White Courtesy Telephone

Sector Agnosticism

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I’ve been hearing it mostly from younger people entering the nonprofit field: You can do good for society in any sector—nonprofit, business, or government.

The lines between the sectors have blurred, I’m reminded, and it’s the IRS that forces incorporated entities into nonprofit and for-profit boxes. The social entrepreneur who starts a profit-making venture to support her charitable work shows us how to free our not-for-profit minds. Blended entities such as B-corporations promise double and even triple bottom lines. If you’re hip to the jive, you avoid using words like nonprofit altogether.

Am I imagining this or do I sometimes detect a bit of a sneer in all this sector agnosticism?

Belittlements aside, the view that nonprofit designation is largely a matter of IRS convention—or worse, a failure of entrepreneurial imagination—appears to be gaining currency.

I understand the frustration some people feel with the normal course of business at many not-for-profits. But our sector agnosticism overlooks an uncomfortable truth: there are important social goods nobody wants to pay for. If it really were possible for a business-minded individual to turn a hefty profit by providing health care to the penniless, for example, it would have happened long ago.

R U a philanthrocapitalist? If you are, I’ll eat my shoe if you can convince a hundred investors to buy stock in a company that promises to make a killing by helping returning prisoners reintegrate into their communities.

The nonprofit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of imagination or of will, but rather a sober assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely. If you’re selling a product like the iPhone, you’re in luck. If not, you might need to resort to begging like the rest of us not-for-profit shlumps.

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Image source: Sketchpot

New Nonprofit Study Promises to Change Everything

A groundbreaking new study by the Institute for Better Philanthropy concludes that sound management, good governance, and smart fundraising are strongly correlated with nonprofit success.

“We weren’t completely surprised by the findings,” commented Zach Skywalker, CEO of the 2Cool4U Foundation which sponsored the study.  “We’ve been saying for years that a completely new paradigm is needed for nonprofit work.”

New Wine in Old Skins: Attracting the Next Generation of Nonprofit Leaders

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Attend any earnest discussion of nonprofit issues and there’s frequently an elephant in the room.  On the issue of how to attract and retain the best nonprofit talent, the room that houses all those elephants in the room is, in my view, the chronic and significant undercapitalization of nonprofit organizations. 

“Undercapitalization” is a fancy way of saying that nonprofits are always madly scrambling for money.  This undercapitalization leads to fundraising burnout (figuring prominently in both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead  reports*), underinvestment of time and money in staff capacity, lack of attention to new staff, and an impoverished organizational infrastructure.

But chronic undercapitalization also exacerbates something I’ll call the nonprofit “frump factor.”  That’s frump as in “frumpy.”  Think Roz Chast doing a cartoon about a bake sale for the local 4-H Club.

A friend and I were watching a film about the making of Cloverfield, one of those big budget summer blockbusters featuring extraordinary special effects: thirty-storey monsters tearing off the head of the Statue of Liberty and hurling it down Broadway—that kind of thing.  At one point my friend, a veteran of nonprofit work, turned to me and asked, “Why can’t our sector do anything as cool as that?”

His question gave me pause.  You’ll have investors lining up to get a piece of the Cloverfield franchise, but few who’d expect to make a buck by housing the homeless.  To my friend’s point: there is something yawn-inspiring about the way we describe our work and communicate its impact to would-be employees and other audiences.  We invite the idea that nonprofits are pokey, unglamorous, 19th century places to work, mired in process and wed to outdated business models.

A widespread misunderstanding and undervaluation of the sector contributes to the nonprofit frump factor.  We tell our parents we want to be environmental advocates, and they roar back, “What the hell kind of job is that?”

In this country, we’re not for-profit organizations; abroad, we’re not governmental.  We’re the in-between sector, the neither-this-nor-that sector, the invention of IRS lawyers and policy wonks.

We’re the sector that does things nobody really wants to pay for.

