The inefficient nonprofit marketplace

A friend who’s doing a lot of work to improve giving practices and flows of capital in the nonprofit marketplace asked me the other day: “do you think capital is allocated efficiently in the nonprofit sector?”

“Of course,” is what I was supposed to say, but instead I asked, “Compared to what?”

Here’s another version of these questions, played back with a little more detail:

Question 1: Is there a significant gap between the way capital optimally would be allocated in the nonprofit sector and how it is allocated (where optimal = the best, most high impact ideas / organizations get the most funding; the worst get the least)?”

Answer: Yes.

But before we stop there and dive headlong into the steps we can take to “optimize” how capital is allocated – with better rating systems and more transparency and standards – I’d like us to ask and answer this question too:

Question 2: Is the nonprofit sector any worse than any other sector in how it allocates capital?

Answer:  I haven’t seen any data that helps me answer this question.  So for now, I have to say I don’t know.

Or, more simply:

Might we be a mess? Sure.
Are we any more of a mess than anyone else? Dunno.

For example, let’s compare the nonprofit sector to the mutual fund industry (since both involve individuals and institutions allocating their capital in pretty significant ways).  Mutual fund clients have the clearest incentive to allocate their capital efficiently and to avoid paying for things (like high management fees or stock-picking managers that say they’re going to beat the market) that are proven to be inefficient.  Plus, tons of time and effort has gone in to creating standards and disclosure requirements to protect individual investors and provide them with clear, easy-to-understand information.

And….?  And investors make all sorts of screwy decisions about what to do with their money, pouring billions of dollars into funds that cost 10, 20, 30 times the cheapest and most efficient option.  (And in further proof that we keep on getting halfway to the wall, just three weeks ago the mutual fund industry had another call to action about how disclosure and transparency need to be radically improved.)  In the meantime, high fees persist, people put money into underperforming funds, and investors ignore reams of data that says it’s impossible to beat market returns in the long term, especially with high-fee mutual fund managers.  On average, we buy high and sell low most of the time.

So what about another, simpler point of reference, like, say, just about any consumer product on the market?  Because while mutual fund fees may be obtuse and hard to understand (so arguably a great point of reference for the nonprofit sector), people also routinely spend, say $250 for 1.7 ounce facial moisturizer when its non-comodogenic cousin costs $10.99 for a 20 ounce container (about a 300:1 price difference).

$150/ounce or $0.50/ounce?

The point is not that the nonprofit marketplace doesn’t need better disclosure, more transparency, more accountability – it does. But we need a mental model of what we hope our sector will look like when we’re successful if we’re ever going to get there.  And “better than where we are now” isn’t much of a rallying cry.

Is the model publicly traded companies (with GAAP and ratings agencies…which failed us spectacularly in the latest economic meltdown)?  Is it the mutual fund business?  Consumer credit?   The point is obvious: lots of markets more “advanced” than ours fall short the same ways we do.

Since it’s so hard to find examples of markets that are “working” in the sense that capital is allocated in the “right” way, I would advocate starting by understanding how we’re the same (we’re interacting with consumers who, with limited time and attention, are allocating capital) and how we’re different (nonprofits tend to die slower deaths than their for-profit brethren), and then be clear about what these differences and similarities  mean and, from that, describe the gap we hope to close from where we are to where we hope to be.

In the meantime it feels like there’s a lot of railing about what’s wrong (“it’s not all about overhead ratios!” “Donors just respond to stories and sad pictures instead of digging in and understanding who is most effective!”), and a lot of effort to improve on what we have (by the nonprofits “rating” agencies and work to improve online giving marketplaces) which is all probably productive, but if we don’t know where we’re ultimately trying to go I have trouble seeing how we’re going to get there.

So my closing question is, “What does a highly functioning nonprofit marketplace look like, one filled with real actors who act like real human beings when deciding how to allocate their capital?”  And from that statement, let’s figure out what it will take to get there.

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Pictures and Frames

Here’s an idea pilfered (with permission) from my friend Jennifer.

