Five New Year Resolutions You'll Want to Keep for 2011

By Joshua Winata on December 26, 2010 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As December comes to an end, the time has come to start making your New Year resolutions for 2011. It's the opportunity to start anew, but our list of commitments usually ends up being a depressing collection of limitations and constraints that fall by the wayside before spring arrives. So this year we've come up with a few resolutions you'll actually WANT to keep. By signing up for a pro bono project with Taproot, you'll be making a difference in your community while also reaping benefits of your own. Add these resolutions to your list, and apply to become a pro bono consultant with Taproot in 2011!

1)  BEEF UP
While you may not want your waistline expanding, perhaps your résumé could use a little fattening up. Build and diversify your experiences and skills with a pro bono engagement, which will show prospective employers your range and adaptability in new and challenging environments. And who knows? You may have the opportunity to win a couple awards along the way that will turn your résumé into a real belt-buster.

2) SPEND MORE
As your colleagues slim down their budgets, flaunt your generosity by multiplying your philanthropic contributions. But how to give without breaking your own back account? Our studies have found that an hour of pro bono service is valued at nearly 10 times that of traditional volunteer activities. And pro bono projects strengthen nonprofit infrastructures, which have a sustainable impact with far-reaching effects that may extend well beyond 2011.

3) SHARE YOUR SECRETS
If you're sick of the cutthroat rat race, here's your chance to go from competition to collaboration. Joining a pro bono project allows you to share your skills in new and meaningful ways to solve relevant social issues. You'll have opportunity to think creatively and maximize your expertise. Giving back to your community doesn't stop at the nonprofit: you and your teammates will also benefit from sharing knowledge, and you'll be setting a great example for all professionals.

4) DRINK MORE
When you sign up for a pro bono project, you'll be building your own network with fellow professionals who share your passion for making a difference. Whether or not you're a drinker, you'll at least get to meet plenty of interesting people and will be invited to Taproot's socials and mixers hosted exclusively for our pro bono consultants. Share ideas and best practices, learn about other professions, or just kick back and enjoy a beer while sharing stories of how you made a difference this year.

5) BE A RADICAL
While you may only see your impact locally, your involvement in a pro bono project is part of a greater shift in how we think about philanthropy and giving. We call it the "pro bono movement," and it's equipping nonprofits across the nation with the resources they need to fulfill their mission. Once you experience the power of pro bono, we hope you'll be just as zealous as we are in spreading the word about how simple and rewarding it is to MAKE IT MATTER.

Joshua Winata is an External Affairs Fellow at the Taproot Foundation.

Meet James: Taproot's First-Ever Pro Bono Role Model of the Year

By Joshua Winata on December 20, 2010 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Taproot Foundation is proud to announce our first-ever Pro Bono Role Model of the Year! After reading through dozens of amazing and inspiring submissions, 25-year-old James from Oakland, Calif., stood out for his unwavering commitment to pro bono service in every area of his life. One nomination described him as "a force to be reckoned with: Boundless enthusiasm, action, concrete results."

James works as a partner at a Web development company called Twomile, which builds Web sites for nonprofits and grassroots organizations, and has helped develop a volunteer tracking system and social networking applications. But although his day job already promotes social change, he still continues to use his skills pro bono beyond the office by helping creating sites in his spare time for "other people's dreams of using technology to build communities."

Four times in the past two years, James has led professionals and educators abroad to update the outdated computer networks for schools in rural Honduras. And he continues to provide long-term ongoing support, assembling a team through Engineers Without Borders to continue the pro bono work and inspiring his volunteers to take additional trips in the upcoming year. In addition, he assisted in providing online support after the devastating Haiti earthquakes earlier this year.

In James' own words, it's not his project management or technical skills that make him an effective pro bono hero; it's his ability to encourage and empower others. "I want to help in the hardest situations, fix the biggest problems in the world, but I can't. Not alone at least. The pro bono activity I contribute to the world is supporting others. I seriously believe helping other people's dreams, being their first follower, and making them feel like a super hero can make the biggest change."

In his own community, he's made an impact through one of his personal interest: swing dancing. Over the last five years, he has turned a small group of four enthusiasts into a full-fledged 1920s dance scene that has reached more than 3,000 people through teaching and mentoring.

