Dissent
Beyond Good Intentions and Thinking About Systems
Published May 29, 2009 @ 05:37AM PT
Beyond Good Intentions is a series of short films about what works (and what doesn't) in international development by young filmmaker Tori Hogan. Each Wednesday for the past couple months, she's released a new series of the film.
This past week, she released her segment about microfinance. Of all of the segments so far though, this was one where Hogan was nervous about it's reception. From her blog on Social Edge:
I was a little bit nervous for Episode 9 (and this blog entry) to come out because I am well-aware that I am questioning a beloved organization and a highly popular development initiative. However, I feel that I need to be honest about what I witnessed in the field and, most importantly, I need to encourage a meaningful dialogue about the realities of micro-lending. After witnessing micro-lending programs on three different continents, I came to the conclusion that in most cases the poor don’t need loans, they need jobs. From what I saw, micro-lending isn’t pulling the poorest of the poor out of poverty.
Hogan describes the litany of problems that she found with microfinance that made it less successful than she has supposed in lifting people out of poverty. Some of the main culprits included high interest rates, inadequate economic opportunities, a lack of business skills and entrepreneurial talent, over-burdened loan officers, and a lack of financial sustainability.
I definitely commend Tori for being willing to share her perceptions, and I think they resonate largely with what many critics identify as the Achilles heel(s) of microlending as an anti-poverty strategy.
But perhaps what it's instructive of is the danger of sanctifying any one particular type of poverty intervention. Problems like a lack of business skills and inadequate economic opportunities implicate a system of related problems that no one type of program can address on it's own.
At such an early stage in the history of the social enterprise movement (and yes, Jeff Trexler should rightly point out here that if you want to get truly historical, it's not that early), we have the opportunity to think differently about how we design organizations, fund programs, and facilitate horizontal partnerships that address some of these systemic challenges.
The Limits of Online Fundraising Contests
Published May 27, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT
Stacey from Epic Change wrote an important piece yesterday about how vote-driven online competitions select against international social innovators and give Americans and Europeans one more advantage. I think she's right on, but I think it's important to parse a few things out.
1. Contests are PR and a context for asking for things. Don't get me wrong, I think online contests can be great if done well - we do one each year with Global Giving for the Global Engagement Summit. But they are largely about PR and marketing. The quid pro quo of an online contest is that you (the social innovator) have an excuse to mobilize your communities of stakeholders and ask for things, and in return, the action platform gets more traffic and eyeballs which could result in advertising, larger user bases, media and publicity that send more traffic, etc. I don't think this is cynical at all; people need reasons to act and contests are a great context for trying to inspire buy-in for both the project and the platform.
2. Contests are not rewards for quality social impact. Let's be clear and up front about this one; contests do not reward quality or quantity of social impact, they reward capacity for mobilization. To the extent that people are willing to be mobilized because of quality of social impact, there's a correlation, but by no means is quality a prerequisite. To hold our own feet to the fire a little bit, a lot of the young organizations who win contests frankly don't have the history or infrastructure to have collected lots of robust data about their impact, anyway, so we should be careful about being hypocritical with this critique.
3. Contests have taken on the significance they have because the cost-reward calculus is more clear than other forms of nonprofit fundraising. There is a more or less direct relationship between how hard you work and how likely to succeed you are in an online contest that requires mobilization. If you spend 18 hours a day emailing, you're likely to have more votes than the person who spends 8 hours a day emailing. Compare this to the largely opaque waiting game that is institutional funding. Often for small groups starting up, all they have is their communities of friends and family, and so this takes on the role of bridge or seed funding.
4. (Most) contests are not trying to solve the problem of seed funding for international innovators; not are they trying to solve the problem of internet access. The reality is that contests are designed to get lots of people to do a specific thing in order to increase traffic. This is different from setting out to solve the problem of seed funding for international innovators, which is a deep and profound problem. Now if someone was setting out to solve that problem with a contest, I think that the current constraints would most definitely make that a tough proposition. Even with that said, I think it would be a fair counter argument for someone like GlobalGiving to say that they *are* trying to solve that problem and that contests increase traffic which, overall, makes it easier to solve that problem.
5. Hopefully, contests (and even the current generation of action platforms) are the early indications of a changing social good funding ecosystem. One of the major motivations behind this blog is to see how the ecosystem for supporting and doing good is changing. Contests to me seem to be one exciting element of that, but they should be viewed in that larger context. There are conversations happening around the world about social stock exchanges, new forms of partnerships between non and for-profit orgs, and there are even folks explicitly focused on growing the social capital market. We should keep asking tough questions, but recognize that it won't be every organizations job to answer all of them.
Update: Looking back, I wanted to give a little bit more space to the question of whether contests, as they currently exist, select against international participants. The short answer is yes. We had students in Tanzania, Romania, Ukraine, and a number of other places participating in our Project Challenge this year. The contest was structured so that both amount of money raised and number of donations mattered. But for our international students, credit card processed donations weren't often an option, and so while they had people willing to give them cash, these individuals weren't added to their totals. This is a major problem and something we're working to update for next year; although how we'll do that we haven't figured out yet.