It turns out that when people go to museums, they spend up to 10 times as much of their time reading the blurbs next to the artwork as they spend looking at the artwork itself.

Which might be why, when we try to describe what we do, we essentially write blurbs that are good enough (at best) to sit next to the picture…which is a shame since we’re all in the business of creating art.  You know: “We aim to revolutionize the customer experience by enabling real-time interaction in a customer-centric fashion using…..”  (Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz).

And yes, the nonprofit sector is the worst offender here, because the things we’re doing, the things in the picture frame, are so motivating and so real, and they inspires such a deep human connection that it’s doubly shameful that we use such wilted language to describe what we do.

So, the next time you sit down to write down what you do or to explain it to someone, start by imagining the picture that’s inside the frame, and describe what you see instead.

I promise it will be more real, less polished, and less likely to be interchangeable with the next organization up the block that seems, to all of us, to do the same thing you do.   (And I bet you’ll write it in real English too!)

Go ahead, even if it’s not your job to do this stuff, imagine the picture that’s inside the frame for your organization.  Describe it 6 words or less.  Send your description to the CEO and to the people that really matter.

Have fun.

[NOTE: Just realized that Katya’s (Network for Good COO) blog has some great step-by-step tips about how to do this.  Thanks Katya!]

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Habits, decisions, and arbitrary deadlines

I started practicing yoga ten years ago – very intensively in the early years, a drop-off when I moved away from the first yoga studio I really loved, with a slow but consistent decline in the past few years as my life has gotten busier and my kids have gotten bigger.  Over the last few months, things got so full that whole weeks were passing without any yoga at all, and it was affecting my sleep, my mood, how my joints felt, the works (all worse).

I know enough about yoga and about how the mind and body work to know, intellectually, that between practicing a lot every so often (that is, 2 hours every Saturday) or a little a lot (30 minutes every day), a little a lot is much better.  Once a week feels virtuous, but thirty minutes a day is a habit, it’s part of my life, it builds.

But I don’t have this kind of time.  I don’t have an extra 30 minutes (which always becomes 40 or 45 minutes), certainly not every day.

Or do I?

Last week, I decided the time had come to do something.  So I decided then that the next day and every day I’d wake up 30 minutes earlier.  No planning involved, no “I’ll get to it at the end of the day.”  I admitted to myself that I needed to make an arbitrary commitment that was clear and time-delineated and non-negotiable.

It’s early days, but so far so good.  It’s working because it’s clear, it’s simple, it’s something I can do right now.  I’ve created a structure that works for me.

We are all filled with good intentions. There are lots of things we want to have in our lives but we don’t create space for them – because our lives are full, our days are full, and because it’s easy to do what we’ve done.  We need help doing the things that we want to do, doing the things that will make us happy.  We need a structure that will help us act.

One of the problems so many nonprofits face is that the issues we tackle are so big that they’ll be here tomorrow.  And the next day.  And the next.  This is the perfect excuse for someone who genuinely cares to end up not acting – because of the gap between good intentions and good actions.

WE, the nonprofit professionals, feel the urgency today, but that’s because we live in our world; because we’ve dedicated our lives to this.  For everyone who doesn’t live and breathe this, we need to translate this sense of urgency.   When we talk to people and try to motivate them to act, we cannot simply say “this is important, I want you to help.”  We need to communicate why we need their help NOW.  We need to move that person to action – to help her do what she wants to do but isn’t doing – with a calendar and a deadline and things that will not happen if they don’t act now.  (and “now” doesn’t have to be today, but now can’t be “someday” either.  More than six months away is the same as “whenever.”).

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Is fundraising the same thing as sales?

For anyone who is interested in nonprofits, how they mobilize resources, how to do world-class fundraising, I have good news:  Jennifer McCrea, who has done as much as anyone to revitalize and reposition philanthropic fundraising, just started blogging.  Jennifer has worked with the Boards of scores of top nonprofits, she teaches a wonderful course called Exponential Fundraising, and she brings more joy, energy, conviction and purpose to fundraising than anyone I know.