And finally, James has been dedicated to raising his little sister and taking on a paternal role in his family since the untimely death of their father. "He devotes time and energy with her, being a role model," his nominators say, "inspiring her to become be a confident, caring, and giving person."

Congratulations, James, and thank you for everything you do to MAKE IT MATTER. We look forward to meeting you in New Orleans!

Eight Models of Pro Bono: Marathon - Discovery Communications

By Carol Guttery on December 16, 2010 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Over the next few months, Director of Programming Carol Guttery will be contributing a series based on Making Pro Bono Work: 8 Proven Models for Community and Business Impact, a white paper released by Taproot identifying multiple unique ways that organizations can adapt and deliver pro bono service to address a variety of social issues and business goals. She will be spotlighting organizations that successfully exemplify each of the eight models.

What do Shark Week and nonprofit's needs have in common? More than you might think. The same creative minds at Discovery Communications who routinely scare us with sharks, pit Man against Wild, and bust our myths are offering their creative marketing skills to help nonprofits.

Yesterday, Discovery presented the results of their first (hopefully annual) Discovery Impact: Creating Change pro bono event. Discovery was motivated to develop this event after seeing the success and employee passion demonstrated during their global volunteerism campaign. They were also inspired by new models of service being promoted by Taproot Foundation. They wanted to build a program that would encourage teamwork in their creative services department while also developing a platform for those employees to use their professional skills in service to nonprofits.

The event itself engaged 200 marketing and creative employees in a 12-hour pro bono marathon. Nonprofits applied to participate in the event, and they were offered a social media strategy and training session as well as opportunities to develop Web sites, promotional materials, PSAs, and other marketing campaign work. The list of forty participating nonprofits have really leveraged Discovery's specific expertise in animals, science, and our global world; in fact, some sound like they could be an actual Discovery Channel program: Hero Dogs, Icing Smiles, Polaris, Bikes for the World, and KaBoom.
 
This model of service is called a Marathon, and it's really taking hold. Our blog archive includes a description of the Nerdery's Overnight Website Challenge. We also applaud the efforts of Riggs Advertising and their CreateAthon.  These marathon pro bono events are characterized by the pooling of talent into a concentrated timeframe designed to deliver a mass of pro bono work to nonprofits. This model has the benefit of delivering a large volume of work and is optimized for nonprofits needing tight turnarounds.  It also provides a lot of fun team-building for the participants and, as with both the Nerdery and Riggs, can give the sponsoring company an opportunity to build partnerships among their peers.

This model is also optimized for caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived, crazy-creative types who thrive on the adrenaline rush of a tight deadline. So, if that describes you, we hope we have inspired you to consider your own marathon pro bono event. Red Bull anyone?

Carol Guttery is the Director of Programs at the Taproot Foundation.

How Big Is Your Butt?

By Aaron Hurst on December 15, 2010 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In the last few years, I've come across an alarming number of folks who fill five or more board seats at a time. One guy I met sits on over a dozen simultaneously. Picture that: taking on the responsibilities of more than 12 board positions all at once.

This isn't healthy--on any level.

Board service is rewarding, but this is just taking it way too far. It may even being crossing the line into unethical territory.

Being on a board means meaningfully contributing to the governance of an organization. It means tracking their performance, monitoring risk, and playing a meaningful role in generating resources for the organization.

A board member who is effectively covering all these bases likely needs to spend at least 5 percent of their time on board work (about a day per month). As importantly, every organization deserves board members who make their involvement a core part of their personal philanthropic giving and who evangelize the organization in their professional and social networks.

What is the right number? The only analogy that comes to mind is young kids with working parents.

You can have one or two kids and still work although you may be harried and require a lot of child care. This requires having strong solid income to pay for the support.

With three kids, one parent frequently becomes a full-time caretaker; it is simply too much to do on top of a full time job.

Over three, and you are probably just treading water to keep the kids alive. You are putting them to work taking care of each other. One of them is almost always sick and needs your full attention. Your outside social network dwindles and fades to the background. Your only friends are other parents, and you start to exist in a bubble detached from the rest of the world.

For a full-time professional, sitting on one or two boards is a full plate. For retired executives, three boards are likely manageable. Sitting on more than three, and you cross the line.

Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.

A New CSR Framework, Please

By Aaron Hurst on December 13, 2010 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has evolved over the last 20 years to become increasingly strategic, but also increasingly fragmented and complex. We need a new framework for CSR that can connect the fragments and paint a more holistic picture of a company's social, economic, and environment impact.

