White Courtesy Telephone

Big Philanthropy in the Age of Covfefe

 

Gentleman: Finished?! Your portrait's a bit spare, isn't it?

Artist: On closer inspection, you really didn't give me much to work with.

Gentleman: Preposterous! Didn't you read my monograph on moral courage?

Artist: I must have missed it.

Too Hot For The Countess

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WCT blogger Albert Ruesga met the Countess Apraxina at a Tolstoi Foundation reception a few years back.  She offers a unique perspective on American culture and philanthropy.  “Alyosha” is a Russian nickname for “Alexei.”  She never properly learned Albert’s name ...

Dearest Alyosha—

Past two weeks have had terrible time sleeping! Riviera is furnace thanks to your Mr. Al Gore’s global warming. I have prescription for Ambiens size of golf balls, but they stop working, so am ask new boi toi Philippe to read me from your blonk. So dull, Alyosha. I am asleep before he reaches—how you say?—first semicolonk. Social justice this! Social justice that! Such blind and stupid fool you are, my lapushka, although I mean this only in nicest way. 

I have an e-mails from latest client, Fox News, telling me Ford Foundation was to blame for emancipation of serfs. What tragedy for Russia! I tell you, my little kotik, my Great Great Great Uncle Georgiy was, by all accounts, like father—almost god—to his serfs.  We did not need your philanthropy in Spas-Klepiki. Fortunately serfs on our estates died of disease long before anything like philanthropy became necessary. Mr. Darren Walker has much to answer for, you will believe me!

You write about empowerment of peasants, Alyosha, but you have never witness horrifying spectacle of toothless woman in headscarf breaking wind after potato harvest! Now you have peasant children streaming over your borders and your Mr. Hopey Changey flying them back to country of origin! Веры ридикулус! Hours after they eat every little pretzel on airplane, they are on your borders again! I am suggest to Fox News is more effective to spend little more money and fly children to Gaza Strip, but editors didn’t like idea because I couldn’t work in anti-gay angle.

I am go boating this afternoon with Michele Bachmann.  Will leave cell phone on.  Call me.

— Apraxina

White Courtesy Telephone Laff Fest

This post was prompted by the Countess Apraxina, currently the guest of Vladimir Putin at his Sevastopol dacha. She sent us this telex: “Alyosha, my little turd swallow, please help Apraxina! Send Pussy Riot quick! This dreary man does nothing but sit shirtless entire day displaying effete pectorals and reciting lines from Zhukovsky! ‘A black raven, its wings whistling / Drives above the sleigh / Prophetic wail affirming sadness!’ ... It is summer for God’s sake! Desperately need good laugh!” …

 Link: Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World

 

 

 

 

Lessons in Strategic Philanthropy: How To Do Things With Humans

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This post was conceived as a companion piece to an earlier post on theories of change, titled How to Cause Things in Philanthropy.

1. Engineering without the math. A colleague of mine once pointed out, to my great satisfaction, that as grantmakers we are in fact social engineers. I still feel the glow of this flattering assessment. A PRI here, a dab of cash there, and soon the social machinery is purring contentedly, ending homelessness in Cincinnati or reversing global warming.

That’s the ideal picture, of course. The machines whose wheels we grease invariably have human constituents. These humans snag on one another or break down altogether. Sometimes the entire machine just gets up and walks away.

2. Building a better social intervention. At times like these we might cast a wistful eye at the board game Mousetrap which has delighted children and adults since it was first introduced in 1963.

During the course of this game, players take turns building an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine whose sole purpose is to trap little plastic mice. What a joy to set the mousetrap in motion and watch it work! You turn a crank that rotates a gear that rotates another gear that causes a plastic boot to swing up and kick over a bucket containing a small metal ball that then rolls down a set of stairs and into a chute where it’s channeled to a contraption that dislodges another ball from its high perch whence it rolls into a bathtub and falls through the drain hole onto one end of a teeter board causing a little plastic man at the other end of the board to fly backwards and into a barrel that triggers the descent of the mouse cage.

Those of us who struggle to get our grantmaking interventions to function properly can’t help but marvel at this beautifully choreographed march of causes and effects.

The game also has, I believe, some important lessons for grantmakers and others who work in the Third Sector.

The spectacular predictability of this elaborate mousetrap depends on the fact that interactions between inanimate objects—gears, balls, chutes, and the like—are governed by well-known laws. These laws express in mathematical language the regularities that physicists and others observe in the behavior of matter.

