A More Transformative Corporate Philanthropy

Deloitte, the consulting firm, just released a new series of documentaries about the nonprofits they support. Two years ago they made a three-year commitment of $50 million in pro bono nonprofit work. They’ve already completed 200 projects, with many more in the pipeline. Their focus is taking the specific skills their employees have and applying them to capacity and efficiency constraints in the nonprofit sector. This approach is not new. New Profit, the nonprofit venture philanthropy fund, has enjoyed a 10+ year partnership with Monitor Group, who provides signficant pro bono consulting to the nonprofits in New Profit’s portfolio, which will total a $50 million commitment by 2012.

To promote their work, but also to encourage other companies to think about how they could do similar skills-based volunteering, Deloitte has made a series of short documentaries about their nonprofit projects. As Evan Hochberg, national director of community involvement for Deloitte said:

We made these films primarily to help our own people recognize just how much they have to offer, and to encourage others in the business community to embrace skills-based volunteerism. [We are] committed to helping advance the field of community involvement by focusing on volunteerism that achieves very tangible outcomes, and this film series is an opportunity for us to spark dialogue that makes people think about the value of their professional skills in a different way.

Sure it’s a public relations campaign, but I also think there is something interesting in the philanthropic commitment Deloitte has made and in the films they have created. The film below is about College Summit, a great organization that encourages high school students, who never viewed themselves as college material, to apply, attend and graduate from college. Deloitte has done a number of pro bono projects with them and has made a significant commitment to this organization. Take a look at the video that showcases a really great nonprofit and an interesting way for a corporation to make a much deeper, and more transformative commitment, than just writing a check.

Tags: College Summit, corporate giving, corporate philanthropy, Deloitte, Monitor Group, New Profit, nonprofit capacity building, pro bono consulting, skills-based volunteering, Venture Philanthropy

Echoing Green Call for Social Entrepreneurs

Today Echoing Green launches their annual search for budding social entrepreneurs to invest in. For over 20 years Echoing Green has provided $30 million in seed funding and support to nearly 500 social entrepreneurs – including the founders of Teach For America, City Year, College Summit, and SKS Microfinance, some of the darlings of the social entrepreneurship world.

Echoing Green invests in and supports outstanding emerging social entrepreneurs to launch new organizations that deliver bold, high-impact solutions. Through a two-year fellowship program, they help visionaries develop new solutions to society’s most difficult problems. These social entrepreneurs and their organizations work to solve deeply-rooted social, environmental, economic, and political inequities to ensure equal access and to help all individuals reach their potential.

This year Social Velocity is a search partner for Echoing Green to help them find fellowship applicants. In the Spring of 2011 Echoing Green will award between 12 and 20 fellowships to early-stage social entrepreneurs.  Fellows receive up to $90,000 in seed funding over two years, operational and technical support, and access to a powerful global community of fellows and alumni. The online application opened today and will close on November 12th.

If you think you might qualify, check out their eligibility requirements and assessment criteria and their 2011 Application Handbook.  You can also take a look at some of their past fellows.  They are an impressive, engaging, inspiring group. In fact, one of Social Velocity’s clients, English at Work, is led by Echoing Green Fellow, Maile Broccoli-Hickey. You can read their story here.

The Echoing Green Fellowship is a fabulous opportunity for an aspiring social entrepreneur to not only receive a couple of years of funding and assistance, but also gain a lifetime membership to an elite network of leaders of the social innovation movement. And any past Fellow will tell you that that brings countless opportunities to make things happen.

Good Luck!

Tags: City Year, College Summit, Echoing Green, Echoing Green Fellowship, English at Work, Maile Broccoli-Hickey, SKS Microfinance, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Velocity, Teach for America

How to Scale

Continuing my series on defining and exploring key terms in social innovation, I’d like to take a look at scale.  In an earlier post defining social entrepreneurship, I discussed the key part that scale plays:

Absolutely essential to the idea of social entrepreneurship is the idea of scale. A pattern changing idea, by definition, creates a new model. And to do so, it can’t just exist in one school, in one district, in one city. To truly be social entrepreneurship, the new idea must grow to scale, to reach all of those who can benefit from the solution.

However, just as there are various ways a successful business can grow to scale, there are different ways a nonprofit can grow to scale.  There is the franchise model that we see with organizations like Teach for America, Citizen Schools, or College Summit.  These organizations have a successful model with dramatic results that they want to replicate in other areas of the country.  They raise growth capital that will allow them to import the model to other cities and regions; they bring in or recruit a staff and build the new chapter.  This can be a very successful model.

In a session at this month’s annual Net Impact (an organization for socially-minded business school students and alums) conference, panelists had some provocative ideas for how nonprofits scale.  Aaron Hurst, founder of Taproot Foundation, an organization that provides pro-bono marketing, IT, and HR consulting to nonprofits, took the franchise idea even further arguing that there must be great consolidation within the nonprofit sector:

We need to talk about how we get foundations to stop giving inefficiently…the multitude of nonprofits with similar missions…[are like] the hundreds of Chinese restaurants across New York City. All the restaurants serve dumplings, lomein…[to be efficient] they should all be one Panda Express.

I’m not sure that is the answer.  Nathaniel Whittemore, founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University argued in his blog on Change.org that scale for nonprofits needs to be thought of a bit differently.  Because of the social, consensus and local nature of nonprofit organizations, you cannot simply franchise a good idea from one city to the next.  He makes a very necessary distinction between scaling an organization and scaling a solution.  The former forces a model onto the next community, without taking into account local processes, norms, behaviors, beliefs, etc.  The latter approach molds the basic solution to the new area.  He believes the successful model is Jane Addams’ Hull House, one of the first settlement houses offering social services to the poor.

For [Jane]…[scale] meant helping other socially concerned citizens found their own organizations with similar but locally appropriate models. She was far less concerned with franchising and branding the Hull House name, but cared that poor people in every city had access to the same quality of services with dignity that her organization offered.

That’s not to say that organizations like Teach for America, Citizen Schools and others don’t meld their model to be locally appropriate,  but it is still very much a franchise model.  And as you grow that model overhead becomes more expensive, quality assurance standards become harder to enforce, and ultimately, the solution may creep farther away.

The franchise model also necessitates significant growth capital.  For example, College Summit has had to raise tens of millions of dollars in growth capital to expand to 8 states with their current program and 6 additional states with a pilot program.  And growth capital can be very difficult to find.

With a model more like Jane Addams’, scale is less about the organization that brings about the solution and more about the actual solution.  You are not building a nationwide organization with a very specific solution, but rather you are building local organizations that mold the solution to be most successful in their communities.  However, because the latter is less rigid and more decentralized it would be more difficult to ensure the quality and effectiveness of the solution, and perhaps much more difficult to track outcomes.

There is much more to be learned as social entrepreneurs continue to grapple with how best to grow to scale – what that means, and what it looks like.  But it is a very necessary discussion, because the true impact of social entrepreneurship does not lie in the ideas that social entrepreneurs create.  I don’t think we have ever lacked good ideas.  But rather, true solutions come when a great idea can grow to scale and fundamentally alter an old, broken model.  How that scale happens most effectively, however, is yet to be determined.

Tags: Citizen Schools, College Summit, growth capital, scale, Social Entrepreneurship, Teach for America