[unsolicitedreform]

“The daunting realization is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing in most fields of life, especially the ones that involve people,” says Richard Thaler, professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and author of the new book “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.” He adds, “The alternative to guessing is to run experiments.”

The Anti-Poverty Experiment

[unsolicitedreform]

These budding philanthropists want metrics and analytic tools comparable to the dashboards, like Mixpanel, that power their software products. They want to interact directly with the scientists, field workers and academics whose ideas power the philanthropic world but who have traditionally been hidden away in a backroom somewhere, shielded from their beneficiaries by so-called development officers.

Sean Parker: Philanthropy for Hackers

[unsolicitedreform]

The Servitude Bubble is creating “jobs”, sure — but only of the lowest kind: low-end, deskilled, dead-end, go-nowhere “service” jobs — that don’t only crush your soul, damage your psyche, and break your spirit — but waste your potential. Not “service” as in doctors and therapists— “service” as in pedicurists, trash-pickers, and dog-walkers. And so, on balance, it deskills and impoverishes human potential — it doesn’t expand and enrich it. The Servitude Bubble is made of stuff which, en masse, wastes, decimates, and demolishes the thing which counts most: human potential.

The Servitude Bubble — Bad Words — Medium

[unsolicitedreform]

Nonprofits budgeted an average of $114,443 for technology in their most recent fiscal year. That figure ranges from $10,530 to $432,214 depending on the size of the organization.

Average Nonprofit Spends 3.2% of Budget on Technology, Report Says

[unsolicitedreform]

At first, “it’s like, ‘I’m going to build this thing for the community around me.’ Then it’s ‘I’m going to build this service for people on the Internet.’ But at some point you get to a scale where you decide we can actually solve these bigger problems that will shape the world over the next decade.”

Why Facebook’s $2 Billion Bet on Oculus Rift Might One Day Connect Everyone on Earth

[shitsjefsaw]

“We’ve visited villages where people get their Internet from a Wi-Fi hotspot on an inter-city bus,” he says. “As the bus rolls in, everybody’s phone suddenly will download its messages. And the bus will drive to the next village and suddenly it’ll be a hotspot for those people.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/12/project_loon_how_google_s_internet_balloons_are_actually_working.2.html (via shitsjefsaw)

[did-you-know]

The Danish wave their national flags at airport arrivals to welcome travelers to the ‘happiest nation in the world.” Source

[unsolicitedreform]

It's the small things. 

[unsolicitedreform]

Random Facts about the Rice Krispies Treat

We are doing a bunch of research for a project next year and one of the things we are looking at is how commercial products evolved through public participation. I thought this was interesting: 

Rice Krispies Treats were invented in 1939 by Malitta Jensen and Mildred Day at the Kellogg Company home economics department as a fund raiser for Camp Fire Girls.

The Kellogg Company started promoting the Rice Krispies Treats recipe actively a couple decades later in 1965.

It took another 30 years for Kellogg to bring packaged Rice Krispies Treats to supermarket shelves. 

Today, Rice Krispies Treats are a 100+ million dollar business each year. 

[afterthefiredetroit]

Loveland Technologies, the company behind whydontweownthis.com, tracks structure fires as part of their data collection efforts. Sometimes there are repeat fires at a location within days of each other, as was the case at 5972 Canton Street. The property was surveyed on November 6th, a few days after a suspicious fire damaged the house. The next day the arsonist came back and finished the house off. All that is left is a foundation.

Imagery from whydontweownthis.com

[parislemon]

Good writing has a musical quality to it, a mathematical quality, a balance and a rhythm. You can feel that much better when it’s read aloud.

Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit and Unbroken, talking about her love of audiobooks. (via parislemon)

[explore-blog]

Mentorship is something you do, not something you get. In other words, like all relationships, it is a process, not an accomplishment.

Excellent read on how to get a great mentor. Creative history is laden with examples of how important such a supporter is. (via explore-blog)

[parislemon]

I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures. You might remember Pets.com or Kosmo.com. It was like getting a root canal with no anesthesia. None of those things are fun. But they also don’t matter.

Jeff Bezos, when asked by Henry Blodget if the Amazon Fire Phone was a mistake. His rationale, of course, is that the you can’t have the massive successes without risk-taking, and those successes more than cover the cost of failures. (via parislemon)

[unsolicitedreform]

Capacity Builders vs. Dandelion

There is a cottage industry of "capacity builders" that make up a growing portion of the nonprofit space. Almost all of these service providers are one-to-few person consulting shops offering a prepackaged service like grant writing or strategic plan facilitation to nonprofit organizations. Very few are capable of much customization for their clients. This is due to the unscalable nature of their own business model and the relatively nominal amount of available capital for these kind of services.

The nonprofits are in a tough position themselves. The grants made by foundations and governments are highly restricted to specific deliverables. Organizations who are growing to meet demand find themselves struggling to create efficiencies and activate underutilized assets. The time is simply not available with leaders having to both lead a team and manage fundraising relationships.

My team and I consistently find ourselves at a disadvantage in rooms with nonprofit leaders not familiar with our work. We need to always be doing a better job to educate our market around how we can do all the things we can do at the cost we do it. They are understandably cautious, suffering a fatigue that has come from years of unspectacular outcomes with the capacity building industry.

It’s easy to blame the small business consultant but the reality is that there is not enough income per client to invest too heavily. The money just isn’t there to support a robust team who can adapt to the unique needs of any organization. 