In the interest of doing more than just pointing to Jennifer’s blog, I’d like to jump into a conversation she started yesterday, in her post titled “Fundraising is not Selling.”  It’s an important question, because how we answer informs our mindset, attitude, the teams we build, the activities we engage in, and where we look for lessons.

So is fundraising selling?  It’s tempting to say it’s not, because selling can appear to be about transactions, about pulling a fast one, about a sucker being born every minute.   Selling is the guy with the big fake smile as you walk into a car dealership, it’s the manufacturers’ coupon that you can’t really redeem, t’s the spam that’s cluttering your Inbox,  right?

Sure it is.

What about when you crack open your new iPod box and every last detail of the packaging is just cool and perfect?  When you arrive for a vacation you’ve been looking forward to and the concierge does something special to make you feel welcome?  When the Zappos customer service rep upgrades you to free overnight shipping?  When LL Bean takes returns on 15-year old shoes?  When a realtor finds you the house of your dreams, for less than you were willing to pay?

Well that’s selling too.

Just last week I was cleaning out my Inbox, frustrated with all the junk mail I still receive, when  I opened an email from Dollar Rental Car.  I was planning to hit the “Junk” button, but the email had an offer for specials on midsize car rentals.  I had reserved a rental car an hour before, and by clicking on the link in the email, I saved $150.  It didn’t feel like I had been “sold” anything.

The point is, when you sell something in the right way, you are helping someone get more value from something (a product, an experience, a donation) than what she is paying.  You are solving a problem for her.  You are meeting a need that she has.

So no, I don’t think that fundraising should be transactional, should be a one-time sale, should be about the money.   But I’m not ready to go to the other extreme and say that “selling” is a dirty word, because the nonprofit sector is – technologically, tactically, strategically, in terms of execution – in the dark ages in terms of how we sell the incredibly valuable things we have on offer.  And there is a whole world out there of people in other sectors who do the best, highest level, most value-creating, partnership-enhancing kinds of sales imaginable, and if we throw out the notion that we have something to learn from them, we close ourselves off to a generations’ worth of learning and experience.

It is true that philanthropic giving, especially large gifts, are by definition deeply personal, and that the job of the best fundraiser is to be present, to listen, to understand, to sit at the same side of the table as the philanthropist and help her both understand and realize her goals and and connect her philanthropy to these  goals.  And that process of discovery has many characteristics that are absent from sales of almost any other product.

But I think we’ll serve ourselves better by putting a finer point on what makes philanthropic fundraising (“philanthropic sales”?) different from other sales, and what makes it the same.  Because I for one believe that there are great salespeople – whether they call themselves salesmen or marketing directors or CEOs or slam poets – from whom I have a lot to learn.

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If free is the new black

If free is the new black, because there’s no friction left in the system.

If our major sources of information are going to radically upend their business models because they’re competing under a completely new set of rules.

If the future of newspapers and magazines looks like National Public Radio, whose listeners decide what something is worth through the donations they make.

If our major sources of information are going, in one form or another, to become nonprofits.

Then when, exactly, is it time to learn how nonprofits do it, how they look someone in the eye and say, “This thing we do is worthwhile, and I’d like you to support it.”

Do you think the time is tomorrow or today?

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The toughest sale

Here’s a riddle: all good product sales are not about the product, they’re about the story about the product, right?   (Method soap tells a story about the kind of hip, environmentally conscious, non-ostentatious but still a little bit fancy consumer you are;  there’s a whole ethos and culture and world outlook story that surrounds each iPhone (and, soon, iTouch) ; JetBlue sells an attitude about flying along with free TV.)

What about selling something that has no product?  That seems hard to do.  In fact, it seems so hard to do that if you could find someone who knew how to do that, you’d know that they were pretty darn good at their job – probably better at selling that someone who has a product AND a story to sell, right?

Selling philanthropy seems to me to be a product-free sale.  It’s the pure sale of an idea, of an ethos, of who you can be.

So the riddle is: if philanthropy is a product-free sale, why aren’t the people selling philanthropy the best salespeople around?

