April 2009 Archives
By Aaron Hurst on
April 29, 2009 3:08 PM
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President Obama last week signed legislation that will expand the AmeriCorps program to 250,000 people. That is the equivalent of two college towns suddenly unleashed to fight poverty across the country. Amazing.
At this scale we need to rethink the whole program and ecosystem needed to support them to ensure the results our nation needs.
Here are four ideas for how to support this growing army.
1) AmeriCorps is a well-known brand at universities and with folks entering the job market. We need to expand this reach to promote the program to mid-career professionals who are either looking to do a career change or a sabbatical. To do this, AmeriCorps could market to career coaches and corporate HR departments. They will quickly spread the word. This will bring a needed influx of middle management into nonprofit organizations and also build a pipeline for leadership in the sector.
2) The AmeriCorps program will need to market to nonprofits much more aggressively. It should partner with the Foundation Center to do trainings for nonprofits across the country where they can help organizations understand all the ways they could leverage the program.
3) Much like the IRS has created an industry to help people and organizations file their taxes, my sense is that we will need a small industry to support AmeriCorps. The nonprofit sector does not have the capacity to manage this new influx. We need intermediaries to help nonprofits design programs, apply for AmeriCorps grants, find the best people for the jobs and help a nonprofit integrate Corps members into their organization. These intermediaries will need lobbying, grant writing, recruitment, program design and training competencies.
4) Speaking of armies, AmeriCorps would be an interesting re-entry program for returning veterans from the Middle East. It would enable them to continue to serve while integrating them into the domestic workforce.
So, there they are. Four ideas of how we can harness the exciting influx of AmeriCorps members.
By Aaron Hurst on
April 27, 2009 2:34 PM
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I can't recall an article that I have read that gave me as much of a sense of optimism about our country as the cover story in
The New York Times "Week in Review" section a couple of weeks ago about the shift in professional aspirations of college students (
read article here).
We have heard for a while that this generation was more public-service oriented, but I had my doubts about how this attitude impacted action. I worried that it was like the research that showed that people prefer to buy products from good corporate citizens but when it comes time to make purchases they forget these values as soon as they begin pushing their shopping carts.
The shift the article described that caught my attention was the shift in the prestige of careers. Going to work on Wall Street or for a large consulting firm is no longer seen as being as sexy or as good of a way to impress your peers as it once was. Careers in public service, science and other professions directly related to addressing core global issues are the new "plastics" -- where the best of the best focus their talents.
For those of us from middle class families, prestige is typically more important than money in selecting careers (assuming you get paid a living wage that can cover your debt from school). We all want to have our friends and family admire what we do for a living -- especially in a society where your occupation defines so much of your identity.
This is a sea change that will impact everything from the nonprofit sector to universities, to the government, to consulting firms who will now have to change their game to attract the best and the brightest.
I suspect and hope that pro bono service programs will be a big part of what makes this transition work. If the top consulting firms can match the legal and architecture firms and make commitments that 1-3% of their billing hours are used for pro bono service to support public benefit organizations and causes, they are going to be in a much better position to secure and retain talent.
This will be a win for the firms and the nonprofits they serve. It will also be critical to building the capacity of nonprofits to absorb all the top talent who will be seeking full-time jobs in the public sector.
I counsel many of the top young professionals I meet to go learn their trade in the corporate community and then, once trained, to come to the nonprofit sector. I argue that the nonprofit sector doesn't have the capacity to offer the kind of training and management support they could get at a company like McKinsey, and they will do more for society if they get that first and then make the shift.
The capacity of nonprofits to offer such training needs to improve to reflect the interests of this new generation and the scale of their desire to join the public sector. We need to focus much of our pro bono service efforts on building the training and management capacity of nonprofits so that they can be that ideal first job for newly minted professionals.
The nonprofit sector must become an employer of choice, not just as a fantasy of well-intentioned students, but in the reality of the professional experience that comes from working for a well-operated nonprofit in your first years out of school.
