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 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Epigraph

PART 1. TESTING IDEAS

1 The Discovery Phase
2 Engaging All Stakeholders
3 Reframing Failure as Learning

PART 2. MEASURING IMPACT

4 Crafting a Compelling Theory of Change
5 Maximizing Use of Data
6 Making Your Data Tell a Story

PART 3. FUNDING EXPERIMENTATION

7 Laying the Foundation to Experiment with Earned Income
8 Testing Earned-Income Strategies
9 Optimizing Fundraising Efforts

PART 4. LEADING COLLABORATIVELY

10 Cultivating Collective Leadership
11 Bringing in Senior Leadership Early
12 Building an Active Board
 PART 5. TELLING COMPELLING STORIES
13 Creating a Compelling Narrative
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Praise for Social Startup Success
Appendix A: Cast of Characters
Appendix B: Methodology
Appendix C: Additional Resources
Notes
Index
For my parents, who taught me the value of
citizenship,
for Ted, forever ago,
and for Lara, Eleanor and Teddy, you are the
future.
 INTRODUCTION

Rob Gitin never intended to start a nonprofit organization. But

in college, he stumbled upon a class titled “Poverty and
Homelessness in America,” largely because he liked to sleep
in late and the class met at two in the afternoon. The course
changed his life. The students were required to intern with an
organization that helped homeless people; Gitin selected a
program for homeless youth, and he quickly fell in love with
the work and the kids he encountered. The injustices they
faced—let down at every step in their lives by the social
services system—kept him up at night.
After three years volunteering or working at this program,
he became determined to do something different to address the
problem, and a few months after graduating, he and cofounder
Taj Mustapha decided to try to create a program to reach the
most disconnected youth. The well-known seed-stage funder
Echoing Green supported him, and his organization, At The
Crossroads (ATC), was born. He and Mustapha conducted
nightly outreach with homeless youth, walking the streets of
San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Mission districts, often from
seven-thirty until eleven-thirty at night. They were able to
build trusting bonds with some of the hardest-to-reach youth
and helped them build healthier, more stable lives.
The work was personally fulfilling, but after about a year
Gitin and Mustapha realized that they alone could only make a
small dent in the growing homeless epidemic in San
Francisco. If they really wanted to make a substantial impact,
they would need an army of people and money to pay them.
Gitin worked hard to raise funds, and he was able to hire some
staff, but he faced a number of daunting hurdles in trying to
scale up. He had no idea how to hire or manage well, and there
was a ton of staff turnover. He also didn’t know the best
methods for raising funds, and as a recent college grad with
few contacts in the foundations or with high-net-worth
individuals, he spent dozens of hours chasing donations that
never panned out.
Despite those challenges, Gitin persevered, and he
managed to grow the organization to a budget of around
$800,000. But then he hit a wall; he couldn’t break past that
level of funding. Even after fifteen years of successful work,
the organization’s budget was still stuck at that level, and
meanwhile the need for its services had increased several-fold,
and ATC couldn’t keep up with the demand. Gitin decided to
make a concerted new effort to expand services and to raise
more funds, launching a four-year plan to achieve an annual
budget of at least $2 million. He has now just about achieved
that goal, and I’ll share the story of how he’s done so, along
with the stories of a host of other nonprofit leaders and the
methods they used to scale their organizations. The struggle to
scale, I have found, is the most pressing challenge for the
social entrepreneurship community.
I have had a front-row view of the boom under way in
social entrepreneurship. As a social entrepreneur myself—
cofounder of Spark, a network of millennial philanthropic
donors who raise money to support gender equality—and a
lecturer in the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford
University, I have watched the launch of so many exciting
innovations for good. And yet, while for many nonprofits this
has been an invigorating and transformative time, so many
other nonprofits, like At The Crossroads, have struggled on the
sidelines. Despite doing important work, many operate in
constant survival mode, scrambling for the money to make
payroll every month. In 2014, almost two-thirds of reporting
public charities in the U.S. had an annual budget of less than
$500,000.1
I became obsessed with understanding how nonprofits can
get off the treadmill and attain organizational sustainability,
which I define as reliably raising around $2 million in annual
revenue. Of course, for some organizations, a small budget is
sufficient to sustain their operations and be highly impactful.
Scaling revenue also does not necessarily equate to scaling
impact; an organization can be very good at raising money
with programs that aren’t really making a significant
difference. But many organizations that have the potential to
do a great deal more good by scaling, and that are trying to
grow faster, are stymied.
I learned this the hard way in working to grow Spark. I
cofounded the organization in 2004 with six friends from my
undergraduate days at U.C. Berkeley. We wanted to create a
membership network of young professionals to raise money
for other organizations focused on issues of women’s equality.
As recent college grads living in San Francisco, we saw that
there was no shortage of charitable galas to support, but rarely
did those events educate their guests about the problem
addressed by an organization or give them an opportunity to
get more involved. Over drinks one night after work, my
friend Maya Garcia said to me, “These events are leaving so
much untapped potential on the table. What if we do
something different?” Our hope was that if we could connect
young people to social causes in a meaningful way early on in
their careers, they would become participants in the social
justice movement for life. Passionate about global women’s
issues, we decided to start there. We invited some other friends
to join us, and the seven of us crammed into Maya’s studio
apartment over the course of several months, sharing several
bottles of wine, to begin planning.
We held our first fundraiser in a small art gallery in San
Francisco, and were elated when our promotional work led to
a line around the block of people coming to donate. We had
earmarked funds from this gathering for an organization of
women in Rwanda rebuilding their lives after the genocide, for
whom we raised $5,000. That felt like a million dollars to us.
As we continued to network, we doubled our revenue every
few months, and by our third year, we could afford to hire our
first executive director, Shannon Farley. By then, we had over
ten thousand members, but we had hit a wall.
As I witnessed other exciting new nonprofits take off all
around us, we began struggling to find more growth capital.
We explored creative fundraising ideas, but we couldn’t bring
in more than $500,000 annually. Year after year, we found
ourselves spending inordinate amounts of time chasing gifts in
increments of hundreds or thousands of dollars, barely making
ends meet. We kept hearing about new forms of “venture
philanthropy” being pioneered by leaders in the technology
sector, such as Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar and Mark
Zuckerberg. But none of that money was reaching us at Spark.
In 2007, I decided to leave my job as a corporate lawyer
and started teaching international human rights and social
entrepreneurship at Stanford University so that I could devote
myself full time to advancing social causes. Teaching with the
Program on Social Entrepreneurship, where we host highly
successful social entrepreneurs in residence for a quarter, I
began to hear stories like ours at Spark over and over. Nearly
all organizations struggle with the scaling challenges Spark
faced. The difference with these social entrepreneurs was that
they had somehow managed to overcome them. I wanted to
understand why some social startups had beat the scaling
challenge so successfully, sometimes growing to several
million dollars in annual revenue within just a few years. I
decided to study the nonprofit scaling challenge.
For the past five years, I have been traveling around the
country, visiting the founders, leadership teams and funders of
dozens of what I call breakthrough social startups. I’ve
interviewed nearly a hundred social entrepreneurs,2 academics
and philanthropists, both newcomers and veterans in the field,
including the leaders of Teach for America, City Year,
DonorsChoose and charity: water, and started our
conversations with a simple question: “What is the key to
nonprofit success?” I’ve spent time at organizations and
observed their operations, getting a read on the aspects of their
organizational cultures that contribute to success. I’ve also
talked to staff members and to beneficiaries, seeking to
understand what it is about the approaches of these
organizations that has enabled them to build highly productive
teams and such strong followings among those they seek to
serve. While interviewing, I also scoured the research
literature, reading hundreds of articles, books, studies and
reports, looking for answers.
My first discovery was that very little actual data existed
about how organizations grow, especially in the early stages,
despite the volumes of advice offered. To bridge the gap, I
conducted a survey of early-stage organizations, drawing from
the portfolios of top seed funders such as Echoing Green,
Draper Richards Kaplan, Silicon Valley Social Ventures,
Ashoka and the Skoll Foundation. The survey asked nonprofit
leaders a host of questions about how they had launched their
organizations, how they measured impact, how they managed
teams, how they sought funding and how they raised
awareness. I then followed up in person with one hundred of
them to dig deeper into how they applied the methods they
described and to get more specifics about their responses to a
range of the most difficult challenges, such as measuring their
impact, managing their time, developing an active board that
helped grow the organization, and hiring the right people.
Their answers provided a treasure trove of insights and
inventive methods that every organizational leader, whether of
a fledgling startup or of a large, well-established organization,
can profit from.
In the pages that follow, I present five key strategies that I
heard over and over again were responsible for the breakout
growth of the most successful social startups. Each
organization that scaled most successfully employed many, or
all, of the following practices:
• testing ideas through research and development to get
proof of concept before seeking major funding or media
coverage;
• measuring impact right from the start, often with
inventive metrics tailored to their specific programs;
 • funding experimentation through a combination of
selling products and services that were in strong
alignment with their mission and employing bold
strategies to raise philanthropic capital;
• leading collaboratively in a fashion that allowed them to
optimize the talents of their staff, including building a
strong board of directors; and
• telling compelling stories in ways that utilized the most
recent innovations and tapped into others to advocate on
their behalf.
What is most exciting about my findings is that the specific
methods for executing on each of these, which I describe in
detail, can all be readily applied to the work of any nonprofit,
starting immediately. During my interviews, I kept expecting
people to say success was driven by a truly remarkable idea, or
by the charisma of the founder, but no one did. Not one. This
isn’t to say that factors like charisma, grit or brilliant ideas
don’t contribute significantly to success. Of course they do.
But the foundation of success is this set of best practices.
In these uncertain times, when so many social problems are
not only persisting, but in many cases, worsening, we need
every bit of creativity and determination to find better
solutions. My hope is that the stories you read in this book and
the tools it recommends will help you to make your own
organization, or those you are supporting, thrive. We need to
spend less energy keeping organizations alive, so that we can
devote more energy to spreading positive impact. This book is
a guide for how to achieve that.
Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish
or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have
revolutionized the fishing industry.
—BILL DRAYTON, FOUNDER, ASHOKA
Social entrepreneurship is a process by which citizens
build or transform institutions to advance solutions to
social problems, such as poverty, illness, illiteracy,
environmental destruction, human rights abuses and
corruption, in order to make life better for many.
—DAVID BORNSTEIN AND SUSAN DAVIS,
Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to
Know
 PART 1

