Bright+3

Bright Ideas Change the World

brightplus3

What community advocates should know about the Princeton Offense

by

2310501543_c25c74204f_bIt occurred to me, while watching Georgetown trounce Western Carolina a few weekends ago (thanks for the game, Eric!), that nonprofit advocates might learn a thing or two from the Princeton Offense practiced by the Hoyas and others.

The Princeton Offense, so named because of its origins at its namesake university early in the 20th century, is a high-energy offense that uses constant motion, frequent passing, and sharp cuts to create shooting opportunities. The offense relies on nimbleness and speed … by making frequent and sudden cuts timed with sharp inside passes, players often find themselves all alone with the ball and an easy layup. If the defense pulls in to cut off those opportunities, the offense finds itself with more open three-point shot options.

The Princeton Offense has some limitations. For one thing, it depends on the entire squad being strong at passing, layups, and shooting three-pointers. Everyone doesn’t necessarily need to excel at everything, but they all need to be solid. For another, it requires a great deal of preparation and discipline, effective communication, and tight teamwork. This may be true for basketball in general, but it’s exacerbated in an offensive scheme based on sharp, precision movements.

But it doesn’t rely on overpowering your opponent, which is good given that small community groups are often at a disadvantage in terms of funding, political connections, and political muscle. Instead, it relies on qualities often found in spades among nonprofit advocates: agility, high-energy, and versatile team members.

This analogy is a stretch, I know, but the basic point is sound: play to your strengths. Design strategies that take advantage of your assets, and sidestep or minimize the strengths of your opponents. Whenever possible, set the terms of the engagement rather than play their game.

If you like the basketball-as-political-strategy analogy, the basketball team at Grinnell College offers another fun example. Unable to compete for the best players (it’s a small college in the middle of Iowa, after all), but still able to recruit a bunch of guys with solid high school experience, they twisted convention on its head: rather than field their best players for longer stretches, they substitute fresh legs constantly so that every Grinnell player on the court is able to play at 100% for the entire (short) time they’re on. The details vary every cycle, but they send in substitutes every half-minute or so, and within the first three minutes Grinnell has already fielded fifteen players playing an average of a minute each. They shoot like crazy and they leave guys on the offensive end (violating convention but not the rules). Although their opponents may consistently field better players, each member of the Grinnell squad can play at 100% the entire time they’re on the court (versus, say, an opponent, only playing at 80% because of their need to pace themselves for longer stretches of game time). “The System,” as it’s called, is a controversial approach, and it isn’t popular among basketball purists, but Grinnell – with a 7-2 record this season – is figuring out a way to play competitive ball despite being underpowered and out-skilled.

Analogies like these obviously have their limits, but there might be some wisdom to draw from the comparisons, and at the very least they can help reinforce some basic instincts about crafting effective strategies even when outmatched by your opponent.

(Photo by Flickr user Keith Allison.)

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

Pretending to be your donor

by

2468506922_c1ed495959_z - Sybren A. StüvelI found myself wondering the other day – as I struggled to make sense of the less-than-clear instructions on my business’ quarterly sales tax return – how often anyone from the Department of Revenue actually goes through the process of filling out their own paperwork as though they were a business owner like me.

If the folks who process returns, the people who manage the people who process returns, the department heads and the political appointees at the top of the org chart … if any of these folks had actually experienced the process of filling out a return, they might be inspired to improve the design of the system, or at the very least prepare clearer instructions.

I suspect, however, that most of these folks don’t actually use the system they run, so most have no idea just how complex, frustrating, and difficult it might be for the end users.

It’s easy to poke fun of large government agencies for not bothering to use their own services, but I’m willing to bet that most nonprofit folks don’t do it, either. When is the last time you walked through any of your user experiences, not with the eye of the program manager or executive director but as though you were the customer, user, visitor, or client? If it’s been more than a few months, it might be worth revisiting.

