Reflections on Fundraising By Text

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about the explosion in donations by text messaging since the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Here are my latest thoughts:

1. Gavin Clabaugh, one of the smartest folks I know about this stuff, made a very insightful comment on my post the other day about Haiti signifying the tipping point for fundraising via social media. His comment was that text messaging is not a social media tool since it doesn’t creates opportunities for many-to-many conversations unless using a special app, like Twitter. So, what he says what we have been seeing is pretty traditional fundraising with text really as “a billing system, not social media.”  Point well, taken. It’s funny, I had just reflexively lumped text messaging into my social media toolkit because it’s digital, cheap and ubiquitous. But, I think Gavin is right, without the facility of many-to-many conversations it doesn’t reach the threshold, unlike email.

2. Katya has a brilliant post up about the quick drop off of donations to Haiti. It speaks to another problem with text giving,  which is the way that the donation comes to the organization. It is a circuitous route with a cell phone carrier in the middle — and that can’t possibly be good. As I mentioned in my earlier post this week, giving by text is a pledge not a direct donation. On top of that, as reported by the Chronicle here unless the donor opts in to provide their cell phone number, an organization has a lag in the giving and perhaps just a check from the carrier, leaving them with no way to connect with donors beyond that initial engagement.

3. Jenna Sauber of the UN Foundation shared with me this Make-A-Wish web page with an opt-in option for folks to sign up for alerts by text as a way for organizations to begin to build relationships with folks who want to communicate mainly by text.

So, where does this all leave me on text giving? Trepidatious. It’s certainly not a panacea, and may be best used as part of an immediate crisis or disaster responses – exactly as the Red Cross has done. However, it may not be as useful when the initial crisis begins to wane. In part, because most of the donors will opt-out so organizations will have no way to contact them and also because, sadly, I think it will be too tempting for organizations to misuse cell phones numbers and become spammers. It seems to me that relationship building with a first engagement being a cell phone number is going to be inherently difficult. I hope I’m wrong, would love others to disagree!

Fundraising Using Social Media Tipping Point

Blackbaud released a study last year that provided start evidence that fundraising through social media had not yet reached a maturation, much less tipping, point. The study (based on a very small sample of 24 nonprofit organizations that are significant because of their size) revealed that online giving was still just a tiny fraction of giving through direct mail and in person.

However, the earthquake in Haiti may have permanently changed sizes of the fundraising pie slices. According to a new study by the Pew Center for People and the Press, “Haiti Dominates Public’s Consciousness” (highlighted by Lucy Bernholz)  37% of giving since the earthquake in Haiti was giving online or by text message. And, we know that it hasn’t been small change, either, with the Red Cross reporting $22 million raised by text message one week after the earthquake.

So, have we reached the tipping point? I think so, but with a caveat and a caution (you didn’t think this was going to be straightforward, did you?)

Here’s the good news. It is clear that in the time of a disaster or an emergency a lot of people are ready and willing to give donations using social media. Donating by text, in particular, fits the bill perfectly. But millions of dollars have also been raised on Facebook, websites and Twitter.

But, here’s the drawback. One of the first lessons is that giving by text is easy for the donor but not so easy for the organization. It takes some time to set up the donation process with the mobile carrier (isn’t anything that involves a telecom going to be complicated somewhere along the line?) It is a cumbersome mechanism on the back end – it takes time to set up (the Red Cross that is so fortunate to have Wendy Harman on staff had already put this mechanism in place.) More disconcerting there is ordinarily a lag time between pledges made by text and the time the organization receives it because the phone bill has to be paid. The phone companies agreed to pay 80% of donations up front for Haitian relief because of the urgency of the situation. This also raises the issues of pledges made in the moment that may  not be paid later by the donor, unlike giving online using a credit card or PayPal.

The other important lesson is that just because text and, say, Twitter worked under these circumstances doesn’t mean that they are appropriate for other fundraising needs and efforts.