Do Low Nonprofit Salaries Drive Young People to Social Enterprise?
Published May 21, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Sharon Schneider just wrote a fiery post suggesting that if the nonprofit industry doesn't get over it's discomfort with "overhead" and start to pay people better, it's going to have a harder and harder time competing for talent. It's worth quoting at length:
For bright kids graduating from college with a mountain of student debt, it’s tough to ask them to choose between $30,000 and a sense of fulfillment and $50,000 with a 401K and good health insurance. The current emphasis on “low overhead” at charitable organizations is leading to a brain drain from the sector that most needs an influx of young workers.
Personally, I find it a bit self-righteous to tell those who want both financial security and the opportunity to make a difference “the nonprofit sector DOES NOT need you.” Really? Because we’ve solved all the world’s problems so effectively and don’t need new ideas and new talent? Because Baby Boomers heading up nonprofits never plan to retire so that new leadership is needed?
You know what? Forget this debate, you’re right. Kids, if you hope for a double bottom-line return on the investment of your own talents and intellect–both social and financial–I’ve got a sector for you. It’s called social enterprise, and they’d love to have all the passion and idealism and ambition and energy you have to offer.
Let the masochistic working poor and their aging institutions whither as talented young people seek to do good and to do well. It may be painful and pointless, but at least they’ll feel good about themselves.
I literally couldn't agree more. One of the hallmarks of the generation graduating from schools right now is their pragmatism. They're not seduced by the notion that nonprofits are the only place that they can make a difference and have a career aligned with their values, and far too often, the opportunity costs of toiling in the nonprofit sector just aren't worth it to them.
This is not a question of entitlement. The argument that people simply should suck it up and deal with the nastier parts of any particular industry is just ringing more and more hollow. The particular crosses that the nonprofit industry bears include low salaries, rigid bureaucracies, and a lack of professional development. But it's not the only industry where younger professionals are butting up against the status quo.
About a week ago, I linked to a great post by Adrian Young about how the partners of law firms don't understand Gen Y:
“Generation Y is entitled, lazy, selfish, tech savvy, and incompetent,” is how Scott Greenfield, one of the finest criminal defense attorneys in NY, started off the panel....
...Just at this moment the voice of my generation stepped in, “I spent years as an associate, I hit all my metrics- but I didn’t want to become partner. Its no secret that focusing on making as much money as possible ruined many of these older partners’ personal lives.” said Anthony Zana, he is now Corporate Counsel for Intergraph Corporation- where he left behind the billable hour.
“I’ve seen too many successful partners on their 3rd and 4th marriage- and I did not want that to be me.” Anthony added. “Even the ABA reports that depression, suicide, divorce, and alcoholism rates are higher for attorneys that work those types of hours.”
Adrian goes on to argue that "lifestyle" is the more important currency than money to the Millennials (or Gen Y, or whatever you want to call us). I'd add, in the context of this blog, that it's about meaning, values, and freedom.
On the lower financial end (and this is where the nonprofit industry needs to shape up) its about freedom from debt and constantly looking behind you to see if there's any unpaid bills lurking, among other things. On the reverse, career fulfillment has to involve freedom from the constant, unyielding, and suffocating pressure of being "on the clock"
I would argue that this is healthy for all these industries. Frankly (and this will seem ironic coming from me for those who know me off line), America has a pretty messed up relationship with work. Returning to a more holistic sense of fulfillment that involves the sort of financial freedoms mentioned above but includes being able to enact our values, connect and stay close with friends, family and community, and having time to learn and think and care and do is pretty essential, if you ask me, for the sanity and long term safety of our society.
Your Brand is an Invitation
Published May 12, 2009 @ 07:22AM PT
Fake Brands in Nanjing China (via Flickr)
The social sector sucks at branding.
In much of the nonprofit sector, the concept of "brand" has been poisoned by anti-globalization advocates who conflate conspicuous consumption, reckless and exploitative business behavior, and lemming like devotion to particular brand identities with the idea of brand itself. While much of this "No Logo" style critique is vital, what's always frustrated me is the misdiagnosis of branding (rather than the exploitation of brand power) as the problem. Brand-washing - where a brand is used to cover up nastiness behind it is a problem; brand itself is an opportunity. And as we write away branding as ancillary to the mission rather than the core means of building a community of believers, we lose that opportunity.
A brand is about more than the logo. Brand is about how to distill complex concepts into associational chunks, and share with the world in the simplest terms the core of what we care about. Your organization's brand is its DNA, a combination of description and inspiration that helps people identify your company or nonprofit as a fellow traveler.
The social sector should totally kick ass at branding.
The social sector has an incredible story to tell. In some way or form, every organization is imbued with a passion for a more equitable, just world. Every organization has programmed into its core the idea that the world can be a better place, and that problems created by people can also be fixed by people.
We live in a moment where people want that message. We want to believe in ourselves, and moreover, we want to believe in a more complex conception of ourselves. Big box brands and botique brands aren't going away, but in a world of such turmoil and instability, brands that make us feel anchored in values and connected to something bigger than ourselves are immensely important, and have the potential to keep the flame of entrepreneurship and justice alive in tough times.