TESTING IDEAS
 CHAPTER 1

Social startups face a vexing catch-22: funders want to see

proof of an organization’s success before offering grants, but
nonprofits need funding to get their ideas off the ground. The
lack of seed funding is one of the biggest differences between
growing a nonprofit organization and a for-profit business.
Private sector startups are often able to gain support for the
research and development (R&D) phase of building their
organizations from angel investors, who hope to earn a
handsome return once the startup becomes profitable. For
nonprofit startups, private angel funds don’t exist. Most
foundations are also not interested in providing financial
support for testing. Typically, they want to fund organizations
with a proven approach. Even at the infancy of an idea, they
press for results, asking: “What is your set of early outcomes?
How do we know this is going to work?”
But how can organizations improve their programs with
testing and prove impact without funding at the early stage?
This dilemma has left many social startups in slow-growth
mode for years. The solution is to adopt a powerful set of
innovation methods—a cycle of researching, brainstorming,
prototyping and implementing often called “human-centered
design”—that the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship community
developed for creating new products and services. These
innovation methods not only allow an organization to produce
compelling early indications of scalable success, but also help
to speed up the development process; they avoid the common
mistake of investing too much time and money in efforts
doomed to fail. These methods have enabled much more rapid
innovation at lower cost, while also facilitating the
development of products and services more responsive to the
needs and desires of customers. They have fueled the
astonishing success of the Valley’s fastest growth companies,
including LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber and Pinterest—and have
driven the breakout success of many of the most exciting new
social enterprises too.
A consistent theme in my interviews with breakthrough
social entrepreneurs was that they had used these innovation
practices to develop their models for their products or services,
and had tested them before going out to raise capital and seek
press coverage. This allowed them to develop more effective
programs and products. It also enabled them to tell a
persuasive story about how they had arrived at their models,
impressing funders with their research and development
process and their initial set of results. In the long run, adopting
these practices instills a culture of continuous innovation that
helps to assure that organizations keep scaling their impact—
always experimenting with ways to improve and expand their
offerings, while discontinuing efforts that aren’t working so
they can focus on new approaches.
There are three core methods to draw on. One is the lean
startup approach to product development, popularized by Eric
Ries in his book The Lean Startup.1 Closely related but with
some methods of its own is the practice of design thinking,
pioneered at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford
University (known as the “d.school”) and the private
innovation consulting firm IDEO. This method has been
introduced in several books, including Change by Design by
the CEO of IDEO, Tim Brown.2 Finally, open innovation, also
referred to as “cocreation,” was introduced by Professor Henry
Chesbrough, of the Haas School of Business at the University
of California, and is described in his book Open Innovation.3
Collectively, these methods can be referred to as “human-
centered design.” Though each has specific nuances in
execution, which you can read about in more detail in the
books mentioned, at the core of these methods are three
fundamental principles: that organizations must design
products and services based upon an in-depth investigation of
the customers’ needs and desires; that organizations must test
prototypes of products and services (often very simple ones)
with customers, and further develop them according to their
feedback; and that no matter how compelling an idea for a
product or service may be to a founder or organization, if it
fails to win the approval of the targeted customers in tests, the
organization must pivot to a new approach and consider the
failures valuable learning experiences rather than crippling
mistakes.

A consistent theme in my interviews with breakthrough social

entrepreneurs was that they had used these innovation
practices to develop their models for their products or
services, and had tested them before going out to raise capital
and seek press coverage.

There is no one widely agreed-upon strict process to

follow; organizations can either tailor the methods to their
work as they see fit, or can follow one or another well-
established guide. IDEO, for example, has developed a
rigorous step-by-step method for nonprofits through its
nonprofit spinoff IDEO.org. It offers a Field Guide to Human
Centered Design for free download.4 Many other
consultancies have followed in IDEO’s footsteps and
developed their own set of specific procedures. Several
companies and organizations have drawn on these resources to
craft their own particular processes to fit their needs.
Surveying the full range of methods, the following is a basic
step-by-step process for producing optimal results:
1. Conduct in-depth research on the problem with
the intended “customers,” who, for social
innovators, we’ll call beneficiaries.
It is vital to build strong connections with the end-users in
order to better understand their needs. This must involve
methods such as focus grouping or surveys, as well as going
out to target communities, observing the nature of end-users’
lives and conducting in-person interviews to understand the
problems they face. Prominent civil rights activist Bryan
Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Alabama-
based civil rights organization Equal Justice Initiative, refers
to this as gaining “proximity.”5 He stresses how important it is
to build understanding and empathy with communities in order
to design effective programs. As he said in a recent speech:
“We cannot make good decisions from a distance. If you are
not proximate, you cannot change the world.”6 Proximity is
also critical to getting buy-in from the communities you hope
to serve.
2. Brainstorm a series of solutions for addressing
the problem(s) and select a first candidate for
development.
Once you have conducted interviews, discuss key findings
with your team and perhaps with a range of stakeholders and
outside advisors. Hold a session in which you invite unfettered
idea generation about the best ways to address the problem; or
for established organizations, to make changes in existing
programs or products. It is imperative that everyone
understands that all ideas are welcome at the table, and none
should be shot down during this brainstorming. A ubiquitous
practice for idea generation in Silicon Valley is scribbling
thoughts on brightly colored Post-it notes, then sticking them
on a whiteboard, wall or large sheet of paper.
3. Create a rough prototype and get feedback.
This should be a very simple and inexpensive representation of
the product (such as a sketch depicting the product), or how
the service will work (a storyboard describing how the service
would operate). You can present the prototype to targeted
users and gain valuable feedback.
4. Refine the prototype and launch a pilot program or
product to test results.
As you observe the responses to the pilot, you will generally
discover additional ways to improve it, often launching a
number of progressively more developed versions until you
see the results you are aiming for. It is critical to have good
benchmarks to measure impact during this phase to determine
whether a pilot is successfully addressing the problem you
seek to solve. You may find the approach simply isn’t
working, and that it’s time to pivot to a new one.

The Elements of Human-Centered

Design

NEVER ASSUME YOU KNOW THE ANSWER

Too many nonprofits have made the mistake of not

interviewing and testing before launching their service. A
number of the respondents to my survey described this as the
biggest mistake they made in building their organization. One
of these is Rachel Armstrong, the founder of Farm Commons,
a Minnesota-based organization that serves farmers by
providing them with information regarding legal issues. Her
original concept was that the farmers would be clients, paying
the organization for providing legal services. But after the
service was launched, it turned out the farmers didn’t want to
pay for legal representation. What they did want was
education about legal issues, and Farm Commons had to
completely redesign its model, not relying on income from the
farmers and developing extensive educational resources and
tutorials.
Even if social entrepreneurs have direct experience with
the problems they are trying to solve, research and testing with
beneficiaries is invaluable. Speaking with beneficiaries and all
the other stakeholders, who can either help to make one’s
program a success or stand in its way, will always be
enlightening. It will also build understanding in the
community and earn buy-in. In the nonprofit world in
particular, engaging beneficiaries is essential: communities
will not embrace your efforts if you do not involve them in the
process of developing your idea.
Take the case of CareMessage, a multimillion-dollar
organization Vineet Singal and Cecilia Corral cofounded. It
provides a sophisticated web-based system that allows health
clinics to send patients text and voice messages to remind,
educate and motivate them to manage their disease. One target
is Spanish-speaking individuals who struggle to understand the
information they receive from health care providers. Corral
grew up between south Texas and Mexico, and her own
parents spoke only Spanish at home. She knew very well the
problems these patients have with the language barrier,
because she watched her parents’ blank stares as they
struggled to understand doctors, and sometimes even the
translators.
Despite her familiarity with the problem, Corral led
extensive interviewing and testing of the prototypes for
CareMessage with targeted users. She sat in on meetings
between Spanish-speaking patients and translators, and even
enrolled people from her circle of family and friends in the
program, without notice, to see how they reacted to receiving
such messages. She then proceeded to question them about
their thoughts as the service evolved, constantly asking, “Does
this sound okay? Is it making sense?”

FROM POST-IT TO PROOF OF CONCEPT

To see how powerful this general approach of customer

research and product testing can be for social enterprises, let’s
take a close look at the process Tipping Point Community used
in collaboration with the nonprofit Aspire Public Schools (a
group of charter schools) to devise a boldly creative solution
to ineffective preschool education in low-income
communities.
 Tipping Point Community, based in San Francisco, is one
of many funders supporting nonprofits to embrace human-
centered design practices. Others include Google.org, the
Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation. The Gates Foundation, for example, has spent
hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D to test various
solutions to the malaria epidemic. In a speech, Bill Gates
described R&D funding as “urgent to stay ahead of emerging
disease threats.”7 It is promising to see international, national
and local funders recognizing the vital role they can play in
dedicating significant amounts of philanthropic capital to
R&D.
Tipping Point Community aims to find solutions to extreme
poverty and to facilitate innovation. To promote more
innovation and design thinking in its work, it established an
R&D arm, called T Lab. As Renuka Kher, the founding
managing director of Tipping Point’s T Lab, says, “The
problem is that nonprofits are held to a different standard
while in the business world we call R&D spending
‘infrastructure’ and it sounds essential, in the nonprofit world
we call it ‘overhead’ and it is highly scrutinized.” As a result,
while corporations spent $145 billion on research and
development in 2015, nonprofits spent nearly nothing. Tipping
Point decided to change that, making R&D spending a priority
within their own organization.
Through their research, T Lab identified the lack of
preschool in many neighborhoods as a key problem, leaving
eighty thousand children in the San Francisco Bay area
without early childhood education. The lab’s research group
decided to tackle the challenge. Step one was for fellows of T
Lab, a cohort of young professionals that Tipping Point trains
and supports in human-centered design, to reach out to
members of the communities lacking high-quality preschool
options; the group asked questions about what they desired for
their children in their early years, and their perspective on how
to improve the situation. The fellows reached out to
community-based organizations, schools and libraries to talk
with parents, teachers, principles and anyone else who might
have an opinion about how to solve the problem.

R&D Spending in For-Profits versus

Nonprofits. Whereas in the business
sector we characterize administrative
costs as essential “infrastructure” and
leave a significant portion of the
budget for research and development
(R&D), in the nonprofit sector we refer
to administrative costs as overhead and
scrutinize anything over 20 percent,
leaving virtually no space for R&D.
Source: Tipping Point.

The team then held a brainstorming session, often called

the “ideation” phase of human-centered design, and proposed
a wide range of creative solutions. The team chose eight
concepts, then developed a series of prototype solutions for
testing. One was to convert a bus into a classroom, which was
appealing because it would solve the problem of needing to
either rent building space or, in many cases, construct a whole
new building. They could also move a mobile classroom
wherever needed, perhaps serving families in more than one
location if scheduling permitted.
 The Ideation Phase of the T Lab Preschool Bus Project.
Source: Tipping Point.

The team made a simple cardboard mock-up of a bus for

their prototype, which they took to the community to ask
parents, teachers and school administrators what they thought
of the concept. They probed for any issues that might be
important to consider. For example, they asked, “What would
your concerns be if you put your children on a bus for
preschool?” and “Would you be comfortable with your child
being on this bus?” Many people were enthusiastic. They saw
the concept as a great potential option for preschool. But some
parents were worried about their children’s safety, asking if the
bus would be driving around with the children in it. They also
thought that the children might not like the bus, because it
might not feel as nice as a regular classroom. Overall, the
feedback indicated the idea had potential, especially since the
concept was to park the bus while school was in session. The
next step was to build a working prototype for testing with
children.
The T Lab team first used painter’s tape to outline a life-
sized bus in their office. They created a mock-up of the bus,
furnishing the tape outline with cheap shelving, rugs, chairs
and toys from IKEA to see how they could design the space.
They then found a company with an old school bus for rent,
and recreated their mock-up on the real bus. They got
permission from Aspire to test the concept for two days at one
of their elementary schools in Oakland, and invited parents to
bring their children to come check it out, as well as teachers.
Everyone was delighted with the result; not only were parents
and teachers enthusiastic, but most importantly, the kids loved
it!
With such positive responses, Aspire decided to invest
further in the concept development. With $250,000 of R&D
support from Tipping Point they were able to conduct a more
robust five-month trial serving fourteen students. They parked
the bus in the lot of an Aspire elementary school in Oakland,
and invited families of Aspire students with preschool-age
children to enroll. The bus was a huge hit, as described in a
San Francisco Chronicle article, which reported that “on
bench seats running lengthwise down the bus, are kids
counting, coloring, laughing and occasionally throwing in a
wobbly handstand on the rug at the back end, in front of the
emergency exit. Outside, classmates are making noodle
necklaces and building with colored blocks.”8 Following the
trial, a waiting list developed for families who wanted a “seat
on the bus.” With such a successful trial, Aspire decided to
dedicate $450,000 to conduct a pilot program for the full
academic calendar year. Tipping Point provided another
$200,000 grant to support their pilot. This allowed Aspire to
purchase the bus and serve twenty-eight four-year-olds,
offering them a full five-day school week. The pilot program
was an overwhelming hit with teachers and families alike, who
realized that placing children in preschool made them more
kindergarten-ready, setting them up for success throughout
their education.