So, the bottom line for me right now is hooray for the increased trust and facility with a variety of social media tools that people are showing right now. However, that doesn’t mean that all of these fundraising channels are going to work for every organization in every circumstance. More reason, again, for organizations to continue to experiment with the tool set and focus on building relationships  through online social networks rather than just ask random people for money online — and to focus on learning what works for your organization over time.

Giving Guidelines for Disasters Part II

The response to my post the other day about the need of developing giving guidelines for natural disasters was very positive. And I’ve been following other developments online unfold throughout the week as well. Based on what I’ve been reading and discussing with folks, I’d like to expand on my original proposal for national guidelines for giving for natural disasters.

I’d like to begin with a point of clarification. The focus of my proposal is on the immediate affects of an event. In his excellent post on what donors can learn from past disasters, Michael Seltzer calls this period “immediate relief.” What I’m not focused on here is coordinating relief efforts or creating a central fund for nonprofit relief organizations. I’ll let others has those things out. I am simply focused on providing guidelines for giving donations to relief organizations in the first throes of a large natural disaster.

I wanted to mention an interesting experiment happening on the Great Nonprofits website. The idea is to crowdsource relief organizations that are doing a great job. It’s an interesting idea that needs some tweaking in order to be really effective. First, they need a bigger crowd in order to really do this well. Small crowds are good for somethings, like a technical review of a legal document, but bigger ones are needed to assess the performance of organizations working around the world in difficult circumstances.  However, that’s not the real problem. The real issue is that I don’t think crowds should be assessing relief organizations. It’s simply too easy for organizations and their supporters to game a system. Instead we should have an independent, rigorous assessment after significant relief efforts to ascertain which organizations performed well. What we could crowdsource are the criteria for quality relief work.

I was asked who would host the guidelines? Well, it’s a social media world, we don’t need one host, guidelines can live everywhere online and when an event happens organizations, bloggers, tweeters can share them and encourage people to abide by them. At this point, perhaps a group like The Clinton Global Initiative (not to be confused with the Clinton/Bush Haiti Fund which is collecting huge sums of money to be given, sometime in the future to unspecified organizations.) Or maybe it’s something a Philanthropy Ambassador’s office as outlined here in this interesting post by Sean Stanndard-Stockton could spearhead.

So, let’s get started!

Step 1: Based on past events and experiences, develop criteria for what is needed for immediate relief.

Step 2: Identify a core group of organizations that meet these criteria. The groups could be organized by geography as Tony Pipa suggested.

Step 3: Draft the guidelines including which organizations in which parts of the world. Just as importantly these guidelines would outline  WHAT NOT TO GIVE TO within, say, the first thirty days. Meaning don’t try to send food or clothing but rather give money to these organizations.

Step 4 Disseminate the guideliens to organizations, media, bloggers and tweeters.

Is it just me, or does this seem pretty simple?

Time for a Nonprofit Natural Disaster Gameplan

The outpouring of concern and donations for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti confirmed what we already know, people are good hearted and want to help.

Geoff Livingston has done a fantastic job over at  Mashable identifying the five social media lessons learned from Haiti: the maturation of mobile giving,  the unfolding narrative of the disaster shared on channels like Twitter, the integration of social and traditional media, the glossing over of the underlying issues and story of Haiti’s history of poverty and corruption that excerbates natural disasters, the potential for short-attention spans for the long and difficult road to recovery for Haiti.

I’ve also been blown away by the reaction of the tech community, spearheaded by the inexhaustible Andy Carvin of NPR, of an event called Crisis Camp organized by a grassroots networked called Crisis Commons. The commons and the camp are geeks coming together around an urgent need to crowdsource a panoply of efforts to support, in this case Haitian, relief efforts. They include translation, basic maps of the country, mapping of NGO efforts, mobile applications for crisis response, and family reunification systems.

I am struck by a few things from all of this swirl of activity. Just how quickly people can be mobilized to do more than give money is amazing. But there is something else going on. After Katrina, there was a huge gap between the amount of money given by individuals and foundations and the amount given by governments, specifically the difference was $6b from private donors vs. $120b from the government.

