December 2009 Archives

The 2010 Pro Bono Resolution

By Aaron Hurst on December 29, 2009 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

While New Year's resolutions are made with great intentions, in practice, many of them end up being somewhat insignificant or self-centered. Though positive changes, will it really make a difference if you lose 5 pounds or brush up on your French this year? When February rolls around, will your resolution be something you care about enough to stick with it?

All this talk about new year's resolutions got me thinking--imagine the impact if all business professionals made a resolution that really mattered-- "I will make a positive impact in my community by doing pro bono work."

Reflecting on the past year, I've been realizing the impact pro bono service can have on the nonprofit sector and have been inspired by all of the amazing individuals and corporations currently engaging in pro bono service. As we've said many times, pro bono work is not just for lawyers. There are hundreds of thousands of nonprofits that could desperately use the skills business professionals like human resources managers, graphic designers, management analysts, and marketers have to offer.

According to the 2010-2011 Occupational Outlook Calendar of the Department of Labor Statistics, in 2008 there were 904,900 people working as human resources, training, and labor relations managers, 286,100 working as graphic designers or graphic artists, 746,900 people working as management analysts, and 623,800 people working as advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations, and sales managers.

That represents over 2.5 million people with professional skills that are currently put to use in the for-profit arena which could also be used to strengthen nonprofit organizations improving our communities. And those numbers don't even include people working in IT, copywriting, journalism, architecture and many other professions whose  skills would also benefit the nonprofit sector.

Imagine the impact on our communities if all of those individuals spent a few hours in 2010 contributing their services to a local nonprofit and did so in a structured, well-managed engagement, which ensured its success. Recognizing that you have talents that can be shared to really make a difference is a first step. Pro bono work can be the gift that keeps giving. Many participants say the work they do for nonprofits in their communities renews their pride in their profession and gives them an opportunity to do work for causes they care passionately about. This is a resolution worthy of kicking off the New Year--and new decade.

An amazing video production team got as excited as we are about this vision and contributed their services pro bono to help us make the video above, and we've posted it on our brand new youtube channel.

We hope you'll kick off the new year by watching our video and considering the exciting potential in our vision for a society where the business and social sectors truly partner to address today's toughest challenges. This year, we hope you'll help us spread the word about the positive impact pro bono service can have. We hope you'll share this video and vision with business professionals you most respect, engage in the national dialogue about meaningful service in our communities, and consider ways your employer could partner more substantially with the community organizations they most care about. We hope that this year you'll share your passion and talents with the nonprofit sector!

Make your 2010 resolution matter.


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All of us at the Taproot Foundation would like to thank all of the people who have inspired and energized us in 2009 and wish you a happy and healthy 2010!

 

Design Thinking

By Aaron Hurst on December 18, 2009 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Design thinking has become one of the hot topics in the consulting world and is now making its way into the nonprofit sector.  The most recent edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review even did a cover story on the topic that was co-written by CEO Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, both of the design innovation and consulting firm IDEO.

Wikipedia describes design thinking as "the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success." This design process emphasizes creativity and the needs of those whom the design is being created for. In their article,  Tim and Jocelyn outline how the nonprofit sector is starting apply design thinking in to account in solving societal problems.

I also just finished reading "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage" by Roger Martin. In this book, Roger describes a model for the process of design thinking which he calls a knowledge funnel. This model descries the way most social entrepreneurs think and creates a model that makes this thinking more accessible and deliberate. 

The knowledge funnel starts at the top with a mystery.  For example, the mystery when I founded the Taproot Foundation was - how do you make capacity building services like marketing and technology widely accessible to nonprofit organizations who can't afford to pay for them?

Going down the funnel, you next examine the mystery and develop a heuristic or a hypothesis that you feel could unlock the mystery.  For Taproot, we observed that given cost constraints of nonprofits, to provide them with capacity building services, our solution would need to use pro bono service. We also observed that to be scalable and reliable, this service would need to done using a production line model. Thus, the heuristic was to use a pro bono service production line.

