At the opening session of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations’ recent conference, Dev Patnaik, author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, made the compelling case for philanthropy to develop a “gut-level connection” to grantees and the communities they serve. Patnaik posits that the extent to which we base our strategy choices on a deep understanding of what’s happening on the ground is directly related to grantmakers’ chances of making decisions that deliver meaningful results.
I couldn’t agree more. Called by a variety of different names – Dev Patnaik prefers “cultivating wide-spread empathy,” others use the terms “human-centered” or “user-centered” design – these concepts increasingly turn up in conversations about how philanthropy can have more impact. The idea is that grantmakers need to understand in an intuitive way what grantees and communities (the ultimate “users” of philanthropic products) truly need. Only then can philanthropy be certain that it is making investments and providing services that will deliver real results.
Many grantmakers are experimenting with ways to develop a gut-level connection to those they serve. Take the experience of the Stupski Foundation. Two years ago, they came to the disheartening conclusion that despite millions of dollars in support to try to reform public education in targeted districts around the nation, it was not getting a lot of traction. Rather than walking away and perhaps investing their energies in another field or a different set of goals, however, founders Larry and Joyce Stupski agreed it was time to think differently. They began experimenting with radical reforms that put the 21st-century learner at the center of educational change.
But creating a learner-centered system requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of the learner’s needs and interests. And so the Stupski Foundation invested in intensive ethnographic research in six school districts. They are now in the midst of an even more ambitious customer research study focused on understanding the explicit and tacit needs of school, district, and state leaders to help in the construction of solutions. In a presentation at the GEO conference, Stupski’s chief strategy officer, Nelson Gonzalez, said the research included focus groups and “deep interviews” with young people, plus countless visits to schools.
The goal of the research, according to consultant Erika Gregory of Collective Invention, Inc., was to “understand things people don’t tell you in a normal conversation.” She explained further: “Much of our knowledge about systems and what people need is tacit. It is knowledge you can’t draw out through direct inquiry, and so you have to engage in observational research.”
In other words, you have to go out and see things for yourself, unlock what’s really happening in the schools and communities where you want to make a difference, and try to get people to open up about their real wants and needs.
This is empathy in action. Whether you are working with third-party researchers and anthropologists or doing this on your own, the idea is to look at the world through the eyes of the people that your organization is seeking to serve. Grantmakers for Education recently adopted a novel approach to this challenge at a meeting where every participant adopted the persona of a young learner in the year 2025, complete with a fictional name and back story. The idea was to have the group envision some of the key characteristics of a learning system that could respond to every learner’s needs.
“One thing I found astounding about the experience was how quickly we got to a deep, shared and aligned view of what needs to happen,” said Gonzalez, who participated in the GFE session.
It’s a work in progress, but one that holds enormous potential to demonstrate the power of empathy to transform how philanthropy works – and what results we get in return for our investments.
There are a lot of grantmakers like the Stupski Foundation that are experimenting with new ways to engage with key stakeholders, new ways to figure out if their work is truly having a positive impact on the people they care about most, new ways of involving others in the design of better solutions and better programs. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s YouthTruth project with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is another such example.
My question for you is this: How can philanthropy more effectively put those we hope to serve at the center of our work?
Kathleen P. Enright is President and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations
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Disclaimers and Disclosures: The views expressed in the CEP blog by guest bloggers are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
| Posted in | Assessing Performance |
| Tags | beneficiary feedback, effective philanthropy, foundation effectiveness, role of philanthropy, stakeholder engagement, YouthTruth |
The competitive environment seems to make this difficult. Due to the risk of lost funding, it is nearly impossible for a NPO or grantee to say to a potential funder, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Similarly, it is very difficult for funders to publicly explain why they didn’t fund certain programs or NPO’s that may seem appropriate on the surface but have significant issues underneath. The balance is delicate, but we need to find ways to air such best practices and issues openly.
–David, SDSVP
Hi David, You’re right, it’s very difficult for nonprofits to tell the unvarnished truth to their funders (and sometimes vice versa). One thing that seems to make it more plausible is when foundations commit to funding organizations that are central to their goals and strategies over the long term. Given SVP’s approach, I would guess you’ve had the experience that longer term relationships can open up discussions that would otherwise be impossible. Have you found that to be the case in your work? What else has helped you create the context where grantees and funders can be more open?
I think one answer to your question is to not learn the wrong lessons from business, which is where I think many non-profits are headed.
The person that actually has the best quote about performance and results is Clint Eastwood:
“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster!” Clint Eastwood.
How Non-Profits are Learning the Wrong Lessons from Business, and Ignoring the Good Lessons
by Bill Huddleston, The CFC Coach
More and more non-profit blogs and consultants, as well as both government and foundation funders are becoming more and more insistent about the need for non-profits to evaluate their results. What’s often used as the model for this is some version of the mantra: “Non-profits need to be more like a business.”
