Category Archives: learning

Creating a Trusted Community Giving Center

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What if donors had really cool, trusted places to learn and gather?  What would those places be like?

I’ve been puzzling through this question for a couple weeks after reading recent research and commentary on how donors use or don’t use information to guide their giving.

I think much of the answer can be drawn from what philanthropy is learning from working with and through networks.  Working Wikily, The Networked Nonprofit, and the Network of Networked Funders are just three of the popular resources.  But my primary inspiration is a recent conversation with community development guru Bill Traynor and board members of Grassroots Grantmakers.  Bill heads Lawrence CommunityWorks in Massachusetts.  He and his team are going through the hard work of restructuring the nonprofit to operate more as a network rather than a traditional community center or social service provider.

I’ve used the insights Bill shared with the group to create a hypothetical “Community Giving Center” – both a physical and online place in which we can try some of Bill’s and others’ ideas.  I think the ideas could be applied to donor service organizations such as community foundations, United Ways, giving circles, or some wealth management offices.

So, what’s a cool, trusted Community Giving Center all about?

It’s about a “human environment” – the vibe of a place makes or breaks a person’s participation and behaviors.  It’s about the right room set-up, the feeling of welcome and friendly fun, the interactivity.  Traynor said Lawrence CommunityWorks is becoming not a social service agency (though it offers services) but a place that people love to come “to bump up against one another.”   Maybe our ideal Community Giving Center would even be a great Third Place, an anchor of creative community life.

What if your local United Way was a place that donors loved to hang out informally and share their passions about life and the community?  A place that donors came to be inspired at their own leisure instead of just to sit on a committee?  Or, what if the United Way relocated some staff to existing Third Places frequented by generous individuals?

It’s about “value exchange” and “co-creation” – the place would be about collaborating to find answers, not about “servicing donors.”  Traynor reminded our group that people are most willing to bring different forms of capital (intellectual, relational, financial etc.) when they see opportunities for good value exchange.  They’ll be more likely to return to a place if:  a) they feel like they can get stuff done that’s important to them, b) their perspectives and needs are valued, and c) there’s reciprocity in the relationship.

When Generous Jim walks in, a Community Giving Center staff member would sit down with him in a casual environment and talk through what Jim was trying to accomplish.  She might introduce him to other people working on the same issue or guide him to some online or print resources (not do it for him).  As Jim finds answers and Jim and the staff member get to know each other better, she might invite him to lead a discussion group on the mission trip his family took and what they learned about the needs of the country they visited.

What if your local community foundation didn’t treat donors as sources of new revenue, but treated donors as a latent marketplace of good ideas, relationships, and opportunities to learn and connect?  What if the foundation let donors formulate and lead strategic initiatives, helping them get generous stuff done that is meaningful to them?

I’ll add some more thoughts in the next few days.  Do you think these ideas could work in your community?

Grand Unified Theory of Donor Desire

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There’s been another round of intense dialogue in the philanthropy blogosphere regarding what motivates donors to give and how they give.

Research by a UK firm, YouGov, revealed that few donors found charity rating services useful.  Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy kicked off some U.S.-based responses.  Among others, Nathanial Whittemore at change.org, Jacob Harold at the Hewlett Foundation, Tris Lumley at New Philanthropy Capital, and then Sean again discussed three essential points:

  • People act based on emotion first, then logic
  • Donors don’t want to be told to which organizations or sectors to give, but do want help defining and implementing their personal philanthropic goals
  • Advocates for “effective philanthropy,” charity ratings, nonprofit assessment reports, and other giving based on logic have to be more creative and focused to engage donors in the use of those services.

Those authors and others also pointed to a recent study by Hope Consulting, Money for Good, that examines the preferences, behaviors, and information demands of donors with household incomes over $80,000.  It breaks donors into six behaviors, with only 16% driven by “high-impact philanthropy” but 59% of the donors willing to give more or reallocate giving based on nonprofits improving certain behaviors and/or information.  The full Money for Good report is a must-read for nonprofits, foundations, fundraisers and gift planners, and other advisors to donors – download and discuss!

In the midst of all of that came the annual bible of charitable giving data, Giving USA and its new free executive summary (another must-read).  Two data points in Giving USA struck me as I was reading through the blogs and report above:

1)      Giving by individuals only dropped 2.4% in the past two years, despite lousy markets, personal income, and employment numbers.  To me, this confirms donors’ consistent will and intent to give whether despite the lack of widely-spread good information or analyses about nonprofits or their measurable impact.

2)      Charitable remains at around 2% of GDP, and that number hasn’t changed for 40 years.  I believe this means that all of us who care about charitable giving – and its positive impact on donors and recipients – have clearly not yet learned how to unleash large-scale, transformative generosity.

What to make of all of this information and opinion?  I think it all re-affirms what I learned from the best philanthropic advisors:  if you want to increase charitable giving, first, listen to a person’s story and hopes.  Then help them find meaningful options for expressing those hopes through charitable giving.  Then give them opportunities to experience those options – and the potential impact of gifts – emotionally, first-hand if possible.  Then finally, help them with any background information they need to feel comfortable about giving.

My “grand unified theory of donor desire” is simply this:

People are driven by a fundamental search for meaning and belonging and a fundamental need to control their own destinies and make life choices.   These trump data and pre-defined versions of effective philanthropy and nonprofit effectiveness. The more time and resources we can spend on the former, the more use there will be of the latter.

Or am I just being a crotchety old-timer and armchair psychologist?

P.S. – then again, this new effort by Gates, Rockefeller, Buffett and other to get billionaires to publicly pledge to give 50% of their net worth to charity might just trump everything else…

Good Advice on Foundation Strategy

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Bob Hughes, VP and Chief Learning Officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a recent series of thoughtful posts on foundation strategy on the The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s blog.  In the posts, he covers:

If you’re working in philanthropy or advising donors, take some time to read through his ideas.  He poses some great questions and challenges for donors and foundations working to focus their grantmaking.