Laws governing human interactions, by contrast, are fiendishly difficult to come by. Unlike the creators of the Mousetrap game, we don’t often have the luxury of encasing our human subjects in plastic and flinging them off the ends of teeter boards or causing them to fall against one another like dominoes.

How then, as good social engineers, can we get our humans to behave in predictable ways? Fortunately, there are regularities of human behavior—stunning regularities—that grantmakers can learn to exploit.

3. The inner-life of cocktail-tropic fauna. In a previous post I considered how causal chains can become ridiculously complicated as they lead from our grantmaking intervention to our hoped-for outcomes. This thwarts our attempts to develop meaningful theories of change for our work.

Causal chains can also become rather brittle: all the stars may be in alignment for moving from some cause to a given effect, from one link of the chain to the next; all the felicity conditions might be satisfied; and yet, if the movement from cause to effect depends on the vicissitudes of human actors, we might be wise to put long odds on the outcome.

One of the challenging aspects of human actions is that they’re mediated by representations of the world. What does this mean? Shine a light near an amoeba and, without thinking, this phototropic creature will ooze its way towards the glow. Light up the sign for a bar and a cocktail-tropic human might move towards the entrance, but there’s no inevitability about it. If he does, he’s likely to pause at the threshold considering whether or not he likes the bartender, weighing his chances of meeting the man or woman of his dreams, estimating the likelihood that the lounge’s one television screen will be tuned to his favorite channel. He’ll consider his options for the evening. He’ll remember an article about beer not being as fattening as wine. In short, his beliefs and desires will interact in complicated ways to shape his resolve and ultimately bring him to a bar stool—or not.

In the case of the amoeba, the shining light activates various biochemical processes that produce the animal’s phototropic behavior. Biochemistry is also very much at work in the cocktail-tropic human, but it doesn’t determine human action without first creating or recreating various representations of the world inside the head of our subject. These representations—beliefs, desires, aversions, fears, memories—will either put a spring in the lounge-lizard’s steps or stop him in his tracks.

Most social interventions depend on linking and coordinating the activities of many human actors, each with his or her repertoire of beliefs and desires, each introducing some uncertainty into the unfolding path of events. Rather than act according to plans—our plans—these actors will be observing, remembering, desiring, resenting, and yes, perhaps even assessing whether or not they’ll cut off their own noses just to spite us.

4. You often get what you pay for. There are many cases in which desired outcomes do in fact arrive at the distal ends of long chains of coordinated human activity. Consider, for example, the writing and delivery of a letter, or the flying of 200 passengers from New York to Paris. These extraordinary accomplishments require the precise sequencing of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of human actions. But there are important differences that set these examples apart from those we typically encounter in nonprofit work where sought-after goals often elude us.

Put aside for a moment the fact that mail delivery and air travel can fail in spectacular ways. Flying 200 passengers from New York to Paris is no doubt a complicated affair, but each step of the process, from the design and construction of the airplane to the training of the aircrew, operates according to principles that are well understood. By contrast, creating the political will to address climate change might be one of those “wicked problems” that will forever resist a comprehensive solution.

Then there’s the issue of buyer incentive, and here we need to face an uncomfortable truth: there are important social goods that nobody really wants to pay for. If you’re selling a product like an iPhone or a flight to Paris, you’ll find many willing investors and customers. If you’re raising venture capital to end racism in Mississippi you’ll likely need to go begging. When you do, you’ll find that what grantmakers and other donors drop into your hat will never come close to covering the cost of what it will take to accomplish your mission.

There’s a reason so many charities are incorporated as not-for-profits. The nonprofit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of entrepreneurial imagination or of will, but rather a clear-headed assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely. Lack of buyer interest means no working capital; it also means a social entrepreneur has little with which to incentivize her staff, cover program costs, or grow the capacity of her organization.

5. Small carrots, big sticks. The issue of an appropriate reward structure for humans whose actions we’re attempting to motivate is a vexing one—especially outside the sphere of well capitalized for-profit enterprises. How do you get complicated, extraordinary things to happen without paying people huge sums of money?

Certainly no catalog of the various ways to motivate human action would be complete without a consideration of intimidation and terror. We see that in North Korea, for example, they host an annual spectacle in which tens of thousands of citizens hold up colored placards at just the right time to create the likeness of Kim Jong-un, or of a missile pointed at San Francisco, or of some other great socialist achievement. These mass displays provide a striking model of coordinated human activity.