The T Lab Human-Centered Design Process for the Preschool

Bus Project. Source: Tipping Point.

Aspire was ready to scale the program when they ran into a
wrinkle: the state of California refused to give them a license
to operate more buses, saying they had failed to satisfy the
state facilities code. Aspire decided they couldn’t let the state’s
decision stop them. They went back to the drawing board,
using the design of the bus classroom to redraw the classrooms
in their schools, making space for preschool classes. In some
cases, they decided to expand buildings. They learned that
bringing the preschool programs in-house allowed them to
serve more students than they could have with the buses.
Going forward, Aspire hopes to provide all their students with
preschool education, targeting a goal of serving 132 students
in five classrooms by 2019.
When Renuka Kher heard that the state had shot down the
bus idea, she was nervous about breaking the news to her T
Lab team, who had become emotionally attached to the buses.
But while they were initially sad that the buses wouldn’t be
deployed, they realized that testing the buses had been a great
learning process, which helped Aspire arrive at an optimal
solution. This story is a perfect example of why in human-
centered design it is so important to keep the focus squarely on
solving the problem, as opposed to falling in love with a
particular solution.

ANY ORGANIZATION CAN FOLLOW THE STEPS

Sure, the human-centered design method worked fantastically

for Aspire, you may be thinking, because it was initiated by T
Lab and backed by funding from Tipping Point. But social
startup seed funding is still rare, despite the movement to
support such R&D efforts, and most social startups can’t rely
on assistance from donors for the pilot phase. The good news
is that organizations can conduct this process on a veritable
shoestring. A number of breakthrough social innovators I met
used scrappy versions of human-centered design to perfect
their models, collect signs of impact and obtain funding.
One of those is Alexandra Bernadotte, founder of Beyond
12, an organization that provides technology and coaching to
support college students from underprivileged backgrounds.
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Bernadotte’s parents immigrated
to the United States so she could have better opportunities for
success. Bernadotte worked hard to get into Dartmouth
College, and she vividly recalled struggling through her four
years there because she did not have the tools she needed to be
successful, such as family members to review her resume or a
network to get summer internships. Several years later,
Bernadotte was working at New Schools Venture Fund, a
venture philanthropy firm that supports education nonprofits,
when she learned that she was not alone: by age twenty-four,
only 9 percent of students from the lowest income quartile can
expect to earn a bachelor’s degree, versus 77 percent of
students from the highest income quartile. She decided to find
a way to help more low-income children succeed.
While Bernadotte had a clear idea of the population she
wanted to serve, she wasn’t sure how best to help them. On the
one hand, a free technology platform to provide support would
reach a large number of students; but on the other, a human
coaching service would offer a more in-depth, personalized
experience. Without funding in the bank, or a foundation
willing to support her launching a formal design process,
Bernadotte decided to create her own human-centered design
approach to R&D. She started working with a small focus-
group company to learn best practices for targeting students
who were the first in their family to go to college. She
ultimately did that through student groups, such as the Latino
Alliance and the Black Student Union. She also got advice on
the questions to ask them about their experience. With this
crucial information in hand, she dove into the research phase
by going to college campuses and talking with students. She
set up tables at student unions, did outreach on Facebook and
used word of mouth through the people she met to connect
with both students who were persisting in college and some
who had dropped out. Taking the student comments back to
her team, she held a brainstorming session in which they came
up with a variety of strategies for supporting students. They
determined to test a model that combined a smartphone app,
which would connect students with valuable campus
resources, and individualized coaching to help them navigate
personal challenges.
According to Bernadotte, this early design process was a
key component of Beyond 12’s success, because the
organization was able to develop an intimate relationship with
their target users. Meeting with students was so valuable, in
fact, that her team continues to regularly reach out to them for
feedback about what is working for them and where Beyond
12 can improve. This feedback loop was critical when Beyond
12 received a grant several years later to hire the design firm
IDEO to lead the organization through a more formalized
design process. The goal was to make the service scalable and
financially sustainable. Several beneficiaries who had gone
through the Beyond 12 program helped improve their model.
IDEO started by researching analogous models from the
business world, such as Weight Watchers, whose model also
blends live coaching with technology support. As Bernadotte
recalls: “Weight Watchers was such a great example that I
never would have thought of because it’s not in our space, but
they have been so successful at providing a very analogous
experience. We were able to learn from it because it just fit
with everything we were trying to do.” IDEO then ran design
sessions with Beyond 12 students, covering the walls of the
meeting rooms with brightly colored Post-it notes suggesting
ideas for features to improve the app.
The design process produced dozens of feature ideas,
which were whittled down to a few that IDEO and Beyond 12
prototyped using InDesign, creating sample screenshots. The
team then took the screenshots to the students for feedback.
The conversations clarified that what the students most needed
were resources to help them better navigate their college
experience (like reminders about academic and financial aid
deadlines), so the team tailored the design of new features
accordingly. Because the organization had such strong
relationships with their beneficiaries, they were able to tap
them for additional feedback multiple times throughout the
development process.
Beyond 12 is now tracking the progress of more than fifty
thousand students and coaching close to two thousand students
on 180 college campuses. All the testing has paid off. Of the
students coached by Beyond 12 who entered college in fall
2011, 82 percent persisted into their third year, compared to 59
percent of first-generation college students nationwide.

Another example of a social entrepreneur who bootstrapped

her early testing phase is Beth Schmidt, founder of Wishbone,
a crowdfunding platform that sends low-income high school
students to summer programs that help them pursue their
dream careers. She was a high school teacher in east Los
Angeles when she gave her students an assignment to write a
paper about their passions. Blown away by what they wrote,
she imagined founding an organization that would make her
students’ dreams come true. To test the idea, she simply
photocopied the papers that had impressed her and mailed
them to her family and friends, pleading for donations. With
the money that came in, she picked seven students and
arranged for them to attend summer programs. Next she built a
website to experiment with growing the program. It brought in
enough donations to send sixty kids to programs the following
summer. She then analyzed how the model was working, and
she realized that the overhead was $2,000 per student, which
was much too costly to scale. In response, she asked summer
programs to provide scholarships, which reduced the price
significantly. With that tweak to her model, she was ready to
push for growth. As Schmidt says, “You can put a bunch of
kids through a poorly made machine where they don’t have a
great experience, and the machine is going to break down in a
year and you’re going to hit a plateau. Or, you can actually
spend the time to explore it, get it right and do the research
you need to do to create a machine that works over the long
haul.”
Sometimes your testing must be a little more sophisticated
than using a photocopy machine and sticking some
handwritten letters in the mail, but it can still be at quite low
cost. Charles Best was a teacher in the Bronx when he
developed his idea for a crowdfunding site for teachers. Now a
$100 million fully self-sustaining nonprofit organization with
celebrities like Stephen Colbert on its board, DonorsChoose is
based in the heart of midtown Manhattan, with swanky offices
that resemble a tech startup more than your typical nonprofit.
As I waited to meet with Best, I was drawn to the flat-screen
TV mounted on the wall of the waiting area showing that
already that morning $87,712 had been donated to projects all
over the country, including Bring Music to Our Classroom and
Technology for Our Troops’ Kids.
The origins of DonorsChoose were much more humble.
Best got the idea one day when he and his teacher friends were
talking about books they wanted their students to read, field
trips they wanted to take them on and a pair of microscopes
they needed for a science experiment. It occurred to him that
there must be people who would help to fund these needs if
they could see where their money was going.
Best was living at his parents’ home at the time, so he used
his rent savings to pay a web designer $2,000 to build a bare-
bones website to test the idea. Today, paying a designer would
not even be necessary, because so many free templates for
websites, adequate for the testing phase, are available. To
kick-start posting projects for funding, Best turned to his
coworkers. “My mom made roasted pears for my colleagues,”
he told me. “When I brought them to the teachers’ lounge
people would pounce and I stopped them and said, ‘If you eat
one of these pears, you have to go to this new website called
DonorsChoose and ask for whatever it is you want most for
your students.’” This is how Best managed to get the first
eleven project requests on his website.
Then he had to find donors. His aunt funded one of the
projects, and Best secretly funded the rest using his savings.
Rumors about a website where teachers could get money for
their classrooms spread across the Bronx, and teachers started
posting hundreds of projects. By that time, word had also
spread to donors that this website would provide a chance to
contribute to local schools, so luckily donations began to
trickle in and Best no longer had to fund them himself. After
ten months of testing his pilot site, he was able to prove the
promise of the model: if you built a platform where teachers
could post their classroom wish lists, people would gladly
fund them. With those results in hand, Best approached
foundations to seek funding; he was able to get a $100,000
grant from the Goldman Sachs Foundation to go ahead and
create a more robust website and fulfillment team to launch
the organization.

ADDING IN COCREATION

While interviewing targeted users and testing prototypes with

them is core to all the human-centered design methods,
actually engaging users in helping to generate ideas for
products and services, and having them actively develop them
with you, is not always included. Such direct involvement in
development may not be appropriate for all organizations, but
it can be a great way to make the development process more
affordable, and can also speed it up. The cocreation, or open
innovation, process is a method for inviting your intended
users to submit ideas for developing your product or service,
and maybe even take part in the development process.
The method has been used to great success by a number of
companies. LEGO has implemented the method, with its
LEGO Ideas platform, which offers LEGO users the chance to
submit design ideas.9 All users can then vote on the
submissions; the company then produces the highest rated
designs, with a small percentage of the revenue going to the
designer. With the development of online crowdsourcing
platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, cocreation has
become even more interactive.
The Center for Youth Wellness is an example of how this
approach can catapult nonprofit growth. Dr. Nadine Burke
Harris, the founder, has become one of the most influential
doctors of her generation, recently gaining international
acclaim with prizes such as the Humanism in Medicine Award
from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Heinz
Award.
When she finished medical school, Burke Harris was
committed to bringing top-quality health care to poor
communities. She managed to secure funding from the Sutter
Health Hospital to start a clinic in the Bayview district of San
Francisco, a low-income neighborhood. As she began to
research the health conditions of her patient population, she
came across a Kaiser study out of San Diego identifying a then
little known phenomenon called “toxic stress” in children.
Researchers found that adverse childhood experiences due to
life traumas, such as drug problems, abuse, neglect or
alcoholism, could cause disproportionate poor health outcomes
down the road. She immediately realized that this was the
cause of many of the serious medical problems of the Bayview
community. She told me that making this connection was akin
to finding a pathway to a cure for cancer. If pediatricians
would screen children to discover whether they had
experienced such traumas, they could more effectively target
interventions to counteract the longer-term medical effects.
She founded the Center for Youth Wellness to advance that
mission. In addition to spreading the word about toxic stress
exposure through public advocacy, such as through a much
viewed TED talk,10 she determined that she would create an
Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) screening survey. Her
hope was for the government to require every pediatrician in
the country to use the ACE survey to screen patients for toxic
stress exposure. Her initial plan was to use a sample survey
during patient visits in her clinic in Bayview, and analyze the
results over time. She wanted to test the user friendliness of
the survey and perfect it before taking it to national authorities
to lobby that it become a mandatory tool in pediatrics. Only
after proving its effectiveness would she make the survey
available for public use. But once the word that she was
developing a survey got out through her TED talk, clinics and
doctors from all over the world began contacting her to request
it.
Burke Harris had applied for the Google Impact Challenge
Award, offered by Google.org. When they awarded her a $3
million grant to develop her survey, the Google team
suggested the cocreation approach to address the immediate
need. Burke Harris took the advice and made a provisional
version of the survey available for download, fully disclosing
that it was not a finished product, including an official legal
disclaimer. She invited those who downloaded it to participate
in improving it. In just over a year, a thousand health providers
in fifteen countries have downloaded the screening tool and
are in the process of offering useful refinements to the Center
for Youth Wellness with an online survey tool. These doctors
are now co-creators with the Center for Youth Wellness and
are poised to provide significant input on how the survey
works on their patients, what can be improved and how to help
make it as user friendly for the doctors as possible. The goal is
that once Burke Harris finally does go to national authorities
to advocate for its widespread use, the survey will have been
well tested.