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Burying a blunt instrument

The other day a very thoughtful friend told me he’d like to pull together a list of recommended nonprofits for his co-workers as a way of raising visibility and funds, and he wanted my suggestions.  We were talking about what the list should look like in terms of geographic focus, issue area, etc., and he said, almost as a throwaway line, “…and we should make sure none of them spends more than 10% on fundraising.”

He didn’t mean it this way, but it could have sounded like, “Let’s make sure none of them spend too much money doing what you do.”

So let’s dig a little deeper.  What he’s essentially saying is, “let’s make sure the organizations aren’t wasting money,” and unfortunately “overhead spend” is the unbelievably blunt approximation we have of wasting money.

A great comment on my blog last week, in another post where I riffed on the overhead ratio test, put this point very well, concluding:

There are horror stories of huge sums burned by inefficient organisations. It isn’t bad guys, frauds or scammers. It’s just organisations that don’t do as good a job…In some cases almost all of the money donated goes into running the bureaucracy of the organization itself. In some cases, fundraising itself costs more then the activities it funds.

…How do you avoid donating to companies like this? Well, you might find that most great organizations have a 20/80 overhead/programs ratio…The problem with this is that it is incredibly crude. If all else is equal, a lower overhead is certainly good but all else is never equal…

I understand what you are saying. I agree. You’re right.

But what is the alternative?

It turns out that a number of “rating agencies” in the nonprofit space have banded together to answer this question, with the goal of creating a quick and easy way to rate the effectiveness of nonprofits.  Tim Ogden, Editor-in-Chief of Philanthropy Action, recently issued a press release titled “The Worst (and Best) Way to Pick a Charity,” and the release was signed by the CEO’s of Guidestar and Charity Navigator, the two organizations that have arguably done the most to create the “10% overhead” rule of thumb in the nonprofit sector.  Hats off to Tim for kicking this off, and to Bob Ottenhoff (CEO of Guidestar) and Ken Berger (CEO of Charity Navigator) for signing on to the release and for helping push this conversation forward.

Some thoughts on how this might play out:

1. Changing perceptions about this will be hard. Convincing someone that your new idea (product, story) is better than the one they currently believe in (purchased) is harder than selling them on a brand new idea (this is part of the reason the iPhone still beats the pants off of the Palm Pre – iPhone created the category, and the Pre is trying to be improvement on the iPhone).  So getting people to let go of the overhead ratio myth will actually be harder than it was to convince them of the myth in the first place.  For any real traction, this thing needs a breakthrough idea, message, and advocate.  In fact, I bet you most people don’t even know where they first heard the overhead ratio number.

2. Effectiveness is the right goal, but will we ever get there? The push to replace the overhead rule of thumb with an effectiveness rating feels right, though I worry that executing on that promise will be elusive.  There are lots of players pushing this forward, but I’d feel a lot more comfortable if the push were towards “here are the questions we want to ask” rather than “here are the answers.”  I know the world wants a star rating for everything (including the food we buy at the supermarket), but can’t we do better?

3. The endgame is creating better stakeholders. Let’s learn from the field of socially responsible investing.  A lot has gone into ratings of public companies, and the track record is decidedly mixed: attempts to make ratings more sophisticated have generally resulted in less transparency and objectivity.

The real power of these ratings comes not from the ratings themselves (with retail shareholders and consumers somehow knowing if companies are good or bad), it comes from shareholder activism – as information becomes more available, passionate followers create a dialogue with companies that can turn the dial on accountability.  If ratings can create real dialogue (hopefully with much less acrimony than exists with public companies) we’ll make more real progress (and for this to happen, the raters have to be held accountable too…)

4. If you must talk about overhead ratios, ask about efficiency. Since I doubt that the myth of overhead spend is dying any time soon, why not in the meantime promote a marginally better measure: measure fundraising efficiency (how much does it cost to raise $1) rather than how much fundraising is done (fundraising as a % of total spend).  I’m not sure I care if a nonprofit with a great mission spends 8% or 18% of its budget on raising funds – assuming they can spend the funds they raise wisely.  But I do care if a nonprofit spends 4 cents to raise a dollar or 40 cents.  While neither of these numbers tells me anything about the effectiveness of the nonprofit as a whole, all in all I’d rather make a bet on the one that’s more efficient.