In the Ready to Lead study, we saw significant “sector agnosticism,” the notion that a person could contribute to the public good in any sector.  And I increasingly run into people who wish we’d save ourselves the embarrassment by simply dumping the term “nonprofit” altogether.

Yet I also remember what attracted me to the sector years ago, and what keeps me committed to it.  I know that each day tens of thousands of nonprofit workers in my city are getting out of bed to do somebody an unambiguous good.  I’m convinced—foolishly perhaps—that after great art and literature, nonprofits are the last remaining civilizing force, this function having been long ago been abandoned by government, business, and the media.  I believe strongly that nonprofit work is the glue that keeps us bound together as a society.  And I believe that nonprofits and the foundations that fund them are the last institutions capable of shaking a fist at government and business when a fist-shaking is called for.

We can do much more to make this work appear less frumpy.  But we’d be challenged to make it any more meaningful.

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* Full disclosure: I was one of the authors of the Ready to Lead report; my foundation funded and helped create both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead reports.

March Metrics Madness

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I was recently invited by Bill Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy & Civic Renewal, to speak on a panel titled Metrics Mania.  Panelists were asked to comment on an essay commissioned from Gary Walker, the founding director of Public/Private Ventures, on the subject of evaluating social programs.  Here is the text of my remarks ...

Bill Schambra saw my role on this panel as the guy who when asked about metrics replies “metrics schmetrics,” but I’m going to have to disappoint him—to some extent.  Measurement and evaluation, when done properly, are not just a bit of value-added for philanthropic or nonprofit work, they’re absolutely essential.  Only a fool would disagree with that proposition. 

But here I mean not just the kinds of formal evaluations described by Gary Walker in his essay, but informal evaluation as well: the kinds of course corrections we naturally make when we embark on a project, take a false step, and adjust what we do accordingly.  Evaluation is not and should not be the sole province of the highly compensated consultant.  We evaluate all the time; our own eyes and ears notice things the most astute consultant will never notice; and we’ll often be our own worst critics.

Now here’s where the metrics schmetrics comes in, perhaps: We’ve written more nonsense about evaluation than just about any other subject in philanthropy.  Worries about evaluation, engendered in part by logic models the length of whale intestines, have become the math anxiety of the philanthropic world.

My general thesis—if I could call it that—is that from the perspective of somebody like Mr. Walker whose organization has been commissioned to conduct lucrative, large-scale evaluations of social programs (lucrative by nonprofit standards), the Impact Revolution might seem like a good thing.  But from the ground, from the perspective of many people working in community-based organizations, this so-called revolution has brought with it new sources of irritation, new ways of adding meaningless make-work to already overburdened nonprofit staff members.

It has not been a people’s revolution, in other words, but rather one championed by elites—like myself, I’m afraid— sometimes unable to see far enough beyond our own measuring sticks to understand the limitations of formal evaluation techniques, and the trade-offs in staff time and other resources that these formal techniques require.

R U Ready 2 Lead?

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Assuming the impending nonprofit workforce crisis is real and not imagined, we have some work to do.  The latest report on the subject, Ready to Lead: Next Generation Leaders Speak Out,* reviews the various factors that will make nonprofit leadership recruitment more difficult in the years to come.  The report is based on a survey of close to 6,000 mostly younger next generation leaders—the largest survey of its kind to date.

Retiring Baby Boomers and the money worries of Gen Xers and Gen Yers will constrain the supply of would-be leaders even as nonprofits are drawn into an all-out “war for talent” with the government and business sectors.  Meanwhile, a lack of support and mentorship from incumbent executives will make it difficult for younger staffers to develop the skills they need to lead a nonprofit organization.

We’ll soon see if market forces will, as some predict, smooth out the bumps in the road ahead.  It’s possible that with more openings in the leadership ranks, more young people will look for careers in the nonprofit sector.  Sector leaders may rally and create new training programs and new incentives for charitable work.