In my study, I encountered numerous other examples of

cocreation at work in the nonprofit world. For example, when
Natalie Bridgeman Fields founded Accountability Counsel, a
group of lawyers representing communities around the world
that have suffered human and environmental rights abuses
from development projects, she quickly realized that her small
organization would never be able to reach the millions in need
of representation. Her team developed the Accountability
Resource Guide11 to make their process open-source, so any
lawyer could read it and bring cases against the institutions
funding harmful development projects.
Countless nonprofits have used Kickstarter, Indiegogo or
other crowdfunding platforms to develop advocacy campaigns
that engage their supporters not only to fund their work, but to
get their ideas about how to improve programming.
SurveyMonkey and Google Surveys are great ways to receive
feedback from a targeted audience of stakeholders. And a
cocreation model doesn’t even have to be sophisticated; of
course, Facebook and Twitter are easy ways for nonprofits to
use social media to get feedback and constantly improve upon
their programming.

STAYING CLOSE TO THE PROBLEM AND THE BENEFICIARIES

The process of connecting with end-users and other
stakeholders should be ongoing as your organization grows.
As your organization hires more staff, you should implement a
process for connecting new employees as well. One of the
common ways nonprofits go off course is losing touch with
the needs and desires of the community they are serving, thus
failing to perceive new problems that might arise. Top-
performing social entrepreneurs are dedicated to continuously
improving their model and the services they’re providing, and
they find ways to stay close to their beneficiaries. For
example, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is committed to maintaining
her clinical practice as a pediatrician one day a week in
between speaking engagements and running her organization.
Andrew Youn, founder of One Acre Fund, which provides
African farmers the tools to increase their production yields,
lives in Rwanda in order to be close to the populations he is
serving.

The process of connecting with end-users and other

stakeholders should be ongoing as your organization grows.
As your organization hires more staff, you should implement a
process for connecting new employees as well.

Many of the breakthrough organizations I visited work

closely with their staff to connect them to the people they
serve, so they develop a deep understanding of the problem
they are tackling. Charity: water, the New York–based clean
water initiative, which has raised over $200 million, and in the
last year brought clean water to nearly 7 million people, takes
each staff member to the developing world at least once, to
experience how the organization’s work touches the lives of its
beneficiaries. Organizations also stay connected by hiring staff
who have suffered the social problems the nonprofit addresses.
For example, Jessamyn Rodriguez, the founder of Hot Bread
Kitchen, a job-training facility for low-income women that
helps them launch careers in food manufacturing, hires select
graduates of their Bakers in Training onto their full-time staff.
This allows the organization to leverage the insights of
beneficiaries in administering and developing their programs.
 A strong connection with the needs of your targeted users,
and an open-minded commitment to listening to their input
and responding to it, will gain you the support and engagement
of those you seek to serve, the insights to improve your results
and, in turn, the funds you need to take your organization to
the next level.
 CHAPTER 2

While the human-centered design process focuses on

interviewing and testing with potential customers, or end-
users, in social entrepreneurship it’s vital to consult a wider
range of stakeholders. One of the common mistakes nonprofits
make is failing to reach out to certain important players; these
players can either help craft a better approach and support its
adoption, or can thwart efforts or even turn other stakeholders
or the intended beneficiaries against the organization. With
social innovation there are almost always governmental
figures and organizations with a stake in the problem you are
addressing, as well as other nonprofit organizations, and
sometimes even businesses. In addition, there are often
scholars who have been studying the problem. Other types of
researchers, such as those working for the government or
grassroots activists, may also be championing a similar or a
quite different approach. The stakeholders can either help to
mobilize their networks in support of your efforts—or against
them.
It’s important to work hard to identify and interview the
full cast of characters who will play a role in the success of
your organization. Listening to their opinions and insights
carefully, and with an open mind, can be extremely fruitful,
especially because social problems and their solutions are
always more complicated than initially expected.
An infamous example of failing to consult the full scope of
the stakeholders involved in understanding and solving a
problem, and to take account of the information and insights
they could offer, is the Invisible Children Kony 2012
campaign. Jason Russell and two of his friends founded
Invisible Children after the three graduated from film school,
and in 2003 traveled to Uganda in search of a subject for a
film.1 Staying in the town of Gulu, they learned that a militia
group known as the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), led by
Joseph Kony, had been abducting children and forcing them to
become soldiers. They founded Invisible Children to raise
awareness of the problem and advocate for action to
apprehend Kony and stop the LRA.
While the organization did bring attention to the problem,
it was also widely criticized by many people with knowledge
of the LRA and the larger conflict situation in Uganda and the
surrounding Central African nations; opponents argued that it
simplified the nature of a long-term conflict in which the LRA
was just one party. Russell and his colleagues were accused of
mischaracterizing the situation, for example, leading to the
impression that the LRA was still based in Uganda when in
fact it had moved elsewhere in 2006.2 The criticisms came to a
head after Invisible Children produced a thirty-minute
documentary featuring the story of Jacob Acaye, whose
brother was tragically murdered by the LRA.3 The video went
viral as soon as it was released on YouTube in 2012, reaching
hundreds of millions of views in just days.4 Using the video,
Invisible Children galvanized action from a host of supporters,
from American high school students to members of the U.S.
Congress and celebrities like George Clooney, Kim
Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey.

It’s important to work hard to identify and interview the full cast
of characters who will play a role in the success of your
organization. Listening to their opinions and insights carefully,
and with an open mind, can be extremely fruitful.

What should have been a triumph for the organization

quickly turned into a travesty, as experts in Uganda and a host
of grassroots Ugandan activists complained that Invisible
Children had irresponsibly suggested that Kony could be
apprehended, although he had eluded capture for more than
twenty-five years.5 They also lamented that the video falsely
suggested that Kony’s elimination could solve the larger and
more complex problem of violence in Uganda. If the
organization had worked with these stakeholders who were
deeply involved in ending the civil war in Uganda, they could
have conveyed a more accurate depiction of the problem and
the complexities of finding a solution. Michael Deibert, an
expert on African politics, expressed the frustration of many of
those with in-depth knowledge of the situation in Uganda
when he said at the time: “I have seen the well-meaning
foreigners do plenty of damage before, so that is why people
understanding the context and the history of the region is
important before they blunder blindly forward to ‘help’ a
people they don’t understand.”6 As criticism mounted, and
other complaints about the organization surfaced, such as the
large portion of donations that Invisible Children used to pay
staff, donations dried up. Just two years after the Kony 2012
video was released, Invisible Children was on the brink of
collapse.7

Even organizations that work hard to engage stakeholders

sometimes get it wrong, spending precious resources and often
a good deal of time, only to have their efforts thwarted. Jim
Fruchterman, the founder of Benetech, which promotes ways
to apply technology to solve wide-ranging problems around
the globe, warned about this mistake in a blog post that
recounted one project he had to shut down in spite of great
hopes. Before founding the organization, Fruchterman was a
rocket engineer who used his technological savvy to create
many innovations, such as an affordable reading machine for
the blind and an open-source software application that
securely gathers information about human rights violations in
the field. When I arrived at Fruchterman’s office to interview
him, I couldn’t help but notice hundreds of plastic name tags
hanging on hooks behind his door, which he explained were
from conferences he’d attended over the years. “Networking is
key,” he told me. But as he admits, it turns out even a guy who
loves networking can fail to consider all the stakeholders in a
project.
One of Benetech’s efforts was to build a relatively
inexpensive land mine detector to help prevent the massive
suffering caused by bombs left in the ground in post-conflict
civilian areas. In 2004, Fruchterman met the head of the land
mine detector research program of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department
of Defense, who told him about a new detection technology
developed by a company called Quantum Magnetics. While
Benetech began negotiating to gain access to the technology,
Benetech simultaneously sunk considerable funds into
developing the project, hiring a top engineer from Sun
Microsystems and conducting field research by visiting with
humanitarian land mine groups.
But the organization failed to realize that before it
proceeded with development efforts, it should have ensured
that one of the most important stakeholders, with the power to
block its access to the technology, was on board. The Office of
Naval Research, also part of the Department of Defense, had
funded the development of the technology and had the
authority to block Benetech’s access to it. The organization
became embroiled in protracted negotiations with the Office of
Naval Research. By the time Benetech secured approval,
another stakeholder decided to deny access—Quantum
Magnetics (QM) had been purchased by General Electric,
which had changed QM’s management, laid off most of its
technical staff and sold the rights to the technology to a British
military contractor. The contractor, it turned out, was not
interested in granting access to Benetech, and it had to
discontinue the project.
In his “post-mortem” blog outlining the lessons he learned
from the project’s failure, Fruchterman made it clear that even
if Benetech had secured permission to use the technology, the
devices might not have been embraced by the intended users.8
Benetech didn’t anticipate pushback from stakeholders in the
countries with the land mine problem. But as it conducted
research in the field, the organization eventually discovered
that both the governments and workers of those countries had
no interest in cutting down on the number of workers needed
to clear mines, which the new technology would do. Benetech
anticipated that the device would, in fact, cut manpower hours
by half. But the jobs of clearing the mines were hot
commodities, both to employees (because the jobs paid double
or triple the prevailing wage) and to politicians (who wanted
to demonstrate their ability to create jobs). They viewed land
mine clearance work as a jobs program. Even though people
doing the work wanted technology to make land mine
detection safer, no one wanted to cut the number of jobs in
half. Failing to fully understand these political and economic
factors was a major flaw in the early planning for the project.
As Fruchterman wrote: “Historically Benetech simply waved
the intelligent good-guy flag and people helped us.” This time
that approach fell short.

In my survey of social entrepreneurs, in response to a request

to describe their organizations’ biggest failures, many replied
with stories of not accounting for how various stakeholders
would respond to the organizations’ efforts. One such story
was that of Face It Together, a North Dakota organization that
uses data about drug and alcohol addiction to improve
treatment. The state government hired the organization to
bring its model into a community that had not asked to be
helped. As cofounder and CEO Kevin Kirby described: “It
was like pushing a rope. We learned a hard lesson; we only go
where we’re invited by those with the capacity to affect
transformational change.” This experience exemplifies the
need to evaluate the full range of players in the target
community and to reach out to them to discuss any issues they
may have with your plan. This is true even if other important
players, such as influential funders and key government
figures, are backing you.
 So how can you avoid such costly mistakes? You can begin
by creating a simple list of all the stakeholders in your project.

WHO CARES AND WHY?

