Pro Bono Junkie's Blog

The Candidates and Service

2008-09-03T13:02:07Z

Next week, Senators McCain and Obama will attend a presidential forum on service as part of the Service Nation Summit in NYC. It will be one of the first public events to include both candidates.

McCain's military service gives him a natural platform for advocating for service. Obama is a trained lawyer, and hopefully he appreciates the importance of pro bono service and the role of the presidency in the rise of the pro bono ethic in the 1960s under JFK.

Service tends to receive bi-partisan support, but there tend to be a few areas where lines can be drawn within the issue.

Here are some questions that I have seen draw out these differences:
- Should we mandate a year of service for all Americans?
- Should the government be involved in funding the capacity of nonprofits and religious groups to recruit and manage volunteers?
- Should the government fund and run programs like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps?
- Is volunteering a "right" of every American that the government must support to maintain our democracy and stay faithful to our Founding Fathers?

How would you respond to these questions? How do you expect the candidates to respond?

Labor Day

2008-08-29T13:17:24Z

A couple of years ago we decided to make Labor Day the official holiday of the Taproot Foundation. This Labor Day we hope that you take a moment to think about your labors and how you can put your craft to work for the good of society. Happy Labor Day!!!!

After the honeymoon

2008-08-25T15:39:38Z

As part of the Pro Bono Action Tank's campaign to support and grow pro bono service at professional services firms, we conduct regular conference calls with leading firms. The calls include some of the largest advertising, consulting, accounting, IT, legal and architecture firms in the world.

The most recent call was on program evaluation. An architecture firm, Perkins and Will, shared the practice of POEs or post occupancy evaluations. Ten to 12 months after a building is complete, architects go back and ask those living, playing and working in the space for feedback.

This is so much more meaningful than just getting feedback when you hand over the keys. After 10 - 12 months, you know if there is enough storage space. You have weathered all the seasons. You are able to give feedback beyond the initial romance of first seeing the new space.

After the call I wondered if other professions should adopt POEs. How often does a strategic plan laid out in PowerPoint dazzle, but 12 months later it is still sitting on a shelf? How often is a database built, but it's never adopted?

Some firms do return to clients to see the legacy of their intervention, but it is too rare. It may be that we want the praise associated with the final presentation, but we are too scared to see the true outcome of our work.

What do you do on the subway?

2008-08-20T12:01:30Z

I just moved to Park Slope in Brooklyn from San Francisco. My 12-minute BART ride is now a 40-minute subway ride. Not only is that nearly an hour and a half per day confined to public transportation, but unlike BART, the NYC subway has no cell service. At least on BART I would read the NY Times online or check sports scores. Nada.

I've tried reading a book and it is OK, but all the motion makes me a little ill. Newspapers take up too much space on a crowded train and also tend to make me nauseated.

That is seven and a half hours per week - the better part of a full work day. How can I make it productive?

Looking around a given subway car there are likely between 50 and 75 people. Are they also wasting the equivalent of a day a week? That would be about the same as two months per year, per person. That is 100 months per year, per car of folks or the same as eight years worth of productivity down the drain for one subway car alone. On a ten car train you have two entire careers worth of time represented.

As a Pro Bono Junkie, I immediately wonder how this time could be harnessed for the public good. I often see graffiti scratched into the seats using a key. I guess that is a way to create pro bono public art. There are occasional preachers on subway cars that provide services for the religious types on the car. For the faithful, this might count as some kind of productive social benefit activity. Neither does it for me.

How can I use my time on the subway productively?

P.S. Does anyone live in Brooklyn and have a helicopter? If you can give me a lift to work with you, we could avoid this whole issue.

Help - We Need Values

2008-08-19T23:50:22Z

We are in the midst of evaluating the articulation of our organizational values. While our values hopefully never change, as we mature we hope that we are increasingly self-aware and able to better articulate who we are at the core.

It is really hard, despite the fact that we do this work for dozens of nonprofits every year.

As part of this process we had a veteran volunteer interview our team and solicit their input on our values. We wanted to see how the team was experiencing our values and culture.