  • While pretending you are a first time prospective donor to your organization, visit the website and see how easy it is to find the information you think you might want to know.
  • Go through the process of making a donation while pretending you are a supporter of the organization but unfamiliar with the donation process … visit the website, find the donation page, and actually make a donation. Any annoyances? Any steps where you might be tempted to give up and do something else?
  • Try signing up for your newsletter. Was there any friction in the experience? Now unsubscribe to your newsletter. Was that as easy as it should be?
  • If you sell products online, are there any annoyances in the shopping or purchasing experience, or it is smooth and delightful?
  • Try playing the part of a long-time supporter experimenting with a new service or tool for the first time. Did you easily figure out each step? Did the process make you feel valuable?
  • If your nonprofit provides a facility or a service, this list gets a lot longer: imagine being a first-time visitor to the museum, or a first-time customer of the service.

Walk through every step of the process thinking about how that user will experience it. Every user touch point sends a sharp signal to your supporters and potential supporters. It tells them how much you care about them and their contribution. And beyond the symbolism and messages, the more friction and the less pleasant your user experience, the fewer who will actually complete the transaction.

When we run programs, websites, and organizations, we often think about their design in terms of what’s easiest for us. We pick the donation tool that most easily integrates with our database and our bank. We design the navigation on our website in terms of how our staff uses the website. We design the sign-up forms for our membership programs, field trips, and services based on what’s convenient for managing those offerings.

We often don’t think about the experience of our supporters, visitors, customers, and clients. The result: the user experience is often neglected, filled with unnecessary points of friction, and can even be simply unpleasant.

And, unlike the Department of Revenue, we can’t compel people to use our services.

(Photo by Flickr user Sybren A. Stüvel).

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

A friend of a friend: How Obama used Facebook to turn out voters

by

We all know that social networks can be a crucial arena for engaging your supporters and developing new relationships, but for a sense of scale look no further than the 2012 presidential campaigns. Both campaigns made extensive use of social networks like Spotify, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and, of course, the giants Facebook and Twitter.

One major problem for the campaigns in the closing weeks of the race: 18-29 year-old voters are very difficult to reach by phone, and making sure that very specific audience actually voted was a critical campaign element, especially for the Obama campaign. Their solution: aggressively, intelligently, and strategically using Facebook to identify supporters, keep them engaged, and then – during the GOTV (“get out the vote”) efforts in the final weeks – reminding them to actually vote.

Because of their early and sustained efforts identifying supporters through Facebook, 85% of the campaign’s GOTV 18-29 year-old targets were friends of friends of Barack Obama on Facebook. Obama for American Digital Director Teddy Goff explains, “We had about seven million instances of people contacting about five million people, all of their friends who they knew … these were people we had to reach, and couldn’t reach otherwise.”

And note the importance of very clearly identifying the audience. Even though Facebook users span a wide range of demographics, different demographics use the network differently. This was a strategy targeted for a very specific demographic. This not-so-little detail highlights a common problem in exhortations for nonprofits to use social networks more aggressively. The first step should always be defining the goal, and the second step – always – understanding the mechanisms of change enough to clearly and specifically define the audiences you need to influence. Then you can figure out if and how social networks matter, and how to use them effectively if they do.

But there is clearly a growing chance that social networks will matter, and if your target audience for a given campaign includes 18-29 year-olds in the United States, then social networks may well be critical part of your strategy.

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

A terrific (if unlikely) new website

by

It’s a truism that government agencies are incapable of designing and implementing great websites. But it’s a truism that happens to be untrue, as the Milwaukee Police Department is making abundantly clear with their new site.

And if it’s possible for government agencies to build great websites, surely more nonprofits can, as well.

A hat tip to the Fast Company blog for both the link (“A Radical Police Rebranding That Starts With A Superb Website“) and a great walk-through of what makes it so strong.

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

The virtues of getting your butt kicked: Barack Obama’s basketball game

by

Michael Lewis covers a lot of ground in his October Vanity Fair profile of Barack Obama, from Congressional gridlock to nuclear reactor meltdowns to a downed F-15 over Libya. But the heart of Lewis’ piece is the President’s regular basketball game. The other guys on the court – everyone but Obama – are former college players. They’re tall and fast. Most are twenty years younger than Obama.