That gap will be much closer this time for two reasons in particular: the economy that has strapped individuals and governments and the destitution of the Haitian government. Just a week after the earthquake, Americans had already pledged $275 million for Haiti. The US Government and the World Bank combined had pledged $200 million.

In light of this growth in the size and importance of private donations for natural disasters around the world, we should have some guidelines as a sector on how to advise people to give. This is to avoid the confusion and diffusion of giving that happens in a sector that is genetically predisposed to order of any kind. For instance, many people, including me, immediately added Jean Wyclef’s Yele Haiti to their short list of organizations to give to. My rationale was that they were established in country and could help facilitate the logistical mess of trying to disperse food and aid within the country. But now I think that was a mistake. They aren’t a large organization, they don’t have any particular expertise in disaster relief, and there have been reports of previous financial mismanagement.

I liked Rosetta Thurman’s post here on what to give — and what not to give — for Haitian relief. For instance, she said don’t donate cans or clothing, there is no transportation to get them to Haiti, and even if they were delivered there isn’t the infrastructure to distribute them.

So, here’s my proposal. We need a Nonprofit National Disaster Gameplan for the next disaster. Our efforts are too large now to be ignored, we are not just a shadow of government, or UN or World Bank support efforts. We need an agreed upon plan, similar to what the Crisis Commons is developing of the kind of aid, and the best groups to provide that assistance, in the immediate wake of a disaster.

I know this flies in the face of free choice in funding that we hold so dear as a sector, but, really, folks, don’t you think we can agree that when hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of lives are lost or at risk, we can agree that The Red Cross has to be first responder? But there are others, like CARE and Doctors without Borders. We need to make a short list of the organizations we should endorse who have the size, expertise and expertise to provide support anywhere in the world for a disaster.  Seems to be a good job for Independent Sector.

Helping Haiti

In response to questions I’ve been receiving, here are a few groups that are providing immediate crisis help to people devastated by the latest tragedy in Haiti. My thanks to Liza Sabater, and Andy Carvin and his colleagues at NPR:

• YELÉ Haiti or donate $5 by texting YELE to 501501

From their donation page: Yele Haiti is a movement led byWyclef Jean that is helping to bring hope back to Haiti. Projects are designed to make a difference in the fields of education, health, environment and community development.

• Doctors Without Borders
• Direct Relief International
• Oxfam America

Turning Theatres into Networks

I read this marvelous post by Jon Stancato of the Stolen Chair Theatre yesterday. He had given a very provocative speech about the future of arts organizations. His post is actually called The Speech That Got Booed!

The boos were for this courageous statement: But, I don’t want to be a charity, in large part because I don’t think our social cause has enough merit to compete with other charities who actually change lives on a grand scale.

But what really caught my eye was this sentence: In this interconnected, digital age, if our art can serve as a meeting place for communities of like-minded individuals to connect, celebrate, and be challenged, then we might find a way of restoring theatre’s primacy in people’s lives and creating sustainable theatre-making organisms (not organizations).

So, let’s substitute social networks for organisms and see what Stolen Chair and other theatres could look like as one.  This is, in fact, the topic of Beth Kanter’s and my upcoming book, The Networked Nonprofit.

Here are a few ways that Stolen Chair, or any theatre, could begin to morph their organization into a social network that will be less expensive to run and maintain and more connected to its real and virtual communities:

1. First step is become facile with the social media toolset. Stolen Chair is doing a magnificent job of this on their blog and through Twitter.

2. Move from transactions to relationships. All organizations have a tendency towards isolation and insulation. It’s hard work to reach out and begin to build relationships with other people and organizations. Particularly when we all feel so busy all the time anyway. But, the only way to change the shape of an organization, to begin to open itself up, is to connect through conversations. And social media make it so easy to do. Just start, don’t worry about having an agenda or a plan, start to talk and connect and share with other people and organizations. Those other theatre groups aren’t your competition, they are resources for ideas and space and people. Because they are so often financially poor historically, arts organizations tend towards transactional ways of thinking. In blunter terms, fannys in seats trumps relationships. Unless those relationships are people with big checkbooks. That may have worked at one time, although I’m sure that it ever really did, but it certainly doesn’t know when people have lots of choices of where to go and what to see and will not stand for being treated like ATM machines.