The volunteer reported back some concepts that were very aligned with our earlier articulation as well as some that resurrected some of the debates we had the first time around.

There is one issue in particular that remains a riddle to me. What is a value of the Taproot Foundation vs. a value of the nonprofit sector?

For example, several members of team suggested values like 'compassion'. Coming from corporate environments the Taproot Foundation feels like a very compassionate organization. It probably stands out. If, however, you join our team after working at a homeless shelter it would likely not even make the top 25 list.

For a nonprofit, is listing 'compassion' as a value the same as a company listing 'creating shareholder value' or 'profitability' as a value?

Are there a set of values that should be made off limits to nonprofits for failing to be descriptive - for being redundant with their tax status? Or, is it the very obviousness of these values that makes them core and important?

Here is where my head is today. The nonprofit sector itself has a set of values that nearly all nonprofits share at some level - like 'compassion'. The core values of a specific organization emphasize a different subset of those common nonprofit values. The organizations need to demonstrate their 'compassion' beyond their mission and programs. It needs to be core to how it treats staff, volunteers and all their stakeholders. Using this test, far fewer nonprofits are 'compassionate' at their core.
The Taproot Foundation is compassionate, but not enough to pass that test.

So what are the other common nonprofit values? Help me brainstorm other common social benefit values to find the one that can pass the test.

Share the values of your nonprofit or pro bono client. Perhaps we can recycle one.

Impulsive Leadership

2008-08-13T14:39:58Z

When we interview candidates for jobs at the Taproot Foundation, we always start by asking the candidate why they want to work on our team. It screens out a lot of candidates, but it also teaches us a lot about how we are perceived and what we communicate on our website (their primary source of information).

Yesterday we interviewed a candidate for our NYC office. He passionately listed a number of reasons why he wants to be a Root. The one that stood out to me was that he read on the PBJ blog that we celebrate Matt O'Grady Day, a day honoring the legalization of gay wedlock in California.

Matt O'Grady is a Root who was one of the first to marry this year after the California Supreme Court ruled against restrictions to equal access to love and companionship.

To add a holiday to our annual calendar would normally be something that would require management team approval and perhaps even board alignment. In this case I conceived the idea and sent out a proclamation to the whole team 10 minutes later without seeking input from anyone.

The response was almost universally positive. We did get one Root who was concerned about meetings that were already scheduled that day and a board member wondered if it was wise to name a holiday after a Root as they will one day leave the organization and it might not be on good terms.

I was raised by parents practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Their teacher wrote a number of books including one titled - 'First Thought, Best Thought'. Not surprisingly, this is not a title taught in business school, but I wonder when this philosophy is the better course at times. When does analysis and strategy get in the way of a simple good idea? Does the analysis validate and strengthen an idea or suck the life out of it?

Do we as a society need to start giving more permission to people to act impulsively? There are a lot of bad ideas out there (I am the owner of a healthy number), but at what cost do we subject all ideas to analysis?

Should we reframe American diversity?

2008-08-11T21:31:28Z

Last week marked the start of the Olympics and my move to Brooklyn after 12 years in San Francisco. The Olympics opening ceremony included 15,000 performers and was one of the most technically complex performances of all time (with the exception of one of my triangle recitals). I watched it shortly after taking the 2 train from mid-town to my new flat in Brooklyn. While I was blown away by the orchestration of opening ceremony, I was also equally struck by the fact that there was more diversity in a single car of the subway than among the 15,000 performers in Beijing.

Over the weekend I watched a few hours of Olympic events every day and was similarly struck by the heterogeneous American teams and the homogeneous teams from almost every other country. We talk a lot about ethnic diversity in this country, but I increasingly worry that we treat it largely as an issue of social justice and not as a global competitive advantage. As a social justice issue the frame is largely about how to overcome challenges in society (very real challenges), but I wonder if it wouldn't be in our broader best interest to change the frame to focus on how to leverage and expand our diversity to continue to dominate the global economy and reestablish our credibility as a global political leader.

