PF Whiteboard

(Originally published on the Stanford Social Innovation Review Blog)

At the Peery Foundation, we think of grantees as our customers and act accordingly. We’re not investing enough resources on our own to solve social issues at a systemic level, so we try to focus on our core function: to invest in social entrepreneurs and leading organizations. This means we leave the big, hairy problem-solving to grantees and focus on how to create a funding environment that better enables their success. We don’t do any of the following perfectly, but here are some of the ideals we try to live by:

We use empathy to design our funding approach.

We’ve spent the past six or seven years designing a grantee-centered approach to funding. This has required that we impose on ourselves the same expectations we have of prospective grantees. For example, we expect that organizations design their interventions based on insights from beneficiaries and their communities. We, in turn, should be designing our funding strategies with input from social entrepreneurs.

I’ve had countless interviews with nonprofit leaders and staff about what is working and what is not with their funders. For example, Jane Leu, founder of Upwardly Global (one of our grantees), articulated for me how multi-year grants enable organizations to grow much more quickly. These conversations have directly informed an approach focused on trust, responsiveness, and long-term, unrestricted support—and we are seeing results. We recently made a multi-year grant to help one organization hire a program director to scale up. This commitment provided a local school district with the confidence to devote significant district resources, more than doubling the reach of the program. Predictable funding gives entrepreneurs the confidence to make important hires now and take risks that can propel their work forward. And while that may seem obvious, it’s not always so for donors who haven’t been in the fundraising chair.

We communicate with intention.

People often ask how we develop open lines of communication with our grantees. It starts with simply having the conversation at the outset about what kind of funding relationship you intend to have. Letting them know they can share the good, bad, and the ugly—without consequence—and letting them know they should decline things we offer if they don’t need them. “If we offer to send you to a conference and it’s not a priority, please tell us. You won’t hurt our feelings!” 

Intentional communication is important to shifting the power dynamic. Small actions and words communicate how we see our respective roles, and who holds the power. For example, when we meet with our grantees, where does this happen—at our office or theirs? When we conduct due-diligence, who spends more time on the process—us or them? We make a point of saving grantees’ time by meeting at their offices, and asking only for documents they already have for diligence and reporting. We are in service to these incredible people who are impacting our world. We are powerless to fulfill our mission without them.

We value honest feedback.

We once asked a new grantee to articulate its milestones for the next 12 months, and in an effort to keep it simple and make the team’s life easier, we requested that they submit just one page. When they sent the one-pager, they told me, “Here it is, but making it three pages long would’ve actually been easier!” I was glad they spoke up—though our intentions were right on, the request should have been about communicating the organization’s milestones in the easiest way possible.

Honest and regular feedback from grantees is critical, but it can be hard to get. Tools such as the Grantee Perception Report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy are great and go very deep, but we need more safe, simple, and accessible ways for grantees to rate and critique their funders.

It recently occurred to my colleague Jessamyn Lau that using a feedback system similar to Uber taxi service—where both the driver and passenger rate each other, establishing a level playing field of respect—could be a way to solicit feedback on the performance of our foundation’s and staff’s performance. Right now we are developing a simple feedback tool that will allow anyone who interacts with us to immediately and anonymously rate their experience, with results given to us at the end of a year.

We encourage grantees to make the rules.

In the world of grantmaking, the funders typically make all the rules. But what if, for example, nonprofit websites had a section listing the kinds of funding they do and do not accept? “We don’t accept restricted funding, as it can hamper our ability to innovate and achieve our mission.” Or what about reporting? “We distribute a quarterly report to all of our investors, which includes all of our performance metrics and updates.”

We are part of a funder collaborative called Big Bang Philanthropy, where our shared grantees issue the same quarterly reports to nearly all of us. We’ve encouraged other organizations to do the same. Not all funders will accept this style of reporting, but, for those who will, it allows grantees to spend less time on reporting and more time running their programs. As grantees streamline their accountability to funders, they will ultimately have a cohort of committed supporters who are bought into the vision the grantee is setting, rather than their own.

In the spirit of learning from those we serve, I’ll close with the words of Rob Gitin of At The Crossroads (ATC), which helps homeless youth move forward in their lives via unconditional and long-term relationships. Many agencies serving the homeless have so many rules that clients feel they have to “game the system” to get help; ATC focuses on building relationships of trust to facilitate the best support for the youth it supports. “They shouldn’t have to lie to be better-served by us,” Rob told me. “Without a foundation of honesty you can’t serve them.”

Tomorrow I am teaching a class on how social entrepreneurs address really big problems. We’ll be over simplifying for the purposes of our 1hr 15 min class, but basically discussing two methods of impact and scale: 1) the laser focused approach, 2) the holistic approach.

