Insights on Change Blog

by Kim Ammann Howard

Recently, I’ve been thinking about new tools that can help present information in a visually engaging way. More than ever before, we are able to easily and cheaply gather and share such information. This has generated vast amounts of visual content; on YouTube alone, 24 hours of videos are uploaded each minute. However, as we know, more of anything doesn’t always equal better; sometimes it just means more. Below are some examples of tools that visually present information in a way that made me stop and think about an action I could take, how I could incorporate the tool into my own practice and colleagues who might have an opportunity to use the tool:

• Wordle is a free online service that creates “word clouds.” The site analyzes imported text and generates visual displays of words that appear most frequently in the source text. The images show the most common words with greater prominence by increasing font size and using color. The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently surveyed nonprofit fundraising staff about their favorite blogs in the nonprofit world and created a word cloud based on the results.
• GapMinder is a free online tool that people can use to create maps that show the progression (or lack of progression) in human development. Through this program, users choose among hundreds of indicators (e.g., unemployment, literacy, life expectancy rates) to create maps that move and shift along a timeline. For example, taking advantage of the attention on the World Cup, one user asked the question whether rich countries are better at soccer by creating a visual display through GapMinder that shows qualifying nation’s soccer ranking relative to the nation’s income per person.
• HealthyCity is a free online California mapping tool that allows users to locate public services, analyze demographic and residential data, create easy-to-read maps and share data projects across organizations. Recently, the Advancement Project utilized their Healthy City mapping tool to coordinate efforts for the 2010 Census and ensure a better count of “hard-to-count” communities.
• Prezi is an online tool to create visually stimulating presentations. Prezi allows users to follow a story line through a presentation and zoom into specific sections for emphasis. In 2009, writer James Geary utilized Prezi at the TED Conference to visualize his presentation about the influence of metaphors on people’s thinking.

Many of the existing tools, those above and others, are easily accessible through the Web and in most cases are even free – something that is critical for many of the nonprofits with whom we collaborate. As we identify and experiment with new tools, and maybe even create our own, let’s share our experiences about how they help us to tell important stories of change.

By Kim Ammann Howard

Everyday, information permeates most aspects of our lives. Rapid advances in technology and our resulting ability to collect and share information takes place at a scale that was hard to imagine, even ten years ago. For many of us, this information explosion results in a “love-hate” relationship that oscillates between invigorating and overwhelming depending on the moment.

The Economist’s recent special issue report “Data, data everywhere” reflects on how, in our information-centered economy, various forms of data have become the new raw material of business in the industrial data revolution we find ourselves in. While other industries continue to struggle during this down economy, the data management and analytics industry flourishes; currently estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, it is growing annually at about 10%. The appearance of new definitions to measure available information is just one indication of these swift changes—gigabytes, which in the only distant past seemed so large, has been quickly surpassed by exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes. While the report focuses on compelling stories of how information is transforming business practices, I wondered about the implications for the nonprofit sector. To what extent can we further harness technology-induced data and tools to transform nonprofit practices? How might we use:

• Data exhaust, the valuable information left from the trail of internet users’ clicks,
• Broader and easier access to public information from the biggest generator and collector of data—the government (e.g., www.data.gov),
• Cloud computing, in which the internet is used as a platform to collect, store and process data, allowing organizations to lease computing power when they need it rather than buying expensive equipment, and
• Open source software, which allows the examination and presentation of data without the purchase of expensive and complicated software packages and updates (e.g., Google Analytics, a free software that provides in-depth reporting on Web site usage).
• Hand held devices and other new technologies that facilitate quicker and cheaper collection and use of information across users and sites.

Whether we like it or not, we are part of a grand experiment of how information will impact our lives. For those of us committed to the nonprofit sector, we are at an exciting moment to influence how these new found technologies can propel us towards the change that we want to see.

By Ellen Irie

Capacity building has been a leading issue in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors for over a decade. This is a good thing. The increased focus has provided nonprofits with time and resources to attend to the underlying structures, competencies and processes that enable them to be more efficient and effective in their mission-related work.

In the last several years, “greening” has also become a topic of much discussion. While greening is a relatively young term that lacks a consistent definition, it generally relates to making a place or processes more environmentally friendly and ecologically sustainable.

