Natural vs. Unnatural Ways of Working
Posted by Allison Fine on January 7, 2010
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.
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This entry was posted on January 7, 2010 at 11:48 am and is filed under Social Media. Tagged: Bob Hughes, Center for Effective Philanthropy, Charity Navigator, hildy gottlieb, Ken Berger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
10 Responses to “Natural vs. Unnatural Ways of Working”
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Adin Miller said
Interesting post Allison. I echo your struggles with pushing for outcome evaluations and clearly the lack of foundation push in this area makes it much more difficult to integrate into nonprofit operations.
Here are several things to consider when analyzing the points Bob highlights:
1. The CEP survey was sent to 726 CEOs and program staff of private foundations with assets of $100 million or more and only 191 responded (26% response rate).
2. Only 155 foundations were represented. No family foundations or community foundations were included. None of the smaller private foundations in the US were included.
3. More than 9,000 foundations, based on a quick Foundation Center search, were not part of the survey.
CEP concludes in that report that it believes its respondents “are likely more strategic in their approach than the broader population of foundation leaders.” That’s a fairly alarming (damning?) statement on the rest of the foundation population, but might explain why Sisyphus could relate to this challenge.
But – and here’s why I think we shouldn’t give up the fight yet – in some circles there are tremendous efforts pushing nonprofits to establish outcome evaluations and performance measurements. For example, the Corporation for National and Community Service (http://www.nationalservice.gov/) is now encouraging its AmeriCorps applicants to adopt performance measures that align with the national performance measures (http://www.nationalservice.gov/pdf/09_0918_nofa_ac_background.pdf) it established in order to aggregate the results of similar programs and demonstrate the impact of AmeriCorps programs. Interestingly, those applicants take on the challenge of reporting on those national performance measures will receive funding priority.
The push by the federal agency for performance measurements and outcome evaluation reflects its need to hold itself accountable to Congress and the taxpayers on its grant allocations. One can only wonder what nonprofits and foundations would do if Congress really started to push for performance measurements and outcome evaluation results in the sector.
ajlovesya said
“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?”
I think you bring up an interesting point here. 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 most of the time what’s being measured isnt particularly helpful in terms of social change. Ive written about this before (http://entrylevelliving.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/five-problems-measure-social-change/) but Ive always been concerned about how many assessments are not people centered, dont account for collaboration, and lack critical thinking.
However, I think organizations may have their own forms of assessment, it just may not be as formal as some would like. What makes you feel “fine” about the services you are providing? Are people requesting more services? Are the grades of students improving? We notice trends in the people we serve and use whatever tools we have to act accordingly.
At the same time, there is something that feels slightly deceitful about willingly not assessing what your organization is doing because youre worried you arent living up to your promises. So, instead of avoiding it all together, what new ways of assessment can we create? How do we engage the people we serve and ask them to assess us? How do we act on findings/changes?
David Geilhufe said
Sysphus had to roll the rock up the hill. The rock then rolled back down the hill. And it started all over again.
I look at the outcomes thing as rolling the rock up a really big mountain. The rock hasn’t fallen back yet, it just gets stuck periodically. And we’re maybe 20-30% up the mountain right now.
You mention there is little in terms of consequences… either carrots or sticks… for measuring or not measuring. But we are slowly seeing consequences develop. We are slowly seeing pots of money being given out on outcome measurements.
I have a feeling that in the next 5-10 years we’ll discover if we truly are Sysphus and the rock is going to roll down the hill, or if we’ll discover that the grade is getting shallower and we can push that rock up the mountain faster.
Social change requires a long time horizon. Changing social change itself requires an even longer time horizon.
Hildy Gottlieb said
Allison:
Yes and yes and yes and too many yesses to fit in one response. All those yesses fit into this one quote, by Chogyam Trungpa (about life overall, but fitting so well with our sector’s work!:
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.”
There is a vast difference between seeking indicators of success and seeking indicators of worthiness. The former is about learning and exploring possibilities. It is about determining whether we are on the right path or if we need to change course. It is about helping guide future choices.
It is the “indicators of worthiness” that feels not only unnatural, but uncomfortable, fear-based, threatening – for the reasons Chogyam Trungpa states (and then some).
Looking forward to seeing how others view this – and grateful to you for elevating the discussion!
Hildy
Debra Askanase said
Allison,
I worked at a nonprofit organization that received a lot of money from the local United Way. For two years, the UW required all of its fundees to learn about outcomes measurement, and even assigned a consultant to work with us. I loved it – it changed everything about the program I was administering (what to measure, what the indicators should be, etc), and became such an enthusiast that I raised funds to bring the consultant back when we were developing new programs. However, the culture of the organization overall was very much against outcomes measurement.
I think you really nailed it when you write that nonprofits perceive that is little positive that came come of it and there are no consequences to not doing it. I began to think that a carrot approach was the best way – look at how many MORE people your organization can serve, or how you can use funds more efficiently, or how you can create better programming. That’s how I sold it at my nonprofit. Maybe that’s one of the “new ways” that we can think about using it – it may flow better.
Dan Blakemore said
As a fundraiser, I have struggled with how this growing shift among funders will affect my ability and that of my colleagues to raise funds in the future at organizations that would struggle with fitting its mission into an outcomes-focused rubric. Hildy Gottlieb’s perspective (and of course yours as well, Allison) gives me hope that there are others who understand that this outcome-centered approach may not be one-size-fits-all.
I look forward to following the conversation!
Marty Kearns said
I agree with Alison but some different reasons.
1. Most foundations are not logical. They give money based on vision, passion, access and personal interest of the donors and staff.
2. The market of information for evaluation (in a traditional sense) will never be accurate. There is little real time transparency into failure on the group or foundation level. Shifts in time, needs on the ground, media cycles, costs, staff changes, political and economic winds make annual adjustments irrelevant.
3. The wisdom of crowd is with the many smart and passionate leaders “in the field” who have real time data not centralized by funders. The wisdom of the crowd “in foundations” suggests projecting strategy and evaluation won’t work. Most leaders in the field know it. Many foundations do. Many professionals in the foundation world are constrained by donors and rule #1 & 2.
This is not to argue at all against being strategic but accepting the idea that for many community and family foundations as well as many small NGOs being extremely flexible and looking for the right moment, team, donor and initiative is very startegic but not that easy or cost effective to evaluate.
Zachary Wales said
Allison, this is a critical piece of what seems to be an ever-expanding topic: how to use social media to improve things like nonprofit board governance and foundation effectiveness. Unfortunately, there aren’t many examples of nonprofits or foundations that employ social media for anything but marketing, fundraising & communications. Social media is already a key part of the culture, so all it would take is a little repurposing.
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Phil Buchanan said
Most major donors and foundation staff I know are not interested, as Alison suggests, in doing what “simply makes them feel good.” They are interested in maximizing the positive impact of the resources with which they have been entrusted. It’s only when they have confidence that they’re doing so that they feel good.
The problem isn’t that it’s “unnatural” but rather that it’s challenging – for all kinds of reasons including those discussed by Bob so well in his post and those discussed in our report, Essentials of Foundation Strategy.
But all the examples of philanthropic impact I can think of – from the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of the Green Revolution to RWJF’s efforts to reduce tobacco use to the Stuart Foundation’s work today with foster kids – shared some key elements. Clear goals, coherent strategies, and good, relevant performance indicators. There’s nothing unnatural about this. And it’s not even new in the way many assert. The early great American philanthropists often operated in these ways.
Phil Buchanan
The Center for Effective Philanthropy