Philanthropy News Feed

Reuters from Paris

From Dior, where soft dresses in greens and pinks were spiced up with riding jackets and flirty stockings, to Vivienne Westwood, who matched princess gowns with paupers' rags, fashionistas acknowledged the tough times while allowing themselves to have some fun.

Good to see the beautiful people so socially engaged.

Peter Frumkin is the author of Strategic Giving, an excellent book that I reviewed last year. Earlier this week, Peter wrote a post on the Philanthropy Central blog calling into question some of his own assumptions about what drivers are most important to successful philanthropy.

Peter wrote:

…I am increasingly troubled by a recurrent worry. It is a worry about what actually drives philanthropic success.

Let’s define two categories of philanthropic processes. The first is technocratic, rationalistic, and ordered: It includes program positioning and issue research, alignment and coordination across initiatives, logic model drafting, white paper or concept paper development, proposal reviewing, adapting and applying new information technologies, program evaluation design and implementation, and all the other day-to-day professional work that goes into modern philanthropy…

Now consider what might be called the more humanistic, interpretive, and adaptive work in philanthropy, which really comes down to judging the capacity, character, resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of the people who seek philanthropic funds. This is the kind of ill-defined and untheorized work that comes down to judgment and gut assessment by the donor of the person sitting across the desk from them. Call this Category Two work.

Now to my worry: What if Category One philanthropic work really only explained a small part of philanthropic effectiveness and social impact? What if Category Two work explained a vastly larger percent of outcomes? If this were a social science morel, we might ask what the r-square statistics of these two types of philanthropic work are if the dependent variable is effectiveness. The r-square statistic ranges between 0 and 1 and tells us how much variation in the dependent variable is attributable to changes in the independent variable (here, that would be Category One and Two philanthropic work).

My concern is that the growing philanthropic industrial complex—made up of consultants, researchers, trainers, and advisors—believes, earnestly believes, that the r-square statistic for Category One work is high, perhaps up to .75, and this justifies the substantial amounts of money invested in building up and supporting this work. But I have come to doubt this assumption over time and now think the r-square statistic might actually be very low for Category One work. I am more and more of the belief that Category Two work has the big r-square and explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit. The problem is that Category One work has an army of salespeople out and about selling tools and frameworks, while there is virtually no infrastructure to support Category Two work.

What I think the field really needs is a systematic guide to the difficult art of assessing the innate ability and capacity of grant seekers  to conceive wisely a vision and then actually carry out their plans. If donors cannot judge character and capacity correctly, all the tricks of the philanthropic trade will not help them achieve their goals. What such a guide would look like I do not know, but I doubt the current philanthropic industrial complex has the will to design and deliver it.

This is a dramatic declaration on Peter’s part. Peter is the kind of academic who talks about r-squared statistics in blog posts. For him to write that the “untheorized work that comes down to judgment and gut assessment… explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit,” is a shot across the bow of the philanthropy industry from someone who should more naturally side with the philanthropic process folks.

Personally, I think Peter is right. It isn’t comfortable to believe that the intangible art of judgment and gut assessment is the most important driver of philanthropic success. It would be far easier if we could all just learn specific, repeatable processes, that while complicated, insured that our giving was effective. But I think the evidence from other fields fully supports the importance of judgment over process.

In investing, Warren Buffett has a process, but it is his intangible gift for spotting value that makes him great. If the reverse was true, then anyone who read the vast literature covering the process that Buffett uses could fully expect to replicate his success.

In writing, novelists around the world study the writing styles of the greats. But The Elements of Style won’t make you Ernest Hemingway.

In economics, thousands of men and women run rigorous studies in an attempt to predict how the economy will behave. Yet we know that this process fails them time and again and fails to even adequately explain historical events.

This is not to suggest that process doesn’t matter. In the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell explains the incredibly important role of judgment and gut assessment in expert decision making. But he does not declare process and rigor is not important. In seems to me that systematic processes are necessary but not sufficient building blocks on which to develop effective philanthropy.

Unless we heed Peter’s warning that “judgment and gut assessment… explains a lot more of the achieved social impact than anyone wants to admit",” all the efforts to build a more effective philanthropy will do nothing more than create elegant mental models that sound great, but fail to make the world a better place.