How does it work?

If you are one of the performers and you do well, you get an extra carrot in your annual ration of vegetables; if you don’t, the authorities stick you and your family in the North Korean gulag. This, I believe, is what’s known as the “carrot and stick” approach to human motivation.

These tough love tactics are clearly too radical for most nonprofit work. The ostentatious tableaux, however, might come in handy for foundation CEOs who, in lieu of publishing inspiring monographs of their pensées, can opt instead to communicate their key philanthropic insights with colorful, football-field-sized displays.

6. Greasy cheeseburger with a side of salad. And then there’s reason. We can’t bang our human subjects together like billiard balls; and it would be challenging to pay our way to good social outcomes in many key areas of nonprofit work. Fear and intimidation are out. Why not try an appeal to reason? In this domain at least we often observe arresting regularities. If forced to choose, more than nine times out of ten a person will strike his head with a kiwi fruit rather than with a hammer. This unprecedented degree of predictability provides strong evidence that we are in the presence of a rational actor.**

Without even thinking about it, we presume that the agents up and down our causal chains will be reasonable. This could be the Holy Grail we’re looking for. It could, that is, if human rationality were robust enough to overcome all the other stuff going on inside our heads, stuff that frequently messes up the calculus of homo rationalis.

Consider these glosses on the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, renowned for their studies of deviations from rationality:*

The set-up	What a rational actor would do	What actually happened
“[S]ubjects were given brief personality descriptions of several individuals and asked to assess, for each description, the likelihood that it referred to an engineer or a lawyer. In one experimental condition, subjects were told that the descriptions were sampled randomly from a group of 70 engineers and 30 lawyers, and in a second experimental condition the proportion of the two professions was reversed.”	“A rational assessment of probabilities, … would involve some combination of prior probabilities (based on the relative percentage of engineers and lawyers) and current information (based on the description), leading to different probability estimates in the two experimental conditions because of differences in prior probabilities.”	“Subjects’ estimated probabilities were nearly identical, however, demonstrating the tendency to … neglect prior probabilities or base rates. Similar patterns have been identified in countless other experiments.”
“[R]esearchers gave subjects the following description: ‘Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.’ Subjects were asked to assess the likelihood that various statements about Linda were true, among them being that ‘Linda is a bank teller’ and ‘Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.’”	“Given two events A and B, the probability of the conjunction … of A and B cannot exceed the individual probability of either A or B.”	“Over 85% of subjects believed it was more likely that Linda was both a bank teller and a feminist rather than just a bank teller, contrary to the laws of probability.”
[People facing decisions over medical treatments are told in some cases that a particular treatment has a 90% survival rate; in similar cases they’re told that the same treatment has a 10% mortality rate.]	[The two options are logically equivalent so they should elicit the same response.]	“People … respond differently to a 90% survival rate than they do to a 10% mortality rate, although the two are logically equivalent. These framing effects are difficult to reconcile with rational choice ....”

I remember another example from my graduate school days in which subjects were presented pairs of photographs, each depicting a possible meal, and asked to assess which of the two had the lower number of calories. In one set-up, picture A showed a greasy cheeseburger; picture B showed the same cheeseburger together with a side of salad. I leave it to the reader to guess the outcome of this particular experiment.

These are refined studies, but the evidence for our persistent irrationality is often in plain sight. Ten years after 9/11, 41 percent of Americans still believed that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks,” and according to a recent Pew study, 33 percent of all Americans reject evolution saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” Some of us still avoid stepping on cracks or walking under ladders.

Other cases elicit more pity than derision. Nonprofit staffers who work with people in crisis, for example, know that these individuals may not always make rational choices; they will not consistently desire more rather than less good for themselves. Unfortunately, there are powerful forces that mess with our ability to make wise decisions for ourselves and our families. Even when we’re not in crisis, reason will often yield to more pressing demands on our psychic machinery.

Finally, we need to consider that we can have perfectly rational actors operating in a flawed scheme to address some social challenge. The scheme might be flawed because our analysis is unsound, or because our strategies and tactics are defective, or simply because perfectly rational actors might have reasonable grounds for refusing to cooperate with our boneheaded plans.

7. The paranoid madman. What do we do in the face of these challenges? Dear reader, if you’re a grantmaker, have you ever had a brutally honest conversation with a disaffected grantee, with one of those nonprofit leaders you’ve appropriated into your strategy for making the world a better place? If you have, then you probably have some inkling of why it’s so difficult to do things with humans. People don’t like to be played. They don’t like to be managed. They prefer to be the authors of their lives and the work they undertake.