How can we change this frame while still honoring and continuing to address the challenges of racism in our country?

Architects & Pro Bono

2008-08-04T12:45:16Z

This is the first in a series of posts under the banner of "Pro Bono Design." Future posts will range from specific pro bono design project profiles to developments in the growing pro bono design movement. Two brief disclosures are probably in order: first that I am the executive director of a nonprofit (Public Architecture) on whose board Aaron Hurst serves; second that the subject of this post is a membership organization that I have belonged to for over eight years and which in 2008 became a sponsor of Public Architecture's pro bono service program, "The 1%."

This past Friday, August 1, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued a draft of its forthcoming "Pro Bono Guidelines." This is the first substantive and official statement on the subject in the AIA's 150-year history. To date, the AIA's position on pro bono has been a very general 2-sentence mention in the organization's Code of Ethics & Professional Conduct.

Architects and the AIA as our primary professional association are apt to compare ourselves to other established professions such as law and medicine. The reality, however, is that both the American Bar Association (ABA) and American Medical Association (AMA) have long had explicit expectations and provided resources for their members to undertake pro bono service, while it has been simply an aspirational statement in architecture. In this respect, the ABA in particular provides a compelling model for the AIA to now aspire to.

Although still in draft form and awaiting adoption by the AIA Board of Directors this fall, the guidelines are a major step forward for the AIA and the architecture profession as a whole. It also a sign that this culture of pro bono that we have been working to build since the launch of Public Architecture's pro bono service program, The 1%, is taking hold.

Between now and August 20, the AIA is soliciting comments on its Pro Bono Guidelines, a 15-page document, which is broken up into nine major sections. The stated intent of the guidelines is to provide "encouragement, guidance, and recommendations for the management of the provision of pro bono services by members of the Institute, firms, and AIA components who are presently, or contemplating becoming, engaged in providing such services." No small task.

AIA members have been invited to comment on the draft in a members-only section of the AIA website. My hope through this and future posts addressing each major section of the draft document is to draw on the expertise and interests of this pro bono discussion forum to help refine this important landmark document. Your comments will directly inform Public Architecture's response and recommendations to the AIA, and help shape the pro bono agenda for an entire profession.

Click here to download a PDF of the 15-page report.

100 Million Hours of Thought

2008-08-01T21:17:12Z

Seth Godin's blog just directed me to a great posting by Clay Shirky, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus". I had the pleasure of seeing Clay speak at the Ideas Festival in Aspen this summer and many agreed that he was the most dynamic and interesting speaker that week.

In the post, Clay shares his calculation that Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of human thought and hypothesizes that much of this time would have otherwise been spent watching TV (Americans watch 200 billion hours of TV per year). He describes this as a social surplus. At the close of the piece, he asks how else we might deploy our social or cognitive surplus doing something more productive than watching TV.

Clay focuses on technology. That is his gig and he is hopeful that much of this surplus will find productive outlets online.

As a social entrepreneur, I see this 200 billion hour surplus and it gives me a great deal of optimism about our ability to harness human capital to improve the human condition through service. We need to make it easy for American professionals to spend an hour or two a day using their talents to invest in society.

The average American watches four hours of TV a day. If we could cut that down to three hours per day and have that other hour dedicated to service, imagine the changes we would see in society.

Need Your Advice Re: Social Media

2008-07-31T18:10:58Z

Over the course of 100 hours, our thousands of talented volunteers get a powerful opportunity to learn about their community and the nonprofit sector. We want to figure out how to translate that into increased participation in civic problem solving. Our volunteers are such a powerful resource for the community.

We are currently investigating different social media/networking approaches to enable our volunteers to be able to share insights gained from their projects, ask questions and find like-minded volunteers in our network.

For those of you who work in the web 2.0 world or are frequent consumers of web 2.0 sites, we would love to get your input on how to realize this opportunity. What really works?

Here are two ideas I have been tossing around:

1) Knowledge wiki. Create a wiki that has entries by issue area (e.g. foster care) where volunteers who work on projects for nonprofits working in those issue areas (e.g. First Place Fund for Youth) can share their learning and insights. Volunteers just starting a project in the issue area can read existing entries to get up to speed and then later add to the collective knowledge.