We are trying to crack this nut.

Dandelion is Impact Assembly. We don’t write reports. Nonprofits tell us what they need (diversify their income, execute a program, reinvent their brand, etc.) and we create a managed process to deliver that result at a flat rate that our clients can afford.

Our model is unique to the industry. Our project managers are on the ground in the cities in which we work and they are plugged in to our distributed network of specialized talent. Our management team run things like a assembly plant. Led by a former Chrysler Group VP,  we design 21st century solutions for community minded organizations and leverage our talent network to assemble anything our clients need.

[unsolicitedreform]

Build It And They Will Fund

Foundations are inundated with requests for funding. Most of those from lesser-known non-profits. Almost every day I hear from a burgeoning organization equipped with little more than a one-pager to communicate their impact. They are in essence attempting to sell an idea.

Meanwhile, established nonprofits are able to demonstrate measurements for their impact, however anecdotal. Foundations have a finite amount of program capital they disperse each year. Any money that goes to a new non-profit is money taken away from an established institutional non-profit. Foundations being shepherds of other people's money are naturally risk averse.

Trying to sell your impact without having proven your model is going to prove fruitless. Build the minimum measurable impact. Show funders that you can deliver the impact you are asking them to fund.

A good example of this is the fellowship program Challenge Detroit. After a period of time spent trying to convince economic development funders that a fellowship program partnered with corporations would serve to measurably attract and retain young talent, the leadership at Challenge Detroit pulled the dollars together and launched the program on their own. Once proven, they received $230,000 from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation for the next year.

If your plan for impact intends to feed someone, house someone, help someone get a job -- help people access an opportunity at a certain amount of impact per dollar, save your time. Don't go asking foundations and other institutional funders for the money to feed, house, or employ 1,000 people. Do it yourself with 10 or 50. Show you can have the impact you're proposing and then put yourself in proximity with funders and their investments will come to you.

[deadpresidents]

No, you shouldn’t have co-opted the name and tried to take ownership of it from the opposition in the first place. You owned it, and the “brand” stuck, and that’s half of the reason why there’s opposition to it.

You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. You should have hammered home that it wasn’t “Obamacare” from the very beginning. This isn’t a discussion that you start having six months after you were dumped from the Cabinet. This is something you just do very early in the process — before the Affordable Care Act was even passed. Is there nobody in the Executive Branch who ever worked in communications or advertising or, oh, I don’t know, a political campaign?

I’m astonished that the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was in charge of implementing the Affordable Care Act, is publicly saying this in December 2014 when I’ve been saying “We need to kill the term ‘Obamacare’” since before Obama was even elected. It’s not a simple fix. Not anymore.

[unsolicitedreform]

Earned Revenue for Established Nonprofits

  More than 1.4 million nonprofits with thousands more coming online each year. The barrier to entry in developing a new nonprofit has reduced drastically in the last decade. This is true of many other industries over the same period.

Foundation and Government budgets are relatively finite. Tax rates are historically low while expenses inevitably increase and foundations need invest only 5% of their endowment each year to maintain their tax status.

Earned revenue is the only good way forward towards reinvention and growth. Diversify your funding streams. Every dollar you earn without grant applications and answering RFP’s is unrestricted. You can allocate the revenue into the departments that serve your long term goals.

At Dandelion, we are often asked to build out earned revenue models within nonprofit organizations. Over time we have developed a simple framework to evaluate an organization's ability to succeed with a new product or service. We call it the 4 W’s:

Who is your customer for this product or service you want to sell?

Why specifically should they buy it?

What are their alternatives? Your competition.

What is the profit margin per unit?

As a nonprofit, if you cannot answer these questions in a sentence, you are not ready for social enterprise.

[unsolicitedreform]

“It’s in Turnaround.” What Philanthropists can learn from Hollywood.

Well managed nonprofits around the world are working right now to respond to a request-for-proposal (RFP) from a funder. A government, a foundation, “the funder” is looking for a specific type of impact and so they are outlining exactly what they are looking for from applying organizations.

RFP’s work optimally in the private sector because profit-making organizations have the margins necessary to afford the operational capacity to infinitely scale up and meet demand. The nonprofit sector doesn’t work like that. Foundations and Governments fund programs all but exclusively and the capital is heavily restricted to program related activities. There are only nominal allocations for operational support and they are usually defined as contract staff or technical assistance. Nonprofits spending those dollars on consultants out in the capacity building market.

This misalignment reminds me of an inefficiency that Hollywood studios have found a way to correct. Studios will fund a project and for any number of reasons it will fall apart before it hits the big screen. Those funded initiatives have a rider in the agreement that allows the studio to pull the project into “turnaround.” They will push pause on the funds not yet distributed and take a closer look to see if the investment continues to be viable. Often times they bring in outside experts to get it back on track.

Everyday at Dandelion, we see nonprofits struggling to deploy funded initiatives effectively and often at all. It’s really not their fault -- restricted revenue and an insufficient marketplace of capacity builders, often peddling pre-packaged products and preconceived ideas, leave nonprofits in the unenviable spot of having to prioritize the needs of their beneficiaries over the outcomes that their funder had originally sought.

If civic and social funders could see their way to include the concept of "turnaround" in their grant relationships and have a go-to contingency plan, they would be more insured that their investments would result in the most impact-per-dollar while simultaneously supporting their grantee with a safe environment to course correct unstable projects.