3. Trust people. People want to help, they want to be involved in meaningful organizations and efforts, and that includes arts organizations. An organization doesn’t have to change lives on a grand scale as Jon said to giving meaning and be important. Organizations inhabited by passionate people, and increasingly paid staff, can often forget that people, those folks out there sitting on their coaches, want to help. They want to be creative and help shape efforts. To see some examples of this, take a peek at what Nina Simon writes about the wonderful ways that museums are developing participatory cultures using social media on her blog Museum 2.0.

4. Lose Control. Jon, are you and your colleagues ready to turn yourselves over to your network? Are you ready to let people in to really help shape the productions, or do you really just want them to buy a ticket, sit, watch, clap and go home? (I think you do want to involve them, Jon, that’s why I’m picking on you!)  It does not mean that the artists give up all control, it means that they invite people to participate, to help shape an effort, to share their efforts, to be full, creative participants in places and works that never allowed them to fully participate before. One such effort was an exhibition hosted by the Brooklyn Museum of Art called Click! A Crowd Curated Exhibition.

And, for gosh sakes, whatever you do, stay away from bricks and mortar!! Investing in space may seem like a good idea – oh how lovely it would be to have our very own home, but in the long run, for the overwhelmingly number of theatre and performing arts groups it is an enormous finance drain. And this is why relationship building with other organizations and individuals is so key to the success of arts organizations, because shared resources are the only way we’re going to make it.

It’s a very exciting time to rethink arts organizations. The Nonprofit Finance Fund has a fantastic paper on reimagining the capital structure of arts organizations here. But we also need to reimagine participation in the arts, as Clay Shirky would put it, by the crowd formerly called the audience.

Beth’s Birthday Party

Today is Beth Kanter’s 53rd birthday. I wouldn’t have shared the number with you, but she already has here and here and here on her blog! My friends Amy Sample Ward and Stacey Monk organized an effort by bloggers, a surprise bloggy birthday!, today to wish Beth a happy birthday and help her to reach her birthday goal of sending 53 Cambodia children to school. I’ve just donated $25, I hope you’ll do the same here on Facebook.

But, Amy and Stacey also asked us bloggers to do one more thing for Beth’s birthday. They asked that we share how Beth has impacted your work. Well, that’s might sound like an easy thing to do, but for me it isn’t easy at all. The problem is that Beth has impacted how I think about social media, what I know, who I know and what I do in so many profound ways it’s hard to capture it all! I’ll just highlight a few so you get an idea of how important she is to me as a friend, teacher and partner.

• Beth was the first blogger to review my first book, Momentum. That’s how we met, and I was so struck by her humanness then- she wasn’t an aloof reviewer, she was a full person who just told you what she liked and why without any pretense, and certainly without any snarkiness (unlike yours truly, too often, I’m afraid!)
• We partnered on the assessment of the first round of the Case Foundation’s Giving Challenge last year. We had fun doing it, and I learned so much from her about how Causes and fundraising using social media. But, again, Beth doesn’t just watch from afar, she is a passionate doer and user of social media and her first hand experience as a participant in the Giving Challenge on behalf of the Sharing Foundation was invaluable to our efforts.
• And, finally, Beth is my co-author and partner for our book, The Networked Nonprofit, that Wiley & Sons will be publishing this year. Her insights, experiences, thoughtfulness, and practices are central elements to making the book what I thought it finally became: an important and useful work that perfectly captures this moment in time for nonprofits and social media.

So, my friend, happy birthday, many, many happy returns, and thanks for everything that you have done with me and for me!

More on Sysphus, Effectiveness and Outcomes

I knew that my flame throwing yesterday about the Sisyphean efforts of foundations and nonprofits would spark some interest and was glad to see that I was right!  The comments were fascinating and thoughtful. I wanted to recap some of what was said and add a few more thoughts on this now that I’ve had time for a bit more reflection.