2) Solutions wiki. As volunteers identify ways that nonprofits have found solutions to challenges (big and small) they post them to a wiki so they can be shared with our entire nonprofit client community and with their fellow volunteers.

I have also been looking at how other organizations have tried to achieve this end. Here is an interesting one I found earlier this year: Newt Gingrich created the Solutions Lab to enable citizens to propose and discuss solutions to societal issues.

Please post a comment and share your ideas about how to enable us to engage our volunteers in broader community action and problem solving. We really need your help.

Customer Service is One Blog Away

2008-07-28T16:37:46Z

Brian Stelter wrote a piece in the New York Times last week titled "Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company's Ear" that described an innovative new form of customer service. Comcast, everyone's favorite company to hate, has a team of ten people who identify disgruntled customers online and proactively reach out to them to help resolve their problems.
It sounds like they have a series of automated key word searches running 24/7 that look for phrases like "comcast sucks," "comcast blows", and "comcast must die". A Google search reports 29,600 for the former, 2,170 for the middle term and 25,500 for the later. Google Alerts can email you the latest additions to your list daily.

Comcast then identifies the author of the web page and asks if they can help resolve the problem. It sounds like they have a ton more power than the customer services representatives at 1-800-COMCAST. They can actually make a technician show up in 30 minutes.

You can pretty quickly follow this train of thinking to identify good commercial lead generation programs using this tool. The ambulance chasing lawyers can do searches of blogs for "accident" (155 million search results) and find fresh victims complaining about their injuries. Realtors can search for "thinking about moving" (372,000) to find new clients. Personal trainers can set up Google Alerts to let them know when someone writes "I am fat" (279,000). Endless possibilities.

Since reading the article I have been trying to think of nonprofit or social benefit uses for this model. I guess that instead of searching for "comcast sucks," a suicide prevention hotline could search for "I suck" (6,280,000) The United Way could hunt for donations by searching in January for resolutions posted in blogs that call for "giving back" (4,380,000) or "donating to charity" (77,300). They might even use the Comcast model and help revive their brand by proactively responding to critics who think the "United Way sucks" (214). They could also reward the seven fans who wrote that "United Way is great" (free tickets from their partner the NFL).

Joking aside, it strikes me that there is an opportunity to identify individuals in need of help through key word searches. It would need to be much more refined (the term "I suck" turns out to mostly bring up porn). For example, Exhale, a nonprofit support line for women who recently had abortions, could try to find women openly recovering from the experience (especially young women who would use a blog for such a topic).

There is also a public awareness opportunity for an issue like Lyme disease to find out who is writing about it and to make sure they are painting an accurate picture and connecting people who need help or have questions to resources. Or you could find all the blogs that are writing about climate change and post responses to make sure that readers know that 18% of climate change is due to the cattle industry (if that is your bone to pick).

And, it does create some opportunities to connect with supporters you may not know (the "Red Cross is great" shows 1,340 results) or win over your critics.

Nonprofit Management for America

2008-07-25T19:07:07Z

Teach for America (TFA) is the 6th largest employer of students upon their graduation from college, followed by Deloitte (to put it in perspective). Not only do they do quantity - they do quality. 10% or more of the students at most Ivy's apply to TFA.

As Avi Zenilman wrote in 2006, TFA "turned national service into a status symbol."

What can we learn from Wendy Kopp that can help us make working in nonprofit management a status symbol and attract the top talent from the top schools? Why are all these kids flocking to TFA (besides the fact that Wall Street is now in trouble)?

1) Build a Brand
TFA has developed a blue chip brand. It did this by being very selective in its hiring process and by building a presence on the campuses of top schools.

Could we create a umbrella brand for a set of top nonprofits that pool funds to have representation on campuses and collectively recruit and screen students? Commongood Careers is doing this to some degree now, but it would need a broader coalition behind it to achieve this end.

