W09 nonprofits and NGO's

 The nonprofit industry is changed by incorporating the ideas and practices of social innovation. Nonprofits, though still needing a lot of help, are once again a strong force. 

This week, we covered nonprofits and their respective solutions. I had to take a look at nonprofits and  consider what I expect them to look like with ideas on how to transform an organization into a socially innovative powerhouse. I gained clearer understanding of non-profits. bot (sigh). I am still confused about NGO's.

 

In a TED message this week given by 'Pallotta' (reference below), he said that we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector, are actually undermining the causes we love, and our profound yearning to change the world. Many of today's social problems are massive in scale and our organizations are tiny up against them. Our current belief system is what is keeping them tiny. why do we think this way?-- old Puritan beliefs, they've come all the way across the Atlantic to make all this money, but making all this money will get you sent directly to Hell, charity became their answer. It became this economic sanctuary, where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies -- at five cents on the dollar.  So of course, how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money? Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others, so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself, and in 400 years, nothing has intervened to say, "That's counterproductive and that's unfair.". 

Two rulebooks. We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world. He spoke of 5 different areas

• you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector 
• you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes 
• you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector 
• you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place + you've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every level. 

I did my best to follow--

In the the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service. Interestingly, the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people is a powerful, but negative, side effect,  It gives a really stark, mutually exclusive choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the world, to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities, and sends tens of thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit sector, marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they're not willing to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice. 

advertising and marketing: Charitable giving has remained stuck in the U.S., at two percent of GDP, ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s. That's an important fact. The nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector. .The taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue is easier for for-profits than nonprofits. Nonprofit's are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud. How to measure  progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true. 

time: when a nonprofit organization has a dream of building to a large scale, years are needed. Non-For profits on the other hand are viewed as creditable, are frowned upon for increasing their time and funding --you can't pay profits in a nonprofit sector, so the for-profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion-dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital. So the next time you're looking at a charity, What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?" There are a lot of problems with this question. I'm going to just focus on two. 

First, it makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not part of the cause. 

Now, this idea that overhead is somehow an enemy of the cause creates this second, much larger problem, which is, it forces organizations to go without the overhead things they really need to grow, in the interest of keeping overhead low.

We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things.

Most nonprofits and NGO's are actively doing good, but does that make them socially innovative? No! True social innovations create solutions to systemic issues. Attributes or practices unique to social innovation. 

Measures impact
Sustainable
Scalable
Focuses on people
Focuses on root causes
Has a good Mission Statement
Incorporates original ideas and solutions 

I can use this lesson in every aspect of my life-- nonprofit volunteer, donor, board member, or employee. I do not work for a large company so I will focus on volunteer since this is a big part of my life. It is needful that i give of my time and resources to programs in which social change is a foundational and at the forefront.  

References

Pallotta, D. (2013, March). The way we think about charity is dead wrong. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare.