Social Velocity » nonprofit

A Monster List of Social Innovation Books, Blogs, Conferences, Funders

Nell Edgington — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:10:21 +0000

Since today is Halloween, I thought I’d offer a monster list of resources for nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, board members and others involved in creating social change.

The following list comes from the Resources page of the Social Velocity web site. The page includes social innovation conferences, organizations, funders, blogs, books and other things that anyone involved in the social change space should be aware of. It could be a starting point or an ongoing exploration of what’s going on in the space.

We are constantly adding to the Resources page, so if we are missing something, let us know in the comments.

Organizations Moving Social Innovation Forward

Funders

Conferences

Philanthropic Thought Leaders

Things to Read

Blogs

Financing Impact

Using Social Media

Being Strategic

Finding Inspiration

Growing Solutions

Leading Well

Photo Credit: annabellaphoto

About the Author: Nell Edgington is President of Social Velocity (www.socialvelocity.net), a management consulting firm leading nonprofits to greater social impact and financial sustainability. Social Velocity helps nonprofits grow their programs, bring more money in the door, and use resources more effectively. For more information, check out Social Velocity consulting services and clients.

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Are You the Next Echoing Green Fellow?

Nell Edgington — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:37:31 +0000

Echoing Green has launched their annual search for social entrepreneurs. Each year, Echoing Green identifies promising social entrepreneurs with bold ideas to solve society’s most pressing problems and provides them with up to $90,000 in seed funding, strategic support, leadership development, and a powerful community of nearly 500 other Fellows and alumni. To date, Echoing Green has invested nearly $30 million in seed funding to almost 500 social entrepreneurs and their organizations.

Echoing Green is a great organization and a real pioneer in the social entrepreneurship space. To find out more, you can read my interview with Lara Galinsky, SVP at Echoing Green, and read about English at Work an Echoing Green fellow and Social Velocity client transforming the lives of ESL service workers.

Echoing Green’s online Fellowship application will be open from December 5, 2011 to January 9, 2012. You can find out more about the Fellowship application process here and you can sign up to receive the latest news on the process here.

Good Luck!

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Next Generation of High Engagagement Philanthropy: An Interview with Carol Thompson Cole

Nell Edgington — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:14:41 +0000

In this month’s Social Velocity blog interview, we’re talking with Carol Thompson Cole. Carol is President & CEO of Venture Philanthropy Partners (VPP), a philanthropic investment organization (co-founded by Mario Morino) that helps great leaders build strong, high-performing nonprofit institutions. She has over thirty years of management experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. She served as Special Advisor to President Clinton on the District of Columbia and was the Vice President for Government and Environmental Affairs at RJR Nabisco.

You can read past interviews in our Social Innovation Interview Series here.

Nell: This year marks Venture Philanthropy Partners’ 10 year anniversary. And in fact, venture philanthropy itself is only a little bit older. How has the concept of venture philanthropy changed since it first came on the scene?

Carol: People began talking about “venture philanthropy” about 11-12 years ago. Back then, it meant many different things, depending on who was speaking. Today, it still means many different things, but those organizations that work within this philanthropic mindset, like Venture Philanthropy Partners, have learned some important lessons along the way and share some common characteristics like a focus on performance, long-term financial commitments, investing in capacity and building infrastructure, and bringing resources in addition to capital to the table, to name a few.

At VPP, we actually moved away from using the term “venture philanthropy” a number of years ago as we realized that our approach was not a strictly “venture” approach. We are much more about blending some of the ways private equity firms approach their financial investments with many of the lessons learned and techniques developed by philanthropists through the years. We usually call ourselves a “philanthropic investment organization,” and we work to maximize all available resources, including capital, time, the skills and experience of our team, and the power of our network, to improve the lives of low-income children and youth in the National Capital Region.

Venture philanthropy arose out of the tech boom in the late 1990s, when many young entrepreneurs making their fortunes online decided to shift their resources into philanthropy. They saw a real opportunity to apply their business and management knowledge to nonprofits to create real, sustainable change for our society. These entrepreneurs decided to take the principles of venture capital that helped them become successful and shift that over into philanthropy.

Of course, the main strategies of venture philanthropy have been used, in some form or another, by grantmakers long before the late 90s. Venture philanthropists focus on high-engagement approaches to their grants, work to build capacity of organizations to scale their programs, and seek measured and proven outcomes as a result of their investment. Above all else, venture philanthropists use high-engagement techniques to bring more than just money to their partnership with nonprofits. Different grantmakers have refined their own ways of implementing these strategies, but they remain at the core of venture philanthropy, even a decade later.