Adin Miller and David Gielhufe counseled patience. We are just beginning this journey, they said, and groups like the Corporation for National Service and other grantmakers are making progress. As David wrote, “But we are slowly seeing consequences develop. We are slowly seeing pots of money being given out on outcome measurements.”

Marty Kearns rightly pointed out the difficulty of the stars aligning between the timeliness of grantmaking and the real-time difficult of evaluation. He wrote, “Shifts in time, needs on the ground, media cycles, costs, staff changes, political and economic winds make annual adjustments irrelevant.”

I really liked what Allison Jones had to say when she wrote, “The issue is not to measure outcomes, but do so in a way that is not disruptive or merely punitive. For example, all the hype around low overhead being a great measure of effectiveness is now being dismantled because, well, it isnt a good measure of effectiveness and for those organizations who got “bad grades” because of this kind of measurement, Im sure more harm than good was done.”

And, of course, Hildy Gottlieb, who kicked this whole conversation about challenging the notion of individual organizations assessing outcomes as opposed to communities assessing results, added this brilliant quote, “Chogyam Trungpa says, “The basic problem we seem to be facing is that we are too involved with trying to prove something, which is connected with paranoia and a feeling of poverty. When you are trying to prove or get something, you are not open anymore, you have to check everything, and you have to arrange it “correctly.” It is such a paranoid way to live and it really does not prove anything.”

So, what does it all mean? Well, for those counseling patience, I have to respectfully disagree. The revolution that was predicted twenty years ago in effectiveness and performance simply hasn’t materialized or scaled. Not only have individual foundations and nonprofits been unsuccessful (with, of course, the regular exceptions like the oft-cited Harlem Children’s Zone that come up over and again.) What we haven’t seen is performance and outcomes evaluation becoming norms of philanthropic and nonprofit behavior that one would have expected given the investment, talk, expectations raised over the years. One indicator of how little progress we’ve made is that no one even tracks how much nonprofits or foundations invest in evaluation!

But I also want to make an important point today that I don’t think I made clearly enough yesterday. Of course I believe that foundations and nonprofits should be effective. They should aim to do something beneficial for people and communities and do it well. I don’t believe that the lens and frameworks that we have used to determine how and whether that’s happening are working. It is the frames that need changing not the goals.

I would like to develop more natural systems for doing this. Processes that feel more empowering for nonprofits, systems for foundations that marry their natural desire to do good with the need to support good work. Unfortunately, I don’t know yet what those frames look like, although I do know that they involve the integration of social media into the fabric of organizations.

That’s where I am right now. Where are you?

Natural vs. Unnatural Ways of Working

I read the post “Why Haven’t Foundations Made More Progress in Becoming Strategic?” by Bob Hughes on the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) blog with interest. Hughes reports findings from a recent CEP report on foundation effectiveness that indicate that:

• Only half of the CEO’s report a shared understanding among the Board, CEO, and the staff of the foundation’s goals
• A majority don’t have a logic model
• Just one-fourth use performance indicators to assess all their strategies.

Hughes notes that working in strategic ways enables foundations to streamline their work by accomplishing two goals. “The first is to set out a positive direction to help guide decisions.  The second function, which Porter and Kramer noted in their seminal article, is to clearly say what the foundation will not be doing.  This is often a source of conflict, as any funder who has decided to leave a field well knows.”

As I was reading this I was reminded of the unfolding conversation on Ken Berger’s blog at Charity Navigator on nonprofits and outcomes evaluation. Hildy Gottlieb lays out an alternative option rather than each organization assessing their efforts. Hildy suggests, “Within the context of the ultimate end goal of improved communities, therefore, What’s Next would be a system for first measuring the larger context of community-wide improvement, and only then measuring the performance of individual organizations within that larger context.”

This comes on the heels of a survey last year by Charity Navigator that revealed that very few nonprofit organizations are measuring outcomes.

Anyone feel like Sysphus?