2) Create a Path
TFA doesn't ask candidates to dedicate their careers to teaching. In fact, they decline candidates if they say they want to be career teachers. It is two years and out.

This is a tough one for the nonprofit sector as we need people to stay in the sector, and the career paths in the nonprofit sector are often not attractive. The latter is a product of having small nonprofits that are not at scale and therefore can't offer entry level hires a clear career path. This forces talent to leave when they are ready for promotion. We need role models who are not social entrepreneurs, but nonprofit professionals who have risen in the sector to a place of prominence. Their success is not publicized.

Is it knowledge or data that is power?

2008-07-23T21:28:56Z

One of the most common criticisms of the nonprofit sector is that it isn't data driven. Given the lack of data available and the cost to collect data, being data driven is often not a realistic expectation.

Alana Conner Snibbe, senior editor at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, gave a great presentation last year. She demonstrated that the measurements requested of grantees by foundations would typically cost $1 million to produce in a scientifically valid fashion. That is a big investment to secure a $25,000 grant for nonprofit with a $750,000 annual budget.

Despite this overwhelming case, foundations continue to ask for data, and what they end up getting is faux data that is often unintentionally misleading. This not only undermines the trust between the foundation and nonprofit community, it also builds a culture that trades on poor data and half truths.

The president of a leading national nonprofit once told me that in the nonprofit sector - "knowledge is power." The reality is, it is data and not knowledge that is power. Sadly, most data is garbage and the opposite of knowledge.

Here is the most recent example I have seen of this trend: A recent report by a Boston nonprofit consulting firm showcases this headline as a key finding: "Fifty-eight percent of nonprofits surveyed are allocating 2% or less of their annual operating budget to support key functions."

Upon my first reading of this headline, I was shocked. Nearly 60% of nonprofit organizations are spending two percent or less of general operating budget to marketing, program operations, public relations, human resources, financial management, or technology? Wow. Nonprofit executives are truly miracle workers to be able to run their organizations with so little money for overhead.

Then I started doing the math. A basic financial audit (a de facto requirement for all nonprofits with budgets over $250,000) costs between 0.5% and 1% of your budget. That is just the audit - a nonprofit with a budget north of $1,000,000 will almost always have someone full time doing day-to-day accounting,operations and HR processing. Fully loaded that is a cost of about $75,000 (or 7.5% of the budget).

It wasn't adding up - there is no way that nonprofits spend that little on those six functions combined. I know their spending is thin, but not that bone thin.

Puzzled, I went back to the report and read the fine print (or at least non-headline print) and found this supporting statement: "The majority of survey respondents spent less than two percent of their operating budget in any one functional area." After reading this line a few times I realized that their finding was actually that 58% of the respondents reported that they spent less than 2% of their budgets in ONE of the six overhead functions.

Knowing that nonprofits spend very little money on public relations, one could conclude that 58% of nonprofits spend less than 2 percent of their budgets on public relations. Now that is not surprising and not really headline worthy. In many cases, I would be concerned if nonprofits were spending more money on public relations.

I then looked at their sample - 123 nonprofit respondents. We all see polls with +/- degrees of accuracy of 2-4% in the paper all the time. With this small a sample and considering they looked at nonprofits with budgets between $500,000 and $5,000,000 (10X) in three cities, the data likely has a +/- of close to 100%.

All that said, I will be the first to admit to spinning research results based on small samples. The goal here is not to point the finger at one report. The issue is more systemic. The desire to create data in the sector has led to far too many reports that would not stand up to scrutiny in any other sector.

How do we solve this problem?

For better or worse, any solution to an issue in the nonprofit sector needs to follow the money. Foundations funding a specific area (e.g. nonprofit consulting) should pool their funds and facilitate the creation of uber studies to benchmark the state of the issue and then create a common tool for evaluating success relative to other service providers.

In this case, foundations should fund a well designed survey with an meaningful sample that is based on input from the key players in the nonprofit consulting arena. This survey would look at the real state of the infrastructure in the sector and the key needs for consulting services.

