This Week’s The Giving Show

I’m delighted to announce that I will be Michael Chatman’s guest on this week’s Giving Show. Michael was voted America’s Maverick Philanthropist and one of the nation’s leading authorities on new philanthropy. He heads the nation’s largest network of mission-related philanthropists giving up to $50,000 annually, The Association of Maverick Philanthropists.

Michael hosts a weekly radio show, called the Giving Show, the largest weekly audience devoted to the topic of philanthropy.

I’ll be Michael’s guest this week on Thursday, September 8th at 11:30am Eastern. You can click here to listen then.

We’ll be talking about Financing Not Fundraising, how to get your donors to be more effective, how philanthropy is changing, what the social entrepreneurship movement means for nonprofits and much more. I hope you’ll join us.

Click here to listen to the Giving Show on Thursday at 11:30am Eastern.

Tags: financing not fundraising, Michael Chatman, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit innovation, nonprofit trends, Philanthropy, Social Entrepreneurship, The Giving Show

10 Great Social Innovation Reads: August

Since I was on vacation for a couple of weeks in August and pretty much unplugged, I’m probably not qualified to list the 10 greatest reads in social innovation for the month of August, but I’m still going to give it a shot. As always, please add what I missed to the comments.

You can also read the lists of Great Reads from previous months here.

1. Guest blogger on the Tactical Philanthropy blog, Jed Emerson, a pioneer in the impact investing arena, argues that impact investing is at risk of missing a key opportunity to move the field forward.




2. Strategic finance is one of the hardest things for many nonprofit leaders to master, but also one of the most critical. Nonprofit Finance Fund explains how to approach it.




3. Sea Change Capital Partners and Lodestar Foundation are partnering to create a new fund to pay for nonprofit collaboration and mergers. A pool of merger money is a great new addition to what is a pretty big hole in the nonprofit capital market.




4. From the Harvard Business Review blog comes the argument that sometimes it can be good for business to fire some customers. This concept should apply to nonprofits’ donors as well.




5. One of the biggest hurdles to nonprofit performance measurement is a lack of money to make it happen. On the Social Currency blog, Angela Francis explains how nonprofits can find the money for evaluation through capacity capital.




6. The biggest news in August was nonprofit Jumo’s merger with for-profit GOOD. Antony Bugg-Levine (who was just announced as the new CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund yesterday) explains how this merger is just the beginning of a real blurring of sector lines to come.




7. On August 24th, US Secretary of Education @arneduncan held a Twitter Town Hall to answer questions about America’s public education system and his ideas for reform. You can see the Tweets at #askarne or read the highlights here. He plans to hold another Twitter Town Hall soon.




8. The Future Generations blog offers a great framework and examples of that often touted, but rarely understood, concept: “scale.”




9. In the wake of Steve Jobs’ resignation from Apple, Cliff Kuang offers a reflection on Jobs as a supreme innovator and great user of technology.




10. From the tech blog, A Smart Bear, comes a lesson for entrepreneurs (and social entrepreneurs too) when being an expert is harmful.

Photo Credit: afunkydamsel

Tags: 10 Great Reads, Antony Bugg-Levine, Arne Duncan, capacity capital, GOOD, impact investing, Jed Emerson, Jumo, Lodestar Foundation, nonprofit collaboration, nonprofit evaluation, nonprofit finance, Nonprofit Finance Fund, nonprofit mergers, nonprofit performance measurement, nonprofit scale, Sea Change Capital Partners, Steve Jobs, Tactical Philanthropy

What Social Entrepreneurs Can Teach The Nonprofit Sector

I’ve written before that with the excitement around the social entrepreneurship movement there is a danger that we are abandoning the nonprofit sector. Indeed, there is sometimes a tendency to dismiss the sector that was working on social change long before it was “cool”. Often the older nonprofit sector is left behind, partly because the sector tends to be risk- and change-averse. Again and again, I’ve heard that innovation will never become part of the nonprofit system — that nonprofits are too set in their ways. Or that the sector is too broken to emerge anew.

