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May Must-Reads 2018

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Each month, we’ll be gathering five new resources that can help us work smarter, think more deeply, and create the change we want to see in this complex world. This month’s reads cover equitable grantmaking, impact evaluations, capacity building in a time of disruption, an argument against fairness, and framing issues to make progress.

1. Power Moves

EQUITY | National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy

This toolkit is a very thorough, actionable resource to guide foundations in examining how well they build, share and wield power. To truly strive for and advance equity and justice, the toolkit states, you have to understand your own power and privilege. The toolkit includes best practices, sample questions to gather data and solicit feedback, discussion guides, and next steps and tools for implementing changes.

2. Bracing for a Downturn: Nonprofits, Charitable Deduction Worries, and How Foundations Can Help

STRATEGY | The Center for Effective Philanthropy

This survey shows how nonprofit and foundation leaders view the implications of the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In short, most of them are concerned that charitable giving might go down. The survey also highlights suggestions for how foundations can help nonprofits such as supporting their efforts to raise money and be financially sustainable, helping them and their donors understand the effects of this legislation, and promoting the importance of nonprofits.

3. The New Normal: Capacity Building During a Time of Disruption

CAPACITY BUILDING | Open Impact 

How is the current economic and political environment impacting the capacity building needs of social change leaders, nonprofits, networks and movements? How are funders responding to these changing needs, and how can they better support this work going forward? This new report shares findings on what nonprofits need most right now and recommendations for how nonprofits and foundations can meet those needs.

4. Ten Reasons Not to Measure Impact—and What to Do Instead

LEARNING & EVALUATION | University of Washington and Northwestern University

Subscription Required – Impact evaluations—while important—are only a good investment in the right circumstances, argue the authors in this Stanford Social Innovation Review article. When circumstances aren’t right, organizations must build an internal culture in which the right data are regularly collected, analyzed and applied. For more on how to build this type of culture, take a look at our blog post on creating a culture of learning through evaluation.

5. Picture This: How We Frame Issues Matters for Social Change

STRATEGY | The Communications Network and FrameWorks Institute 

The way we frame issues profoundly influences our understanding of them and how we approach solutions. This Stanford Social Innovation Review series shares how framing issues of gun violence, sexual violence, immigration, climate change, aging, addiction and housing have helped spark meaningful dialogues and drive change. As we’ve found in our own research, communications must be viewed as a critical piece of strategy in order to make large-scale change.

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Strategies for Sustainability in Uncertain Times

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In a year filled with uncertainty, many social sector organizations are asking how they might successfully sustain their impact in the coming years. Changes to the federal budget are expected to increase need among vulnerable populations in the U.S. while simultaneously reducing federal funding for nonprofits delivering critical services. At the same time, individual activism is rising and the line between donor, volunteer and activist is blurring as individuals seek opportunities to get involved with the causes they care deeply about.

Add to this two key trends: a shift from sustaining incremental change to achieving transformational, scaled impact, and a growing understanding of what it takes to create resilient organizations and networks capable of sustaining the work required to make change. These colliding factors have left nonprofits questioning how they can scale their impact in a sustainable way.

When we talk about sustainability, we mean much more than financial sustainability. At Community Wealth Partners, we think of sustainability as an organization’s ability to create long-lasting, transformational impact. This requires funding, sure, but also a focused business strategy, a culture of adaptability and learning, strong partnerships, and the personal sustainability of individuals within that organization.

As organizations adopt new strategies and test ways to scale their impact, we are seeing three emerging themes across our work with partners and the field in general:

1. Creating a culture of innovation

Agility and innovation are key characteristics of successful organizations, regardless of tax status or sector. For commercial businesses, the ability to grow and meet financial goals depends on their ability to provide a unique, valuable service or product to customers. Doing so requires predicting how emerging trends will shift customer needs or upend the landscape of competitors.

The same principal applies for nonprofits and their ability to sustain their impact. As a recent Bridgespan survey highlights, nonprofit leaders feel urgency to innovate, yet also feel limited in their ability to do so. The most successful nonprofits can adapt to changes in the policy environment, rapidly capture new types and sources of funding, embrace and influence emerging social movements, and continuously build new partnerships and pathways to achieving impact. Cultivating an innovative culture, as we’ve found is the case with any culture, requires changing mindsets and behaviors across an organization.

We recently visited AARP’s innovation laboratory, The Hatchery, a start-up incubator and accelerator housed in a physical collaborative workspace, to get an inside look at how the organization is scaling transformative ideas that drive revenue while accelerating AARP’s mission to disrupt aging.