By Aaron Hurst on
April 23, 2009 11:41 AM
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To our pro bono consultants,
Happy National Volunteer Week!
Consider this an interactive, virtual thank you card from all of us at Taproot Foundation.
Today we honor our pro bono consultants from coast to coast for National Volunteer Week, or as we call it, National Pro Bono Week! Since 2001, you have collectively provided
$49 million of pro bono services to over
800 nonprofits nationwide and we are grateful for your commitment.
We don't award money to nonprofits; we award something far more valuable--your talent and time. You are truly the life force of Taproot Foundation and we realize every success we have is ultimately due to your great work and dedication. To our over
4,000 current pro bono consultants--
thank you all for using your gifts and skills to give back. We are so proud to have each of you as part of our team.
Please take a moment to reflect on your tremendous accomplishments highlighted below. We encourage you each to leave a message of thanks to your fellow "Roots" in the Taproot Foundation family. Think of recognizing your project teammates or even pro bono consultants in other markets you've never met before! Together, you represent a powerful network of innovative professionals dedicated to solving problems. Whether you know it or not, you are advancing the pro bono movement in the U.S., inspiring others to join, and serving as an invaluable resource to nonprofits nationwide.
We look forward to another year working with all of you to continue strengthening more nonprofits and communities.
Thank you all for making pro bono service a priority. We couldn't do this without you.
Look at all you've accomplished in the last year! (Since National Pro Bono Week 2008)
Bay Area Pro Bono Consultants
This is where it all began. As our founding market, you have been there since the beginning, in 2001. Thank you for continuing to be such a strong foundation upon which we can grow.1,394 current pro bono consultants
In the past year...
106 projects completed
$4,670,000 of capacity building services donated!
New York Pro Bono Consultants
In 2004, Taproot Foundation officially became a "national" organization thanks to all of your hard work on local projects. Donating your talents at such a critical moment in our history enabled us to take a leap and expand. Now you've brought us to the cover of the New York Times and NBC Nightly News online. Thank you for helping us see what more was possible. 1,002 current pro bono consultants
In the past year...
77 projects completed
$3,270,000 of capacity building services donated!
Chicago Pro Bono Consultants
Since 2006, you've made "pro bono work" as Chicagoan a notion as deep-dish pizza. As the founding Midwestern market, you have helped us pilot new ideas for our Service Grant program, being a hub of innovation for Taproot Foundation. Thank you for helping us strengthen our model. 729 current pro bono consultants
In the past year...
55 projects completed
$2,370,000 of capacity building services donated!
Seattle Pro Bono Consultants
Your commitment to service is so off the charts, you are the first market to ever be honored with an official benefit concert! Since 2007, you've been strengthening local nonprofits and people have noticed, like KEXP radio and the Puget Sound Business Journal. Thank you for proving that pro bono service is something to talk (and sing) about! 441 current pro bono consultants
In the past year...
26 projects completed
$1,010,000 of capacity building services donated!
Washington DC Pro Bono Consultants
Happy one-year anniversary! What better way to spread the pro bono movement nationwide than by bringing it to the nation's capital? Thank you for helping us set roots in the capital and expand our mission to a truly national level. 271 current pro bono consultants
In the past year...
6 projects completed, 19 in progress
$270,000 of capacity building services donated!
$950,000 of capacity building services to be donated!
Los Angeles Pro Bono Consultants
As our newest market, in just a few short months you have already accomplished so much. Without even having permanent Taproot Foundation staff on site yet, you self-organized a giant kick off event, a networking event and truly hit the ground running! Thank you for your energy and excitement to get started. 162 current pro bono consultants
In the past year...
7 projects in progress and more on the way!
$365,000 of capacity building services to be donated!
Boston Pro Bono Consultants
Since we are suspending operations in Boston, your continued dedication to service is especially important now, as we complete our remaining projects. Thank you for ensuring our nonprofit clients in Boston continue to be well-served. We look forward to returning to Boston in the future, coming back stronger than ever.318 current pro bono consultants
In the past year...
