The Service Enterprise

By Aaron Hurst on November 25, 2009 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In an Op-Ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy earlier this year, I outlined the challenge we face as a nonprofit sector in absorbing the influx of volunteers brought on by both the recession and the emphasis on service by the Obama administration. This past October, the challenge was expanded by the push of the Entertainment Industry Foundation to promote service across American media through a week-long campaign that featured volunteerism in the plots of America's most popular television programs.

Earlier this year, a number of service leaders recognized the challenges presented by the influx of volunteers and formed a group called Reimagining Service to look at how the capacity of the nonprofit sector to engage Americans in service should be built.  The members, including Taproot Foundation, meet again on December 9th at the White House to launch several campaigns to help the sector.

As I have been wrestling with the issues of volunteer engagement and underutilization, it has occurred to me that we need a better system to classify the ways nonprofits use volunteers. Creating this framework would enable us to characterize nonprofits based on how they utilize volunteers, find appropriate strategies for each segment, and find paths for nonprofits to evolve their volunteer engagement methods. This system would also allow us to look more systemically and strategically at the role of volunteer service in the nonprofit sector.


Here is a potential framework for classifying nonprofits based on how they engage volunteers:

1) Ad Hoc Services Users

Ad Hoc Service Users are organizations that use volunteers whenever they find a need for extra hands or whenever an eager volunteer approaches them. They typically scramble to put these volunteers to use. This process rarely generates value and leaves both parties frustrated. It also creates a cycle where negative experiences lead to skepticism which leads to under investment which leads to more failure. This type of volunteer engagement is unreliable and offers little or no return on investment.

2) Centers of Service Excellence
 
These organizations have identified some regular volunteer needs and have built some infrastructure to set these engagements up for success. A typical example would be a nonprofit that hosts a big gala annually and has developed a reliable model for using volunteers to support the event. These organizations execute specific volunteer projects well, but do not have a greater infrastructure for using volunteers. This is an effective model and breaks the frustration cycle experienced by Ad Hoc Service Users but often only makes an incremental impact because effective volunteer engagement is siloed within the organization.

3) Service Enterprises

These organizations represent the Holy Grail of successful volunteer engagement with a high-impact on nonprofits (i.e. pay close attention). They have deeply integrated service into their work and their infrastructures and have thereby been able to radically reduce their cost structures and scale their work in new ways. For example, the Girl Scouts designed a program model that leverages volunteers (moms) to be scout leaders and thereby replaced the entire need for program line managers. Their model wouldn't be economically viable otherwise. The Executive Service Corps in Chicago uses volunteers to reliably cover a wide range of administrative, fundraising and program functions. They too would go under if they had to pay for staff to do all these tasks. These models take years to develop and are often tied to strong program alumni programs.  Most scout leaders were girl scouts as kids. Building a service enterprise may take a generation, but we could significantly cut the cost of the sector and/or achieve new scale if more organizations evolved to become service enterprises.


This segmentation can help us focus the conversation and efforts around engaging the recent influxes of volunteers. In doing so, we can focus on the important questions such as:

How do Ad Hoc Service Users become Centers for Service Excellence? How do Centers for Service Excellence become Service Enterprises? What investment spurs this evolution? How do we quantify the value for nonprofits of being Service Enterprises and then use this measurement to help us convince nonprofits of the ROI from building volunteer management infrastructure?

If we can answer these questions and execute against the conclusions, we might just be able to realize the potential of volunteer service in this country.

FD Sets Gold Standard for PR

By Aaron Hurst on November 18, 2009 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We recently received a service grant from FD. FD is a global communications consultancy where one of our board members is a senior managing director. FD focuses on business and financial communications and has worked with us in a pro bono capacity on a number of projects for several years.

When FD describes their company values, they say that they strive to be intelligent, expert, dynamic, holistic, collegial, and accountable. Partnering with us to promote and model effective pro bono work speaks to these values and is one vehicle for their community impact.

Our partnership with FD is a great alternative model that demonstrates one way nonprofits can tap into the resources their board members provide. It also demonstrates that Board service doesn't have to be all cash give-and-get. Sometimes the best Board service can come in the form of leveraging personal and professional relations to bring additional pro bono skills and profits to nonprofits.

Our latest project, a two-month grant of service which was established with the help of our board member, was valued at $13,450. We are at inflection point as an organization and this grant was critical. After eight years focused on internal growth and development, we are turning to external audiences and realized we needed to build our own capacity for public relations efforts.

PR is hard to do pro bono. A lot of pro bono work is done for one-off projects, but this doesn't work well in PR, because it is about relationship building. FD understood this and really focused on helping us build our capacity to manage such relationships rather than just executing one-off tasks.

FD has been amazing and has done pro bono right. They really treated us as though we were a paying client. They provided us with a contract that included a scope of work. They tracked hours. At the end of the program, they even asked for evaluation.

Over the past year, FD has helped us better identify and define our audiences, create messaging and documents that can be used as templates, and build a media list. In this past quarter, they even created a series of training sessions to help us build our PR infrastructure and train members of our new marketing team to build relationships with media sources while creating strategic communications plans.

FD really demonstrates the gold standard of pro bono work. It is something other PR firms should aspire to achieve.

Thank you Betsy Neville, Stephanie Brown, and Carly Jarosz for your support, and, more importantly, for setting the standard for pro bono work. You rock.

Making the Nonprofit Sector a Better Place to Work

By Natalya Matusova on November 11, 2009 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of nonprofit sector's biggest challenges is one that has typically been under-researched, under-funded, and largely unaddressed.

Nonprofits' struggles with attracting, nurturing and retaining the right people are well known. We know that nonprofit employees work hard and are passionate about their work. We also know that low pay can be an issue, but it is definitely not the issue.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that unlike most for-profit companies, nonprofits tend to view good HR as a luxury rather than a necessity for survival. This view leads to an underinvestment in an organization's most precious resource: its people.

This is where the Taproot Foundation comes in (full disclosure: yes, this is a shameless plug). Presented by American Express, our new Leadership Development & Strategic HR practice offers a set of grants aimed at helping nonprofits think and act more strategically with regard to human resources. By strengthening HR philosophy and execution, these Service Grants strengthen and empower entire organizations.

Fostering leadership throughout an organization gives the organization's executive leadership more time to concentrate on other priorities--fundraising, networking, building or sustaining good programs--and to do so with confidence in their staff.

We have developed these grants because we have full faith in their power to transform the way work is done at nonprofits. I realize that these sorts of efforts may seem reminiscent of situations worthy of an episode of "The Office," but worry not. Extensive research and input from experts has gone into the development of these grants. There will be no Steve Carells in sight.


Natalya Matusova is a Product Development Fellow at the Taproot Foundation.

Million Dollar Home Run

By Aaron Hurst on November 4, 2009 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over the last few years, it seems like every televised sporting event has some kind of philanthropic hook. In the World Series, for example, MasterCard is pledging $1,000 to a nonprofit for ever home run hit.

A couple of times each game they promote this campaign.

Best case scenario, the series goes to seven games and there are three homers per game. 21 home runs. $21,000 for nonprofits.

Do Americans really now see MasterCard as a community leader because of a $21,000 donation?

There are pairs of tickets being sold for World Series games for more than $21,000. The TV ad time to announce this campaign has to cost seven figures. And then there is the backdrop of baseball player's salaries.

Next year, how about a million per home run? Now that would be meaningful.