I would like to posit—promote even—bringing these two concepts together into the “greening of organizational capacity.” Currently, for nonprofit organizations, green practices are often an add-on—something to do when resources permit (e.g., printing on recycled paper or increasing electronic communication and transactions). But what if being green was essential to strong organizational capacity? I’m not just talking about adding environmental elements into program outcomes, which may be an appropriate path for some nonprofits. I’m talking about green thinking and practices being critical to strong organizational capacity—enabling a nonprofit to reach programmatic outcomes.

Can the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors “green” the frameworks we use to understand organizational capacity? Can we move beyond greening as a feel-good or compliance issue to a core capacity element that is essential for efficiency and effectiveness—not just “nice to have,” but “need to have?” What will this take? Stay tuned for my next post on some specific ideas – and I welcome any of your thoughts as well.

By Lande Ajose

In liberal California, diverse philanthropic leadership may not appear to be much of a conversation. After all, a quick look at many of our leading foundations—James Irvine Foundation, The California Endowment, the California HealthCare Foundation—as well as some notable community foundations—California Community Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and the East Bay Community Foundation—would suggest that the issue of diversifying leadership is a thing of the past. Yet according to a recent national report by the Council on Foundations, only 20% of new foundation CEOs are from diverse backgrounds. So what gives?

A few recent publications show that the issue of diversifying the leadership tier is alive and well.  The Council report summarized a fall 2009 convening in which executive search consultants and philanthropic leaders lamented the field’s lack of diversity and mused about whether there were actual career pathways to becoming a foundation leader, and how to tread such a path. Also last fall, Vincent Robinson of The 360 Group suggested in Responsive Philanthropy that the quest for “celebrity leaders” means there is an infinitesimally small pool of candidates to choose from. A key issue it seems is that foundations’ boards, which are notorious for their lack of diversity, prefer to look outside of philanthropy for their next leader, and even then, only to those individuals who have held similar executive positions. Conclusion? As Robinson says, the pool is infinitesimally small.

Even so, pointing to the leaders of many of our California foundations reflects a narrow understanding of leadership. While leadership is often focused on the individual, it is most often carried out by a select group that includes the board and senior leadership team, and that is where diversity is woefully lacking. Diversifying the entire leadership infrastructure of foundations is the critical next step in creating philanthropic institutions worthy of the causes they are serving.

Foundations need increased pathways, not only for diverse leaders interested in CEO positions, but also for the next generation of board and senior leadership team members. Yet the impetus for this panoply of diversity needs to come from a deeper place: it needs to come from the field’s acknowledgement that the work we are doing in our respective organizations is best served by having a multiplicity of leaders who can think differently about our social problems because their relationship to those problems is different. It means recognizing that a diverse leadership infrastructure is essential to the achievement of mission.

By Kim Ammann Howard

Coaching, when done well, can result in breakthrough changes for leaders, their organizations and over time the individuals and communities that they serve. It has been used to enhance nonprofit leadership and organizational effectiveness in a variety of ways ranging from renewed commitment to nonprofit work due to better work-life balance, to stronger senior leadership teams and boards due to clarification of roles and responsibilities, to shifts in roles from an internal to external focus due to more frequent and effective delegation.

Over the past few years, I have had the pleasure of learning about the experience of nonprofit coaching from hundreds of individuals, including nonprofit leaders who have received coaching, coaches who have worked with these leaders and funders who have supported coaching. I have been struck by the power of coaching, not only in facilitating and accelerating change, but in coaching’s ability to bring about breakthrough change—changes that leaders have been hoping, or needing, to make but have a varied history of less than satisfying attempts.

What makes coaching unique? Its power lies in its confidential, tailored and real-time nature. Leaders are able to bring their most salient concerns to the coaching relationship and consider solutions for themselves and their organizations—something that is especially important for leaders, such as CEOs, who typically experience a high degree of isolation in their position. Coaching addresses the porous boundaries between leaders’ current positions, their personal lives and their career paths in ways that many other types of supports, such as leadership trainings and organizational consulting, do not.

If coaching can be so effective, why doesn’t it happen more often? While the business world has embraced coaching for years, and spends over $1 billion on coaching annually, in the nonprofit sector, coaching remains a fairly emerging practice. To facilitate its practice, it is important that more people recognize that coaching is best utilized as a reward for high performing and promising leaders rather than a tool to fix problem behaviors.