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Too much nonprofit marketing?

Zeenat Potia, who now works at and blogs for Oxfam America, started her career in book publishing.  In her first year in the book business, Zeenat would often be asked at parties whether she was an editor, and she’d say no, that she was in marketing.  But:

“I did not like casting myself as a marketer because their inevitable response would be a smug, quasi-judgmental “ah.”

The premise: the editors do the high-status, high-value work (finding manuscripts, editing them, working with the authors); the marketers are just peddlers.  And look where the book business is today.  What’s the right balance between editorial and sales & marketing?  I don’t know, but I’d guess that it’s in the ballpark of 50/50, not the 90/10 or 80/20 that I’d guess it is in the book business (at least from a status perspective, maybe from a time and effort and honing of craft perspective too).  The goal is to find great books and get them into the hands of readers, isn’t it?

Zeenat makes the right analogy to the nonprofit world: just swap out “editors / marketers” with “program staff / development staff” and you get the exact same equation.  “Program” is where the people who do the “real” work go, the ones with the PhDs who really know what’s going on and what works.  The development staff just run off and package the “real work.”  Ancillary and low status.

This is what gives space for Zeenat’s question.  Marketing is “just selling,” right?  So you should do just enough to be able to do the real work.  It’s possible to do too much marketing, right?

Probably, but I bet that there’s not a single iPhone owner (or craver) out of the 22 million owners in the United States who discusses whether Apple is wasting its money on “all that marketing.”   Same goes for Amazon.  And Virgin.  And probably even Wal-Mart. Same even went for GE in the heyday years of Jack Welch (the story was just different).

When done right, marketing helps us discover solutions to our problems, influences how people see the world, and helps them make decisions.  When done wrong, it’s peddling something someone doesn’t quite need and quickly regrets buying.

Let us not, as a sector, fall into the trap of listening to critics who say that we should minimize the dollars, effort, brain power, and ingenuity that goes into everything but the “real” work (programs).  In so doing, we risk forgetting that our role is BOTH to find solutions to the persistent problems of inequality and injustice and malnutrition and infant mortality and safe drinking water and AIDS and malaria…AND to figure out how to explain to the world that these problems matter, that we have the tools to solve them, and that if was have the tools to solve them, then we must all act.

It’s not easy.  But that’s marketing.

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“Help” or help, and the Fifth Element

Nonprofits face a dilemma.  Especially in a down economy, we get lots of offers of help.  How do we figure out what to do with these offers?  And how do we, kindly, with grace, respond to “I’d like to help” with tough questions to figure out whether that help will be, well, helpful?

The dance of sorting this out – in a way that minimizes investment of time and effort for everyone involved – boils down to figuring out who is offering what across four dimensions:

  1. Brand
  2. Skills
  3. Resources
  4. Time

1. Brand. E.g. “I’ve got an startup online marketplace where the profits go to nonprofits and I’d like to feature your organization on my site.”  This happens pretty often.  There are lots of online startups that have noticed the success of places like GlobalGiving and want to populate their own sites with lists of brand-name nonprofits that get them to critical mass.  So in this case an “I want to help” might really mean “I’d like to borrow your brand, which is worth a lot to me, in exchange for which you might get some revenues/visibility down the line.”  Not necessarily a problem for the nonprofit, but understand the exchange that’s going on and make sure the exchange is a fair one.  (This analysis also applies to multinationals linking up with nonprofits – there’s huge value in nonprofit brands, but as an intangible asset, it’s often undervalued in the exchange).  Also, this can cut the other way, namely a firm that offers pro-bono help (legal, PR, communications, etc.) to a nonprofit – you can only figure out what such offers are really worth if you can get past the brand that’s being offered (which is often very appealing) and learn more about the Skills, Resources and Time (meaning the people) you will get on the project (see below).