I’m not sure if the two groups I’m using as examples (Nuru and One Acre Fund) would characterise their organisations in this way exactly, but their models provide an interesting contrast.

One Acre Fund being the example of laser focus, where Andrew Youn created a distinct model of working with small holder farmers, providing them with inputs, education and insurance that in one crop cycle at least doubles their harvests and profits. Small holder farmers + inputs + education + insurance. Very straight forward. Pretty quick. This focused model has enabled them to rapidly grow to 130,000+ families in only 6 years.

Nuru, by contrast is going the holistic approach, where Jake Harriman’s team acts like a general contractor of sorts, bringing in and layering solutions in Agriculture, Community Economic Development, Water & Sanitation, Healthcare, and Education, all within one village. Over time they train and build local leadership to continue to run the programs, so that the village as a whole owns and participates in the overall increase in standard of living. Between 2008 and 2011 Nuru had worked with 2,006 families in their pilot in the Kuria district of Kenya.

Nuru’s model is clearly moving at a slower pace, but goes so much deeper. And OAF’s model is arguably shallower, but has already produced extraordinary scale. So who has the better model?

The theory is that once Jake has got the Nuru model down, their ability to replicate and scale will increase. And now that Andrew has the OAF model reaching so many people in their farming network, he’s starting to layer on other products and services. Perhaps they are both right and will end up reaching similar numbers of people at a similar depth. We won’t know for awhile, it’s early days for them both. But how exciting to watch these two models, which in some ways are vastly different, work towards the common goal of eradicating poverty. We love working with these guys!

We are officially 2 weeks in to our brand spankin’ new course on Social Innovation - Do Good Better.  So far, so good.  We’re piloting the class to a small group of students at Brigham Young University.

As part of the class students are asked to blog once a week on a prescribed topic - for example: “Defining Social Entrepreneurship: Do you believe it is important to have one definition of the term SE? Why or why not?”.  Thus far we’ve been quite impressed with the students’ responses; we’ve seen both impressive insight and a touch of healthy debate.

Give it a look, let us know what you think, and maybe even leave a comment or two. 

As you know we’re piloting a new class at BYU, one that we hope at some point soon we will adapt and deliver online for anyone to take. As part of this process we solicited the assistance of an instructional design professional. She had great tips and considerations for teaching from a distance and developing online content. We figured we’d share a few of them, for anyone else who might find them useful:

- Avoid delivering information via more than two sources at any time. Try to minimise diluting the attention focus of your viewers by only having two methods of information delivery at once, eg voiceover + whiteboarding (other sources of info would be slides, video of the speaker, photos, etc..).
- Always start by showing the person speaking, even if it is only a picture, before cutting to other visuals that they may be talking over. Having a mental picture of the person speaking makes continued engagement with the information easier to maintain.
- Don’t feel like you have to create a whole new discussion community for students to contribute to, solely focused on the class. A great alternative, which potentially provides more value, is to encourage the students to listen in on and join existing communities already focused on class topics. This way their learning and participation is more likely to continue beyond the limitations and duration of the class.
- Encourage students to solve each other’s queries, before coming to the instructor or teaching assistant. Better for the learning process, and better for time management for larger classes. This can be done through an online forum or wiki.
- Create 1 minute videos with screen-share recordings to demonstrate how to navigate the syllabus, find resources, use any tech platforms necessary. Break everything down. Model everything.

We’re still incorporating a lot of the advice we got yesterday. Hopefully some of it is useful for others out there.

Thanks to the internet (and google) we have almost endless information and resources at our fingertips.  We can access the life work, groundbreaking ideas, and carefully developed resources of experts in any imaginable field with a few strokes of the keyboard.  So why shouldn’t we?  It seems to me that in this age of information there is absolutely no excuse for reinventing the wheel.  There is just no sense in wasting time and energy re-doing something someone much smarter than us has already done. 

We’ve mentioned before that we’ve recently developed a social innovation curriculum at the PF - something none of us have ever done before.  We have an idea, and we think it’s a good one, but to really make it useful we’ve found it’s best to borrow wherever possible (as long as we have all of the appropriate rights and permissions, that is).  For each lesson we’ve pulled articles, videos, and frameworks from across the web and our networks.  We think this makes our curriculum much, much stronger.  We may know that it’s important for our students to understand root cause analysis, for example, but we also know that someone else has far superior tools to actually teach it to them.

Throughout this process we’ve been pleased to find that everyone we have asked has been more than happy to share their resources and expertise (and we’ve asked a lot of people).  It just doesn’t make sense not to.  Especially in the context of the social sector—we all have the same vision and should help each other achieve success wherever possible. 

So here’s our vote for more sharing, more borrowing, and much less reinventing.