What needs to take place to increase the use of coaching? Early adopters of coaching need to share what they learn about coaching with the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors so that people fully understand its value. This will help nonprofit leaders to better understand what coaching is and what it is not; when and how to use it; and enable them to fully appreciate how a relatively small investment of resources can have an enormous pay off.

To read more about what we have learned, please see our coaching action guides for grantmakers, nonprofits and coaches on our website. An online toolkit that includes FAQs, tools and case studies to help inform nonprofit and grantmaking decision making about coaching can be found at either of our partners’ websites: www.compasspoint.org or www.geofunders.org.

By Jennifer Curry Villeneuve

Calls for more and better evidence of programmatic outcomes echo through the nonprofit and philanthropic world. These appeals get louder with the intersection of increased needs in the community during tight economic times and the pressures to accomplish more with fewer resources. When planned and implemented well, evaluation can address the important questions of how supports are used and their impact, while also increasing an organization’s ability to refine and strengthen program goals and implementation towards more effective and efficient practice. In addition, high quality evaluation can inform future work.

A primary priority for evaluation is to decide what matters most to the organization or program being evaluated through the process of determining a learning agenda. Next is the process of deciding who can best inform the process before settling on how and when to collect  information, analyze findings and plan for using the results in the organization. Before planning  evaluation activities, though, it is important to keep in mind that while learning through the evaluation process can reap all the benefits listed above, organizations vary greatly in their readiness and capacity for conducting meaningful evaluation activities. Determining one’s capacity and readiness is extremely important and should come first.

BTW recently developed and tested an Evaluation Capacity Diagnostic Tool, which is designed to help organizations assess their readiness to take on many types of evaluation activities. It captures information on organizational context and the evaluation experience of staff. The tool has multiple uses, including pinpointing particularly strong areas of capacity as well as areas for improvement and can calibrate changes over time in an organization’s evaluation capacity. In addition, the process of asking questions about capacity can lead to staff brainstorming about how their organization can enhance evaluation capacity by building on existing evaluation experience and skills.

Two major components constitute the assessment of an organization’s readiness and capacity for evaluation: Organizational context and staff experience with evaluation. Each  contributes in different ways to determining appropriate levels of readiness, and thus determining “right size” evaluation activities.

Organizational Context. First and foremost in determining an organization’s ability to learn from its evaluation efforts is assessing the organizational culture and practices related to learning and reflection. An organization needs more than commitment, interest and experience;  resources for evaluation such as time, appropriate staff roles and responsibilities and on-going support for evaluation contribute greatly to ensuring that learning is integrated into everyday operations.

Staff Experience with Evaluation. Clearly related to an organization’s ability to conduct evaluation is having a basic understanding of evaluation. This experience can range from designing data collection processes to possessing the analytical skills to make connections between evaluation findings and programmatic intentions.

While the sense of urgency to provide more and better evidence of programmatic outcomes and impact grows, evaluation and other form of organizational learning are valuable tools that can inform planning and operations alike. But, like any tool, getting the most out of it is highly correlated with being ready and knowing how to use it effectively and efficiently. That’s where BTW can help.

For more information on BTW’s diagnostic tool, please contact us.

By Ellen Irie

Good evaluation depends on integration. Integration with what? Integration into the daily and ongoing work of organizations dedicated to addressing pressing social problems and bringing about social change.

Evaluation is fundamentally about learning, and it involves much more than just collecting, analyzing and reporting on data. It is not just about accountability; nor is it just about proving assumptions. Yes, for evaluation you need good data—and I would argue, multiple types of data. And yes, evaluation can also help ensure accountability and establish cause and effect. But at its core, evaluation should support learning, and learning should be an integral part of doing social change work. Evaluation is not an add-on—something to do from time to time, only when there is special funding or spare time—and who has spare time anyway.

From working with scores of nonprofits and foundations over the years, I have found that evaluation efforts are most valuable when they are integrated into an organization’s routine practices. For example, developing measurement metrics for both the short and longer term is as essential to the process of planning for new or expanded programming as determining how you are going to staff the efforts. Data collection activities are best incorporated into the ongoing procedures and tools that a program uses. Furthermore, reflecting on the implications of data analysis is not just an activity for funders or board members. Program staff need access to information as well as time scheduled into their regular staff and program meetings to review the information and consider what it tells them about their accomplishments and where they can make adjustments to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Of course, there is a time and place for independent, third-party evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of program models and approaches. Likewise, there is great work going on right now in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors to create shared measurement metrics and knowledge-sharing platforms. These are important pieces of work and should continue to be encouraged, but they should punctuate the daily practices of most nonprofit organizations, rather than be the norm.