The innovation lab incubates up to three home-grown startups, including a website to help small businesses understand and select 401(k) options. Each new business idea goes through a rapid but rigorous process of coming up with ideas, modeling those ideas, and testing them in the market. Most importantly, The Hatchery and AARP follow a disciplined process to assess and shelve ideas within months if evidence doesn’t suggest they can rapidly grow into independent business opportunities that leverage market forces to drive impact at scale and generate significant earned revenue. The Hatchery also selects a few later-stage, mission-aligned technology startups—like a company developing a virtual reality–based system for remotely conducting physical therapy—and provides them with access to experts, potential customers or partners, and other resources on aging.

Beyond its role as an incubator, The Hatchery is designed to be the center of an innovation revolution within AARP. The open, creative space helps spur new ideas during meetings, and the team trains “Innovation Champions” from various departments across AARP in human-centered design and rapid prototyping methods so each department can apply those skills to their team’s work. The goal is to accelerate a culture of innovation across the entire AARP enterprise, enabling the organization to sustain its impact by staying ahead of emerging trends and designing solutions that meet society’s evolving aging needs.

2. Engaging donors as activists

Over the past year, many of our nonprofit partners have described a shift in their relationships with supporters and donors. Many donors are seeking a more active and engaged role in helping an organization deliver its mission. This is partially driven by the rise of technology that makes it easier for individuals to connect to, engage with and donate to organizations. It is also a result of increased competition for resources among nonprofits and the changing profile of donors—from baby boomers who are often interested in issue-focused membership organizations to millennials who more commonly seek opportunities to directly support specific causes. These factors, combined with a dramatic rise in civic activism, create opportunities for nonprofits to rethink the role donors play in their sustainability.

A leader in understanding and promoting new practices in nonprofit fundraising, The Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund has begun to define and elevate the concept of a “culture of philanthropy”—an organizational culture in which everyone has a part to play in raising resources for the organization. In their paper “Beyond Fundraising: What does it mean to build a culture of philanthropy?” The Haas Jr. Fund and author Cynthia M. Gibson explain that donors are looking to give to organizations not just because of the work these organizations do, but also because donors aspire to the same goals and want to engage with the organization to achieve those aspirations. The paper highlights four core, interrelated components of a culture of philanthropy:

  • Shared responsibility for development
  • Integration and alignment with mission
  • A focus on fundraising as engagement
  • Strong donor relationships

For example, another of The Haas Jr. Fund’s papers, “Fundraising Bright Spots,” highlights Fierce, a membership-based organization building the leadership and power of LGBTQ youth of color in New York City. Fierce’s former executive director, Angela Moreno, explains that when the organization’s donors attend its top fundraising event, the donors “feel connected to each other even though they’ve never met before.… The history and purpose of our organization is so clear and so deeply meaningful that it’s really easy for donors to say yes to us.”

Passive donors are becoming fewer and fewer. Creating authentic opportunities for donors to experience and contribute to the causes they care about most is essential to sustainability over the long run.

3. Adopting market-driven business models to accelerate impact and diversify funding

Shifts in the ways organizations bring in revenue and encouragement from grantmakers to diversify funding has led nonprofits to explore market-driven approaches and business models to achieving and sustaining their impact. One example of an organization experimenting with a new, market-driven model is the Center for Children’s Law and Policy (CCLP), an organization committed to ensuring the response to youth who get in trouble with the law is developmentally appropriate, free of racial and ethnic bias, and focused on building strengths that help youth avoid further involvement with the justice system.

Since its founding, CCLP has worked in counties, cities and states, delivering trainings, providing technical assistance and advocating on topics such as eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system, reducing unnecessary incarceration of youth, and improving the conditions of confinement for youth. Since its work was funded by grantmakers, the organization offered programs to populations and geographies that were priority for funders. When philanthropic and government funding streams changed, CCLP saw an opportunity to use their existing expertise and services and create a new business model to market their expertise directly to jurisdictions through trainings and consultation, regardless of whether those jurisdictions are a priority geography or population for grantmakers. Not only does this strategy generate revenue through a new source, but CCLP hopes it also creates stronger results and buy-in from stakeholders since they are putting more “skin in the game.”

Adopting this new model requires some organizational shifts. To respond to changing market needs, CCLP is adopting new cultural norms: nimbleness, flexibility and entrepreneurialism. As CCLP markets directly to jurisdictions, it is having new types of conversations that highlight the organization’s unique value. It also is creating business processes for more effective staff planning. While the new model requires new approaches, CCLP is already seeing the benefits: it has greater autonomy, it is better able to sustain its work, and it is now able to serve more young people across the country.

Prepared for the Unforeseeable

The only constant, as the saying goes, is change. To survive and thrive amidst changes, nonprofits and foundations must change the way they operate. In addition to AARP, The Haas Jr. Fund and CCLP, we see another great example of this in NeighborWorks America. The affordable housing and community development organization has invested heavily in equipping its network members to become market-driven, innovative organizations able to seize opportunities and weather changes. As profiled in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, NeighborWorks America is in the midst of implementing a multi-year pilot designed to cultivate innovation throughout its network, helping member organizations diversify revenue by adopting new, technology-enabled sustainable business practices.