And yet so many exemplars of “strategic philanthropy” are top-down affairs. We grantmakers, myself included, act as arrogant elites, drawing arrows and triangles on the whiteboards of our well-appointed conference rooms with no one around to challenge our flawed thinking. We strut about like giant roosters puffing out our breast feathers and clucking incoherently about “disruption” and “theories of change.” We look foolish to everyone except ourselves and those even more foolish than we are.

What’s missing here is a certain kind of sensibility rooted in the imperative that we treat people as ends not as means. This sensibility has as one of its fruits the goodwill people feel towards those who approach them in humility, asking for help rather than offering to save them from themselves. With this sensibility it becomes immediately possible for us to do things with humans rather to humans. Our causal chains become less brittle. A sense of commonality sustains our social change efforts through their rough patches.

Beyond this sensibility, what’s needed most, in my view, is a profound distrust of those who would straightjacket the work of civil society, imposing on it the apparatus of technocracy, framing human behavior as a problem that requires management by social technicians. “What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment?” asks Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man. “What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile?” To admit these as possibilities is to forge our causal chains one tentative link at a time, in solidarity with others, quickly reaching the point where we’re left staring into the dark of an unseen future, rejoicing in our anticipation of what’s possible rather than dreading what we cannot foresee and manage.

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* All of this material is excerpted from “Daniel Kahneman: Judgment, Decision, and Rationality” by Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University, available for download here. I’ve arranged excerpts from his text into table form.

** The rational actors of some economic and social theories figure prominently in the work of grantmakers who promote consideration of the “triple bottom line,” the economic, social, and ecological benefits produced by for-profit enterprises. I’ve been informed by private communication that researchers at the University of Schmerz am Überhogen are very close to developing the quadruple bottom line. In a landmark paper appearing in the Mathematikerzeitungsbringengelächterjournal, Alfred Stüber has proven that n-tuple bottom lines are impossible for any prime number n greater than or equal to 95,651.

 

 

Related articles

How to Cause Things in Philanthropy

Philanthropy's Uneasy Relationship With The Social Sciences

The Hierarchy of Rigor

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Old Foundation Thinking Meets New

Nicest Legs in Philanthropy

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Announcing the winners of the WCT  “Nicest Legs in Philanthropy” contest! …

 

 

 

Ambrose Williams, Vice President for Programs, DuFour Community Foundation

 

 

 

 

 

Anita Brecque, Program Officer, The MotoCorp Charitable Fund

An Easter Message From The Countess Apraxina

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Editor’s note:  We publish occasional messages sent to us by the Countess Apraxina.  She and former White Courtesy Telephone editor Albert Ruesga became friends after meeting at a Tolstoi Foundation reception many years ago.  According to Albert, the two spent the rest of the evening drinking Champagne Martinis and pretending to share a fondness for the works of Turgenev.  The Countess consistently and mistakenly refers to Albert as Alyosha ...

My Dearest Alyosha:

I am surprise to see my new assistant, Ivan, read your blonk.  He tell me he is on payroll of Vikki Spruill  who as you know is безумный [ed: crazy] for foundations.  Poor Ivan is dangerously bored with your writing so you will stop immediately.  Yesterday he dissolve 50 Ambiens in Big Gulp frozen daiquiri.  But don’t worry, my little turkey waddle, he did not drink.  As he hold cup to lips he say, “Inducing state of eternal nothingness would be redundant after reading White Courtesy Telephones!”

How tedious you have become, my little zaychik, and I mean this only in nicest way.  As we say in old country, “Guilt is rope that wears thin quickly.”  Much better to make powerful people feel good about themselves.  We are the winners, Alyosha.  Don’t lecture us about truth.  We eat truth for breakfast with side of sausage.

You will call me on cell, please, to tell me how much you admire me and because I need your advice.  Am working on new Impact Investments project for Global Philanthropy Forums.  We are going to bring power to villages in rural India by passing electricity through people too hungry to move.  This will stimulate activity at Bottoms of Pyramid.  Villagers will then use electricity to shop on Amazon.  Investors get 3 percent of every purchase over 10 Rupees.

I have foot massage at four o’clock your time but call me after.  Ciao.

