“I Found My Tribe”
-
National Council of Nonprofits CEO Tim Delaney, Vice President Jennifer Chandler, and their colleagues put out a concise guide to key trends for the coming year which ought to be required reading for every nonprofit board. The report highlighted “Transparency About Outcomes” as one of these trends: “Because of the intense competition for financial resources, and donors’ desire to know where their contributed dollars are going, it continues to be important for charitable nonprofits to be transparent about not only their finances, but also their outcomes.”
- Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) President Phil Buchanan, who lent his intellect and self-deprecating humor to the “Do Funders Get It?” panel discussion at After the Leap, used his blog to shine light on the disconnect between what funders say they want to see from their grantees and what they’re willing to support. “If foundations want to see nonprofits achieve higher standards of evidence of effectiveness and be better at data collection and analysis that fuels improvement—and our research suggests they do—then they need to support nonprofits in doing that work.”
- Thanks to the talented Bridgespan team, Mario was given an opportunity to contribute thoughts to the “Giving That Gets Results” series on the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s website. In his interview, he implores funders to support executive management development and reward nonprofit leaders for making outcomes-based decisions.
- We recommend Jessica Benko’s Wired article “Reality Check: The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor,” about the unassuming but brilliant Harvard economist Michael Kremer and the “randomista movement” that is bringing more discipline to the field of international development. “In the realm of human behavior, just as in the realm of medicine, there’s no better way to gain insight than to compare the effect of an intervention to the effect of doing nothing at all,” writes Benko. “That means you need to climb down from the ivory tower and do some serious legwork in the places you’re trying to help.”
- The “Moneyball for Government” meme is spreading. Check out this blog post by Barbara Poppe, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. Poppe, who describes herself as an “activist at heart with a head for data,” writes with nuance and candor about her efforts to track progress in helping those who have no home. She acknowledges that one well-intentioned effort to help homeless veterans produced the opposite of the intended results. “The expectation was that by making the process easier … more Veterans experiencing chronic homelessness would be served. Unfortunately, the opposite seemed to occur…. The pressure to meet the key metrics drove providers to reach the easiest to serve not the hardest to serve.”
- Mazel tov to David Hunter for breaking the 6,500-download threshold for his Working Hard—and Working Well. (For context: only about 2% of the books published every year sell more than 5,000 copies.)
- We just read The Holy Grail of Public Leadership, by Adam Luecking, the CEO of Results Leadership Group. The book is a narrative accompaniment to the organization’s Results Scorecard 3.0 performance management system. We particularly liked the book’s clear definitions (e.g., “Measurable Impact is the difference between promoting awareness about HIV/AIDS and lowering infection rates by 30 percent across the most vulnerable segment of the population”) and the performance case studies in Appendix A.
Events for Raising Performance:
- “How to Involve People Served in Program Decision-Making, and How to Know If It’s Successful” webinar; January 16, 2014; PerformWell
- “Impact Leadership” conference; London; January 29, 2014; New Philanthropy Capital and Charity Finance Group
- “2014 Champions for Change: Leading a Backbone Organization for Collective Impact” workshop; Burlingame, CA; February 11-13, 2014; FSG, the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, and the Tamarack Institute
- Ready by 21 National Meeting; Covington, KY; April 22-24, 2014; The Forum for Youth Investment
Happy holidays to one and all,
Mario and Lowell Mario Morino is Chairman of the Morino Institute, Co-Founder and Founding Chair of Venture Philanthropy Partners, and author of the lead essay in Leap of Reason. Lowell Weiss is president of Cascade Philanthropy Advisors, co-editor of Leap of Reason, and advisor to the Leap of Reason initiative.Download Leap of Reason and Working Hard—and Working Well for free. Check out our suite of materials for strategic planning sessions, performance-management projects, professional development, board meetings, or graduate/undergrad classes. And encourage colleagues and stakeholders to sign up for monthly updates to help power their leap.