The source of the greatest innovation potential in the nonprofit sector is not from external sources but from within the very programs and organizations that are doing the social change work and are dedicating their time, energy and passions to improve the lives of individuals and communities each and every day. These are the people who need tools and processes—i.e., good evaluation—that will support their exploration and creativity and help to unleash that potential.

By Lande Ajose

In the private sector, generally speaking, there is generous room for mistakes. In an R&D function, private companies can spend a lot of money trying and testing a problem, and failing, without the fear of having to make their learning known. Eventually they unearth the positive lessons, bury the negative lessons and move on.

For nonprofits dependent on foundations for resources, R&D is a little tougher. Particularly in this era of accountability, nonprofits are ever-conscious of spending their resources on something that delivers more quantifiable outcomes and impact—or at the very least, some best practices or lessons learned.

In a double whammy for nonprofits funded by foundations, they are also obliged to “learn in public.” NGOs spend a lot of time writing progress and grant reports that give their funders a front-row view of the sausage-making, when they would almost certainly be more comfortable just serving the sausage. It’s a lot easier to learn in public when there’s not so much at stake…like next year’s operating budget.

In The Revolution of Scientific Thinking, Thomas Kuhn makes an argument that significant breakthroughs in knowledge only come about after a long series of smaller breakthroughs. What does that mean for nonprofits that exist in an environment where risk taking, experimentation and making mistakes is not generally permissible?

How can we bring about innovation and new ideas without a chance to make mistakes first?

Luckily, there are some things foundations can do, many of which are already “best practices”:

• Commit to Longer Multi-year Funding
  The usual conversation about multi-year funding extends just three years out. Yet few organizations are able to create the kind of impact they want to see in that period of time. In a three-year timeframe, nonprofits focus on how to achieve their outcomes quickly, not on what might be the best way to achieve their outcomes. But what if the industry standard for multi-year finding were five years instead of three? How “freed up” would nonprofits feel to be creative, experiment and trust their funders to be thought partners or critical friends, rather than banks? How revolutionary would that be?

• Provide General Operating Support
  Part and parcel of multi-year funding is providing general support rather than project dollars. Much, of course, has already been written on this. While project dollars may provide some degree of accountability (showing how a foundation’s resources are being spent), they rarely lead to dramatic new insights or findings about how to do the work. They don’t allow a nonprofit to try a new programmatic approach, hire a crackerjack staff person or engage in a strategic thinking exercise to resolve a particular problem. It’s general operating support that provides a cushion for dramatic advances in an organization’s thinking. With more support like this, nonprofits really could change the world.

• Foundation Advisory Council
  Too often, nonprofits lose out on the very value foundations have to offer: their extraordinary insights and bird’s-eye perspective on a problem. Instead, nonprofits treat foundation staff as people to keep at arm’s length, unless and until you’re looking for dough. This is quite rational. There’s a power imbalance between nonprofits and foundations. Every time a program officer opens his or her mouth to be helpful, that friendly suggestion may in fact be more of an edict in “friendly suggestion” clothing. This dynamic is amplified by foundation staff themselves; one step removed from the action, they often like the process of tinkering in an organization’s business. Yet there must be a way to more fully capitalize on the knowledge that program staff bring to bear and to mitigate their impulse to tinker. What if nonprofits developed a specific forum, such as an advisory council, where foundation partners could be engaged and consulted for their expertise and offer their perspective? This would help channel program staff’s energy and allow the nonprofit to control the agenda, providing some parameters for the foundation’s contributions.An advisory council of program officers might also have a self-policing effect. With a collection of program officers from multiple institutions in the room, no one foundation’s perspective would hold sway; instead, the foundation staff could focus on the problems the nonprofit is trying to solve, rather their own foundation’s agenda.

The irony in all this is that most funders intentions are pure; they really do want to find productive ways to help their grantees and ensure organizational stability and success.

Now, if the field would just change its own best practices enough to allow nonprofits to have safer failures and, consequently, revolutionary breakthroughs….