— Countess Apraxina

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Other messages from the Countess:

• The Countess Apraxina on Fashion 
• The Countess Apraxina Blings Philanthropy 
• The Countess Apraxina on Fundraising

 

Pulp-O-Mizing Big Data

Wittgenstein Meets The Culture Wars Meets Downton Abbey

First Big Data Research Results in Philanthropy Announced

Big Data is getting to be big news in philanthropy. A team of researchers at the University of Schmerz am Überhogen recently starting analyzing a large database compiled by a consortium of Bavarian foundations. They used anomaly detection and dependency modeling techniques to sift through 700 petabytes (700 x 10¹⁵ bytes) of digitized conference plenaries and flip chart notes.

In a paper recently published in the Überhogenerzeitungsgebrungensjournal, these researchers reported finding a very striking linear correlation between the age of grantee organizations and the year of their founding. They also uncovered a series of highly “cohesive” (German: kohäsiv) data patterns, one of which is displayed below:

Philanthropy à la Sauce Béchamel: Predictions for 2013 and Beyond

There’s nothing like a perch plucked from the depths of Lake Como, poached by a master chef, and arranged in pastry shells covered with a well-seasoned sauce béchamel, yolk of one egg, and knob of butter to inspire new thinking about the economic insecurity of American workers.  I’ve not yet been invited to Bellagio or Davos, but I know it’s only a matter of time.

Scores of colleagues have made these pilgrimages, worrying about the state of the world as they take in the mountain air. My turn will come. I notice, however, that these colleagues tend not to insult their hosts by implicating them in petty shortcomings. Nor do they dwell on the spectacular failures of our field. Rather they conduct research and predict trends that are challenging and upbeat, enabling their patrons to strut, au courant, in front of restive board members. I am in their debt, being generally rather slow on the uptake.

Philanthropic Capital Markets, Impact Investing, Networked Nonprofits, Big Data! Critics call them passing fads hawked to insecure CEOs like me. I call them the Keys to the Kingdom, l'oca che spende tutta la notte da barba se stessa, e ancora non è stanco (the goose that spends all night shaving herself, and still is not tired).

Lest I be accused of being yet another leach on the body of American generosity, I hope you’ll marvel at my own well-researched predictions for future trends in the foundation field, available in TED Talk, Pecha Kucha, Ignite, and 140-character formats with speaker’s fees waived and optimized for alpine vistas:

Biggest Data Ever. Genetic engineering will create miniaturized monkeys who’ll be trained to type vigorously on specially designed keyboards. Their output will be mined for interesting patterns by highly compensated experts.

Voucher Philanthropy. Instead of making grants, foundations will award grant vouchers directly to the deserving poor, snapping a towel—with market force—on the buttocks of underperforming charities.

Nano-Lending. The gap between the haves and the have-nots will increase, and the number of poor grow so large, that micro-financing will become unobtainable by most. Instead, low-income people across the world will be offered nano-loans collateralized against small pieces of plastic and other debris.

The Wearable Foundation. This all-graphene suit will insulate the most sensitive among us from too much reality and provide extra headroom for personalized liberal echo chambers. Optional micro-hydraulics will provide a confident gait while spoken words are sifted through a Universal Scrambler™.

Quantum Grantmaking. Quantum theory tells us that Schrödinger’s cat  can be alive and dead at the same time, prompting physicists to posit parallel universes in which each possibility and everything in-between is simultaneously instantiated. Taking advantage of this phenomenon, evaluation-fixated foundations will soon require not only outputs and outcomes from their grantees, but hyper-outcomes as well—benefits to parallel universe denizens affected by real-world interventions.

Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) Market Efficiencies. In the United States, it’s considered at best impolite to kill the poor. As a nation with deep religious roots, we strongly prefer that the market do it for us. To increase the efficiency of market forces, the poor, who generally lay about listlessly, will be bled daily for valuable plasma and have their unused organs harvested for deserving job creators and their pets.

Dearest Western European Conference Organizer: I offer you a heady tour of poverty parks, genetically modified program officers, and more! A world in which the apple you’re saving for lunch is networked to implants in your salivary glands—ready to signal the optimal moment of ripeness. A world in which throngs of “network weavers” and nonprofit visionaries wander through your streets cataloging and creating connections between things real and imagined. Trust me: I can make you look good!  Hey, MacArthur, are you feeling me yet?

Exiled in Philanthropy: Lit, Poli Sci, and Other Majors Welcome!