It's right to recognize that brands cannot in themselves create quality. But they can create a pathway for new people to be inspired by and contribute to quality, and it's worth carving out just a little bit more time and space in our organizations for translating the values we hold and the impact we make into a brand that invites new people to be a part of changing the world.
What Social Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Wyatt Earp
Published May 05, 2009 @ 12:38PM PT
The image of the romantic Western hero is not unlike the image of the social entrepreneur. They are both deeply moral visionaries who march to the beat of a different drum and are not afraid to make their own rules. People who make the world around them, rather than taking it as is.
But for whatever truth both of these images contain, their more cinematic qualities can also mislead. In a brilliant column in the New York Times today, conservative commentator David Brooks writes about how the Republican Party has misunderstood "rugged individualism" and lost a sense of community and "civic order" that he asserts most Americans cherish.
Brooks points out that John Ford, in his estimation the greatest of all Western directors, did not tell stories of John Wayne-style individuals but of communities. And he wonders about the position that has left the Republican Party. It's worth quoting at length (emphasis mine):
Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice...
They would begin every day by reminding themselves of the concrete ways people build orderly neighborhoods, and how those neighborhoods bind a nation. They would ask: What threatens Americans’ efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be dissolving.
But the Republican Party has mis-learned that history. The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.
The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.
I think it's a dead on analysis. The Republican Party has, it seems to me, lost itself. It's allowed a philosophy that at its best affirmed the capacity of people to lead and make their own decisions to calcify into a million different Gospel Truths which seem to be concerned only with regulating people's social lives and deregulating everything else. There is almost nothing of the live-and-let-live libertarianism that still pervades places like Maine (where I grew up, and which has voted increasingly Democrat for years) left in the national platform.
When I read Brooks column, I couldn't help but think of my own nervousness about the language we place around social entrepreneurship. To be sure, our nascent field is nothing like the decaying, moribund leftovers of the GOP. But sometimes in our excitement about innovation and our need to classify, we get locked up and trapped up in our glorification of the individual.
When we focus only on the stories of individual social entrepreneurs, we risk creating a wall of exclusion. Rather than inspiring others to aspire to be change leaders, we instead make them wonder if they have the characteristics which would allow them to be such a person. Moreover, we make it easier to underestimate the importance of teams and the brilliant chaotic messiness of community organizing that spurs movements. And of course, we put an absurd and unreasonable burden on the shoulders of those we celebrate.
This is not a community vs. markets question. The irony is that the story of markets, too, is a story of relationships, not of individuals. Markets only work when people with complementary needs can find one another.
I do not believe that the social entrepreneurship field only cares about individuals, or that it doesn't understand that change comes from helping communities organize and bring their assets to bear around common goals.
But I think it's hard to tell that story and to tell it well. I think there's a reason John Wayne is easier to latch onto than John Ford. Both movements and markets are messy, and they do not follow simple plot lines. It's our job let the mythology ride into the sunset and to tell the right story.
On Teams: Is the Burn Rate or Burnout More Dangerous?
Published May 01, 2009 @ 10:03AM PT
(via Flickr)
There's an air of danger around the entrepreneurs I know right now. It's not the fear of funding (although, that's there too), or nervousness about mission or results. It's the terror of self immolation, inflicted by far too little sleep and far too much to do. In other words: burnout.
The most common thread between social and traditional entrepreneurship ventures is the utter inability of Time to provide enough of itself. Part of the adrenaline rush we get starting something is the race against the clock. I've felt it in settings ranging from the last push to put on an amazing conference to the impending leap of starting a new company with no money in the bank.
Of course all things that go up must come down, and the other side of entrepreneurship is knowing how to avoid the crash. We all have limits and can push them only so far.
The most important thing I've learned in my own projects is to make heavy upfront investments in teams. Not just capital investments in paying them, but extraordinary investments in understanding what drives them, figuring out how to give them responsibilities that push them in directions they want to go, and making sure that more of their personality - their passions, values, ideas, and quirkiness - has a place in the mission.
But there's immense pressure when you're bootstrapping a company or running a new social entrepreneurship startup to limit the team and focus on other issues. With for-profit companies, the tension is both about how much cash you have on hand to pay salary and about how much equity in the company you're willing to give up.
The "burn rate" is how much money you spend and how fast in any venture. The idea with limiting staff in the bootstrapping phase is to keep that rate low and get more with the investment you have in order to preserve as much ownership as possible. I think there's a lot of good that comes from that, particularly the extraordinary focus on getting the results you're seeking. But there's got to be a balance between the threat of the burn rate and the burnout.
With social entrepreneurship ventures, at the early stages it's a matter of how much money you have and how effectively you can rope in and coordinate the talents of unpaid volunteers. Later on, the tension is about keeping overhead low to appease a donor community that's been sold a bill of goods about overhead as a measure of organizational quality.
We talk about social entrepreneurs as mobilizers of community resources, but fund them as individuals. Venture capitalists say their funding decisions are all about the team, but the broader world celebrates heroic individual entrepreneurs.
For our entrepreneurship sector to grow, we need to do better validating, celebrating, highlighting, and sharing the importance of team.