CSR today has evolved to cover three distinct discussions:

1) Giving Back

For most Americans, CSR means corporate philanthropy and volunteerism. For them, responsible means reinvesting in the community where you work and sharing your wealth with those less fortunate.

As someone pointed out to me, the issue here is the assumption behind 'giving back.' It implies you took something and are settling the score, at least partially. The cleanest example is carbon offsets. If a company knows it is taking from the environment due to its carbon production, it can donate funds to plant trees in the Amazon to give back the clean air and 'offset' its harm.

It is important, but few if any companies truly give back enough through philanthropy and service to even make up for a small fraction of what they take.

2) Do No Harm

The second discussion is around the concept of "doing no harm." This is the focus of most CSR departments at Fortune 500 companies.  How do we not create negative externalities in the course of our work?

This includes a wide range of issues from the human rights of employees (especially in manufacturing), to carbon production, to food products that contribute to obesity and disease, to media that impacts body image of kids.

The reality is that it is impossible to do no harm. Companies, like people, consume, and the simple act of consumption does harm to the planet.

Even nonprofits do harm. We fly on planes, use paper and buy products that likely involve less-than-responsible practices in their production. Consider the typical nonprofit gala event, which generates massive waste and energy use.

3) Do Good

While we mock Goldman when their leadership proclaims they are doing 'G*d's work', we need to start to recognize the positive social, environmental, and economic impact of companies in the equation.

If you discount the negative externalities, one could credibly argue that the products and services of companies in this country likely do more good for society than the nonprofit sector.

How many nonprofits:

• provide a public meeting place in nearly every neighborhood (Starbucks)
• enable tens of thousands to purchase their first home and begin to build their economic security (Wells Fargo)
• bring fresh and healthy food into communities (Whole Foods)
• bring creativity into every home (Time Warner)
• provide a first job to young and at risk youth (Gap)

But, there is a dark side to each of these businesses. They do tremendous harm and take a lot from our society; at the same time they are adding value.

A CSR framework and associated discussion that doesn't address all three of these areas can't effectively measure a company's footprint on the world and our society.

Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.

Pro Bono Worldwide

By Joshua Winata on December 7, 2010 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the joys of being part of a pro bono movement is discovering the ever-expanding ripple effect of your work as it spreads in ways you never even imagined. At Taproot, we focus our efforts in five core cities--Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.--but in 2010, we've discovered kindred pro bono spirits in locations all around the world. Here are a few of the international partners we've worked with this year.

SERVICE GRANT TOKYO
Japan

In April, several Taproot staff members and pro bono consultants were invited to Japan by Service Grant Tokyo to share lessons we've learned for advancing their fledgling pro bono movement. Pro bono is a relatively new concept in their country, where foundations and nonprofits are limited in number and scope and tend to be marginalized. However, there is a lot of potential and interest from corporations to harness the skills of the professional workforce for social change. Through a series of summits and seminars (not to mention local television news coverage!), Taproot shared management practices and answered questions from the eager crowd. You can read more about Service Grant Tokyo's official launch here.

Then last month, Satoshi, a representative from Service Grant Tokyo, visited our San Francisco office as part of his training. We're advising our Japanese counterpart as they start to implement the Account Director model and incorporate that role in their program as well. We, on the other hand, were excited to learn more about the state of pro bono in Japan and social and cause networking.

VOLONTARBYRAN
Sweden
Eight years ago, Amelie founded Volontärbyrån, a Swedish volunteer-matching organization that has connected 22,000 people with community engagement opportunities with more than 1,000 nonprofits. The next step in her vision is offering quality pro bono consulting, so she turned to Taproot for some knowledge-sharing and cross-cultural learning. For three weeks this fall, Amelie worked out of our San Francisco office to observe how Americans do it pro bono and is working on a funding application to begin pro bono efforts modeled on Taproot in her home country. Stay tuned for a guest blog entry from Amelie later this week!

MESOAMERICA
Costa Rica

Taproot has been acting as a role model to Mesoamerica, a strategic consulting and investment banking firm working in Costa Rica and Colombia and a leader in the Latin American pro bono movement. The company currently has a program for employees that allows them to dedicate up to 10 percent of their time to social projects and, most recently, has assembled a team to develop a volunteer platform that will potentially be used by an Costa Rican association of more than 80 companies to provide pro bono options to their workers. In addition to sharing some insights from our Service Grant program, we also have connected Mesoamerica with our friends at Service Grant Tokyo in a truly international effort to promote pro bono service!