17 projects completed
$755,000 of capacity building services donated!
By Aaron Hurst on
April 23, 2009 10:25 AM
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President Obama made a great choice in nominating Maria Eitel as the new CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). This next CEO will be inheriting the recently-signed Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act as well as partners like Mayor Bloomberg across the country. This is the biggest opportunity in the history of the service movement and the President has selected a nominee who has the potential to deliver.
Maria Eitel is currently the President of the Nike Foundation. She is known for being smart, savvy and demanding. Just what the doctor ordered.
In addition to her general disposition, Ms. Eitel brings experience that is really well suited for the post. First, she comes from a corporate background. The Serve America Act and other government initiatives have been light on encouraging and supporting corporate investment in service. Ms. Eitel will hopefully help fill in this gap and move some of her predecessor's critical corporate initiatives, like Billion + Change, forward. Not only does she come from a world-class corporation, she understands that service needs to not be constrained to our national borders and through her work at Nike she understands the "
girl effect". Supporting opportunity for girls around the world is one of the best investments we can make. Finally, Ms. Eitel is media savvy. The movement needs to continue to harness media to drive our objectives. Time magazine has been a large part of the recent media successes. MTV wants to get more engaged, and the big networks are working with the Entertainment Industry Foundation to do a primetime special this fall on service. She can take this interest and make it strategic.
Nice choice Mr. President.
By Aaron Hurst on
April 21, 2009 9:16 AM
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It was a great honor yesterday for the Taproot Foundation and some of our pro bono consultants to be guests at the Mayor's event to unveil NYC Service - the first city in the nation to really embrace the President's call to service. At the event yesterday the Mayor outlined a plan that goes beyond just addressing the simple wins and seeks to make courageous changes that will require a lot of political capital and will be challenging to implement.
The most impressive part of his plan is a new requirement to have service be a part of every school in the city - no exceptions. As he said, service will be part of the DNA of every New Yorker. This is revolutionary and will not be easy to pull off given all the other mandates in education. Joel Klein, Chancellor of the NYC Dept. of Education, was there to back up the Mayor, and if this is doable, those are the two leaders to make it happen.
The plan also calls for investment in nonprofit capacity to engage volunteers. Bloomberg shared that one in three volunteers are turned away from nonprofits in NYC due to those organizations' limited capacity. He clearly listened to the field and understood that you can't rally the city to serve unless there are places that both need them and can engage these volunteers effectively.
He ended his plan with a clear call for accountability for service in the city. This too is novel as service is usually not elevated to a level of importance to focus on making it accountable. It sends a clear message about how Bloomberg sees the role of service in the success of the city over the next few decades and beyond. To this end, he is appointing a senior executive to manage the NYC Service department at City Hall.
Now that is leadership. I hope it serves as a model for dozens of mayors from across the country.
By Aaron Hurst on
April 13, 2009 6:40 AM
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Despite writing a clear job description with required qualification requirements when looking to fill a job opening, you usually get hundreds of resumes. Most hiring managers are able to quickly reduce the pile of resumes by around 75%. These are applicants who clearly do not have the experience or skills needed to do the job. A more careful reading of the resumes can often trim it down so a short stack of 5-10% that seem worthy of an interview.
That is when you are looking to hire someone full-time. What if you were hiring a consultant or consulting firm? If you put out a request for proposals (RFP) would you get a dozen responses? Of those, would you speak to more than three to choose the right partner?
In looking for the right person for a pro bono consulting project, how many people would you need to interview to find the right fit? How many applications would you need to see to have enough people to interview?
For many nonprofit organizations the answer is one. Someone comes in and says they want to help with a marketing plan, and they are off to the races. We also know that most pro bono work fails to be completed or meet the expectations of the nonprofit client. Failing to apply what we know about hiring to selection of pro bono consultants is likely a major cause of this outcome.
I don't have an answer to this question, but I can provide some data from our experience managing pro bono consultants on over 1,000 projects that might help you think about the right ratios.