As a player on the other team, who must have outweighed Obama by a hundred pounds, backed the president of the United States down and knocked the crap out of him, all for the sake of a single layup, I leaned over to the former Florida State point guard.

“No one seems to be taking it easy on him,” I said.

“If you take it easy on him, you’re not invited back,” he explained.

It turns out that Obama, despite his age and his lack of competitive college (or even high school) hoops experience, is good enough to be useful to his team, passing well and playing smart.

But what’s really remarkable to me is the game itself. This is a guy, as Lewis puts it, who could “find a perfectly respectable game with his equals in which he could shoot and score and star.” Instead, Obama seeks out this “ridiculously challenging” game. He goes out of his way to surround himself with people he knows can outplay, out-hustle, and out-muscle him. The president is extremely competitive, and he plays to win, but he also wants to be pushed and stretched and challenged.

A players hire A+ players, as the saying goes, and B players hire C players.

And people who consistently exercise great leadership know that you only get better when you stretch and take risks, and that building great teams is as much about surrounding yourself with people who are really good at what they do – even better than you – as it is about whatever talent and drive you might bring to the table.

(White House photo via Creative Commons)

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

Risk tolerance and recklessness among nonprofits

by

TechCrunch posted an Andy Rachleff piece a couple of weeks ago on the odds that an angel investor or venture capital investor will make money. The conclusion: pretty darned unlikely.

The vast majority of venture capital funds, for instance, either barely break even or actually lose money.

Why does this matter to nonprofits?

The “what can nonprofits learn from technology startups” theme has picked up steam in recent years in concert with the current technology startup boom, and is regularly a topic on this blog (see, for example, our recent exchange with Jon Stahl: “Should grantmakers be more like VCs” and “Should grantmakers act more like venture capitalists?“).

A grantmaking investment model that assumes an 80% failure rate among grantees may not be our best option. What I find most interesting about the Rachleff piece, however, and potentially most useful in the social sector context, is the risk tolerance that permeates the private investment landscape. Even the most optimistic of the experienced investors know that most of their investments will fail. They are willing, to varying degrees, to invest in organizations each of which only has a small chance of succeeding.

Fostering a Nonprofit Culture of Risk-Tolerance

Fostering a culture that genuinely encourages and supports risk-taking, within organizations and between organizations and their funders, is a real weak spot among nonprofits. Doing this means that the price of a failed project can’t be very steep. It means that organizations and funders have to provide positive feedback for smart risk-taking. Claiming to support experimentation and risk-taking but penalizing people and organizations with experiments don’t work out as planned fosters a culture of risk-aversion, not risk-tolerance.

Risk-Tolerance Doesn’t Mean Reckless

Risk tolerance shouldn’t mean encouraging reckless gambles. In fact, a smart risk-oriented strategy will include explicit expectations: clearly identifying the assumptions underlying any particular risk, having a clear process or tool for explicitly testing those assumptions and learning from the experience regardless of the outcome, ensuring that effective feedback loops use this learning to improve strategy and execution.

Innovation – both the incremental and the huge-leap-forward varieties – require people and organizations to take risks, and that only happens in a significant way when the rewards for taking those risks are high enough and the penalties for failure are gentle enough.

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

The best tag line, ever

by

“Anytime Anywhere”

The company is called Global Rescue, and these are the folks you buy insurance from if you want to guarantee evacuation or field rescue  – from anywhere on the globe you might happen to be – in the case of a medical emergency, civil war, and natural disasters.

“Anytime Anywhere” conveys everything that needs to be communicated in a tag line, they are perfectly on pitch for the intended audience, and they did all that in just two words.

This tag line is so good it could easily double as an elevator pitch.

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

A new study asks: Should the nonprofit and charitable sectors engage in political activity?

by

Should nonprofits engage in political activity on issues that broadly impact the nonprofit sector?