They should then create a universal online survey tool for all nonprofit consulting clients to complete after projects. The data could then be sliced by the consulting firms and by the foundations. Ideally, it would also be made public to the nonprofit sector as a kind of "Consumer Reports" for nonprofit consulting services.

Until this happens, be sure to read all nonprofit data and reports with a critical eye - like you would read the results of the famous Pepsi Challenge of the 1980s.

Led by a Blind Man

2008-07-22T19:48:36Z

I volunteer as an account director for the Taproot Foundation, an organization that is basically a Peace Corps for professionals to benefit non-profit organizations. Right now, I am working with a team to help create a new name and visual identity for the Living Skills Center for the Visually Impaired - you can probably figure out why they need a new name! This organization teaches blind youth how to live independently, despite their disability.

We had a client kick-off meeting today, and to better understand this non-profit, the CEO asked that we experience what it is like to be blind. On came the blindfolds, and we were escorted in to the kitchen where we were asked to chop ingredients for a Waldorf salad. I was able to quickly relate to the shapes of sliced apples, grapes, celery and walnuts because of my seeing experience. Congenitally blind people take longer to figure these things out. We used a cool device to safely chop the ingredients, and then had to guess how much dressing to scoop in to the salad...I clumsily slopped it on my fingers.

Next came the guided tour, and I quickly volunteered to be led by a blind man, down a hallway, up three flights of stairs, and in to an apartment shared by two blind 19-year young men. The experience was surreal! Here was this blind man, leading me with confidence and determination, telling me what to do and helping to make me feel safe. I felt off-balance as he told me to use my hearing to help get my bearings. He sat me down on a sofa, and proceeded to sit on the floor next to me.

With the blindfolds on, we met Tom and Dionne, the two roommates learning skills to live independently - from cooking and house cleaning, to paying bills, grocery shopping, going to the mall or traveling and any of the thousands of things - big and small - those of us who are sighted take completely for granted.

These two boys reminded me of my son, who at 19 is also learning some of the same skills to be independent, but without the added challenge of not being able to see. They were excited about their learnings and the skillful coaching being given to them. And, like my son, there were so many similarities in their interests, starting with music, but also girls.

I listened to their voices, painted pictures in my mind of what these boys might look like, and it was a gift to then be able to remove the blindfold and see their fresh, beautiful smiles. As we left the apartment, I was struck by its cleanliness - the place was immaculate! I only wish my kids had such skills...

The last destination on our tour was the adaptive technology lab where a blind instructor whizzed through demonstration after demonstration of web technology, check-writing, GPS and other tools that help make the life of visually impaired people easier. This guy was amazing - he could listen to the computer-generated voice faster than my brain could register...

I have only intense admiration and respect for the teachers and staff who dedicate their life to work such as this. To be able to positively impact these youth is a gift that money just can't buy. Unfortunately government funding for organizations such as this is dwindling, creating a squeeze that necessitates more philanthropy and creative financing to keep these programs open.

In the coming months we will be exploring creating a new, catchier name and logo for this program to help them better attract new students, fundraise, and thrive.

Dear Reader - if you haven't considered volunteering, try it. It is sure to enrich your life. I know that mine got a little richer today.

Perfection vs. Multi-tasking

2008-07-21T18:26:58Z

One of the most common habits that is also one of the hardest to break is perfectionism. For all but a few roles (e.g. accounting) perfectionism causes a huge hit to productivity.

I read somewhere last year that the best general managers make the right decisions 65 percent of the time, but are constantly monitoring the results of their decisions to enable them to adjust course should they find they erred in their thinking. Forward motion is almost always rewarded more than perfection.

One of the leading causes of the perfectionism affliction has to be our outdated academic system. A student graduating from a top college has been trained for 17 years that 93+ percent accuracy (A grade) is the definition for success.

If you ask most students, they will tell you that the effort to get an A versus a B is significant. It often doubles their work load. This is the same loss in productivity that you find with perfectionists in the workplace.

Perhaps the right target hire is the person with a B average who made the most of college through activities, internships, travel and work. Multi-tasking is far more valuable than perfection.