To put this data in perspective, you need to know that we have clear job descriptions that we post online to look for pro bono consultants. These describe the role and qualifications necessary (something many organizations don't proactively do when seeking pro bono talent). Business professionals then apply for one of these specific roles by providing their resumes and completing an online skills matrix.
Of the professionals who apply, 58% are declined in our first pass based on fundamental gaps in their skills relative to the job description. They apply saying they can do the job based on a job description and yet more than half don't have the right experience.
Of the remaining 42% that are qualified, roughly a third of the applicants don't apply for the best role to match their skill set. Despite the fact that they fit squarely in one of the roles we need, they either apply for something more junior or senior or for a job that is outside of their functional area.
This data tells us that even with clear proactive job descriptions, only about 25% of applicants have the right skills and can identify the appropriate role.
That would suggest that if you have a clear job description you will need around four applicants to get one that would make sense to interview for culture fit (which is still a much better ratio than the scenario describing the search for a full-time employee). You would also need to screen for time availability and commitment during the interview. My guess is that you would want four people to interview to make a good decision. That means getting 16 resumes from interested professionals.
It also means investing a couple of days to make the hire (write job description, do outreach, screen resumes, do interviews, select finalist and negotiate project terms). For a typical senior nonprofit manager with a fully loaded salary of $100k per year, that would mean an investment of around $1,000 in time.
By Aaron Hurst on
April 9, 2009 2:49 PM
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Reframing a "flood of volunteerism" as a sustainable resource for nonprofitsGuest Post By: Miriam Young, Taproot Foundation AmeriCorps Program & Fundraising Fellow
To begin, consider the basic components of any good Godzilla disaster scene:
giant reptile + running amuck + people fleeing =
end of world as we know it. Now, using recent media language on growing volunteerism, replace "giant reptile" with "flood of volunteers" or "volunteer swarm" or even yes, "glut of volunteers."
glut of volunteers + running amuck + people fleeing =
end of world as we know it.Language in the
recent press on soaring volunteerism among business professionals conjures up images of catastrophe rather than opportunity. Godzilla-esque--we volunteers are scary en masse, bumbling around cities, breathing our fiery passion to do good and knocking over things with our collective scaly tail. Ironically, these very volunteers who are being globbed together by the media as a "flood" or "swarm" and, my favorite new word, "glut," are of course individuals, each with incredibly honed, specific skills to offer nonprofits. But that level of detail seems to have gotten lost in the flood.
With the
Serve America Act recently passing and
National Volunteer Week just around the corner, this notion that the rising interest in joining the pro bono movement is "too much of a good thing" needs a good old-fashioned Godzilla tail swat!
As an
AmeriCorps Fellow at Taproot Foundation, I am honored to work with our dedicated pro bono consultants who make pro bono service an integral part of their lives. While I'm excited for the media spotlight on volunteerism, I'm also disappointed by some pessimistic assumptions underlying the coverage.
For example, ending this recent
New York Times front-page article, "
From Ranks of Jobless, a Flood of Volunteers," was the following quote:
"'My hope is when [the volunteers] decide it's time to do something else, they have fond memories of what they learned at United Way,'
After a pause, she added: 'Maybe they'll even become a donor. I'll tell you, there isn't an executive director in town who doesn't think that way.'"And now, 3 assumptions that simply are not so:
1) "when they decide it's time to do something else"This assumes that post-recession, once a business professional is employed again, service will no longer have a place in his or her life. They will decide service is "out" and "something else" is "in"--that the two are mutually exclusive. Taproot Foundation's thousands of pro bono consultants nationwide easily debunk this myth! For them, pro bono service is part of one's career. Employment status is irrelevant for pro bono service; if you have the skills, we want to leverage them to strengthen nonprofits.
2) "fond memories"The article portrays executive directors' hopes for these volunteers as being limited to having nice memories after they presumably will leave an organization when they find jobs. But shouldn't we all be striving ensure these volunteers will want to remain engaged in service long-term?