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You would think, given all the ballyhoo over the importation into philanthropy of for-profit business models, that the foundation world is crawling with MBAs.  It’s not.  Ask a roomful of philanthropoids about their academic bona fides and you’ll find that many have backgrounds in the liberal arts, in law, in the sciences, or in nothing in particular. This is a healthy thing for a field still searching for its soul.

You’ll also find that younger people in the field have hidden their undergraduate degrees in their sock drawers, haunted, perhaps, by the memory of some infelicitous essay on Plato’s Republic.

Let it go!  Let it go, I say!  Our first inklings of a world beyond that described to us by our parents have extraordinary value.  The exhilaration we felt at being invited to question authority can still save our field from grave errors.

Let’s reclaim those tens of thousands of dollars we suspect were wasted on our college educations.  Our parents still love us.  They’re proud of their son or daughter who’s now gainfully employed, doing something “having to do with irrigation, I think,” as my own mother—God rest her soul—once described it.  The nonprofit world needs fresh thinking, mired as it is in the corporatist nescience that currently passes for wisdom.

If you majored in Cultural Anthropology  …

We need you most of all. Perhaps you’ll write the first ethnography of organized philanthropy, describing its rigid hierarchies and the fabric of myths that support its delusional over-estimation of the foundation’s contributions to human progress.

If, in your quest for truth, you find yourself quailing—take heart!  You have a colleague who blazed the trail: Joel Orosz, founder of the The Grantmaking School, who published an extraordinary proto-ethnography of the foundation world titled, Effective Foundation Management: 14 Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—And How to Outfox Them.  What made it extraordinary was Orosz’s willingness to speak with candor about the culture of a field that “lacks a salutary external discipline.”

What Dr. Orosz wrote on the subject of foundation risk-taking is especially revealing.  If foundations have the freedom to try pretty much anything to address society’s problems, he asserts, “it would be virtually impossible to open a newspaper without reading of a groundbreaking social experiment fueled by their funding.”

It’s true that foundations as a class are not very good at communicating their good work or its importance.  But according to Dr. Orosz, the appearance of ineffectiveness does not deceive us.  There is a hidden reason for the inability of many foundations to address our most pressing social problems, and that reason is embarrassment.  According to him:

Since foundations are undisciplined by the market, electorate, or funders, their only impetus for improvement comes from their (generally) self-perpetuating board of trustees. If you are a foundation leader, your imperative thus is a simple one: keep the board happy, and you will keep your job. So, what makes a board happy? The answer is easy: pride-inducing success. What makes a board unhappy? The answer is equally easy: embarrassing failure. What does this mean for the CEO? As a practical matter, the answer to this question is also very simple: since any kind of success is preferable to any kind of failure, since embarrassing the board members is to be avoided at all costs, it is critically important that every project be a success. What is the best way to ensure that every project will be a success? The key to perpetual success is to keep every project uncomplicated and modest in its ambition. Thus, inexorably, in order to keep their boards happy, in order to assure that embarrassment never darkens the trustees’ doorsteps, CEOs tend to seek the cautious and incremental success. Paradoxically, the societal organization given the most freedom to act hobbles itself; it is as if a superb French chef, capable of creating any gastronomic delight, insisted on making nothing except the blandest of oatmeal.

The problem is one of foundation culture.  It’s culture all the way down, argues Orosz.  Culture that kills strategy.  Culture that imposes a kind of omertà on grantmakers, keeping them from shouting these truths from the rooftops: “We are guilty of small ambitions!  We live in morbid fear of losing our prized sinecures!”

Only you dedicated students of anthropology can unravel this tangled ball of cultural yarn and put us on the right track.  Consider wearing muted colors and sensible shoes so you can mix freely among us natives.

If you majored in Behavioral Economics …

You know the score.  You’re hep to the homo economicus jive.  So many decision-making models imported from the world of business and finance attempting to exploit the predictability of human actors.  The ideal foundation executive, according to one prominent prototype, posits this predictability to develop highly articulated theories of change and assign Bayesian probabilities and financial payoffs to possible outcomes, transforming complex sociological problems into straightforward utility calculations.  The technical term for this, I believe, is “pure baloney.”

Dan Ariely popularized the field of behavioral economics when he wrote the book Predictably Irrational, which a New York Times reviewer described as a “far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner lets on.”  The book, according to this reviewer, is “a concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the markets-know-best model as a fairy tale.”