That attitude, though, is unacceptable. The nonprofit sector is an enormous part of our economy and has a long history of working towards social change. If we were to cast it aside completely, we’d lose the tremendous resources (money, people, mind-share) that are being invested in that sector every day. The nonprofit sector has tremendous potential for innovation. Indeed, without innovation in the nonprofit sector, the broader movement to solve social problems is doomed.

So instead of tossing it aside, let’s remake it, re-envision, restructure and reinvent it.

To that end, Social Velocity is hosting a webinar on July 12th, titled “What Nonprofits Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurs,” which will help nonprofit leaders understand the new models, funding approaches, messaging, systems that social entrepreneurs are employing to create social change. If nonprofit leaders can understand this new movement and integrate some of the ideas into their work, they can achieve more social change.

This webinar will help nonprofit leaders understand the social entrepreneurship movement and the innovative people, organizations and funding vehicles that are solving social problems in new, exciting ways. It will help nonprofit leaders understand what they can do to keep up, and how to make their own organizations more innovative, attract new kinds of funding, and achieve their social change goals more effectively.

The webinar will include:

• Case studies of nonprofit and for-profit social entrepreneurs
• Examples of philanthropists and social investors who are funding social change in new ways
• How social entrepreneurs are becoming more effective at making a case for support
• What the social capital market is and how it’s evolving
• What new foundation funding vehicles like “mission-related” and “program-related” invesments are
• What “venture philanthropy,” “philanthropic equity,” and “growth capital” are and how to organizations are using them to grow their organizations
• New models nonprofit growth
• New legal structures for social change organizations
• Inspiration for taking your organization to the next level

What Nonprofits Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurs
A Social Velocity Webinar
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
12 noon – 1:00 pm (EST)
Registration Fee: $40

Register Now

I hope to see you there!

Photo Credit: katrinalopez

Tags: abandoning the nonprofit sector, innovation in nonprofit sector, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit learning from social entrepreneurs, philanthropic equity, social capital market, Social Entrepreneurship, social innovation, Social Investing, Social Velocity webinar, Venture Philanthropy

Socap Day 2: Unlocking the Nonprofit Capital Space

Day 2 of SoCap was by far my favorite. It started with an interesting keynote from Julie Sunderland of the Gates Foundation. She offered a perhaps more realistic, bordering on the pessimistic, view of the social capital market space. She said that Gates struggles to find entities that can absorb the size investments they want to make. They get excited about the idea of bringing together foundation, government and private dollars in stacked deals, but that the work is complicated and hard and they have yet to craft one of these deals simply because it is extremely difficult to determine the terms. All of this underlines what I’ve said in a previous post: in the nonprofit, philanthropic and government worlds there is still much work to be done to unlock capital.

The first session of the day for me was “Lessons of Behavioral Finance: Understanding and Overcoming Barriers to Impact Investing” with Hope Neighbor and her ground-breaking research, Money for Good, released earlier this year calculating a $120 billion pool of potential impact investing money that is sitting on the sidelines. Hope said that despite our desires to the contrary, people still very much think of their charitable giving as separate from their impact investing, “the reality is that people compartmentalize their money.” And only 3% of the population uses data to compare the organizations they give to.

My favorite session of the day, by far, was “Deep Dive Into the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative.” This session was exactly what I was hoping to see more of at SoCap this year. A group of leaders in Cleveland realized that the heart of their city was quickly deteriorating and no one was doing anything about it. They formed a coalition of the anchor institutions in Cleveland (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, etc), foundations, city leaders and others to create the Evergreen Cooperatives that brings career-track jobs and green, employee-owned businesses to the inner city, transforming a city that has lost 50% of its population in the last 50 years. Beyond the fascinating coalition, business model and results this project is achieving, lies its impressive financing. A combination of bonds, foundation grants, loans, HUD money and others launched this project and financed the 3 businesses they currently operate (a green laundry, an organic greenhouse, and a solar power company).  According to Evergreen leaders, “Cleveland wants to be where the world is going, not where the world is.”

