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.

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?