CiYUAN
China

In September, Taproot President & CEO Aaron Hurst traveled to China to as an advisory board member for BSR's three-year CiYuan (China Philanthropy Incubator) initiative. Through this experience, we got to see firsthand the challenges of the nonprofit sector in other foreign environments and provide support and insight to brand new pro bono initiatives that are taking root in the world's most populous country. Check out Aaron's blog post after his visit to China here.

New Program Innovation Process

By Aaron Hurst on December 6, 2010 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Whether in a commercial or nonprofit setting, you see more breakthrough innovation with new products or programs than with existing offerings. Once programs are launched, it becomes hard to change them significantly for a host of reasons.

We are experimenting with a new approach to drive the evolution of our signature Service Grant program. It is a work in progress but we are encouraged by the ongoing advancements.

At the core of this process has been the articulation of the roughly 50 assumptions we made in designing the program eight years ago. They cover the needs of stakeholders and what is technically possible.

We are now reaching out to our internal teams, looking at relevant other programs in the market (commercial and public benefit), and reviewing the latest research in the field.

What we are finding is that roughly half our assumptions used to design the program were wrong or that technology has changed enough to change what is possible. We have the leading program in the field, and yet it is designed based on a ton of clearly now-false assumptions.

From a program design perspective, this really opens us up to innovate. We can now update our assumptions with this new knowledge and design the second generation of the Service Grant program with permission to make radical changes to best meet the needs of the community.

This is a model for program innovation that more nonprofits (and companies) should try. Write down all your assumptions that drove your design decisions and then honestly test them.

Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.

Leaders Who Govern

By Aaron Hurst on December 3, 2010 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New research from Pete York and the TCC Group shows that peer-to-peer executive director coaching and support is one of the most effective means of capacity building.

This is no surprise. Groups from CompassPoint and the Gap Inc Foundation have been experimenting with this model for years and seeing powerful results.

When I started Taproot one of the first things I did was create a monthly executive director support group. It met monthly and provided the thinking partners and emotional support I needed in the rough early days.

This group and efforts by organizations like CompassPoint are important and need to expand, but we also need to look for more integrated and sustainable solutions.

When I serve on boards, I find that much of my value is simply in being an executive director. It helps me better support my peers and make sure the board is delivering what they really need to thrive.

This board work is also some of my most valuable professional development. I get at least as much out of it as the organization and the executive director. It is a wonderful and needed synergy in resource-constrained sector.

Many nonprofit executive directors serve on boards, but not enough in my estimation. Every nonprofit could benefit from having several board members with that kind of experience and knowledge. By logical extension, this would mean having every executive director sit on a couple boards.

There are some basic conflicts of interest that can come up. Executive directors can be great fundraising assets, but the lines need to be clear to avoid conflicts with their own organization's fundraising. There can also be some of the same challenges you find on corporate boards of CEOs who sit on each other's boards and are engaged in compensation decisions. This can be clearly avoided with some proactive processes. There are a few structural changes that would help support the adoption:

• ED benefits should be amended to include a donation match to amplify their ability to make a cash contribution on boards;
• An ED's 360 review should include feedback from the chair of the boards where they serve; and
• Board conflict of interest policies should explicitly address the issues that arise from peers serve on the board.

Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.

Service Enterprise: One Year Later

By Aaron Hurst on December 1, 2010 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

It was a year ago last week that I posted a blog entry coining the term and concept of a Service Enterprise, a nonprofit that has "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."  I conceived of the idea while serving as a task force member for Reimagining Service, a cross-sector coalition led by Gap Inc. Chief Foundation Officer Bobbi Silten that is driving a national dialogue about how to increase the impact of service, not just the volume of it.

The blog spurred a conversation about the possibility of corporate Service Enterprises, companies with service programs that are co-led by business executives, measure success via impact, and integrate service with talent management. We also reflected on the possibility that city agencies - schools, policy departments, parks departments and other government entities - might also be Service Enterprises that achieve outstanding results due to their integration of volunteers.