I’d worry less about the impact of this impending crisis if the sector were, in general, better bankrolled.  Instead, charitable organizations operate in an environment of chronic scarcity as they struggle to meet the demand for services.  In this kind of environment, current leaders neglect to nurture the younger talent in their ranks; board members lose touch with the overhwelming fundraising burdens on executive directors.

But if there’s a theme that runs through these various workforce reports, it might be this: Because it’s so hard to raise charitable dollars, those of us who direct the work of the sector—current executive directors and board members, in particular—are frequently tempted to recruit and retain good talent on the cheap; but our investments in staff are the absolute last places we should be looking to cut costs.

It used to be that if one applicant turned his nose up at a nonprofit job, there’d be three waiting in the wings to apply.  We’re moving into an era when the demographics will turn sharply against us.

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* I was one of the authors of this report together with Marla Cornelius of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and Patrick Corvington of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  I serve as vice president for programs and communications at the Meyer Foundation, one of the report’s primary sponsors.

The Axiology of Nonprofit Impact

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In a celebrated 2001 essay, wordsmith Tony Proscio asked, “Are grantmakers a species of investor, building benevolent enterprises that produce a measurable return for society, or are they more passive enablers of good, seeking mainly to support those who pursue charitable ends by whatever path?”

He was commenting on the tendency of the foundation sector to import the language of business while remaining largely oblivious to its insights.  But his question still manages to provoke.  The debate over the “measurable return” of charitable enterprises rages on between the wielders of business metrics and the Luddites who oppose them.

The Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington attempts to stake a middle ground with a new report titled, Beyond Charity: Recognizing Return on Investment.  The report includes the kinds of cost-saving arguments familiar to many of us: each dollar spent on Johnny’s education saves us tens of thousands of dollars in prison costs and helps turn Johnny into a productive citizen who pays taxes to support local schools and fire fighters.  But the report also attempts to highlight nonprofit contributions that are a little harder to quantify—strengthening community, improving the quality of life, stimulating reform.

I understand the need for return-on-investment arguments, but I also worry about their impact on audiences that might have a limited understanding of the civilizing effects of the nonprofit sector.

What’s the ROI, for example, on a provocative question that interrupts, if only for a moment, our relentless consumerism and reminds us of what we once aspired to become?  And where do we learn to distinguish between those cases in which metrics apply and those in which social goods are less susceptible to measurement? 

It used to be that notions like “character” and “good citizenship” figured prominently in arguments for maintaining the quality of a good public education.  Now it’s mostly about the dreary but important business of building a better workforce.

What do we lose when we attempt to convert every currency to a single coin?

Selling Soap, Saving Lives

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Susan Herr’s recent post on Filmanthropy raises some interesting questions in aesthetics: Why is it so difficult to marry art with advocacy?  Why is so much political art shrill or heavy-handed?

Population Communications International, a New York-based nonprofit organization, has, for the past twenty years, pioneered the use of telenovelas in the fight against poverty, AIDS, and other social ills.  The organization has politely rejected every socially conscious script I’ve sent them, including this latest, titled, La Flor Apolonia:

(Apolonia is a beautiful woman with big beauty-parlor hair and long nails.  Her dress makes a small “X” across her chest, barely concealing her breasts.  Marta, her closest friend, wears a white mini-skirt, a bright blue Spandex top, and long, bangly earrings.  She has applied her makeup with unmatched zeal.  The two women speak in quick, unaccented Spanish.)

Apolonia:  Enrique told me that his parents had disowned him.  I pitied him, Marta—you’ve seen those big brown eyes of his!  (Apolonia juts out her chin defiantly.)  The barbarian repaid my kindness by forcing himself on me.  (The orchestra swells, heavy on the strings, as Apolonia clenches her teeth.)  Now I’m pregnant with Enrique’s baby and I’m afraid I might have AIDS!  (Music sting.)