The key here is to move beyond consideration of the

immediate beneficiaries, and the most obvious people or
organizations that can either facilitate or hamper your success;
it is necessary to identify people knowledgeable about the
broader landscape in which you will be operating and who will
challenge any assumptions you might have about why your
program or product will be received positively. Those people
will help you to identify stakeholders you might not have
considered. You can start by simply brainstorming all the
players who will be directly influenced by your work, and then
consider all the individuals and organizations that have any
degree of control over the provision of services to your
beneficiaries. This should include all government agencies,
public interest groups, funders, politicians and business
leaders. Also consider all players who have studied the
problems your beneficiaries are facing, whether they have
focused specifically on the particular issues you are
addressing, or others. For example, if you are creating a drug
treatment program for inner-city youth, a scholar who has
studied their lives in a community much like the one you are
intending to serve may offer insight about informative
individuals not on your radar, such as church leaders.
Then you should begin reaching out to these people, and in
the process of asking them their thoughts about your plans, ask
them if they know anyone else you should consult. One social
entrepreneur who used this method to great effect is Alejandro
Gac-Artigas, the founder of Springboard Collaborative, which
works to involve parents in underprivileged communities with
their children’s learning, training them to be effective literacy
coaches at home. He got the idea teaching first grade in a
Philadelphia school, as a Teach For America corps member;
he witnessed that the school system tended to treat the parents
of struggling students as liabilities rather than potential
partners in developing their children’s abilities. He understood
that the program he wanted to launch would benefit hugely
from the support of schools. The model he ultimately
developed was one of partnership with schools, and the
schools paid for the service.
To hone his model and gain support from the school
system, he reached out to a host of school administrators,
drawing on his connections from his Teach For America
network. He recalls: “I’d get on the phone in the afternoon and
evening with two or three administrators a day and in each of
those conversations I would ask for two more people to
connect with. Then I began synthesizing their insights.” By
calling so many teachers, principals and superintendents, he
realized that if he could offer a service that met their standards
for less money than they would pay a business to develop such
a program, they would come on board. Without actually
talking with this range of stakeholders inside the system, he
never would have been able to develop a pricing scheme that
made sense for the schools.
You can also solicit the assistance of influential supporters
who can help you to connect with stakeholders you might not
otherwise have access to. An example is Accountability
Counsel, the small human rights organization in San
Francisco. It decided that it needed to better understand the
leverage points for its work around the world providing a
voice for grassroots communities suffering human and
environmental abuse caused by development projects. For
their strategic planning process, they used their board
members to interview staff, experts and key friends of the
organization to come up with a list of the stakeholders most
important to leveraging influence on the issue. The
stakeholders included people actually working in development
institutions, such as the World Bank, as well as funders,
nonprofit leaders and academics working at the intersection of
human and environmental rights. As another example of
collaboration with stakeholders, the organization has been able
to create the International Advocates Working Group, which
they convene on a regular basis both by phone and in person,
to ensure all their efforts to support communities globally are
working in harmony.
In addition, you can use the power of social media to reach
out not only to members of the community you aim to serve,
but also to the broader range of stakeholders. Effective actions
include putting a call out on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter;
sending cold emails to leaders at community-based
organizations; posting a request for interviews in a community
center; or passing out flyers at a school. This was the strategy
the T Lab team that developed the preschool-on-a-bus model
tapped into, posting notices at libraries, local schools and
social services organizations to find teachers and librarians to
talk to, as well as students and parents to interview.

A great case of incorporating stakeholder feedback is City

Year, cofounded in 1988 by Alan Khazei and Michael Brown,
which recruits young adults for a year of national service in
high-need schools, to help students succeed. In 1988, after
conducting a ten-week summer pilot for fifty initial corps
members in Boston, the founders interviewed each corps
member to ask what they liked and disliked about the program.
City Year had been planning to launch the organization as a
yearlong program, but the founders heard over and over again
that they should allow corps members to have the summer off
so they could get summer jobs. Though corps members
received a stipend, the feedback was that the pay wasn’t
enough to fully compensate for summer employment. They
also heard that because the work was hard, people would burn
out if the program was year-round, especially because the age
group involved was used to going to school, then having their
summers free for work or other activities. The cofounders
listened, and launched City Year as a nine-month program
conforming to the academic calendar. According to Khazei:
“As a year-long program it would have been much harder to
recruit our target age group.” He also reflects that during the
early years, the summer became a time that allowed the
organization “to recalibrate as a staff and organization to learn
from the previous program year, do summer training and to
give the staff a break because people worked really hard
during the program year.” City Year has gone on to become a
successful national nonprofit, even serving as a model for the
AmeriCorps program, established under President Bill
Clinton, which has enabled more than one million Americans
to contribute upward of 1.4 billion hours of public service
across the United States.9
 CHAPTER 3

One of the key reasons that so many social startups don’t

break out to achieve large-scale success is that their leaders
aren’t willing to evaluate their programs with full honesty and
to give up on ideas and approaches that aren’t working. Even
once an organization embraces innovation and makes R&D an
integral part of its work, this is a tough challenge, for a
number of reasons.
One is that in the chase for funding, the spoils are directed
to those who demonstrate success. Leaders are focused on
featuring their work in the best light. They fear that if word
gets out that they launched efforts that failed, their judgment
will be questioned and they’ll be at a disadvantage with
funders. Then there are worries about individual donors, who
are such an important source of funds for so many social
enterprises. Won’t they feel let down, and that their donations
have been wasted?
Another reason leaders are reluctant to shut down failed
efforts is that we all tend to become intensely committed to
our ideas, and it can be difficult to evaluate them
dispassionately; we want to dig in and keep trying to make
them work. Added to this is perhaps the most difficult aspect
of program failure in social entrepreneurship: programs are
meant to help people with pressing needs and problems.
Discontinuing a program that’s been bringing aid to people in
need can feel like a betrayal of one’s principles and of one’s
commitment to those people—and it can exact a heavy
emotional toll. But the deeper truth is that an organization will
serve people best by recognizing when efforts aren’t working
well and making the difficult changes that will produce better
results. This will ultimately lead to greater support from
funders as results improve.
Failure, and knowing when to admit failure, are critical to
the innovation process. Thomas Edison once famously said, “I
have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t
work.” The CEO of IBM for over forty years, Thomas Watson,
once said, “The fastest way to succeed is to double your
failure rate.”1 In recent years, there’s been a great deal of
attention paid in the world of Silicon Valley innovation to the
importance of teams having leeway to take more risks and to
fail more often. As Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes write in
their Harvard Business Review piece “The Failure-Tolerant
Leader,” these leaders “push people to see beyond simplistic,
traditional definitions of failure. They know that as long as
someone views failure as the opposite of success rather than
its complement, that person will never be able to take the risks
necessary for innovation.”2 The freedom to fail is vital to
producing more creative ideas and to landing on ones that will
lead to truly transformative new products and services. Hand
in hand with the call for embracing the inevitability of failure
has been a call for more “failure-tolerant leaders” who help
employees overcome their fear of failure.

Failure, and knowing when to admit failure, are critical to the

innovation process.

My interviews with many breakthrough social

entrepreneurs revealed that they embrace this failure ethos,
and truly believe that failure has often been a critical element
of their success. They realize that failure is a necessary
corollary to innovation and that failures should be reframed as
productive learning experiences. In addition, I found that
adopting this ethic instills a culture of innovation that fuels
faster growth.

THE REASONS FOR FAILURES ARE LESSONS FOR SUCCESS

As Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, has said, “Don’t think of it

as failure, think of it as designing experiments through which
you’re going to learn.”3 This is the culture at one of the most
effective innovators in the social sector, D-Rev, a nonprofit
medical device company focused on closing quality health
care gaps for underserved populations. Their mission, more
specifically, is to make treatment with first-class medical
devices available to those populations. They do this by
developing the products, as well as through an innovative
manufacturing and distribution system by which they license
rights to manufacture their products to local for-profit
producers; they then partner with local health care providers to
optimize distribution and assure correct use of the products.
Originally founded in 2007, since that time D-Rev has
created many cutting-edge products, such as the ReMotion
Knee, a low-cost replacement knee joint that allows for greater
mobility than the existing lower-cost options. The knee joint is
the most expensive and complex component of a prosthetic
leg, and the ReMotion Knee is serving a great need. The
numbers of leg amputations in the developing world every
year, most due to vehicle accidents, is staggering—in the
hundreds of thousands. And D-Rev reports that 80 percent of
those amputees do not have access to modern quality
prosthetics.
As evangelists of the human-centered design process, D-
Rev has made it a priority to discontinue products that aren’t
working for their targeted users or achieving the impact it
hopes to see. Krista Donaldson, CEO of D-Rev, stresses how
important it is that rather than frame efforts that don’t work as
failures, we should consider them learning experiences and
call them that. The language used is critical to building
comfort with accepting the need to change course. “Embracing
the learning always results in insights about the problem you
are trying to solve.… Calling a learning a failure will
discourage honesty and integrity—and hinder the pursuit of
impact.”4
A focus on building what works and retiring ideas that
don’t gain traction has been critical to D-Rev’s success, not
just in the early days of the organization, but every step of the
way. For example, in 2014 D-Rev received a seed grant from
USAID’s Saving Lives at Birth program to develop a more
compact version of the organization’s flagship product, the
Brilliance phototherapy device. The devices deliver blue-light
therapy to infants suffering from severe jaundice, while the
children lie in bassinets under intensive LED lights. Until D-
Rev developed its first Brilliance device, the machines were
prohibitively expensive for clinics in much of the developing
world. D-Rev’s first Brilliance device was so successful in
delivering cost-effective treatment that, true to the continuous
improvement mandate of human-centered design, the company
developed two additional devices, including a “pro” version
with improved functionality and usability. As of this writing,
devices in the Brilliance line of products have been installed
by clinics in twenty countries and have treated a reported
220,000 infants for jaundice.
USAID wanted to see if D-Rev could make a smaller,
radically less expensive and more portable device specifically
tailored for use in rural clinics. Treatment for jaundice is
typically given in urban areas where hospitals and clinics can
afford the machines, and have the staff expertise to administer
the treatment. That means that many infants in more remote
rural areas do not have access to treatment, and by the time
they reach urban facilities they are already severely ill. The
hope was that treatment could come sooner and be available in
even the smallest and poorest of facilities. D-Rev developed a
prototype device called Comet, which they installed in thirteen
clinics in three different countries, India, Kenya and Nepal, as
a pilot program for careful testing. There was no question that
the device was well made; D-Rev’s experience in creating its
Brilliance products had taught them how to assure this. But the
team also knew very well that any product had to be field-
tested; unanticipated problems with design, the manufacturing
process, the distribution system, or in use by clinicians would
often be discovered. As D-Rev product engineer Garrett
Spiegel explains: “An elegant design, however informed and
beautiful it is, won’t generate meaningful impact without
effective education, sales, distribution and maintenance.”5
Over the course of a year, D-Rev’s investigators observed
several problems with the Comet device. One was that the
rural clinics did not have the necessary expertise or resources
to diagnose jaundice in infants, such as with a blood test,
which most of them were not equipped to administer. D-Rev
would need to do something to improve the diagnosis rate in
order to make the devices a worthwhile investment for clinics.
In addition, the clinics had basic problems using the device,
including that their power sources were unreliable and that a
battery pack did not produce enough electricity to consistently
keep infants warm enough throughout the several days of
treatment. One clinic installed solar panels in order to try to
solve this problem, but that wasn’t a broadly viable option.
Although D-Rev had invested significant dollars in creating
the device, and even though it built its reputation on the
success of the Brilliance products, it decided to discontinue the
program. Writing about the decision publicly in a blog post at
the end of the trial, Garrett Spiegel was true to the firm’s ethic
of using the language of learning, saying, “One thing to be
clear about is that Comet was not a failure. In design,
everything is information for the next iteration.”6 In fact, the
user testing for Comet focused D-Rev’s attention on the need
to improve the supply chain for the distribution of its
Brilliance devices.

