Hybrid Organizations Need More Study

An interesting piece from the HBR on Hybrids. I particularly like the fact that the authors noted the risk of mission drift.

In dealing with customers and beneficiaries, hybrids face difficult tradeoffs in determining the best ways to price goods. Often there is a mismatch between the people who would most benefit from the product or service and those who are able to pay. Hybrids thus risk mission drift, as they may over time start targeting wealthier and more profitable market segments.

Read the article.

Frumkin part two

A little while ago I posted a supplementary article about Frumkin's Diamond. Recently, a student wondered if Frumkin's Diamond related to other aspects of a development office or was more exclusive to the fundraiser-donor relationship. The answer is simple - the Diamond has a major impact on the development office as it requires a high-level of donor stewardship.

If, for example, a donor makes a gift using a blend of positivistic and normative measures, and those measures were supplied in part or in whole by your development office, then it falls to your organization to ensure that some sort of follow-up occurs to demonstrate impact and effectiveness. You and your stewardship staff (assuming you are lucky enough to have stewardship staff) need to not simply document who or what was impacted by the gift, but you need to demonstrate what effect the gift had. Presenting that information in an unbiased and honest way allows the fundraiser and organization to maintain a close relationship with the donor, and if the numbers are good, provides a good chance of future gifts.

Remember, though, that this level of stewardship requires a great deal of time and energy. Smaller, less well-resourced NPO's, need to be cautious that they don't over-promise or neglect other donors.

Invest in Fundraising!

Wow! What a fabulous post over at HBR about the power of philanthropy when directed to the FUNDRAISING arm of the nonprofit.

Read the article here.

Thanks, HBR, for making such a cogent argument for something most people want to avoid.

Gift of William Blake Featured at Amherst College

It's not everyday that one gets to close a gift of a rare William Blake painting, but that's what happened to me last Fall. Read about the gift in the Winter 2012 Amherst College Magazine.

Here's how the story starts...

On his birthday in 1962, Henry deForest Webster ’48 received an unusual gift: a small tempera painting, well over a century old. The gift was from Webster’s mother, who’d inherited it from her second husband, Webster’s stepfather, who’d received it from his own father, William Augustus White, a prominent art collector.

For decades, Webster kept this 10-inch-by-15-inch painting on a wall near the kitchen door of his Bethesda, Md., home. It hung in his house as he built his career at the National Institutes of Health, which he joined as a young neurologist in 1968. It hung there as he and his wife, Marion, raised their daughter and four sons. When the couple sold their house and moved to an apartment, the painting came, too.

The painting is The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter, by the poet, painter and printmaker William Blake, a towering figure, unappreciated in his lifetime, whose artwork is today concentrated in a very small number of repositories, among them the Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Very few American museums own even a single Blake painting. (More common is to see his engravings in U.S. museums.)

Click here for the full article.

Planned Parenthood for the Win

A fantastic analysis of how PP turned the Komen decision to their benefit:

http://gettingattention.org/2012/02/komen-planned-parenthood/

A good reminder that a well cultivated base and a strong message machine will succeed every time.

Notes on Frumkin's Diamond

[The following is a supplement to Week 4 in my Bay Path College NMP621 class: Introduction to Philanthropy and Fundraising Fundamentals]

The issue of Public and Private Value is important to Peter Frumkin, as we learned in his early work while at Harvard. However, many students have expressed a lot of confusion over what Frumkin is referring to when he writes about these two types of values. Using a 2006 text, I hope to clear up some confusion on this issue.

In Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy (2006), Frumkin expands on his early work and spends a great deal of time discussing the issue of private value and public need:

"All philanthropic activity involves a choice about how to join public needs with private commitments that is both beneficial for the organization and satisfying for the giver." (Frumkin 148) So the goal, then, for the fundraiser or advisor, is to present to the individual an unmet need that, once met, is most likely to give the donor the most satisfaction. Why is satisfaction so important to the donor? Well, according to Frumkin, without a high level of personal satisfaction, the donor loses interest or burns out.

Simple, right? Not so fast.

Rarely do donors have a clear understanding of their own "private value". Who among us, if pressed, could easily define the needs most worthy of our philanthropy? Could you write a mission statement for your philanthropy? Frumkin suggests that helping a donor articulate his/her personal values is an incredibly important first step. Without a clear sense of personal mission, the choices of who to give to can be overwhelming. Sometimes donors need some experience giving money away before they settle on the one or two issues that are most important to them. (Frumkin 148)

How 'public need' is defined, and by whom, is equally important. Is it the donor who defines what the community needs, or is it the government, the advisor, or the community itself? Each one of these groups might use positivistic (measureable) or normative (moral) measures (or a combination). If the community defines the need (which is most common), we tend to see a lot of competing concerns and political pressure, which can be distracting for the giver. If the need is defined privately, by the donor, research can be burdensome which causes the donor to rely on normative measures. So what's the answer?

According to Frumkin, the wisest choice is a hybrid that "pursues a compromise position that combines both the expressed desires of the local community and [the donor's] own convictions, balancing, at the same time, the latest research and science with the most powerful and compelling moral arguments made on behalf of others." (152). Here is an illustration I made to represent the hybrid and the effect of the hybrid:

So what does this mean for you and me?

It means, in short, that we need to understand how the donor is, or is not, defining need. Once defined, we can then help the donor create a system to measure the effectiveness of the gift and then report back on its success (or failure). Assuming for the moment that the gift had a positive effect, we can then safely assume that the donor will achieve a high level of personal satisfaction which will create future opportunities for additional gifts.

Let's continue the conversation in class.



Frumkin, Peter. Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2006