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Emergent by Design is her quite extraordinary blog and emergent community.

Lynn Morton's quick summary of plenary at #ideas10#ideas10 Opening General Session « SNAP Blog: "#ideas10 Opening General Session07Mar10Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Innovation 1. Make Meaning – You want to change the world. So change it. Do it for a reason"

Is Buffett, Not Carlos Slim, the Richest Man? | Market Features | Financial Articles & Investing News | TheStreet.com: "Still, one of the biggest points raised -- or, more to the point, not raised -- by the annual list is the extent to which charitable giving influences the flip-flopping at the top of the Forbes list of billionaires. We adjust for inflation, but when it comes to billionaires,

News & Star | News | No fundraising at Uppies and Downies games this year: "Organisers, who usually raise about £7,500, said they will not be asking people to dip into their pockets mainly because locals have already donated money to the flood funds."

Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch View more presentations from Jean Russell.

Download in pdf.

Institutional Investor Magazine:

The “politically unspeakable reality” is that the pension systems are underfunded by something more than $2 trillion, says Orin Kramer, chairman of the New Jersey State Investment Council, citing independent research that he recently commissioned.

Maybe there was something to the Death Panel concept as a solution to ill health and penury in old age.

• VPP | Chairman's Corner: 'Social Outcomes': Missing the Forest for the Trees? After his essay last month in which he worried that many efforts to measure nonprofit results have gone far off course, Mario Marino of Venture Philanthropy Partners returns with an essay looking at the "whys" and "whats" to measure rather than the "hows". (tags: philanthropy)
• NYC Human Services Data Project New York City is beginning an effort to encourage city resources to be deployed in data-driven ways. The project includes a number of foundations and a member of the working group who is building it told me they are looking to the impact investing focused IRIS project as a model. New York City spend $4 billion a year on human service contracts. (tags: philanthropy)

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Philanthropcapitalist arrives: "Don't be afraid! I have two bottom lines."

Effective Telephone Fundraising
Stephen F. Schatz
ISBN: 978-0-470-56059-4
Paperback
288 pages

 

 

Presenting a detailed structure for writing effective telephone call "scripts", Effective Telephone Fundraising explains the necessary and effective components of an effective call from beginning to end, and provides helpful hints, detailed examples, phrases to employ, phraseology to avoid, and a "road map/chart" for structuring effective call scripts.

» Buy now from Amazon
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The Nonprofit Quarterly | The Nonprofit Quarterly | Nonprofit Newswire | Donor Confidentiality vs. Accountability in Political Advertising?: "March 10, 2010; ProPublica | Confidentiality of donors to nonprofits has long been a core tenet of the nonprofit sector, meant to limit the nonprofits’ critics’ ability to harass and deter their donors. The large unmonitored flows of corporate and special

Survey shows pay for nonprofit executives not out of line | StarNewsOnline.com: "The study “challenges the popular myths that nonprofit executives are overpaid,” said the Raleigh-based organization, which serves as a resource for nonprofit board members and staffers.The study also found that turnover among nonprofit staffers is about half that of the average American industry, and that

Study looks at economic impact of six Framingham cultural organizations - The Boston Globe: "A newly released study suggests that the Danforth and five other Framingham cultural institutions generate nearly double their budgets in local spending annually, creating scores of jobs along the way.“For people who believe in the arts, they get it when we tell them art is good because we know it’s good,

One of my favorite new (to me) blogs is the fantastically named Full Contact Philanthropy, authored by David Henderson, CEO of Idealistics Inc. and social enterprise consultant Dan Elitzer. In the wake my back and forth with Martin Brookes over the role of guilt in social investing, Dan left a comment that I want to share.

My objection to Martin feeling guilty about making a non-optimized charitable donation focused on the need for empathy in philanthropy to not be displaced by logic. But Dan took the argument a step further and argues that ignoring the empathic urge undermines philanthropic effectiveness.