IT’S NOT FAILURE TO FOCUS ON OPTIMAL IMPACT

Sometimes programs simply aren’t working, and when that’s

the case, making the call to shut them down may be quite
straightforward, albeit difficult. But often the case is not so
black and white. Even so, discontinuing less-effective
programs is important in order to allow an organization to
focus on more impactful ones. While this can be a hard
decision to make, it can be the catalyst to an organization
really hitting its stride and creating a distinctive identity and
mission, as well as significantly more impressive results,
which then attract more enthusiastic funding.
One organization that modeled how to assess the relative
success of programs and focus efforts is Last Mile Health.
Early on they elected to transition ownership of their programs
to community members and peer organizations, but narrowed
it down to the one program that was showing the best results.
The organization then thoroughly rebranded itself around that
program. Founder Raj Panjabi was willing to radically
reconceptualize the scope of the organization’s work in order
to assure the greatest impact in its mission: the fight against
preventable deaths in Liberia.
Panjabi was born in Liberia and was nine years old when
civil war broke out there. His parents, Indian immigrants, were
granted special permission to leave the country to escape the
fighting. Panjabi vividly recalls the scene at the airport while
his family waited for their flight: lines of Liberians begged to
be allowed on a flight, then, as the hatch closed, trying to push
their way onto the cargo plane his family had boarded.7
Panjabi’s family immigrated to the United States, where he
eventually earned a medical degree. Shortly after, he returned
to Liberia to see how he could support the health care system
there.
What he learned about the medical system was astounding:
there were only fifty-one doctors available to serve a country
of over 4.5 million people. That was the equivalent of eight
physicians serving the entire city of San Francisco. The most
pressing need was to improve HIV treatment and bring it to
many more people. Every day, hundreds of people with late-
stage HIV/AIDS, who might have been saved if they had been
diagnosed early enough, were dying on hospital doorsteps.
Panjabi took a job at a hospital treating AIDS patients, and
noted that many of his patients were coming from remote
villages twelve or thirteen hours away, where HIV testing was
not available.
Working with government officials, in February of 2007
Panjabi asked if he could pilot a program to train community
health workers to treat and track patients. Using $6000 he
raised by asking family and friends to donate in lieu of gifts
for his wedding in June of that year, he launched a community
health worker program connected to a rural clinic. Aware that
the community had many other dire needs, and eager to do all
he could, Panjabi spearheaded several projects not directly
related to treating AIDS. These other initiatives included
teaching better farming methods and opening a women’s
center, all while simultaneously trying to support hospitals and
rural clinics. Fortunately, Panjabi did something from the start
critical to the organization’s success: he made sure it had a
good system for gathering data about the effectiveness of the
projects.
After a year of operations, the data clearly showed that
what the organization was really good at was supporting HIV
patients through community health workers. In fact, 60 percent
more of the patients that workers visited survived, compared
with those they hadn’t visited. The data also showed that there
was a particularly urgent need for more workers in the most
remote corners of the country. The other programs were not
failures. As Panjabi says, “None of those were necessarily bad
projects.” But he perceived that the organization could have
the most impact by focusing exclusively on the training of
more community workers, and he was willing to take the
dramatic step of transitioning ownership of all the other
programs.
Narrowing its focus was critical to allowing the
organization to increase its budget for training; and the clear
data that he could then present, about the life-saving
effectiveness of the additional training to combat the top
drivers of morbidity in the area, led to major support from
funders. Panjabi and his team were able to craft a compelling
central mission statement: “to save lives in the world’s most
remote communities.” They renamed the organization from
Tiyatien Health, meaning “justice in health” in a local
language, to Last Mile Health to reflect the mission more
clearly.
Last Mile Health’s mission has since been designed to
exclusively target hard to reach communities, deploying
community health professionals by giving them the training,
equipment, supervision and pay they need to perform at a high
level. In 2012, Last Mile Health piloted a community health
worker model in the remote Konobo District, fifteen hours
from the capital. This was Liberia’s first community-based
rural HIV treatment program, which the government of Liberia
has scaled to more than nineteen sites nationally. Community
health workers in Konobo District were deployed to serve
forty-two communities, and for an area that previously had
little to no access to professionalized health care, the quality
service it provided represented an enormous step. Panjabi told
me: “I would argue that we probably would have been stuck at
the $50,000 in revenue barrier” if the organization hadn’t
recognized that spreading its efforts too thin was limiting its
impact, and taken the quick action to refocus. By turning its
attention to the work having the most impact and gaining
significant financial support, Last Mile Health became a major
force in averting a global disaster in 2014, when the Ebola
outbreak hit Liberia. The organization’s network of
community health workers was critical to stopping the spread
of the disease.

TRANSPARENCY CULTIVATES UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORT

But how might funders perceive an organization that talks so

openly about failure? Might they interpret failure as bad
judgment calls? While there is no question that demonstrating
success is the surest route to financial support, funders also
respect thoughtful, open communication about how
organizations test and monitor various approaches to
maximize impact. Many foundations understand that often
program failures are not in fact due to bad judgment calls, and
that predicting how an effort will actually play out once it is
launched is simply not possible until after the launch. Vanessa
Kirsch, founder of New Profit, the multimillion-dollar venture
fund for social entrepreneurs, says that failure is something
they actually look for in potential investments: “If an
organization walks through our door and says they’ve never
failed, we’re skeptical. At New Profit we are equally interested
in the success of the pilot as what didn’t work and what they
learned from it.”
Thankfully, an appreciation of the value of sharing about
unanticipated obstacles and disappointing results is spreading
in the funding community. Appreciation is also developing
within organizations, and this is in part due to some
courageous pioneers who have publicly revealed the details of
their stories of learnings, as D-Rev did; it even provided
detailed data on its website about the numbers of infants
treated in its Comet pilot, and a thorough listing of the reasons
adoption of the product was flawed. Similarly, when one of its
most promising pilots failed, the famously successful
crowdfunding platform Kiva posted a thoughtful and highly
informative explanation of why it was making the difficult
decision to shut the program down.
Kiva would seem to have the Midas touch. Jessica Jackley
and Matthew Flannery founded the organization in 2005, when
Jackley came back from a trip with Village Enterprise Fund to
Tanzania, where she had worked to help entrepreneurs build
small businesses. She and Flannery, who was a Silicon Valley
technology engineer, envisioned creating an online platform
where U.S. donors could invest in such small-scale
entrepreneurial ventures. Only two years after they launched
the site, Kiva exploded when it was featured in Bill Clinton’s
book Giving, and thereafter Jackley and Flannery were asked
to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The organization
received $11 million in donations in a little over twenty-four
hours. Their website crashed, but crowdfunding for
entrepreneurs in the developing world was born.
Kiva has been intent to continue innovating. Led by Premal
Shah, who joined as president in 2006, one of the new ideas he
supported was Kiva Zip, developed by Kiva employee Jonny
Price. Whereas the Kiva model lent money to small businesses
in the developing world through microenterprise partners, this
new program would cut out the partner organization, allowing
small-business owners to fundraise for their companies
directly from individual lenders. It would also focus more on
U.S. small businesses such as bed and breakfasts, cafes and
flower shops, as opposed to small rural projects in the
developing world. The organization thought this new model
had the potential to dramatically increase the level of
crowdsourced lending.
In 2011, it started testing the approach in two countries,
Kenya and the United States. While Kiva’s efforts had until
that point been focused on the developing countries, the
organization had learned that seven out of ten small businesses
that apply for a bank loan in the United States get rejected.
Kiva’s impact could be greatly magnified by serving that large
community. Sure enough, the model worked very well in the
United States, with many success stories, such as Christina
Ruiz of San Francisco, who was able to use her $5,000
crowdsourced loan to launch a mobile fashion boutique. But in
Kenya, the small loan sizes, coupled with a struggle to raise
grant funding to continue to pay for the pilot, posed a
challenge to the economic viability of the Kiva Zip pilot.
After a careful assessment of the results, the team
discontinued Kiva Zip Kenya in mid-2015. In explaining the
decision, Kiva shared the insights it had gained along the way.
One key problem, for example, was a widespread lack of
Internet connectivity. Because many of the borrowers did not
have access to the online platform, Kiva’s trustees, who helped
the borrowers through the process, were doing a good deal of
paperwork for loan recipients. And because these trustees were
volunteers, spending that much time to facilitate loans wasn’t
feasible for many of them. In a blog post about the closure,
Kiva shared that “for the Kiva direct model to be sustainable,
borrowers themselves must be digitally included at a level that
is currently not common for low-income borrowers in
developing countries.”8
This public display of “failures” is gaining momentum among
innovation-driving social entrepreneurs. GiveWell, an
organization that looks for outstanding giving opportunities
and publishes the full details of its analyses to help donors
decide where to give, actually has a tab on its website called
“Our Mistakes” where they detail stories about “ways in which
our organization has failed or currently fails to live up to our
values, and lessons we’ve learned.”9 The detailed table of
contents proceeds to list GiveWell’s “shortcomings,” divided
into “major issues” and “smaller issues,” documenting
everything from overaggressive and inappropriate marketing
to diversity and tone issues.
When I asked GiveWell cofounder Holden Karnofsky
whether this level of openness has put GiveWell at a
disadvantage with funders, he said it’s had the opposite effect:
“Transparency enhances our credibility. It’s about being able
to share things we think based on open conversations about
our experience.” Some institutional funders are beginning not
only to support openness about failures but to demand it. Good
Ventures, for example, was founded by former journalist Cari
Tuna and her husband, Facebook and Asana cofounder Dustin
Moskovitz, to give as effectively as possible to maximize their
impact. The foundation has supported GiveWell, and Tuna has
said that the organization’s openness about mistakes and
emphasis on transparency were major draws.10
Whether the admonition of failed efforts is public or
private, the most important point is that it’s vital to develop a
culture of recognizing failure as an inevitable part of growing
an organization. And yet, research shows that only 52 percent
of nonprofits feel comfortable discussing problems that occur
mid-grant with a funder.11 It is important for organizations to
establish a rigorous approach to learning from those setbacks
and take action to improve results. The Hewlett Foundation,
under former-president Paul Brest, implemented a “Biggest
Failure” competition, in which program officers competed to
tell the story of their most important failed grant. Brest says he
created the competition as a way to instill a comfort with open
discussion of failures as part of the foundation’s culture. This
is an idea that any organization can easily adopt. Leaders can
also more simply share information about results, ideally with
the entire staff, openly and on a regular basis. That should
include discussion of what the expectations were versus the
problems they encountered. They can also model frank
discussion of failures by being honest about when they had
mistaken views and unrealistic expectations, and what they
learned in the process.
But a willingness to discuss failures openly is only one
component of taking action to shut down underperforming
programs and redirect resources. Good data—about what is
working, what isn’t, and why—is also required, and that
should be both quantitative and qualitative data.
A major challenge social enterprises face is assessing
which of their programs are working and which should be
improved or closed down. This is because so many of them
aren’t collecting good data on which to base their evaluations.
By contrast, a striking finding in my research is that the
organizations that have scaled up most successfully prioritized
developing a standard for success, then placed a strong
emphasis on rigorously and frequently measuring their results
against that standard. So let’s turn now, in part two, to what I
discovered about the best methods for measuring impact and
for making the most persuasive presentation of results to
funders and donors—another decisive factor in breakthrough
success.