Fortunately for us, you behavioral economists don’t believe in fairy tales!  You know how perfectly chaotic our species can be.  It’s time for you to insinuate yourselves into one of those three-person panels our field produces in such prodigious numbers and set the record straight.  As if to prove your point, defy audience expectations by wearing Groucho glasses and a light-up bowtie.

If you majored in Linguistic Forensics …

The tools of your trade can help elucidate the innermost workings, the nefarious tics and obsessions, of the Philanthropoid Mind!  [music sting]

An article in the July 23, 2012, issue of the New Yorker article titled “Words on Trial” recounts the story of James Fitzgerald, the retired FBI forensic linguist who brought the field to prominence by helping to solve the Unabomber case.  He cracked the case by noticing stylistic similarities between Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and the language of hundreds of documents seized by FBI agents while searching Kaczynski’s hut.

Think about the tortured diction of our field: drill down, impactful, vulnerable population, target audience.

What are we trying to hide behind that thick impasto of verbiage tinged with violence?  What insecurities are revealed by the fact that we are always “meeting around issues of diversity,” to take one example, rather than meeting simply  to discuss diversity?  There’s a story here and I suspect it isn’t pretty.

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So, my friends, proudly use your specialized knowledge to expose the piffle that currently dominates our field.  Brandish your calculators, your close readings, your foam core models like billy clubs.   As the past twenty years have demonstrated, no idea is so feeble, so absurd, or so incidental to our field that it can’t become a topic of animated water cooler discussion in the arid plain of Organized Philanthropy.  Soon, perhaps, I’ll have the Big Data to prove it.

New Products for Philanthropoids!

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Introducing the ALL- New Initiativ-a-Lator®

I like this one because I often get stuck.  Millions of dollars in foundation assets pressuring me to make the world a better place and I just sit there like a dried blowfish without a thought in my head!

Imagine my delight when I inserted the AA batteries into my Initiativ-a-Lator® and, with one flick of a switch, transformed my feebleminded ideas into a $25 million, five-year program to end poverty!

There’s a special offer on orders placed before September 1, 2012: You receive the  “First Program of Its Kind” press release template that turns your ill-conceived initiative into a paragon of Strategic Grantmaking.  If your program tanks, use the optional  “Mea Maxima Culpa” template to win valuable Transparency Points® for you and your foundation.

 

The Equali-Tea Party Play Set

For the little justice warrior in all of us.  You couldn’t have missed the TV ads with the jaunty jingle:

 ♪ Go put out your best ♫
 ♪ For your multi-cultural guests ♫

What’s in the box?  A miniature  18-piece tea service and a full complement of Equali-Tea Party Dolls spanning a dizzying range of worldviews and values that frequently come into horrible, violent conflict with one another.  The set includes a 1:4 scale Eleanor Roosevelt action figure with spring-loaded Karate Chop Arm® to keep your tea party guests in line.

The Junior Flipchart Paper and Easel kit (sold separately) instantly transforms your animated tea party into a dull but earnest convening.

 

The Impact Investor Z80

What is impact investing?  I think it involves bringing people at the Bottom of the Pyramid (ancient Egyptian slaves?) into the market by selling them things they can ill-afford to buy.  This is called “stimulating consumer interest and demand.”  Whatever it is, I know I fell in love with this product the first time I saw the ad:

(Image: Impact Investor Z80 sportscar speeding up a steep mountain road lined with alpine flowers.)

Announcer: You want a machine than can help you leave all those thin and volatile operating margins behind—

(Sound of revving engine.)

Help you forget that your inventory is long on “push” commodities, erase the challenges of building your Bottom of the Pyramid value chains.

(Screeching of tires as sportscar negotiates a hairpin turn.)

From triple bottom line to front of the line: The new Impact Investor Z80 can pro-actively extend your business model to create digital, re-engineered, data-driven synergies.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds plausible.

 

Profiles in Courage: Towards a More Balanced Portrait of the Grantmaking Profession

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Is grantmaking getting smarter? As I reported elsewhere, the answer appears to be ‘not by much’ or at least not fast enough, according to a survey recently released by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations.  This study of mostly US foundations found that over the past three years, there were only minor shifts in grantmaking practices that help grantees succeed, such as providing general operating support and awarding multi-year grants.

Perhaps a different set of questions would have been a little more flattering to me and my colleagues.