One of the wonderful attributes of social media is that enables people to work in natural ways. People want to have conversations with one another. They want to share their news, photos, contacts, information and knowledge with friends and friends of friends. Efforts and information go viral and social networks grow friction-free and quickly because they are natural ways of being and working.

I wonder working towards “foundation effectiveness” and “outcomes measurement” are simply unnatural ideas and processes for most people and organizations to absorb. Of course, there are some foundations like Hewlett have found that working in planful, strategic ways fits their DNA well. But, since most foundations haven’t, perhaps the notion of shoe-horning foundations created for the sole purpose of enabling people to give money to causes and issues and organizations that simply make them feel good is never going to work?

I spent many,  many years fighting the battle of spreading the gospel of the benefits of outcomes evaluation. And it never spread. Why not? Because nonprofit organizations continue to raise money and serve communities just fine, they feel, without measuring outcomes. They are no consequences to not doing it — and very real, and potentially bad consequences, to finding out that your organization isn’t doing all of the wonderful things it promised in those grant proposals and board meetings.

Maybe it’s time for a different kind of conversation. Perhaps we should start to talk about how we can encourage organizations and the people who run them to go with the flow and work in natural ways by folowing their passions and instincts rather than trying to steer them into systems and processes that feel uncomfortable and artificial? Maybe we should take advantage of the particular as the norms and rhythms of social media in order to spread the spirit of foundations and nonprofits through social networks that can be tracked and monitored?

These are just a few burgeoning thoughts, would love to hear what others think.

Associations as Networks Not Organizations

Rosetta Thurman wrote a terrific post this morning about the Fort Wayne chapter of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network opting out of the national association. It seems that it was too much work, too burdensome, for the  local chapter to follow all of the rules that the national association set to be recognized as a chapter. Both entities are made up entirely of volunteers which makes this situation a bit different from the complaints I’ve heard over the years from local affiliates with national entities. For instance, it is common to hear United Ways say that it costs too much to maintain the national, or that the locals are not getting any return on their dues to the national.

At the root of this conflict is the need of national entities to try to exert control over affiliates or chapters. they want to control the message and the messenger of the local entities like they are McDonald’s franchises. And unfortunately groups like the Young Nonprofit Professional Association has bought into this notion that controlling local chapters is important or necessary in developing a national network.

It’s not just unnecessary it’s counterproductive.

Readers of this blog probably have a sense about how I feel about the wasted energy that organizations spend trying to control people and things that they simple can’t control. Most recently, I brought this up in this post about branding gone bad for nonprofits.

But there are other issues at work here in the assertion of the Fort Wayne chapter that trying to conform to the needs and dictates of the national organization wasn’t tenable for them. That is the issue of simplicity.

Organizational complexity, particularly the rules that govern what chapters can and can’t do, is to social networks what cholesterol is to arteries and hair is to drains; it’s the gummy stuff that clogs everything. Simplicity enables people to do what they’re best at, connect and learn from one another, be creative and social. Rosabeth  Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School shares here why organizational simplicity is the Next Big Thing.

Associations are groups of people with a common professional interest who want to connect to and learn from one another. Sounds like a social network. My favorite association, a group that could only exist in Washington, DC, is the American Society of Association Executives – in other words, the Association of Associations! This group, like so many other associations, came about last century as the number and size last century as part of the general explosion in the size of the nonprofit sector. And along with that explosion came all of the expected signs of organizational complexity: brands, staffing, rules guiding what local chapters can and can’t do. And, as the Young Nonprofit Professional Association is demonstrating, the more rules that are developed, the harder it becomes for local chapters to participate.

It’s time to swing the pendulum in the other direction, associations need to get back to their roots as social networks. Staff were added when it was hard for members to communicate with one another. It isn’t hard to connect, share information, learn from one another, gather online or in person with social media.

A great example of a national organization valuing simplicity and trusting their local chapters is the Surfrider Foundation. They have national staff, but they also have tens of local chapters who they support without trying to control.

It is time for all associations to take stock of themselves in light of the power of social media and ask hard questions about themselves and how they function. Do we really need staff, and if so, why exactly? What are we afraid local chapters will do that will harm us?