Monthly Archives: May 2009

Giving, Volunteering, and Happiness

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If giving makes you happy, why don’t people give more? 

I recently encountered an interesting answer to this question, thanks to Stanford University’s Center for Social Innovation. CSI_Red_RGB

Last fall, Stanford marketing professor Jennifer Aaker published a podcast and related journal article about people’s mindsets toward giving.  Her team’s research and experiments showed that asking people for volunteer time before you ask them for money increases their financial contributions later.  

She notes in the podcast:

  • People are overwhelmed by the number of nonprofits, and more importantly, are having a tough time differentiating between them.  Creating a great brand experience (your authentic, distinct promise to your stakeholders) separates you from the crowd.
  • Relationships are driven by first impressions and are cemented in the first six weeks.  It then becomes difficult to overcome any mistakes or problems that happen in that early stage.  So, the first experience with your organization is important.
  • Asking people questions about their intentions to act increases the likelihood that they will later perform the act.  Companies frequently sponsor surveys about buying habits to prompt people into considering buying their products.
  • Volunteering correlates highly with personal happiness.  Even the idea of volunteering evokes connections to positive experience, values, personal growth, and self-actualization.
  • The concept of money and financial gifts evokes questions of utilitarian value, effectiveness, competition for resources.  Those frequently trump the values association with charitable giving. 

So, if you want to win someone’s long-term support, ask them to consider volunteering first.  And when they say yes, make sure the experience is meaningful.  Then later ask for a donation.  Try an experiment with your next batch of prospects and let me know how it goes.

You can listen to the hour-long podcast here – the first half is on the giving research and the second half is on connections to brand strategies.  The related academic journal article, a 15-page PDF, is here .

Insanely Great Philanthropy?

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What would “insanely great philanthropy” look like?  

This question was prompted by some recent blog posts that I read.  

Economics and entrepreneurism guru Umair Haque took businesses to task here for focusing too much time on playing with business models and not enough time on making stuff that’s “insanely great.”  He noted:

Yet, the best business model in the world is also the simplest: make stuff that’s insanely great…That kind of stuff doesn’t need a hard sell, a new market, or a convoluted product range. It just needs to be.

Philanthropy and foundation strategist Lucy Bernholz started a set of thoughtful challenges to the fundamentals of how foundations work here and here.  She noted:

Why do foundations in 2009 – all 70-odd-thousand of them – look so much alike structurally?…Why hasn’t something either inside or outside organized philanthropy fundamentally altered recognizably and admittedly bad institutional practices and replaced them with something better?

And in her earlier post, wrote:

Why create a foundation in the first place? If an individual cares about a social issue, is an endowed pile of money a useful tool for the job?  What about creating media platforms, loan funds for advocacy campaigns, or innovation hubs within public agencies – might some other structure work better? 

Lastly, I ran across the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s report on applying a culture of innovation to improving philanthropy and social impact.

I always appreciate people who can challenge basic assumptions about an issue, policy, or practice.  And these posts and the report were reminders to challenge the basics of how organized philanthropy works.

Philanthropy is fundamentally about offering opportunities to transform lives and communities, ideally in ways that are meaningful and effective to both giver and recipient.  We’ve then layered tax acts, legal structures, theories of change, intermediaries, org charts, and everything else on top of that.

Lucy pushes us to strip away those layers.  Umair reminds us that the best ideas and products are so great that they sell themselves, spread virally, maybe even transform the way we do business or live.

So, what kind of philanthropy would be insanely great – so compelling and effective that it just needs to be?  

Or maybe, what philanthropic products and services would be insanely great?  Is there a “killer app” in our future?

I definitely don’t have the answers (opinions certainly, answers no), but I’m looking forward to the search!  What would insanely great philanthropy look like to you?

Effective Giving During the Downturn

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The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy launched a three-month project to help donors find high-impact giving opportunities during the downturn. The first article provides the following ideas:

  • Support and expand community health centers
  • Get the word out on legitimate foreclosure prevention programs
  • Support organizations and collaboratives that break down silos between different government-supported basic needs services

This list is a great start.  I’d add that donors can also get good bang for their buck by helping nonprofits, communities, and schools effectively pursue, manage, and monitor economic stimulus money.  They’ll likely need help with grant writing, contract management, and holding state and local government agencies’ accountable for effective and transparent spending.

What other high-impact opportunities do you think donors have during the downturn?