That’s one question posed by a new study, Beyond The Cause: The Art and Science of Advocacy, and the conclusion is, well, inconclusive. It turns out that there just isn’t much consensus across the sector on this very basic – if difficult – question.

What Makes For a Successful Political Advocacy Strategy?

The study, which The NonProfit Times reported on in some depth last week, did reach some other interesting conclusions. For example, the report does a useful job of identifying some of the common elements among successful political advocacy efforts. They include:

  1. “Sustain a laser-like focus on long-term goals.”
  2. “Prioritize building the elements for successful campaigns.”
  3. “Consider the motivations of public officials.”
  4. “Galvanize coalitions to achieve short-term goals.”
  5. “Ensure strong, high-integrity leadership.”

None of these results are surprising, but it’s nice to a list like this include some clear implications for both short-term and long-term priorities. The inclusion of item #3, “Consider the motivations of public officials,” is especially welcome because that step – understanding how the decision-makers themselves make decisions – is so often overlooked or undervalued when crafting political strategies. If we don’t understand who they are, and how they make decisions, it’s really tough to craft a successful advocacy campaign.

Why Not Engage in Political Advocacy?

Among those nonprofit sector folks who argued against political advocacy on sector-wide issues, one major concern seems to be about the resource implications. Effective political advocacy does, indeed, require considerable resources, and nonprofits have very compelling reasons to focus all of their resources on their core mission rather than risk dilution through an expanding range of advocacy fights.

A second concern, also understandable, is that sector-wide advocacy fights “would taint the non-partisan image of charities.” It’s very easy to see how the nonprofit sector as a sector would open itself up to sharp attacks by political opponents if it were to engage in a focused way on federal or state level policy debates.

Threats to the Nonprofit Sector

But the largest threats to the nonprofit sector, as identified by study participants themselves, highlight just why I think larger-scale sector advocacy is going to be critical in the years ahead.

Those threats? In addition to overwhelming specter of the federal budget and national deficit issues, participants in the research identified four other key challenges:

  • Threats to the idea that the federal government has a meaningful role and has meaningful responsibilities around social issues.
  • Threats posed by the potential for deep federal spending cuts to nonprofit sector issue areas.
  • Threats to nonprofit tax exemptions and charitable deductions.
  • Threats to government funding for specific types of nonprofit activity, especially around vulnerable populations.

Why Those Threats Justify a More Assertive Nonprofit Sector Political Strategy

All of these are likely to grow in coming years as pressure to tackle federal budget and deficit issues continues to escalate. Engaging on policy issues that impact the nonprofit sector broadly clearly does carry some risk. It will be more difficult to defend the reputation of the nonprofit sector as non-partisan, and some of the sector’s strongest alliances really do cut across partisan lines and might come under pressure as a result. But the risks of not engaging seem even greater. The nonprofit sector is too easy for deficit hawks to target, for example: tax exemptions, charitable donations, preferential treatment, federal funding for programs that generally benefit people who are less politically franchised. Sidestepping state and federal politics won’t insulate the nonprofit sector from attack, and guarantees that we won’t be able to make sure of what should be an enormous political strength: the huge political, geographic, and religious diversity that makes up the nonprofit sector.

You win political fights by defining yourself more quickly and more effectively than your opponent, by building strong coalitions, and executing a smart, proactive political strategy. The nonprofit sector is well positioned, with a powerful “supporting people and communities everywhere” brand and with an enviable degree of diversity.

We won’t avoid becoming political targets simply by not engaging, and our latent credibility and strength won’t be enough to protect the values and needs of the nonprofit sector if we don’t proactively use these assets in a smart, strategic, assertive political strategy.

Defending the Value of the Nonprofit Sector

I’ve always found it a bit frustrating that the nonprofit sector is so apprehensive about advocating for its own needs as a sector (nonprofit tax exemptions and charitable deductions are two of the most obvious and important examples) and asserting its political strength in defense of those needs. It’s as though we think our inherent value as nonprofits will always carry the day. That may have been true in decades past, but it’s not as clear now that it will be true in the years ahead.