In the final step in the funnel model, an algorithm is developed and constantly refined that is the design for how to execute the heuristic to address the mystery. For us, the algorithm was the Service Grant program and all the countless details that went into optimizing it over the last 1,000 projects we have completed.

The article and book really show the power of design thinking and the knowledge funnel model. At the same time, they also showed me that the conversation around design thinking and service is missing the larger opportunity by continuing to focus on individual products instead of larger social missions.

The current design thinking conversation as it relates to service is all about product design and largely about bottom-of-the-pyramid products. The cliché being - how do we develop low cost water pumps for Africa? This is critical and breakthrough work, but the same design thinking can be also be applied to the primary product of the domestic nonprofit sector- services.

Some of the most impressive work of firms like IDEO is their accomplishments helping to drive innovative designs for services, not products. IDEO, for example, helped design Bank of America's wildly successful "Keep the Change" innovation, a service which helps promote savings by rounding up the cost of each purchase made with a check card to the nearest dollar and transferring that change to the user's savings account. Designing a service or program that helps address domestic societal issue may be less attractive to designers as it is less visual and tactile, but it is no less transforming.

Using design thinking and the knowledge funnel model, one can see a great opportunity for taking one of the hundreds of social, environmental, or economic challenges facing our nation, working to find solutions, and then doing the hard work of implementing the plan. We need to look at how we can train the nonprofit sector on this methodology to find increasingly better solutions to our country's challenges. By applying design thinking not only to product development but also to service improvement, we can fundamentally advance our solutions and ultimately address our country's challenges on a more sophisticated level.

 

As a last aside- It would also be interesting to design a conference around design thinking and service. Each year you could bring one challenge to the event and work to leave a few days later with a heuristic that is widely believed by the group to have a strong possibility of solving the mystery.

Corporate and City Service Enterprises

By Aaron Hurst on December 10, 2009 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not only, did she observe, do other entities like companies and city governments fall into these buckets, but they are all inter-connected and enable each other for the good or bad.

Take, for example, corporations-

The company in the Ad Hoc Service User segment encourages a wide range of one-time volunteer activities. They fundamentally see the volunteer function as one of coordination. They measure success based on hours served and the percent of employees engaged (inputs). They often engage in 'days of service' and other tactics to achieve volume goals. Their lack of strategy around volunteerism leads to chronic under-investment which prevents maturation.

Corporations of Centers of Service Excellence are similar to corporations that are Ad Hoc Users, but they have identified a key strategic area or two where they have built a program to engage their employees. This typically involves partnerships with large nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity or Junior Achievement. They hold up these partnerships as core to their measurement of impact. They are well run programs, but they rarely use the true commercial competencies of a company, and their effectiveness doesn't influence the broader employee engagement strategy significantly.

The Holy Grail for companies is the Service Enterprise. This is what I understand Rosabeth Moss Kanter has championed. It is the company that sees leveraging core competencies as the core of their strategy. Their service programs are co-lead by business executives, measure success via impact, and integrate service with talent management.

The majority of large companies are likely in the second segment - Centers of Service Excellence. The corporate Service Enterprise is still pretty rare although a few companies like Gap, Inc. are on the right track and may be there very soon.

On the city government level you see the same pattern emerge-

Service cities in the Ad Hoc Users segment support volunteer centers and the general goal of serving their residents. They likely celebrate volunteers and may even set goals for increasing volunteerism.

The cities that are Centers of Service Excellence are those like San Francisco where the mayor has picked one or two issues and begun to build infrastructure to support service to address a specific need like homelessness.

New York is an example of a city on the path to becoming a Service Enterprise. It is trying to look at the role service can play in every agency and integrate volunteer human capital into the possible solutions to every city challenge. This is just starting, but it appears Bloomberg gets it and is charting the right course.

Bobbi is right that this pattern exists across institutions and also that they all reinforce and support the same behavior. If companies and cities measure service in volume of service hours, nonprofits are pushed to work the same way. If outcomes are the driver, nonprofits can be supported to design strategic engagement models.