Nell: When venture philanthropy started in the late 1990s it was thought to be a true innovation that could transform the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. Has it lived up to those original ideas?

Carol: Venture philanthropy is a true innovation, but the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors are large and complicated systems. Venture philanthropy is an effective tool that has helped us deliver strong results for the children and youth in the National Capital Region. VPP is focused on identifying outstanding nonprofit leaders with strong programs and bold ambitions to grow. We give them growth capital to build their infrastructure and scale their organizations through serving more children and youth, by increasing their outcomes and impact, or through influence – making systemic change that ultimately allows for many more lives to be changed. Our first fund has grown to serve an additional 16,000 youth.

Clearly, venture philanthropy has worked for us, but it is not the only answer for the nonprofit sector. It can be a useful tool to deliver results, but creating those results is more important than the way those results are created.

Nell: Venture philanthropy was in many ways the precursor to what has now become the social innovation movement. How do you think venture philanthropy fits into these new worlds of social investing, for-profit social entrepreneurship, and other areas where the public, private and nonprofit sectors are converging?

Carol: Again, venture philanthropy is a tool to be deployed in grantmaking. At VPP, we are focused on bringing a high-engagement model to our nonprofit partners and delivering results for the children and youth of the region. Social investing, social entrepreneurship, and other innovations coming out of the convergence of sectors are examples of similar tools to drive results. At the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference in March, where I spoke along side Paul Carttar of the Social Innovation Fund, there was a lot of discussion about what type of organizational structure is best to create social change and what type of funding an organization should seek out to achieve its mission. What became clear is that people need to focus on goals and strategy, not methods. Venture philanthropy complements programmatic sources of funding because it can help some organizations scale very effectively to help those who need it.

Nell: The federal government took a step into the world of social innovation last year with the Social Innovation Fund, which was based largely on the venture philanthropy model. What do you think of the SIF and how do you see government’s role (at both the local and federal levels) evolving from this?

Carol: VPP is a member of the inaugural portfolio of the Social Innovation Fund, and we are honored to be included among the other intermediary funders. We applied to SIF because the challenges in our community are too big and complex to be met by a single funder, a single nonprofit, or a single sector. What we need now is a “network” of nonprofits, funders, corporations, local governments, and the federal government working together to solve our most intractable problems.

SIF represents the first step towards that new form of collaboration. Speaking at the Harvard conference, Paul Carttar said that SIF was about much more than money, and it would be a success if the public-private partnership model was adopted by others across the country. In these lean times for funding, it is important that we work together to encourage social innovation where it is needed. SIF, as well as the other public-private innovations launched by the Obama administration, like Investing in Innovation and Race to the Top, are developments that should be encouraged. If we can continue to push local and federal government to take on this role as collaborator, we will be able to achieve much higher levels of impact in our communities.

Even the largest philanthropic investments are dwarfed by public funding and are often deeply effected by availability of public funding as well as how and when it is allocated. Not every partnership needs to be as formal as SIF, but I would urge all philanthropic and nonprofit organizations to look for ways to seek alignment with local, state, and federal government efforts.

Nell: What’s next for venture philanthropy? Where does it go from here? How do you continue to reinvigorate or adapt the model?

Carol: I strongly believe that SIF represents the next step for VPP, and for all of venture philanthropy. We feel our model of philanthropy works and our first investments were successful, but we also feel like there is potential to dramatically improve the lives of the most vulnerable children and youth in our regions through intense and intentional collaboration. Because of this, we applied to SIF.

Our SIF initiative, youthCONNECT, represents the next phase of our work. Instead of single investments, we are investing in a network of high-performing nonprofits that provide a number of different services to young people from low-income families to help them thrive in adulthood. All the nonprofits in the network share the goal of bringing education, job training, and social services to at least 20,000 low-income youth, ages 14-24, in our region over 5 years. As we demonstrate success, this approach can be replicated or adapted by others around the region and the country. We will still make high-impact, long-term investments in single organizations, but we are exploring the transformative power of a network approach.

It is too early to tell the effectiveness of youthCONNECT and SIF, but I think these developments are pushing us into the next generation of high-engagement philanthropy. At VPP, we are committed to evaluation, sharing, and transparency so we can learn from each other as we work in these unexplored areas.

Nell: One of the criticisms of venture philanthropy is that it is only accessible to the largest and most successful of nonprofits. Do you see smaller nonprofits being able to access the ideas of growth capital? And if so, how will this evolve?