To scale this project to create 5,000 jobs (the area needs 46,000 jobs), which will be the impetus to truly transform the inner city economy, they are creating a CDFI and looking to use PRIs and MRIs. What excites me so much about this project is not the spirit of collaboration and tremendous results, but how they are bringing public, private and philanthropic money together in a truly innovative convergence. THIS is the kind of social capital market I’m talking about. Impact investing is great, but it is only ONE piece of the puzzle. I would love to see more examples like Evergreen at SoCap.

The last breakout session I attended for the day was “Nonprofit Analysis: Beyond Metrics,” which gave a great overview of the growing nonprofit evaluators market through the lens of rating one nonprofit, DC Central Kitchen. It was interesting to see how Charity Navigator, the most well-known nonprofit evaluator, has evolved from a system driven purely by IRS 990 form overhead ratios to a three-pronged review including transparency and impact evaluations.

The end of the session gave me serious pause, however, when a member of the audience asked whether any of the evaluators might use the GIIRS system coming out of the impact investing world to rate nonprofit impact. Ken Berger admitted he wasn’t familiar with GIIRS and Tim Ogden of GiveWell said he was skeptical of social return on investment (SROI) calculations in general. Again, my point that the philanthropic and impact investing worlds aren’t communicating and collaborating becomes apparent. Wouldn’t that be amazing if impact in both the philanthropic and impact investing worlds could be measured in a comparable way? That would be truly innovative!

So, although Day 2 of SoCap provided much more conversation and examples of how the philanthropic and government capital markets are evolving, there is still much work to be done to bring both capital fully into the social capital market. Perhaps at SoCap 2011?

Photo Credit: Markets for Good

Tags: CDFI, Charity Navigator, DC Central Kitchen, Evergreen Cooperatives, Gates Foundation, GIIRS, GiveWell, Hope Consulting, Hope Neighbor, impact investing, Julie Sunderland, Ken Berger, Money for Good, MRIs, nonprofit capital, philanthropic capital, PRIs, Root Capital, SoCap, Social Capital Markets, Social Capital Markets conference, SROI, Tim Ogden, Willie Foote

Here Comes SoCap

So it’s my favorite time of year again, well at least in the world of social innovation. The Social Capital Markets Conference in San Francisco starts Monday. There are a lot of social innovation conferences, in fact you can read a great rundown on many of this Fall’s best. But SoCap is by far my favorite. It is the one place where the disparate array of people who are interested in how to get more money flowing to social impact come together for 3 days. There are nonprofit, for-profit and hybrid social entrepreneurs; philanthropists; social investors; government bureaucrats and anyone in between. It seems this conference more than any other is a microcosm of the convergence that is happening in the world of social innovation between the public, private and government sectors.

I’ll be honest, the first two years of the conference were a little heavy on the for-profit social entrepreneurship side, leaving somewhat behind government and nonprofit. There were sessions and speakers from those worlds, to be sure, but the emphasis of the conference in the beginning was how to get money flowing more readily to double bottom-line businesses (for-profit businesses that are making money AND creating a social impact).

This year’s conference promises to open wide the doors of the social capital market. For starters, SoCap organizers have developed 6 “tracks” that each focus on a particular area of the social capital market. The track that interests me the most, of course, is the one focusing on nonprofit/philanthropy. Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy has put together a nice track with cutting-edge topics in the world of making money work better in the nonprofit sector:

• Decriminalizing Fundraising
• Scaling Social Impact
• Individual Donors Practicing Unconstrained Philanthropy
• The Lessons of Behavioral Finance
• When to Invest and When to Give
• Nonprofit Analysis: Beyond Metrics

In addition there are several other tracks that hold great appeal: Impact Investing, New Money, Metrics and System Thinking and so on. And then there are some fabulous speakers including Jacqueline Novogratz from Acumen Fund, Matt Flannery from Kiva, speakers from the Gates Foundation and Root Capital and many others. Add to that the side sessions, pitch events and more, and my head starts to spin. Three days is just not enough.