The media characterizes nonprofits as resigned to an impending volunteer drop off instead of excited at the challenge of attracting and keeping top talent volunteers. At worst, this increase in volunteerism is portrayed as an overwhelming annoyance to nonprofits and, at best, being dismissed as a temporary flux. Why should we rush to dismiss a surge in talented volunteers as yet another burden on nonprofits? This is the breakthrough moment we've been waiting for.
3) "Maybe they'll even become a donor." Also common in the media coverage has been this sentiment--a strange hope, that these new volunteers will donate something REALLY valuable some day...money.
Hold on now. Let's get this straight: volunteers
are donors.
Donating time makes you a donor. Restricting "donor" to "someone who gives money" completely undervalues the tremendous contributions volunteers make every day. Money is paper that gets used up. Volunteers, on the other hand, can be a sustainable resource.
Call me crazy, but money isn't everything. (Remember, I'm an AmeriCorps volunteer.) It can't buy you love and it doesn't grow on trees. It's not the answer to every challenge. Certainly not during a recession.
Nonprofits, like everyone, feel limited by limited money. Obviously nonprofits need funding to run, but surely volunteer power could be harnessed as a creative supplement! Think solar panels and wind turbines. Just as "going green" embraces innovative environmental strategies, "going pro bono" would embrace innovative volunteerism strategies to maximize a great resource. If money is a placeholder for services and goods, isn't it equally valuable to directly deliver services to nonprofits? Especially when those services, with good management, are renewable?
Let us therefore entertain the idea that, unlike money, volunteers can grow on trees. By helping them set "roots" down in this economic climate, current volunteers could grow to become a self-sustaining resource for nonprofits in the future. Now is a real chance for both sectors to collaborate, build relationships, and strengthen each other. Of course there are challenges in engaging such a huge pool of talent, but it's no reason not to try.
When opportunity knocks, don't mistake it for Godzilla.
Open the door.
Miriam Young is currently serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA Program & Fundraising Fellow at the Taproot Foundation in Chicago.
By Aaron Hurst on
April 3, 2009 8:37 AM
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This week we hosted the second Pro Bono Roundtable - a two day retreat for leaders in the pro bono field. Meeting on the 19th floor of the John Hancock building in Boston, we reflected on the state of the field and began shaping the roadmap for advancing the field over the next 24 months.
Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One, Deloitte, Gap, Merck and Target - the corporate leaders in the field joined the heads of Public Architecture, the Pro Bono Institute and the Foundation Center for the meeting. Two of our strategic partners also joined the discussion. CECP helped serve as a bridge to their CEO members and a representative from CNCS was present to connect us with the service initiatives being pursued by the federal government.
The metaphor that emerged which best describes the current state of the pro bono field was that of an hour glass. Thanks to the success of our partners, the calls to service by both Obama and Bush, the effect of Service Nation and our economy, the interest in pro bono service from the nonprofit and business community is incredibly high (see this
SF Chronicle story). Picture this interest in doing pro bono work as the sand at the top of the hour glass. The challenge right now is that the funnel for the sand to pass through to reach the bottom is so narrow that only one grain of sand can pass through at a time. This funnel represents the field's capacity to manage pro bono work, which is next to none. All this interest in pro bono is stuck in the bottleneck because as a field we don't have enough people to effectively manage pro bono engagements ensuring their successful completion.
Given that this is the state of the field, the Leadership Group has dedicated itself to focus the next 24 months on doing whatever is necessary to increase the number of professionals in the field managing pro bono projects for nonprofits in need. We need to support the business case for funding these professionals and provide them with the training and support to be successful. They will exist at consulting firms, corporations, universities, nonprofit intermediaries and hopefully also at large nonprofits who are big enough to have this specialization in-house.
It is time to shift our focus from filling the hour glass with sand to opening the funnel width so we enable nonprofits to be served and for business professionals to realize their ambition to make a difference.