Carol: VPP focuses on organizations with strong leaders that deliver results. We have historically focused on organizations with budgets of $3-$50 million, but in our youthCONNECT initiative we have invested in organizations that fall below that monetary requirement but still have a proven track record in the area. Investing in smaller organizations is a different approach than some venture philanthropists have used, but these smaller nonprofits should have opportunities to access growth capital. What is most important to VPP is that an organization, regardless of size, can deliver lasting and meaningful results for children and youth in our region. Change in the lives of those who need it most will always remain our priority.

Related posts:

The Next Generation of Philanthropy: An Interview with Jessamyn Lau

Financing Nonprofit Growth: An Interview with Susan Comfort

Connecting Government & Philanthropy: An Interview with Rene Cabral-Daniels

My Favorite Blogs

Nell Edgington — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:58:55 +0000

I just updated the blogroll on the Social Velocity website. You can see the brand new list under “My Favorite Blogs” on the right hand side of the Blog page, and I’m also including it below for those of you on the RSS feed.

These blogs are my favorite in the social/entrepreneurship/financing worlds. By my “favorite” I mean that these blogs:

Consistently create pithy posts that make me think, as opposed to just regurgitate a press release or old argument
Include new ideas and arguments
Cover the social entrepreneurship, nonprofit, philanthropy, start up, social finance, and/or social business worlds
Seed or contribute to larger, interesting discussions in the blogosphere

So here is my list of favorite blogs:

But I always love to be introduced to new blogs, so please tell me your favorite blogs in the comments. If your favorite blogs become mine, I’ll add them to my list.

Photo Credit: Don Cheps

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What Social Value Do Nonprofits Really Create?

Nell Edgington — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:24:28 +0000

I have a new post up at the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog called “What Social Value Do Nonprofits Really Create?” Here is an excerpt:

There is a concept that good entrepreneurs know only too well, but nonprofits could stand to explore. A “value proposition” is the unique value a product or service provides a consumer. Without a value proposition a business has no place in the market. For a nonprofit, a social value proposition is just as critical to success, but often ignored. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, due in part to the growth of for-profit social entrepreneurs, nonprofits must analyze, articulate, and deliver on a social value proposition.

In the past, nonprofits could exist without a value proposition. Donors wouldn’t argue that a library, homeless shelter, food pantry or school provided a necessary service. But as we move further down the road of social innovation, the assumption that money will automatically follow good works is no longer valid…

You can read the entire post here.

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What Social Value Do Nonprofits Really Create?

Where Nonprofits Fit in the Social Innovation Movement

A Monster List of Social Innovation Books, Blogs, Conferences, Funders

Financing Not Fundraising: The Plan

Nell Edgington — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:20:37 +0000

A few months ago I argued that nonprofits need to stop fundraising and start financing for social impact. As I wrote:

Fundraising in its current form just doesn’t work anymore. Indeed, traditional fundraising is holding the sector back by keeping nonprofits in the starvation cycle of trying to do more and more with less and less. Really, what the sector needs is a financing strategy, not a fundraising strategy. By that I mean that nonprofits have to break out of the narrow view that traditional FUNDRAISING (individual donor appeals, events, foundation grants) will completely fund all of their activities. Instead, nonprofits must work to create a broader approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change.

The idea is that nonprofits can no longer work towards social impact on one side and throw a gala event (or send out a direct mail appeal or write a grant) on the other side and think that this disjointed, haphazard way of funding their work is sustainable. To truly achieve social impact, nonprofits need to take a huge step back and figure out how to employ all of the financial tools available to them in an effective, integrated way. This is how you finance, rather than fundraise for, social impact.

Over the next few months, in an occasional series titled Financing Not Fundraising, I will elaborate on this argument and demonstrate what financing, as opposed to fundraising, for social impact looks like.

Today I will launch the series with the core element of the idea, which is a financial plan. In essence, a financial plan is a key element of, not separate from, a nonprofit’s strategic plan. That means that the goals of the strategic plan are created with the full knowledge of 1) what it will cost to reach those goals and 2) how the money to cover those costs will be secured.

A financial plan differs from a fundraising plan in a number of ways. A financial plan, unlike a fundraising plan:

Includes ALL activities that bring money in the door (individual donors, foundation grants, earned income, corporate sponsorships, government contracts, loans, etc.) and fully integrates them into an overall strategy and execution plan.
Supports the short AND long term goals of the organization
Funds the programs AND infrastructure of the organization. It recognizes the necessity of and supports not only the nonprofit’s direct service activities, but also, the infrastructure, systems, planning and other organization building that will ensure that those services thrive and grow
Understands the characteristics and uses of different kinds of money (i.e. revenue versus growth capital, loans versus grants) and employs each available financial vehicle in the most effective way
Employs money-securing activities that are in line with, not opposed to, the core competencies of the organization

If you are interested in having Social Velocity help you create such a plan, check out our Revenue Plan consulting service, or if you’d rather create it on your own with our tool, check out our Revenue Plan Step-by-Step Guide.