I’ll be blogging from the conference as I did last year (you can read my blogs from SoCap09 here, here and here).

What I love so much about SoCap is that it really challenges this burgeoning community/movement/space to do more, to ask harder questions, to push the momentum forward. You come out of a session with many more questions than you had going in. But also, so much more energy to break out of the normal way of thinking and envision a different path forward. Because at its essence, SoCap is about creating something completely new. It’s about creating a space where money and social impact meet and create a synergy that can, we hope, change the world. The old rules and constraints don’t apply. This conference and all the people attending it, in person or via social media networks, are writing the new rule book. And that’s exciting, challenging, exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time.

If you are attending SoCap too, let me know. See you there!

Tags: Acumen Fund, Convergence, Gates Foundation, Jacqueline Novogratz, Kiva, Matt Flannery, philanthropic equity, Root Capital, Sean Stannard-Stockton, SoCap10, Social Capital Markets conference, Social Entrepreneurship, social innovation, social investors, Tactical Philanthropy

Convergence Can’t Be Denied

There is a fascinating debate going on in the blogsphere touched off by Michael Edwards, author of  Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World and former director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society program.

In essence, the debate is about whether the convergence of the private (business) and the nonprofit sectors is a good or bad thing, whether market forces help or hurt social change efforts.  Michael kicked off the debate on Monday with the first in a week-long series of posts called “Should Civil Society Be Reduced to a Subset of the Market?” In subsequent posts he went on to attack the emerging social capital market among other things.  You can read the whole series here.

Sean Stannard-Stockton, of the Tactical Philanthropy blog, took up the charge and debated many of his points.  Then the two have gone back and forth over the issues. And the debate expanded on the New Philanthropy Capital blog where Tris Lumley wrote that Michael’s argument “boils down to social capital markets vs civil society – impact measurement vs social justice, data vs values, competition vs solidarity. And in this binary view of the world, he threatens to undermine the very real progress that’s being made towards a much more balanced and realistic perspective.”  Michael responds and so does Tris.

It seems to me that fundamental to Michael’s argument is his fear about the growing convergence between the nonprofit, private and government sectors.  That somehow the “market” will sully social change efforts.  Michael argues that civil society and the market are separate entities: “Civil society operates on solidarity and commitment—the willingness to hang in there for the long haul even if results don’t go your way. Markets work on the opposite principle, “exit”: consumers are free to move from one supplier to another whenever and wherever they like. Otherwise the efficiency of resource allocation would suffer.”

But the fact is that social change efforts and the nonprofits leading them have always existed within a market economy. Resource allocation to nonprofits is very much based on a market. If nonprofits can’t convince donors or governments that their work is important or has meaning, they won’t receive resources.  Nonprofit funders are consumers who are “free to move from one supplier to another whenever and wherever they like.”  It would be great if social change efforts could exist in some sort of vacuum where their good work automatically finds resources, but the world doesn’t work like that.  And as resources for social change efforts become increasingly competitive, nonprofits, and for profits working towards social change, have to become smarter about responding to the marketplace. And as the marketplace demands more social change efforts, which is increasingly the case, more resources will be brought to bear on those social change efforts, thus the creation of the social capital market.

The growing convergence among the public, private and nonprofit sectors is a reality we can’t avoid.  Nonprofits have to respond more effectively to market forces, governments have to be more efficient in their allocation and use of resources, and businesses, in order to survive in a marketplace that increasingly values social good, have to understand and respond to the effects their products and services and business model have on the broader society.

Binary systems and separated sectors just don’t exist anymore.  The lines are blurring.  The market is part of the reality of social change efforts.  To deny that is silly.

Tags: Ford Foundation, Michael Edwards, New Philanthropy Capital, Sean Stannard-Stockton, Small Change, Tactical Philanthropy, Tris Lumley