For example, self-identified social justice grantmakers like me could have been asked to detail our coordinated plans for overcoming our country’s racial and other disparities. (To conserve space, I believe the survey designers could have safely limited this response to 140 characters or less.)  We foundation CEOs could have been invited to stumble through some account of the root causes of poverty, although, quite frankly, without the benefit of a head-clearing trip to Davos, I’m not sure how I would have answered. And let’s be fair, these things take time.  The disenfranchised of the world need to exercise patience while we schedule more meetings to study the situation.

Or, perhaps, in the interest of stakeholder engagement we could have asked the public how we’re doing on reducing global warming, educating our children, and ending homelessness. 

You get the idea: a softball question or two on the survey that probes some of the less technocratic aspects of our work would help restore the bell curve to a less alarming shape and do much to paint a vivid portrait of those of us who sport the mantle of the grantmaking profession.

New Website for Occupy Philanthropy

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I miei amici, what did we ever talk about at our dinner parties before we were occupied? Some trifle in the New York Review of Books we barely understood, perhaps, mm? Where to find a good ... MANCHEGO?

But now, late breaking news. Fresh from the lips of that—come faccio a dirlo?—adorable little morsel I met at Zuccotti Park. She e-mailed to tell me that foundations were being airlifted to troubled areas to purposely ignore work that enables Americans to understand and address the causes of our ... SOCIAL PROBLEMS.

Isn’t that interesting? Coming from such earnest lips, it must be at least 99 percent true, non credi?

She adds that there is now an Occupy Philanthropy website where donors and funders interested in supporting the Occupy Movement can meet, greet, and share ideas.

How immensely practical!

White Courtesy Telephone Caption Contest

The Philanthropy Conference in 2502

Plus ça change.

New Social Enterprise to Support Whining About The Injustice Of It All

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Hugh Janus is the White Courtesy Telephone director of finances.

I keep telling Mr. Roosega that the market just isn’t supporting his social justice line of blog posts and he needs to find a new business model asap.  At the very least he needs to foster a strategic, integrated competence in a pro-active, extended paradigm to create digital, re-engineered synergies that will affect his double bottom line.  It might not be true, but it’s essential.

I’ve been working with a team of young MBAs on this problem.  We identified a number of clients interested in placing ambient ads across the country.  I’ve attached some sketches below.  A little rough, maybe, but the Commodification of Lived Experience is growthsville and we need to hop on this gravy train but pronto.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Social Media Technologies That Will Transform the Nonprofit World

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1. Content.Cloud.0

Problem:  In large metropolitan area X, each of three nonprofit organizations wants to create the online portal for neighborhood-level indicators.

Analysis:  The idea behind a portal is that you try to entice the online user to come to you.  Once at your site, she can benefit from your content and online tools.

The downside:  The user experience is unpleasant because she has to go to your site to find the most accurate data about poverty, another site to find the newest statistics on crime, and a third to track city investments in her neighborhood.

Solution: Content.Cloud.0 is a new social media technology that enables nonprofits to share their content with one another easily.  This new de-portalization tool can be implemented using existing MOU technologies and other B2B instruments.

Here’s how it works:  A group of content creators/providers working in a given area (e.g, neighborhood indicators) agrees to share online content and tools with one another.

This new technology enables online users to find whatever content they’re looking for at their favorite port of entry into the online space, avoiding the hassles of site specialization.  Content.Cloud.0 builds on late 20^th century “SharIng” technologies.

2. CLOUTsourcing

Problem:  During the great healthcare debates of 2009 and early 2010, political will from above met limited agitation from below, leading to legislation that fell short of many activists’ hopes for universal health coverage.

Analysis:  Many of us advocates for low-income communities were sitting on our hands, either because healthcare wasn’t our issue or because we were in the middle of some other campaign.  It was clear, however, that the ability to access quality healthcare would affect the destinies of low-income people for years to come.  The healthcare debate was happening nationally and legislation was being debated in Congress.  Reason dictated we drop whatever else we were doing and get behind this issue.

The downside:  This didn’t happen to any significant degree.

Solution: CLOUTsourcing is a new social media tool that enables advocates to coordinate their actions for greater effect and the greater good.  CloutScourcing can be implemented using existing P2P technologies such as Meetings, Electronic Mail, or Picking Up the Phone and Calling Someone.

Here’s how it works:  When an issue that deeply affects low-income communities is up for a vote in Congress or in the state legislature, and/or is being debated extensively in the media, all advocates get behind the issue instead of doing their own thing.  They offer to help the lead agencies involved by mobilizing their networks; educating their constituencies about the connections between the issue in question and the fate of low-income communities; writing op eds; etc.