Marta:  You were clearly born to suffer, Apolonia!  Listen, I know a woman who works at the local health collective.  Just the other day she was telling me how they had convened diverse community stakeholders around issues relating to the sourcing of positive health outcomes for economically-challenged persons of female.  Let’s go see her …

What’s the secret of seamlessly integrating the preachy earnestness of poverty-fighting messages, say, into melodramas starring sexy Latinas and hunky vaqueros?  Apart from being one of the greatest playwrights of the last century, what made Bertolt Brecht so good at using theatre as a forum for political ideas?

America's Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member

On the eve of the consumerist orgy we call “the holidays,” we republish this classic Phil Anthropoid satire.  It’s a cheeky take-off on America’s Next Top Model, a reality television show in which 13 beautiful young women compete for a grand prize that includes multi-page photo spreads in Seventeen magazine and lucrative modeling contracts.  Each week the competitors are given a new fashion challenge, and one of them is eliminated from the competition.  Our colleague Phil explores what would happen if nonprofit staff members were forced out of their comfort zone and into the world of modeling …

ANNOUNCER	Tonight on America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member, it’s down to the final three: Arthur, the 57-year-old executive director from Services, Inc. in Hendersonville, North Carolina; Bebe, the 43-year-old artistic director from the Granite Falls Community Theater in Oregon; and Cheryl, the fiery 26-year-old communications coordinator from People for a Better Universe Overall. As the final elimination looms, each contestant faces his or her own special challenge. Arthur must overcome the limitations of his geography and upbringing ...
ARTHUR	Nobody in Hendersonville calls minorities “people of color.” What does that make me? A person of clear?
ANNOUNCER	Bebe needs to prove she’s open-minded enough to work in any nonprofit environment ...
BEBE	Well, yes, I did make some unguarded remarks about Cheryl during the Nonprofit Advocacy photo shoot, but these New York princesses really chap my ass!
ANNOUNCER	Cheryl needs to find a style that her more experienced colleagues can connect with …
CHERYL	I mean, if we’re about progressive social change, why don’t we just say so?
ANNOUNCER	Tensions run high as our three contestants approach their final challenge.
	(Scene: The inside of the contestants’ apartment. The contestants are in various stages of undress as the camera pans to a large envelope perched on an easel. Bebe’s the first to see it. She snatches up the envelope, tears it open, and reads the message out loud.)
BEBE	“A limousine will pick you up at noon for today’s challenge. Once you get to the studio, you’ll have 15 minutes to throw together an outfit for a photo shoot on the theme, ‘Haute Couture Site Visit.’ Here’s the catch: You don’t know what your program officer is going to ask you because you didn’t write the proposal!”
	(Music sting. The three contestants shriek. Close-up on Bebe.)
BEBE	Oh my God!
CHERYL	You look like a scabby old egret, Arthur. You’re going down!
ARTHUR	Shut up, bitch.
	(Shot of limousine picking up the contestants at their apartment and dropping them off at the studio. They’re led into a room filled with clothes racks, shoes, and accessory bins.)
MESSENGER	You have 15 minutes. Go to it, contestants!
	(We see tantalizing images of the contestants pulling clothes from the racks and trying on shoes. As Arthur undresses, the camera does a tight close-up on his boxer shorts which are decorated with little fox hounds. Bebe uses her considerable girth to push Cheryl out of the way as she reaches for a leather belt. Cross fade to the judges’ room where we see the three contestants fidgeting in front of a panel consisting of head judge Tyra Banks, fellow judges Jay Manuel and Twiggy, and guest judge Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector.)
JUDGE TYRA	Welcome, contestants. Today we’ll determine who moves on to the final round of America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member. Let’s start with you, Cheryl. Here’s your best photograph from today’s shoot. (Some of the judges roll their eyes, others sigh.) What were you trying to do here, Cheryl? (Cheryl is too shocked to respond.)
JUDGE TWIGGY	You look like the headmistress of a school for proctologists.
JUDGE DIANA	It’s very Senator Grassley—not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
CHERYL	(Defiantly.) Last week you said I needed to tone down my enervating youth and arrogance.
JUDGE JAY	The look isn’t working for you, Cheryl. It’s hyper-zombie, totally glacial.
	(Music sting as camera cuts to Cheryl who wistfully cracks her gum.)
JUDGE TYRA	You’re next, Arthur. Here’s your best photograph from today’s shoot. (The judges shake their heads.) Tell me about your outfit, Arthur.
ARTHUR	Well, I saw this tan bedspread and I thought I could use it as a scarf …
JUDGE JAY	You look like a giant buttocks.
JUDGE DIANA	Or perhaps something flatter, like the Principles for Good Governance report recently released by the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector ...
JUDGE TYRA	Hold that thought, Diana. (Coldly.) Arthur, I think we all agree you look like a giant buttocks. (Music sting as Arthur is left twisting in the wind.) Bebe, let’s look at your best photograph.
JUDGE JAY	The look is fierce!
JUDGE TWIGGY	I like how you use the nun shoes to balance the effect of the whip. Sister Bertrille meets Candidia Cruikshanks. (Camera cuts to Bebe, who smiles, exposing a row of yellow teeth.)
JUDGE TYRA	Bebe … (Suspense music as the camera cuts first to Arthur, then Cheryl, then Bebe.) … you’ll be moving on to the final round! Congratulations, girlfriend!
BEBE	(In tears, turning to Arthur and Cheryl.) Hah! Eat my dust! Eat my not-for-profit dust!
ANNOUNCER	When we return: Who will be America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member? ...