As these organizations recognize, nonprofits and foundations must adopt new ways of working. We encourage all social sector organizations to explore new approaches to sustainability to ensure sustained impact over the coming years.

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Six Steps to Get Intentional About Your Partnerships

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As the social sector increasingly recognizes the importance of addressing the root causes of systemic challenges, it is becoming more critical to form strong partnerships. Partnerships have myriad benefits for individual organizations—from boosting efficiency to growing their influence—but the true potential of partnerships is transformational. If we can forge meaningful partnerships, we can help change systems.

Yet forming a partnership that effectively brings distinct groups together—each with its own culture and agenda—takes hard, deliberate work. We’ve scanned leading practices across several organizations with whom we’ve worked and uncovered ways that organizations can go about building a strong base for partnerships. The steps we describe here are most applicable for partnerships between two or a small number of nonprofit organizations working to design or implement a specific program or initiative. Each step must be adapted to the unique situation of the partners.

As you work to establish or strengthen a partnership, consider these six practical steps.

1. Build Trust

Many leaders with extensive experience developing and implementing partnerships agree: Trust is the most important factor in the success of a partnership. When a trusting relationship exists, both organizations openly discuss with each other what is and isn’t working. Staff foster interpersonal relationships with one another. Both partners are intentional about equitably contributing to the outcomes. Building trust is an art but it is also a science: there is a formula for trust and specific actions that can be taken to foster it. To weave trust into the fabric of the relationship, it is important that organizations establish partnership principles and align on the values and behaviors that will guide how they work together. Read more about how to create a strong culture through explicitly outlining values and behaviors.

2. Fundraise Jointly

Some organizations create new partnerships because they’ve already received funds to do so. For others seeking funding to support specific partnerships and initiatives, fundraising jointly can be challenging. It requires that partners establish clear expectations for each partner’s role, how much funding is needed, and what to do if they raise more or less than expected. It also requires partners to communicate about which funders they’re comfortable approaching and which ones are off limits.

3. Clarify Staffing

Successful partnership staffing ultimately comes down to clarity and simplicity. Don’t overcomplicate the staffing structure by involving people who don’t have a clear role or purpose. To clarify responsibilities, consider using the MOCHA model. At the beginning of the partnership, have an honest conversation about the time and skills needed, and then commit to dedicating what is necessary. Staffing challenges will inevitably arise no matter how well-planned the staffing structures. Create space to evaluate what is working and not working, and adjust accordingly.

4. Ensure Good Governance

Establish clear and transparent processes to govern the overall partnership. You can do this by agreeing upon objectives, outputs and outcomes and communicating these within partner organizations and to external stakeholders. It also helps to proactively develop processes for resolving conflicts between partners and for making changes to, or dissolving, the partnership. Managing finances is another crucial component of governance. It is important that both organizations can understand and articulate how funds will be used to achieve the partnership goals. Create accounting, budgeting and reporting mechanisms and, to ensure accountability, make them subject to external review.

5. Create Communications Processes

Get clear on how to communicate the purpose of the partnership. Each organization generally has four sets of stakeholders: their employees, their board, their partner organization and external parties. To start, create a comprehensive communications strategy to share information with your employees, your board and your partner organization. Create messaging that is easy to understand. This will then help in developing public-facing messaging that clearly and succinctly communicates the value of the partnership—messaging that will help garner buy-in and support from external stakeholders. Before releasing any public messaging, determine a process for how partners will approve and publish external messages.

6. Learn and Evaluate

In contrast to creating a measurement and evaluation strategy for a project, doing so for a partnership is unique because there generally are at least three distinct sets of objectives: those of Partner A, those of Partner B and those of the partnership. A first step is to create a theory of change for the partnership. Creating a theory of change at the beginning enables the organizations to establish a shared understanding of partnership objectives. The next step is to create an evaluation framework. The framework enables partners to identify metrics for Partner A’s objectives, Partner B’s objectives and the partnership objectives. Most importantly, approach the evaluation with a spirit of learning, not just one of accountability. Evaluations are ripe with opportunities to see what is working and what is not, and shift course.

Creating strong partnerships is hard, particularly if time is limited and partnership requests are abundant. Yet if we hope to change systems and make the transformational change we seek, we need partners. These steps may not make sense for all organizations but can serve as guideposts in many partnership situations. Ultimately, forging a strong partnership boils down to intentionality. From building interpersonal relationships to outlining budgets, what matters most is that partners are deliberate and thoughtful in the decisions they make and how they work together.

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