What’s implied, and indeed often said, is that if the non-profit providing the service cannot show results that there won’t be any funding. At one level this sounds very basic, and what could be wrong with “demonstrating results” before funding? Well, actually a lot as it turns out.
Here’s a short list of projects that would have failed if the visionary leaders that made them happen had to demonstrate “proven results before funding:”
The electric light bulb (Thomas Edison)
The invention of the airplane (Wright Brothers)
The polio vaccine (Jonas Salk)
The battery (Benjamin Franklin)
This is obviously just a short list, and there are thousands of other examples, whether they are products or methods of dealing with a problem, e.g. “voluntary associations” to use Alexander de Tocqueville term.
Non-profits and funders are learning the wrong lesson when they insist upon results before funding, especially for a new non-profit, or one that is attempting a new way of dealing with a problem that may be thousands of years old (hunger, etc.) or one that is more recent (AIDS, etc).
“Demonstrate results and then we’ll fund you,” of course sounds seductively real to the non-profit seeking funds, and where the danger lies is that the non-profit will overpromise and under deliver. “Of course, we’ll solve X problem in the space of time your grant will cover, we have great people working on it, and it’s an issue that can be addressed by our unique approach.” P.S. “Please make it a five year grant, but if you won’t do that, make it at least a three year one so we can actually make a dent in this problem.
When a visionary entrepreneur starts a business, there is obviously hope and belief that it will succeed, but the reality is that most businesses fail, and that very few of them grow and become super successful. What’s often not realized that it may be the same person that fails at a particular business before he or she gets everything right – the Ford Motor Company was the third company founded by Henry Ford, the first two failed. Microsoft was not Bill Gates first company, (although granted he formed his first one while he was a teenager).
Non-profits are dealing with the toughest problems on the planet, including many that will never be solved by a “market solution.” If you’re funding a non-profit pick one that deals with an issue you care about, and support them in every way, but don’t demand results before action. If you do, you by definition are restricting the activities and approaches to the most conventional, and ignoring the possibility of a quantum leap of success.
Clint Eastwood has it right when he says, “If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster” and while he may have been talking about the movie industry, it also applies to the non-profit world. Let’s not have our brains and visions stifled by the limiting belief that “results must be demonstrated before funding.” If you don’t like the approach a particular non-profit is taking, choose to fund a different one, but don’t micromanage and limit their ability to succeed by insisting upon results first.
That’s acting like the little boy that planted a garden and went to complain to his mother two weeks later that “Mom, Nothing is growing in my garden.” “How do you know?” asked his mother, “Because I dug everything up to see what was happening!”
Regards,
Bill Huddleston
The CFC Coach
http://www.cfcfundraising.com
BillHuddleston1@gmail.com
Hi Bill, You’ve hit on many important issues. I think many in our sector would agree that “acting more like business” is the wrong goal, especially since we are still recuperating from the overwhelmingly negative consequences of what were seen as standard business practices in the financial services industry. Jim Collins reminds us most businesses are mediocre, so what we really want to be is best in class in what we do. Phil Buchanan and I made some of these same points in a Chronicle article we co-authored in 2007. http://philanthropy.com/article/What-Is-an-Effective-Founda/54864/
You also make the point that the funding community isn’t well served to demand proof of results as a prerequisite to funding. In fact, if grantmakers attempted to uphold that strict standard we would have a very narrow field of investment opportunities. Paul Carttar, the newly appointed directly of the Social Innovation Fund, acknowledged as much when he recently spoke on a panel that I moderated at the Council on Foundations. I thought he framed it well. He suggested that the SIF and its chosen intermediaries will be looking for the best possible evidence of program impact that currently exists, acknowledging that it will likely be imperfect or incomplete. As a funder interested in better information about results, the Social Innovation Fund is willing to dedicate resources to that end. For any funder interested in generating a better understanding of what works, a first step is the willingness to provide appropriate funding to support grantee’s efforts to do just that.
But at the same time, in our quest for even better data to drive our decision-making, I hope we don’t lose our understanding of context or begin to discount intuition or our “gut sense” of what’s going on. I appreciated the way Dev Patnaik talks about this very problem in the book I referenced in the first post. He says “the map is not the territory” and provides several examples where strict adherence to “the data” led companies to make some pretty poor decisions. Coffee drinkers will cringe at the story of how Maxwell House destroyed good tasting coffee by following its market testing data but ignoring the fact that their product began to taste badly.
My hope is that our field will pursue even better, more accurate data to drive our decisions without discounting the importance of really understanding the landscape in which and the people with whom we do our work.