By Aaron Hurst on
July 24, 2009 9:18 AM
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Imagine you are an HR manager for a nonprofit organization with a staff of 40 people. You began your career working as an admin in the operations department of a nonprofit and taught yourself about Human Resources by working in the job. As a result, you got promoted into this new role.
You are the only HR person at the organization. Your boss knows a little about what's involved but is truly a generalist who responsible for a ton of functions--from HR to finance to real estate to legal needs. Neither of you have ever worked for an organization of more than 40 people.
Where do you go to identify best practices? Where do you go for support when problem solving? Where do you go to understand the ways in which your systems need to change as the organization grows to have a staff of 50, 75 and 100 people? To whom do you turn when you want to vent about your challenges to someone who understands the situation? Where do you go to think about your own professional development and career advancement?
For a small nonprofit, this is a very common scenario for professionals working in departments like marketing, HR, IT and finance that consist of only one member (or fewer) due to the organizations small scale. These professionals are often self trained and report to someone without a lot of functional knowledge or experience.
How can we leverage the systems of large companies to support these function-area professionals who are relatively isolated from their peers? How could companies leverage their teams and systems to share with these nonprofit professionals? What if each corporate department "adopted" the functional staff of their company's grantees?
We talk about wanting nonprofits to scale and to be able to retain top talent. Both of these require finding a solution to this issue of isolation for these functional areas.
At Taproot Foundation, we have been looking into this issue and see a potential opportunity for a model of pro bono to provide a sustainable solution. Any ideas?
By Aaron Hurst on
July 20, 2009 2:44 PM
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We have been toying for a number of years with the idea of creating pro bono projects that would serve more than a single client.
Salesforce.com is an example of this model. They donate their CRM platform to nonprofit organizations. That isn't really an act of pro bono work but more like a product donation. What is pro bono about Salesforce.com's model is that they had a team create a configuration especially for these nonprofits, which made their product easier to use increased its adoption.
In this case, to be able to design and implement this single model it probably took them about as much effort as it would for 10 of their usual implementations, but now it can be used by hundreds--or perhaps even thousands--of nonprofits. High leverage leading to high impact.
The open source movement in general falls into this category. Software developers create software that can then be used by any organization (commercial or social benefit).
These are tech examples, but the same concept can apply to different functional areas. I wrote recently about the logical marketing application (
see here). Rather than doing positioning for a single nonprofit, you do meta-positioning for a category of nonprofits (e.g. homeless shelters), which allows you to create a strong unified voice and make it easier each respective organization to develop their own positioning that differentiates them from the field while also reinforcing the meta-positioning.
This could also be done in HR by creating generic systems for recruitment, performance management and other key functions that get an organization 80% of the way to the goal. A more complex HR version might be the creation of a unified pro bono recruitment services. Such a service would centralize and qualify candidates for nonprofits that could operate in a handful of key roles. This would essentially leverage the skills and capacity of a search firm but by working with dozens of clients the centralized function would make sure the right fit was happening across the entire network. Similarly, an HR department could create a training program on key skills, like management, for the employees of all their nonprofit grantees.
On the Strategic Management side of the equation, you could do meta-market research, which would support the strategic planning for a whole category of nonprofits so that they don't need to each do it on their own. Bridgespan does some of this work now, but it is still very macro (across a wide range of nonprofits). Instead, imagine an annual report on the homeless services providers that speaks to different funding models, staffing models, program approaches, metrics used and other key research. Few nonprofits can afford to do such extensive research, which when conducted on a national scale can really identify powerful trends and best practices. Such research and reporting could be done for a dozen different types of common nonprofits.
While there is a need for custom pro bono work for each nonprofit, all pro bono work would be more efficient and effective if companies and professional services firms could take on some of these multi-client projects that would raise the collective bar.
By Aaron Hurst on
July 2, 2009 1:59 PM
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In his first six months in office, President Obama has spoken at length about service, social innovation and professional responsibility. They are some of the core means for achieving his domestic agenda. He sees them as part of how we address issues in our society on a systemic basis.
Service is about volunteering, but it is also about a mindset where one is giving of himself to help the collective.
Social innovation is about the notion that government can't solve problems alone and that we cannot continue do things the same way while expecting different results. The President sees innovation in the nonprofit sector as critical to an effective government and society.
Finally,
professional responsibility was a major theme of criticism surrounding the Wall Street melt down and executive compensation. While the President believes in capitalism, he also feels that business professionals must hold themselves accountable to more than just the short-term bottom line.
Pro bono service is the intersection of these three priorities we've seen President Obama espouse. Pro bono allows business professions to provide social innovators with their skilled service while also constructing an ethic of professional social responsibility in these careers.
By inspiring the adoption of the pro bono ethic and investing in the infrastructure of its field, the President can find a rare synergy where one single effort can have a tremendous multiplier effect.