Innovations in Fundraising: Spinning Straw Men into Gold

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The October 20th New York Times brought us this item*:

After Rush Limbaugh referred to Iraq war veterans critical of the war as “phony soldiers,” the CEO of Clear Channel Communications, the parent company of Mr. Limbaugh's syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, received a letter of complaint signed by 41 Democratic senators. Mr. Limbaugh decided to auction the letter, which he described as “this glittering jewel of colossal ignorance,” for charity, and he pledged to match the price, dollar for dollar.

On Thursday night, Mr. Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host, said he thought the letter would bring in as much as $1 million. He was wrong.

When the eBay auction closed yesterday afternoon, the winning bid was $2.1 million. It is the largest amount ever paid for an item sold on eBay to benefit a charity.

The money will go to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation Inc., a nonprofit organization in New Jersey that provides scholarships and other assistance to families of marines and federal law enforcement officials who die or are wounded in the line of duty. Mr. Limbaugh is a director of the organization, which had total revenues of $5.2 million last year.

Having made his own fortune by underestimating the intelligence of the American public, it was only a matter of time before Mr. Limbaugh would explore new markets.  People will pay top dollar, apparently, for the artifacts of boneheaded self-righteousness.

Mr. Limbaugh’s action suggests a new frontier for fundraisers.  Can the indicted members of nonprofit and foundation boards  make it up to their disgraced organizations by auctioning off their arrest warrants, for example, or their prison dungarees?  Suppose the housekeeper who dusts Alberto Gonzalez’s empty office (Mary, are you reading this?) were to donate to the ACLU the series of memos establishing the United States as a nation that tortures.  How much would these fetch on eBay?

Some of you will recall that several years ago, Mr. Limbaugh’s housekeeper, Wilma Cline, approached Florida authorities to reveal that she had acted as his drug buyer for years, illegally purchasing more than 30,000 painkillers.  Perhaps Mr. Limbaugh would consider auctioning off the court briefs that helped him avoid prosecution, or the master recording of the radio show in which he called defenders of medical marijuana “potheads.”

My advice to fundraisers: Hop on this gravy train as quickly as possible.  The bottom will fall out of the market once consumers realize the tokens of human folly and vice are in liberal supply.

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* “Critical Letter to Limbaugh Fetches $2 Million,” by Stephanie Strom.