Dan writes:

Rather than look at Martin’s gift as a betrayal of his social investment ideals, I think it is more productive to see it as a positive act of consumption and parenting. Instead of viewing his donation to the donkey sanctuary as replacing a more effective act of philanthropy, look at it as replacing the purchase of a toy or movie or other consumer product or service unconnected to charity. Certainly the joy he and his daughter received from his donation to the animal sanctuary was more “meaningful” than an equivalent amount of joy from some non-philanthropic activity.

I agree that the logical conclusion of Martin’s line of thinking would be that “we should all feel bad that we spend a penny on anything discretionary.” Inequality and injustice would cease to exist if we all felt compelled by the same moral compass that directs Martin. Unfortunately, we don’t all feel that way, and it is unproductive for people like Martin to spend too much time self-flagellating over such matters. Denying ourselves all “unnecessary” comforts does not lead to a mental state in which we are suited to effect good works on a larger scale. Granted, we all need to find the right balance for ourselves between absolute hedonism and strict abstention, but wasting too much time ruminating on the subject just prevents us from moving on with the important work we have to do.

To Sean’s larger questions about the role of guilt in the nonprofit sector and the obligation to right inefficiencies vs. giving with our emotions, I say we need to be aware of the role of guilt and other emotions (both rational and irrational) and better understand how they affect giving. Network for Good and Sea Change Strategies recently put out a fantastic (and free) ebook by Katya Andresen, Alia McKee, and Mark Rovner, which uses learnings from the discipline of behavioral economics to help explain why people so often make irrational decisions, especially when it comes to charity. The title is Homer Simpson for Nonprofits, and you can download it here. It offers actionable steps for nonprofits to better align their communications and fundraising strategies with the way people actually make decisions, not the way we think they SHOULD make decisions.

One of the principals discussed in the book is the relative strength of social norms over market norms. If we deny the role emotions play in philanthropy, we step away from effectiveness, not towards it. Rather than beat ourselves up when we give “inefficiently,” let’s strive to direct that energy to better understanding what led us to make that irrational choice and how we can better help our rationally preferred causes take advantage of the factors that drove us to give to our emotionally preferred cause.

Dan brings up the role of the emerging discipline of behavioral economics in helping us understand how people actually behave rather than how we think they should behave. Behavioral economics is a favorite topic of mine and one that I think can lead to great insights in philanthropy (I’ve just downloaded the eBook Dan points to).

As I work to craft the Tactical Philanthropy track at the Social Capital Markets conference, I want to follow up on the suggestion of Duke University’s Ed Skloot to include a session about what philanthropy can learn from behavioral economics. But I’m at a bit of a loss about how to structure such a panel and focus the conversation.

Do you have any thoughts about how to create a fantastic panel discuss about the intersection of behavioral economics and philanthropy? If so, leave a comment or shoot me an email!

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Editorials | Rethink capping itemized charitable deductions | Seattle Times Newspaper: "he center's estimate is a 4.8-percent reduction in charitable donations. That is 4.8 percent of a very large number, or a $3.87 billion reduction in itemized giving by affected households.That sum equals the combined budgets of very large charitable agencies, amounts of money unlikely to be made up in

Gaston student seeking 'online' contributions for food bank record effort | school, food, hopes - Local News - Gaston Gazette: "To give the project a boost, organizers have created a virtual food drive.Donors can visit a Web site and click on virtual donations with an assigned dollar amount. Money pledged online will be used to purchase food on the big day."

City Brights: Marina Park : Thin Mints in the Freezer: "always like asking girls about their sale. What are your goals? I bought my cookies from a 5th grader in front of our local grocery store. Her troop plans to raise enough money to go horseback riding and to purchase books to donate to a public school."

Checkoff California Month Declared to Encourage Charitable Giving on State Tax Return -- LOS ANGELES, March 10 /PRNewswire/ --: "LOS ANGELES, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- To remind Californians how simple it is to make a contribution to one or more of the charitable funds participating in the state's voluntary tax check-off program, the month of March has been declared Checkoff California Month."

• The Social Sector’s Micro Problem – Full Contact Philanthropy David Henderson makes the case that the social sectors current interest in "micro" solutions is misplaced and won't lead to the big changes that we need. (tags: philanthropy)

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