2. Skills. E.g. “I’m a strategy consultant…maybe I can help your organization with strategy issues.”  Potentially hugely valuable.  Also the hardest to judge up-front.  Recognize that nearly all Skills offers require significant investment of time and energy by the nonprofit.  You’ve got to dig deeper on the specific skills being offered and their potential value to you – and you’ve got to know what other Resources and Time are being offered – to understand how to evaluate these offers.  Coupling Skills offers with Resource offers is often a good way to make sure everyone is equally invested in making the relationship work.

3. Resources. E.g. “I’d like to support you financially” or “I’d like to introduce you to people who can.”  These offers are hard to come by, but when they do, you probably want to take them very seriously.  The main thing to keep an eye on is Brand – will this individual strengthen and protect your brand with the same care you will?

4. Time. Brand, Skills, Resources offers cannot be understood without an understanding of Time.  Talking up-front about how much Time is on offer – and when – is key to understanding any offer of help.  For example, the world’s greatest transaction lawyer, offering her services for free, is no use to you if you cannot get her or anyone on her team to reply to an email when your next transaction comes up.

The Fifth Element – Values. Assessing who is giving and getting what – in Brand, Skills, Resources, and Time – is often hard to do up front.  The starting point is having a candid conversation about what is on offer, and explaining that any engagement, volunteer or otherwise, requires your staff’s time so you always dig a little deeper to understand offers of help (drawing up terms of reference helps a lot too).

The silver lining is that you have a trump card, often undervalued and underplayed – Values.  If, when talking with someone who offers to help, you are convinced that both parties hold shared values, then that creates space for honesty and dialogue and transparency and clarity, even when you know very little up front about the things you need to know about.   Conversely, if, as the nonprofit, you walk out of that first conversation wowed with the offer (brand, skills, resources, even time) but feel crummy about the values, it’s probably time to ask a lot of question or just walk away.

One closing thought.  If you’re feeling hesitant about asking tough questions of people who offer to help, consider this: no one at Apple or Virgin or Amazon or Toyota or any brand you respect would mind replying to someone knocking on the door saying “I’d like to help” by saying, “Really? How?”  Why does it feel so different when you’re at a nonprofit?

P.S. A nod to the The Blog of Unecessary Quotation Marks for inspiration on this post’s title.

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The simplest nonprofit ven diagram ever

I presented today to an amazing group of 30+ summer interns and new hires who are about to start working for Acumen Fund, E+Co, Root Capital, Agora, IGNIA and Endeavor – all organizations that are supporting entrepreneurship in the developing world to promote economic development and poverty alleviation.  The training was organized by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), run by Randall Kempner.

I’ve spoken on enough 3-person panels that I’ve come to realize that the best gift I can give the audience is to leave them with one concrete, meaty thought they can take away and chew on.

So here it is, with the world’s simplest ven diagram in support of my big question:

How much overlap do you (future leaders in this sector) think there is between these two circles?

Ven A


It’s such a simple question to ask, and the group is smart enough to know how they’re supposed to answer: there’s a good deal of overlap.

But push yourself a little.  Is it what’s above (A), or is it (B) or (C)?

Ven B

Ven C

So we know the “right” answer to the question is definitely not (B), possibly (A) but maybe it’s (C).

But what we know isn’t necessarily how we act. How can you suss out what’s really going on in your organization?  Here’s a list of questions to get you started:

  • How much senior management time is spent on strategies for raising capital?
  • What percentage of her time does your CEO spend fundraising? (<10% / 30% / 50%+)
  • How much Board time is spent on this?
  • Do you have a Board Development Committee (yes/no/sort of)?  How much does it raise?
  • How much integration is there between the people who raise capital and the “program” folks?  (None/Some/A little/A lot)
  • Is there an obvious difference in the quality of staff you can recruit for capital raising functions vs. everything else in the organization?  (Yes / No)
  • Is there an obvious difference in the prestige of the different roles within the organization? (Yes / No)
  • Is it possible to be a star performer in your organization if you haven’t proven you can raise money? (Yes / No)

(Please, take this set of questions, develop them further, and use them to shake things up in your organization or at a nonprofit you love).

My take: there’s a huge amount of white space between how we analyze this question and how we act as a sector.

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