Networks Part Two

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Another take on networks delivering community results came by way of Bill Traynor, Executive Director of Lawrence CommunityWorks.  Bill conducted a webinar this week for Grassroots Grantmakers on Network-Centric Organizing.  Bill is a long-time community development practitioner and I received some of my first training on neighborhood planning from him at a Tufts University summer program in the early 1990s.

Bill shared these lessons, amongst others, on the webinar:

  • Community is not the network of relationships but the value and functionality that comes from those relationships
  • Traditional community improvement work tends to, in Bill’s words, “fetishize structure and form, and emphasize institution building to the detriment of building a connected environment.”  Neighborhood residents, nonprofits, and grantmakers aid and abet the problem.
  • Neighborhood networks need to be less structured with low thresholds for participation – “flexible environments filled with ambitious, creative people who are working on their stuff and engaged in public life”
  • Lawrence CommunityWorks has built a more network-centric organization and program structure through: constantly building person-to-person connections, fostering open architecture of groups and a club-like membership structure, and offering activities that are “value propositions” instead of services.
  • Donors and funders should be more patient and flexible when supporting networks and focus more on growing forms of connectivity instead of growing specific organizational structures.  The development of successful neighborhood networks takes time, needs room to experiment, and is rarely linear.

Bill’s ideas were similar to the works I cited in my last post – networks that create real community results rely on:  durable, trusting relationships, a clear value proposition for the participants, and someone purposefully connecting people and ideas.

If you want to see and listen to Bill’s presentation (and you really should want to), Grassroots Grantmakers posted it for free public access at http://www.grassrootsgrantmakers.org/page11842.cfm.  In addition, Bill blogs about these ideas and more at http://valueofplace.wordpress.com/.

And, let me know what you think about Bill’s ideas.

Building Effective Networks

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I’ve recently been repeatedly encountering the concept of building strong networks.

First, through my work for the Lumina Foundation for Education, I’ve gotten to know Paul Vandeventer.  Paul is the CEO of Community Partners and co-authored Networks That Work with Dr. Myrna Mandell.  The book is a short, “must read” guide on developing and managing effective coalitions, helping pose and answer key questions around purpose, commitment, conflict, staffing, and other issues that networks and coalitions face.  For my friends back in Indiana, Paul will be speaking at the Indiana Grantmakers Alliance conference in November.

Second, Janis Foster, Executive Director of Grassroots Grantmakers, turned me on to the blog Network Weaving.  The team has a thoughtful set of posts (here, here, and here) about how philanthropists can enhance their giving and strengthen their grantees through developing deep networks of relationships.  In a newer post, they discuss the importance of network weavers, people who intentionally connect people with each others’ assets, opportunities, and dreams.

Lastly, I ran across a short white paper by the Interaction Institute, Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change.  The authors believe the nonprofit sector lags behind the business sector in using networks to innovate and grow.  They then sketch out five strategies for accelerating the use of networks to improve nonprofit impact.

These resources reminded me that funders and nonprofits alike enter into networks and coalitions too lightly.  Getting organizations together to work on an issue, or even just to learn from each other, takes far more time, thought, and resources than we typically devote.  The results are typically frustration all around and coalitions and relationships that don’t begin to reach their potential.

I suspect I’ll be running into coalition development issues in my work in the coming months and am glad to have these new resources at my fingertips.

More Than Money: Movements

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Catalyzing meaningful community results takes more than money.

Experienced philanthropists know that their money and influence, even if significant, won’t go far enough to create lasting change.  Some of the most effective foundations and donors I’ve met have learned to connect their hopes for improving the world with broader social movements.  These movements help connect a broad base of people to action around a well-crafted and well-researched vision.

But knowing how to work with (or against) social movements can be tricky as a donor, foundation, or nonprofit.

Fortunately, The California Endowment and University of Southern California published a thoughtful guide on the subject, Making Change:  How Social Movements Work and How to Support Them, this past March.

The 62-page report provides a brief history of types of social movements and examines what has made both conservative and progressive movements work.  The authors outline:

  • Ten key elements of successful social movements
  • Six key capacities that allow social movements to sustain themselves
  • Three things foundations or donors should not do to help, and
  • Three key areas where foundations can invest to best help.

The authors note that social movements help expand and connect the work of grassroots- or neighborhood-oriented funders, and help deepen the chance of success for more policy-driven funders.  They note that funding social movements may even be more important given the economic and other problems our country faces:

“…people are looking for a broader [communications] frame and a broader solution than typical politics can offer.  Getting to this broader conversation – and making real change – will require groups that are willing to challenge power as well as policy, values as well as legislation.  Social movement thinking and doing will be a key element for both [philanthropic] strategy and giving.”

This guide would have been a great orientation when I was new to grantmaking in state government, and then again when I was a newby foundation program officer.  Kudos to The California Endowment for supporting the creation and dissemination of this guide.  It deserves a wider discussion in the donor, foundation, and nonprofit worlds.

Philanthropy as Art and Science

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Sean Stannard-Stockton, author of the always-thoughtful Tactical Philanthropy blog, makes a good case for music as an appropriate metaphor for philanthropy. He notes that music and philanthropy can both be practiced and enjoyed at a purely personal level or at a trained, professional level.  Ultimately, lasting music, and lasting philanthropy, require both art and science.  

Former foundation executive Tony Pipa also weighs in with an argument that medicine is a more appropriate metaphor.  

Great thinking and great exchange.  Does this mean that philanthropic advisors can now be called philanthropic bandleaders or conductors?