Based on the feedback to the blog, we brought the concept to the Reimagining Service Forum on Dec. 9 last year at the White House. At that meeting, the concept became the core of the Reimagining Service agenda for the year. Our first task was to do the research to determine if the theory from the blog held up when tested. Are there really nonprofit and corporate Service Enterprises, and do they outperform their peers?

Pete York from TCC Group and Julie Quinn from Deloitte took the lead in conducting pro bono quantitative and qualitative research to explore the nonprofit Service Enterprise concept. Over the next few months the findings that emerged far exceeded our expectations. From TCC's data, we learned:

• Nonprofits that engaged 50 or more volunteers per year and had strong volunteer management practices outperformed the rest of the sector in every measure of organizational capacity.
• These Service Enterprises represent 11 percent of the nonprofit sector.
• These organizations were able to achieve the same level of capacity as organizations for a third of the expense.
• The qualitative findings told the story of how these organizations operate and began to point to the path to developing a nonprofit Service Enterprise model.

James Weinberg, CEO of Talent Initiative, led the team that investigated the corporate Service Enterprise theory. Based on interviews, they too found that there was a group of companies that had similar behaviors and appeared to deliver results that far exceed their peers.

On Feb. 5, we co-hosted an HR Service Summit with the Points of Light Institute and Society for Human Resources Management to explore our initial findings with 34 leaders and executives from both the service community as well as the corporate human resources sector, including companies like Time Inc., General Electric, Girl Scouts of America, Gap Inc., and American Express. The feedback from these leaders was encouraging and continued to confirm the value of investing in further exploring the Service Enterprise concept.

Based on this response, we recruited Frog Design to donate their services pro bono to host a design studio in April for a similar set of leaders to challenge us to think about what it would take to double the number of nonprofit and corporate Service Enterprises in the next five years. The studio curriculum was based on the book Switch, which provided a framework for how to amplify bright spots. The design studio generated a wealth of ideas, including the idea to create a diagnostic tool to help nonprofits and companies assess their effective use of volunteer service and begin to point to areas for investment.

The growing excitement about the potential for focusing the sector on increasing the number of Service Enterprises began to gain broader support. The Annie E. Casey Foundation provided some funding to support the work. Bank of America also soon got on board and funded the exploration of the potential for a Los Angeles-based campaign.

At the National Conference on Volunteering and Service (NCVS) in June, we were able to formally unveil all our progress, including the diagnostic tools generated with Frog Design and a set of principles, written by Bobbi that define Service Enterprises. The CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service as well as the head of the White House Office on Social Innovation got behind the work publicly at the conference.

At the NCVS, it was also announced that Reimagining Service will finally get a dedicated staff member funded by Deloitte, Gap, Inc. and Bank of America. The position will report to a board led by Bobbi and will be housed within the Points of Light Institute. This will enable all this great work to really ramp up and realize its potential.

Over the summer, to get further resources behind the Service Enterprise campaign we worked with CaliforniaVolunteers to secure $400,000 from the Volunteer Generation Fund to launch a state-wide Service Enterprise initiative. This multi-sector pilot effort will help strengthen and develop capacity at local volunteer centers to manage skilled volunteers and provide support and training to partner nonprofits.

Simultaneously, we worked with Bank of America on the Los Angeles campaign. After conducting numerous nonprofit interviews, we presented the results to coalition members from the corporate, government, and nonprofit sectors to refine a collaborative, implementable action plan that combines monetary and pro bono support.

Next week, I will be heading to San Francisco to meet with our Reimagining Service leadership council to plot out our 2011 plans. Pete York and I are co-chairing the Catalyst and Outreach Committee, which is driving ongoing nonprofit and corporate Service Enterprise research and exploring the possibility of Service Enterprises in congregations (led by Jon Rosenberg of Repair the World) and schools (led by Lisa Spinali of San Francisco Education Fund).

It is amazing to see what has transpired in the twelve short months since the Service Enterprise concept was conceived. It has been an honor to work with so many great partners to make this happen and to witness the power to create catalytic change when leaders share goals and are committed to a movement.

My deepest gratitude to Evan Hochberg, Karen Baker, Michelle Nunn, and especially Bobbi Silten for making a place at the table for me and for our sector in this historic effort, and thank you also to James Weinberg, Julie Quinn, and Pete York for being such inspiring and challenging thought partners along the way.

Aaron Hurst is the President & CEO at the Taproot Foundation.