar in the Top 10 and some that weren’t in the Top 10 but also seemed to have 5 Stars, the top rating.

I admit it. I didn’t click on every nonprofit. But the ones that I did, that were listed in the Top 10, had ONLY 1 or 2 Reviews. That’s it.

But some of the NGOs that didn’t make the Top 10 list also had the same number of stars and same number of reviews. For example, World Vision International had five stars and two donor reviews (as of 3:55 pm EST today) and they were in the Top Ten list. PLAN USA had five stars and two donor reviews and they were not listed as being in the top 10 list.

And some of the donor reviews had nothing to do with Haiti. Assuming they really are donors, right? I mean, who’s to say that the reviews aren’t the work of a PR firm hired to write the reviews. Or fund development staff?

When I suggested on Twitter (you can find the conversation by searching @gaylegifford) that it was absolutely shameful for Guidestar and GreatNonprofits to be naming a top ten list based on 1 or 2 donor reviews, GreatNonprofits replied:

@gaylegifford its a new site-we need more reviews 2 build the resource. U can help by spreading the word 2 post at http://bit.ly/gnpdisaster

It’s pretty obvious to all that they need more reviews to even begin to have a credible claim. That is, if you buy the whole idea that rating NGO effectiveness is the same as reviewing a book or toaster, which I don’t. It’s not that I don’t think that feedback from donors et al isn’t helpful. Caveat emptor on that.

But  to then take those skimpy reviews and definitively name a top ten list of effectiveness based on the handful of reviews and the handful of organizations reviewed, I’m still shaking my head.

By the way, shouldn’t there be some distinction made between what donors say and what clients or  volunteers have to say?

But what irresponsible  hubris to make a claim about NGO effectiveness in a disaster of this magnitude based on what I might describe as a complete lack of credible information.

I’m not saying that some of the organizations on the list don’t deserve their rating . But I am saying that GreatNonprofits and Guidestar have absolutely no credibility  if this is the criteria they are using to be telling donors or the media that their  uninformed list is in the Top 10 in Relief.

None.

P.S. By the way, just because an NGO has done good work in Haiti in the past (e.g. a school) doesn’t mean it has the competency  to do the type of relief work that is needed in a disaster of this magnitude.  Or the capacity to handle huge amounts of short term aid.

What would be helpful is for those organizations that have been working on the ground for some time in Haiti to communicate with each other and with the world community how donations can best be used … for relief or for long term rebuilding.