BENCHMARKS FOR SOCIAL STARTUP SUCCESS: TESTING

Does your organization have an internal process for testing

ideas?
Does your organization dedicate a portion of its annual
budget to R&D?
Does your organization have strong connections with its
beneficiaries and regularly ask them for feedback on its
products and services?
Does your organization work with its targeted users to
allow them to use products and provide input as it tests
them?
Does your organization provide ways for staff and board
members to stay “proximate” to beneficiaries?
Has your organization developed a list of all stakeholders
who can influence its work, directly and indirectly?
Does your organization provide spaces in staff meetings,
reports, blogs and/or funder meetings to have open
conversations about failure?
Does your organization have a process to incorporate into
its programs lessons learned from failures?
Does your organization regularly assess its programmatic
priorities to ensure it is focusing on areas where it can have
the most impact?
Does your organization have a process for discontinuing
programs when they are not having the expected impact?
 PART 2

MEASURING IMPACT

Over the last decade, there has been a sea change in how
nonprofits gather and analyze data. One report found that 75
percent of nonprofits now engage in at least some
measurement of their program results, and that roughly the
same number have invested significantly in measuring their
impact in the last five years.1 The impetus has come partly
from funders, who now generally expect as a baseline that
nonprofits will provide hard data about results in addition to
the stories they tell about their programs. The demand for data
is particularly strong among the up-and-coming generation of
donors, many of whom made their fortunes by building data-
driven technology businesses, such as Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. But in my
interviews with top organizational leaders I found that they
weren’t just collecting data for funders’ sake; they were doing
it because they genuinely cared about whether their work was
producing results. They measured their impact so they could
refine their programs and make them more effective. This was,
in fact, the number one reason cited in my survey for why
social startups conduct impact analysis.
Though it is becoming more common, impact measurement
is still fraught with difficulty. One reason is that the
proliferation of tools is daunting to navigate. Many
organizations lack the expertise to set up a program for
tracking metrics and conducting analysis. To assist with the
task, the field has developed several commonly used metrics
such as Robin Hood’s Poverty Tracker, which creates
streamlined metrics to assist the New York–based foundation’s
mission to fight poverty.2 But demonstrating actual impact
generally requires developing metrics specific to an
organization’s programs. Nonprofit leaders, who typically
don’t have a degree in statistics, often find creating metrics a
daunting challenge. Many also lack the funding to hire
specialists to set up systems for them and show them how to
perform analytics. The result is that one study found that a
mere 6 percent of nonprofit leaders believed they were making
good use of the data they were gathering.3 The good news in
that report was that 97 percent answered that they would like
to learn to use their data more effectively. The chapters in this
section provide the best advice from leading practitioners
about how to develop a plan for measuring impact, collecting
relevant data and using it effectively to improve your
programs and show your impact.
It’s important to emphasize that good social impact
measurement does not mean simply adopting the metrics of
for-profit business assessment, such as return on investment
(ROI), as some funders have advocated. Holding nonprofits
accountable to the same standards as for-profits may seem like
the rigorous thing to do, but it is misguided. Peter Buffet, the
philanthropist son of famed investor Warren Buffet, smartly
wrote about this problem: “I now hear people ask, ‘what’s the
R.O.I.?’ when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if
return on investment were the only measure of success.”4 I
can’t agree more. Pursuing social change is categorically
different from selling widgets.
In general, the impact of nonprofits should be measured
quite differently from for-profit business success. As Albert
Einstein reportedly once said, “Not everything that can be
counted counts, and not everything that counts can be
counted.” The most effective formula for nonprofits is a
combination of hard-data metrics, some of which are
commonly used and others that are specifically tailored to the
organization’s work, and qualitative assessments, such as those
made through surveys of beneficiaries. Developing such
strong combined measures can lead to major improvements in
programming and breakthroughs in attracting funder dollars.
Take the example of New Door Ventures, a San Francisco–
based organization that provides paid work internships to at-
risk youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four by
running two businesses: a T-shirt printing company and a
bicycle repair shop. The mission is to help their clients obtain
education, employment and the social support they need to
make a successful transition to adulthood. Founded in 1981,
the organization spent nearly two dozen years stuck with an
annual budget of under $2 million. According to former board
chair Alexa Cortés Culwell, a key factor holding back growth
was that the organization had not collected hard data about its
success.
Then in 2003, New Door hired Tess Reynolds as CEO. She
had worked for two decades in the computing industry, having
codeveloped the first presentation software, Harvard Graphics,
as well as running her own management consulting firm. She
completely transformed the organization by making impact
assessment and continuous improvement a core focus. She
started by hiring outside experts to help her clarify the
organization’s goals and develop a theory of change: a detailed
description connecting their social intervention with the
ultimate impact they hoped to achieve. She then successfully
applied for a grant to buy a data system and hire a data analyst,
which was unheard of at the time for such a smaller scale
community-based organization. She credits the growth of the
organization’s annual budget to $6.5 million largely to the new
data-driven approach. As of this writing, New Door Ventures
is serving nearly four hundred clients annually and can
demonstrate that 87 percent of their graduates can obtain
higher education or a job after their internship.
While Tess Reynolds was able to hire experts to assist her,
the wealth of resources now available to organizational leaders
allows for any organization, no matter how small and budget
strapped, to vastly improve their impact measurement. It’s also
possible to work with consultants on a pro bono basis. In the
chapters to come, I will not dive into the weeds about which
tracking and analysis programs to use and the details of the
kinds of data analytics to conduct. In Appendix C, I offer a set
of resources that provide that kind of more detailed, hands-on
assistance, such as links to free downloads. Here I present
instead a set of fundamental guidelines for getting up to speed
with the best practices for impact measurement and creative
approaches that a number of breakthrough organizations have
developed. The competitive landscape demands that all
nonprofits consider these approaches. Indeed, all the leaders of
top-performing social startups I interviewed reported that
impact measurement was a core part of their organizations’
DNA, central to driving their operations, as well as to their
fundraising. If organizations don’t embrace these practices,
they are at high risk of losing funding and stagnating in low-
to no-growth mode.
 CHAPTER 4

One of the biggest problems nonprofits face in trying to scale

up is showing funders that their programs are having a
powerful positive impact on their beneficiaries’ lives. A key
reason for this difficulty is that organizations often limit their
measurement of impact to what are commonly called
“outputs,” rather than the more persuasive measures of long-
term impact, or “outcomes.” What exactly is the difference?
Outputs are best defined as the basic measures of an
organization’s activities, such as how many people have
attended trainings, have used services or have received goods.
While such statistics are vital measures of the number of
people an organization engages, they are not adequate
indicators of the actual impact on those participants’ lives. Just
because someone participates in a program, it does not mean
their life changes. And just because their life changes, it does
not mean there is a causal link between the change and an
organization’s services. Funders have generally begun
demanding proof of such impact.
In order to assess true impact, organizations must develop
measures to track outcomes. For example, if an organization
offers education programs, instead of measuring only how
many students it tutors, it should find ways to track students’
test scores. Job training organizations, rather than counting
only how many people they train, should determine how many
people actually get jobs, and even better, how many of them
still have those or other jobs two years later. Of course, the
reason organizations so often resort to measuring outputs as a
stand-in for outcomes is that data about outputs is so much
easier to compile. If your long-term goal is to help improve
teacher training, while measuring how many teachers
participate in your program is a breeze, what about measuring
their progress in the classroom over time? Or how your
program impacted their preparation and whether they are still
teaching ten years later?

Definition of Outputs versus Outcomes

Even large organizations with long experience have

grappled with the challenges of moving from tracking outputs
to formulating measures of actual outcomes. The Nature
Conservancy, for example, learned the value of measuring
long-term outcomes after over fifty years of operation.1 With
the goal of trying to preserve the diversity of plants and
animals by protecting the habitats of rare species, the
organization measured its success by metrics they called
“bucks and acres”: how many dollars it had raised and how
many acres of land it had purchased. Those metrics had the
benefit of being clear; program managers knew how their
performance would be judged and donors could see the
progress of purchases. By 1999 the conservancy was able to
raise close to $800 million in annual income and had protected
many millions of acres of land in the United States and
twenty-eight countries around the world. But the
organization’s leadership began to realize that those metrics
actually provided zero indication of progress in its mission to
protect species. In fact, judged by the standard of biodiversity
preserved, the Nature Conservancy had been utterly failing:
the extinction of species had reached its highest rate since the
extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The
organization had to completely shift gears to develop an
impact measurement system that included a much more
sophisticated set of outcome indicators, such as biodiversity
health.

In order to assess true impact, organizations must develop

measures to track outcomes.

YOU NEED A COMPELLING “WHY”

The other major obstacle organizations face in attracting

funding is offering a compelling story about why their
programs are having the impact their data shows. The
strongest cases combine hard data about outcomes and a well-
articulated argument as to why their approach is working.
Take the case of Springboard Collaborative, an
organization that provides training workshops to parents about
the importance of reading to their children. Founder Alejandro
Gac-Artigas crafted an argument for the program so
compelling that he was able to convince schools to fund it and
run it on their premises. He got the idea for the training
workshops by digging deeply into the well-documented
problem that students from lower income families often
experience a regression in their reading skills during the
summer break from school. He knew research showed that
when young children’s parents read to them at home, their
abilities improved. When he dug further, he learned that the
parents of the children experiencing the slide were not reading
to them at home as much, if at all, as the parents of more
privileged children. And from his own teaching experience, he
knew that school personnel did not generally engage actively
with low-income parents; but his experience of growing up in
a low-income neighborhood assured him those parents would
respond positively to outreach. He formulated a theory that if
schools reached out to the parents of the affected children,
explained the problem and offered training in reading to their
children, many parents would be receptive and would in fact
begin reading to their children. Schools backed him because
he had such a well-articulated argument for the program’s
efficacy. Years later, he has ample data that proves the concept.
The “theory of change” process is an increasingly popular
practice in the nonprofit sector for assuring that nonprofit
programs are effective and leaders have the data they need to
make a strong case for their effectiveness. A number of large
funding organizations, such as the Ford Foundation, the W.K.
Kellogg Foundation and the Annie Casey Foundation, as well
as government and nongovenmental agencies, have been
adopting the method in evaluating programs.2 I have engaged
in the process with many organizations, and I can attest that it
is not only an effective method but also an enjoyable and
stimulating process.

WHAT IS A THEORY OF CHANGE?

Just as with the variations in the approaches to human-

centered design, from the lean startup approach to design
thinking and open innovation, there is no one completely
agreed upon definition of what a theory of change is and the
best method for developing one; different proponents offer
moderately different descriptions. In short, a theory of change
is a tool showing the causal links between an organization’s
vision and its programmatic activities, detailing the
intermediate outcomes and assumptions that must occur to
achieve success.3 The concept arose in the 1990s from the
work of a group of researchers affiliated with the Aspen
Institute Roundtable on Community Change; they wanted to
help organizations improve their outcomes and articulate more
clearly the causal link between their programs and their
ultimate vision.4 One of the leaders of the roundtable, Heléne
Clark, founded the New York City–based social enterprise
ActKnowledge in 2000 to create guidelines for developing a
theory of change. Out of that grew the Center for the Theory
of Change, which on its website offers a free downloadable
software tool and a webinar to help organizations learn about
the process and actually conduct it.5
 A theory of change is the empirical basis underlying any social
intervention—for example, the belief that a young person’s
close relationship with adult role models can reduce his
susceptibility to violence, or that regular visits by registered
nurses to first-time pregnant women can improve parenting
skills and children’s outcomes.
—Paul Brest, “The Powers of Theories of Change,” Stanford
Social Innovation Review, Spring 2010

The theory of change method addresses the problem that,

too often, nonprofit organizations have set forth a very broad
organizational mission, such as to raise children out of poverty
or to combat global warming, without breaking down their
goals into steps that can serve as benchmarks toward success,
along with metrics that allow them to measure and
demonstrate their intermediary progress. The theory of change
process facilitates describing the mission with more
specificity, as well as a detailed path of “mini-steps” to success
organizations can use to set very clear target goals.
The process of designing your theory of change starts with
outlining your organization’s long-term goals. You might start
by asking, “What does success look like?” You then work
backward to identify the intermediary outcomes you must see
to achieve the ultimate goals, and the program activities that
will facilitate progress. Your theory of change should show
exactly how your organization’s activities will help you
achieve your final goal, either in narrative form or with a
diagram, such as the ones on pages 56, 57, and 61 or
combining both. The document you produce is a powerful
teaching tool for staff as well as funders. Finally, you establish
the metrics you should use to monitor achievement, sometimes
called “key performance indicators” (KPIs), and a dashboard
to measure your progress over time. The theory of change
process can be quite simple, for example, involving only the
founder and the leadership team and three or four meetings, or
more elaborate, bringing together much or all of the staff, the
board and outside stakeholders and conducted over a longer
period of time.
 There are many ways to visually represent a theory of change.
One of the simplest is the “planning triangle,” which outlines
how an organization’s activities cause intermediate outcomes
that lead to the final goal. Source: “Developing a Theory of
Change,” NPC and Clinks.