What I am suggesting is that nonprofits stop exhausting their boards, staffs, donors, friends, and clients with a series of disjointed activities that are meant to raise money, but actually just end up making poor use of a nonprofit’s already limited resources. Instead, nonprofits need an integrated, thoughtful, strategic financing plan that makes social impact a reality.

If you want to learn more about how to apply the concepts of Financing Not Fundraising to your nonprofit, check out our Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series.

To download the 27-page Financing Not Fundraising e-book, click here.

Photo Credit: Steve Wampler

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A New Approach to Nonprofit Funding: Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series

What’s the Cost of Bad Decisions?

Nell Edgington — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:55:14 +0000

I have a new post up at the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog about the cost of making bad decisions in the nonprofit sector. Here is an excerpt:

There is an economic concept that is beautifully profound in its simplicity, but often overlooked in the nonprofit sector. Opportunity costs are the cost (financial, time, resource, other) of what you have given up in making a choice between two or more options. Understanding the opportunity costs of decisions is particularly important when resources are scarce, as is the case in the nonprofit sector. Key to the concept of opportunity costs is that you are consciously analyzing two or more options and what you must give up in choosing one over the others. Because the nonprofit sector is undercapitalized, money is king. A driving motivation in many nonprofits is to preserve money, or go after money, at all costs. So the idea of opportunity costs is often thrown out the window…

You can read the full post here.

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The Social Capital Markets Conference 3.0

Nell Edgington — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:00:39 +0000

I just registered for this year’s Social Capital Markets Conference held in San Francisco in October. It is my favorite conference in the social innovation space for a number of reasons, and I think this year’s conference (the third) may just be even better.

The Social Capital Markets Conference brings together social entrepreneurs (both for-profit and nonprofit, although the latter have gotten less airtime in past years) and those who invest, or would like to, in them. Last year it really felt as if the conference and the incredibly talented and visionary people attending it were at the beginning of something pretty amazing, new ways of providing sufficient capital to social solutions.

This year promises to go much broader and deeper exploring the financial tools and vehicles that social entrepreneurs need and how we create them. For starters, Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy is addressing the conference’s tendency in past years to downplay nonprofits and philanthropy at the conference by leading a new “Tactical Philanthropy Track” that will, as Sean has said:

Bring more donors and nonprofits to the “social capital markets table.” To that end, we’re building a series of panel sessions that examine the way in which philanthropy is an integrated part of the social capital markets, not a separate activity. Our sessions will give donors, nonprofits, investors and for-profits the opportunity to examine together the role that philanthropy plays in social capital markets.

Secondly, representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be at the conference to discuss their decision to put $400 million behind their new Program Related Investments program, which I’ve discussed before as a watershed for the social capital market. The SoCap conference website explains what the Gates session will do:

Gates foundation will discuss the foundation’s PRI initiative including the rationale for charitable investment, the value of investment partners to leverage expertise and capital, and the foundation’s hopes for philanthropy in the social capital market. Remarks will be followed by a deep dive into their experience putting this PRI approach to work with Root Capital.

The Gates Foundation decision to put 1% of their capital into a fund to provide risk capital to social entrepreneurs has the potential to encourage other foundations to similarly experiment with new tools for investing in social entrepreneurs, which ultimately means more dollars in the social capital market.

It’s exciting to see what started three years ago as a small conference of less than 600 (a number achieved only at the last minute by a deluge of laid off investment bankers from the financial collapse) becoming arguably the most important conference in the social innovation space. I hope to see you there!

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What Nonprofits Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurs

Nell Edgington — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:43:02 +0000

It seems that the social entrepreneurship movement is taking the world by storm. In recent years tremendous energy, new ideas, and (we hope) resources are moving toward solving social problems. Saving the world has suddenly become cool.

But, as I’ve written before, we can’t forget the sector that was working on saving the world long before it was cool–the nonprofit sector. And in fact, there is much that the social entrepreneurship movement can offer to rethink, reinvigorate, and remake the nonprofit sector.

To that end, Social Velocity has just released a new white paper, “What Nonprofits Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurs,” detailing what nonprofits can borrow from the movement in terms of financing, articulating, planning and thinking about their work. Here’s an excerpt:

Social entrepreneurship is not a panacea. But there are things to be learned from a movement that is re-envisioning the future, finding new ways to finance social impact, working towards BIG goals and turning the status quo on its head. The social innovation movement provides an opportunity for the nonprofit sector to see things in a new way and move the best ideas forward. And in doing so, the nonprofit sector–the people, organizations, and resources it encompasses–could revolutionize social change in this country. But becoming more innovative involves some dramatic changes in a nonprofit’s mindset, goals, and approach to funding.