Black Courtesy, White Courtesy: The Great ARNOVA Race Debate

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Editor’s note: Two weeks ago an ARNOVA member set off a campfire of controversy by warmly recommending the White Courtesy Telephone blog to his colleagues.  For those of you unfamiliar with the group, ARNOVA is an association of extremely intelligent people who study the nonprofit sector.  WCT investigative reporter Rachel Tension was able to obtain a transcript of the highly charged ARNOVA discussion, parts of which are reproduced below.  (We changed the participants’ names because we were too lazy to ask their permission to use their real names.)  In Washington, DC, it’s dog eat dog.  In academia, it’s the opposite, so we were frankly hesitant to approach the subject without some professional assistance.  We invited WCT semiotician-on-retainer, Monique Nescafé, to help interpret the transcript for us.  Dr. Nescafé’s work for the past several years has focused on neomaterialist narratives in the novels of Jennie Adams.  This is her first guest post with WCT …

I am so very happy to be invited to write for the White Telephone of Courtesy, and especially to comment on the post-capitalist discourse of ARNOVA members.  They say the American mind is closed.  No, my friends, he is wide open, like the pore of some gigantic sweat gland.

Consider this small exchange:

Alas, … I find the name [White Courtesy Telephone] unfortunate. It may indeed be useful but the title is off-putting.
—Betty

I am in the process of considering the title for my upcoming book, so I have titles on my mind.  Can you clarify what it is about the title of the White Courtesy Telephone blog that makes it off-putting? …
—Dorothy

I think the title of “white courtesy” gives the impression that there is something else possible like “black courtesy”—i.e. that there are disparate courtesies for different groups. Or even worse—that there is no other courtesy other than white courtesy.  I have been involved in discussions with other groups who would therefore find the title offensive. Unless of course you mean it ironically (like we don’t have white courtesy).  At the very least, I do not actually understand what “white courtesy” means.
—Betty

In her brilliant rejoinder,  Betty lays bare the racial insensitivity of the White Courtesy Telephone editors.  This is not in dispute: these editors often make light of subjects that would be better treated with reverential silence.  I applaud Betty.  Her act of problematization, of affirming a posttextual paradigm of reality—the impression of a racialized there-for-me—is, in my view, an intellectual tour de force.

How does she do it?  She describes herself as being in a superposition of affective eigenstates: while it’s true that she feels “put off,” she simultaneously postpones her feelings of offense as she considers an ironic reading of “white courtesy.”  She is put off, but she is not quite yet put off.  (A monk asks Dongshan Shouchu, “What is Buddha?” Dongshan answers, “Three pounds of flax.”)  And although Betty does not actually understand what “white courtesy” means, she complains about the phrase anyway.  If confusion is the first step to knowledge, then Betty is clearly very knowledgeable.

Betty also brilliantly presences the elided contextuality of the ARNOVA discourse by referring to “other groups” that would find the blog’s name offensive.  This kind of offense-by-proxy is the mark of a generous individual, willing to be offended not only for herself but on behalf of others as well.

And so, what is it ultimately that puts the “white” in White Courtesy Telephone?  Another ARNOVA commentator chimes in:

… we know words make a difference, so what I’m interested in is: why did the creators of white courtesy telephone pick that name, rather than, say, ‘black courtesy telephone,’ or just plain old ‘courtesy telephone’?

Was it in order to prompt this very discussion?

Or do white courtesy telephones have a special connotation not shared with courtesy telephones of other colours?

I may be exposing my ignorance here—but that’s because I’m ignorant.
—Nigel

Did Monsieur Ruesga, when he chose the name White Courtesy Telephone, choose it in order to “prompt this very discussion”?  It is possible, n’est-ce pas?  He might very well have anticipated the ARNOVA exchange as a sommelier anticipates a Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.  How delicious, to inquire after coloured telephones through the fog of a fine wine.  While these coloured telephones may have a special significance, we will henceforth, in deference to our subject, refer to them as telephones of colour.