Nonprofits need to think bigger–much, much bigger. One thing that all social entrepreneurs have in common is their predilection toward bold thinking. What if nonprofit organizations took a new approach and became bold? Really BOLD. This change in perspective, in goals can revolutionize an organization. No longer are the board, staff and funders content to add a few sites each year with no end goal. Rather, they understand and rally around their long-term goal, which is to solve a problem. And they see every effort they make, every meeting they come to, every investment they secure as getting them that much closer to that solution. It can transform an organization, and ultimately solve a problem…

You can download the white paper here.

Photo Credit: SI Camp

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What Social Entrepreneurs Can Learn From an Old Nonprofit

What Nonprofits Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurs – Recorded Webinar

What Nonprofits Can Learn from Social Entrepreneurs White Paper

We Need an Ecosystem for The Bottom 80%

Nell Edgington — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:53:48 +0000

In response to my post last week on the Change.org blog about the Social Innovation Fund, Sean Stannard-Stockton, of the Tactical Philanthropy blog, wrote a comment that really got me thinking.

My post argued that the $50 million federal Social Innovation Fund is only one small piece of the capital the nonprofit sector needs. The fund will help the top nonprofit organizations, but will not remedy the lack of capital available to the smaller, less sophisticated nonprofits that make up the majority (80%) of the sector. Sean rightly pointed out that like the business sector, the vast majority of nonprofits are small, and as we have done with businesses, we need to create different expectations for different kinds of nonprofits. I would take Sean’s comments even further and argue that we actually need to create a similar ecosystem of funding and expertise for the nonprofit sector, as we have done for businesses.

Sean writes:

One thing I think that people need to keep in mind when they point to how many nonprofits are small is that the same is true in business. While good revenue numbers are hard to find, did you know that 73% of for-profits have less than 10 employees and 54% have less than 4 employees? It seems to me that as a field we need to do a better job of segmenting the nonprofit market and having very different expectations for nonprofits which are “small businesses” vs those that are “public companies.”

Sean makes a critical point. The vast nonprofit sector is often lumped together as one. When in reality, the sector is incredibly diverse. And although over the past 10 years there have been some innovative strides made in providing capital, expertise, and other resources to the top 20% of the nonprofit sector (such as venture philanthropy funds like New Profit and Venture Philanthropy Partners and management expertise from consulting companies like Monitor and Bridgespan) the fact remains that the “bottom” 80% of the nonprofit sector is still very much alone.

This is one of the reasons I started Social Velocity. I saw a real hole in the marketplace in terms of capital and management expertise to the bottom 80% of the nonprofit market. A $500,000 nonprofit organization can’t engage a Monitor or Bridgespan group, and a venture philanthropy fund wouldn’t be interested in scaling them since no one will fund evaluation to prove their results. These organizations are stuck within the vicious starvation cycle and cannot get out.

We need to do a better job, as Sean says, of segmenting the nonprofit sector and creating appropriate expectations for those different segments, but we need to go much further. We have to create an ecosystem of expertise and funding for the smaller, less sophisticated segments of the sector, which includes:

Educating smaller, less sophisticated philanthropists that creating solutions requires funding for less sexy things like capacity, organization building, evaluation
Providing significant capacity capital to build out revenue functions, attract and retain top talent, articulate a value add, message effectively
Supplying growth capital to nonprofits who have a great solution and the desire to scale
Creating realistic and cost-effective evaluation tools so that smaller organizations can prove their impact along with the big guys
Securing management expertise to help smaller nonprofits create strategic and growth plans, articulate their impact and value add to potential investors, develop comprehensive financial strategies, etc.

I think it’s fabulous that there is a growing understanding that nonprofits can’t do it alone anymore. And I’m so pleased to see new funding vehicles like the Social Innovation Fund that are helping to take social innovation to the next level. But let’s not forget that there are many other innovative nonprofit organizations that will never catch the eye of the Social Innovation Fund, or their funding and consulting counterparts.

Over the past 200+ years America has established a fairly advanced ecosystem that supports (albeit not perfectly) the growth and success of entrepreneurs at every stage of the game. We are starting to recognize the need for a similar ecosystem in the nonprofit sector. But there is still much work to be done. Let’s not forget the smaller, less sophisticated nonprofits that may have tremendous solutions to contribute, but who just can’t get past the many hurdles in their way.

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