THE PROCESS IN ACTION

One organization that has become a champion of the theory of

change process is Arbor Brothers, a funder of social
enterprises founded by Scott Thomas and Sammy Politziner in
2009. They focus on supporting what they call “second-stage”
organizations, meaning those that are beyond the launch phase
but have not yet scaled their impact. Thomas and Politziner
had been best friends for over twenty years, since their days
attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (hence the
name Arbor Brothers), and had both participated in Teach For
America. They had moved on to jobs on Wall Street, but
hearing of the struggles of many friends they’d made through
Teach For America who were starting education nonprofits,
they decided to quit and put their energies toward the social
sector. They perceived a huge funding gap for organizations
between the shiny new seed stage and the stage of having
proven models and a well-established infrastructure. In the
process of meeting with a wide range of people in the
philanthropic, academic and nonprofit communities, trying to
figure out how they could be most helpful, they also learned
that many of those organizations needed to lay a stronger
foundation for growth. As Thomas says, “Those leaders don’t
just need more gas for the car, they need a better engine.”
As you can see in this Last Mile Health theory of change from its
FY17–FY19 strategic plan, what is key in depicting the theory of
change is to show in very specific terms the causal links between
the intervention strategies (i.e., community health workforce
recruitment), the intermediate and higher outcomes (i.e., services
to remote communities and improved health-related knowledge)
and the long-term impact (decreased morbidity and mortality
rates).
 As a part of their research, they met Mario Morino, the
cofounder of Venture Philanthropy Partners and author of
Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of
Scarcity,6 which focuses on methods organizations can use to
increase their impact. Marino is an advocate of the theory of
change process. They also met David Hunter, the author of
Working Hard, Working Well,7 a guidebook to theory of
change development. Hunter and Morino influenced them to
incorporate the process into their work with organizations,
helping them to do a better job of their analysis. According to
Thomas: “Anyone can slap a theory of change together, but to
be useful it needs to be rigorous, measurable and plausible.”
With this in mind, Thomas and Politziner always start the
process by clearly identifying the goal. They ask the basic
question, “How will you know if you’re successful?” which
helps them “design with the end in mind.” The team then
works backward to help organizations refine their models and
metrics. For example, if an organization is saying, “We’re
trying to help low-income kids between the ages of eighteen
and twenty-four find jobs,” they work to identify more
detailed characteristics of the kids the organization is trying to
serve, such as the level of their household income, whether
they have graduated from high school and whether they are
attending post-secondary school, as well as more specifically
indicating the kinds of jobs they are trying to help them find.
They then help to establish intermediary indicators, such as
targets for what percentage will graduate from the program,
what percentage will find jobs and what the minimum salary
will be, and the best measures of ultimate success, such as
what percentage will retain those jobs over time. Finally, they
help the organization to create a better dashboard for
monitoring its progress toward these benchmarks and refining
its programming.
An example of an organization that Arbor Brothers helped
this way is the Coalition for Queens (C4Q), a nonprofit
founded by Jukay Hsu and David Yang based in Queens, New
York. C4Q’s flagship program, Access Code, is a ten-month
software development course that trains high-potential adults
from underserved populations to become programmers. When
Arbor Brothers selected the organization as a grantee, the C4Q
founders were still in their early days, having completed an
eighteen-month pilot program with twenty-five young people.
Conversations with Thomas and Politziner forced them to get
much more specific about the outcomes they hoped to see;
they were then able to more clearly map the causal links
between their work and their goal: a more robust Queens tech
ecosystem. For example, they didn’t just set a goal of
increasing their participants’ starting salaries; they did
extensive research to figure out living wages and starting
salaries in New York City for engineers, so that they could set
specific targets. Today, they can say with specificity that 85
percent of their participants will graduate, and that within six
months of graduation 70 percent will secure a technical career-
track job earning a minimum of $85,000 per year.
Having so clearly charted the population C4Q was serving,
their program activities and their metrics for success, Hsu and
Yang were able to see that some of the ways the organization
had been devoting their time and resources were misplaced.
For example, C4Q had been hosting regular events to create a
technology community in Queens; however, those events
weren’t contributing directly to any of the intermediary
indicators of success that would lead to achieving their goals
for their program participants. Instead, they reframed the goal
of those events as important to understanding the community’s
needs, marketing and outreach.
THE STEPS TO CREATE A THEORY OF CHANGE

1. Identify your goals and assumptions: start by asking the question “How
do you know if you’re successful?”
2. Map backward to think through the steps toward achieving the desired
outcomes.
3. Identify interventions, meaning all the things the program must do to
achieve the outcomes.
4. Craft the indicators of progress, such as identifying what changes in the
behavior of beneficiaries you are seeking, and how much change over
what period of time.
5. Create a figure to summarize the above and write a narrative description
of the theory.
6. Develop a dashboard to track your key performance indicators, test your
assumptions and measure your progress over time.
Source: Adapted from the steps outlined in “Theory of Change Basics: A
Primer on Theory of Change,” ActKnowledge.

YOU CAN FACILITATE THE PROCESS YOURSELF

What if you aren’t so lucky as to have partners like Arbor

Brothers working with you? There are many consultants
skilled in helping nonprofits facilitate a theory of change
workshop. But even without outside help, any organization
can implement the process. When Accountability Counsel
engaged in a workshop, the San Francisco–based human rights
organization was struggling with how to better evaluate its
progress toward its goals. Accountability Counsel’s mission is
to amplify the voices of communities in order to protect their
human and environmental rights. It supports complaints at the
grassroots level where communities are demanding justice for
abuses in development finance. Their policy work advocates
for complaint offices to be fair, independent and effective.
They also foster a network to support the global movement for
accountability. Their cases often take years to see a resolution,
as does their policy advocacy work. Founder and executive
director Natalie Bridgeman Fields realized that the
organization could benefit by firmly grounding its work in a
well-developed theory of change, so they could better track
their progress. As board chair, I worked with Fields to
organize a full-day retreat with board and staff to hammer it
out.
Coalition for Queens, Access Code Theory of Change
 Advance planning was critical to making the most of our
day together. For example, we wanted to be sure to incorporate
the views of a wide range of stakeholders, but we also wanted
to keep the conversation at our retreat intimate. So we made a
list of academics, policy makers and directors of other human
rights organizations whose views we wanted to consider; we
divided them up among board members, to interview them
about key topics, asking questions such as “What is your
understanding of what Accountability Counsel does?” “What
is your view of where our work sits within the human rights
field?” “What are our greatest accomplishments?” “In what
areas do you feel we could be more impactful?” “How would
you define success?” “What are the biggest challenges we face
in achieving success?” After completing the interviews, we
compiled the findings and circulated them to the board and
staff ahead of time, along with some “homework” to
brainstorm three to five ideas for each of the components
(ultimate impact, intermediary outcomes, immediate
outcomes, day-to-day activities) of the theory of change.
For the day of the retreat, we recruited an executive from
Intuit, who enjoys helping nonprofits with their strategic
planning on a pro bono basis, to help facilitate; this made it
possible for everyone on the staff and board to be participants,
rather than anyone needing to take a leadership role. We dove
deeply into how, specifically, our activities were impacting our
clients and policy makers, then produced a working draft of
our theory of change, which the staff of Accountability
Counsel has been able to refine over time. What once felt like
a lofty, intangible goal—creating a more level playing field in
disputes between grassroots communities around the world
and large corporations and institutions—is now divided up
into a well-detailed report of performance indicators that each
staff member updates in a dashboard on Google Docs. The
dashboard is available to everyone internally to update
regularly (color coding all indicators by green for on track,
yellow for slow progress and red for no progress) and track
each goal in the theory of change.
 This tracking process has been critical to the organization
in prioritizing and focusing its efforts in order to generate
optimal impact. As Fields recounts: “It’s not that we weren’t
measuring before; it’s just that we were guessing about the
types of things we should measure. After going through the
theory of change process, we understand why we’re measuring
and how we can measure better.” For example, the
organization always tracked how many complaints it
supported, but now it can connect the dots to measure which
types of complaints achieve the best impacts for client
communities, and under what circumstances they have
achieved those victories; it can then more strategically allocate
resources based on the evidence. Fields says this has created a
much stronger causal link between their work and their goal,
explaining: “It’s about following the flow of activity to the
ultimate impact. The activity itself is not enough to measure;
it’s the impact of that activity which makes the metric so
meaningful.”
Once you start to rigorously track indicator data and
connect it to impact, you too will fall in love with the power of
good analytics; you will want to keep diving deeper so you can
maximize both the discoveries you make and the case you
present to funders. Doing data analytics well doesn’t require
that you hire an expert or become one. In the next chapter,
we’ll see how a number of founders, none of whom had data
science expertise, have been remarkably creative in using data
to get funding and improve their results.
THE ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL THEORY OF CHANGE
WORKSHOP

1. Obtain stakeholder input on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and

threats to your organization.
2. Assign participants (board and/or staff) homework for pre-workshop
reflection.
3. Recruit an outside party to facilitate (preferably on a pro bono basis).
4. Start by brainstorming the vision: How do you define success?
5. Work backward to brainstorm outcomes and activities using Post-its to
cluster ideas by category.
6. Take notes and develop ideas into a draft theory of change illustration.
7. Solicit feedback from participants and revise.
Source: Adapted from “Developing a Theory of Change,” NPC and Clinks.
 CHAPTER 5

After developing a plausible theory of change, the next step is

to turn each of your intended outcomes into measurable goals
you can track regularly. The key here is making sure the data
you collect is easy to understand and that the causation
between your work and the outcomes is clear. One acronym
the nonprofit world has adopted from business is SMART, the
idea of making your measurements specific, measurable,
attainable, relevant and timely, introduced by George Doran in
the 1981 Management Review article “There’s a S.M.A.R.T.
Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives.”1
Nonprofits have used SMART goals for tracking everything
from communications to fundraising to programmatic
outcomes.2 Even nonprofit leaders with very little experience
collecting data can use these guidelines to track their
organization’s impact.
One of the people I interviewed who had little impact
assessment experience but who marshaled its power brilliantly
was Aimée Eubanks Davis, founder of the education nonprofit
Braven. Eubanks Davis’s passion is to open up economic
opportunity for people from underprivileged backgrounds.
Before launching Braven, she devoted herself for thirteen
years to that mission by working in senior-level roles at Teach
For America, including as the chief talent officer during the
organization’s enormous growth years. In considering what
kind of program she should offer, she conducted extensive
research, determining that she wanted to create more
opportunities for people from low-income backgrounds to
transition into better jobs once they graduated from college.
She wrote a research paper outlining the problem, estimating
initially that over a hundred thousand young people were
falling through the cracks; they were missing out on
opportunities in the job market because they did not have
access to a specific set of skills, personal networks and
experiences necessary for success. What the research couldn’t
tell her was whether her programming should start in
kindergarten or college. So she embarked on a testing process
to use data to determine the most effective intervention.

DEVELOP S.M.A.R.T. GOALS

Make sure your key performance indicators are as follows:

• Specific: there is a clearly defined goal.
• Measurable: there is an objective calculation of the goal such as “how
much” or “how many.”
• Attainable: the goal is realistically achievable.
• Relevant: there is a connection between the work and the intended
outcome.
• Timely: there is a realistic timeframe to achieve the goal.
Source: Adapted from G. T. Doran’s “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write
Management’s Goals and Objectives.”

She developed a proposal requesting funding for four pilot

programs to launch simultaneously, three with K–12 students
and one with college students, to see and understand the
continuum as quickly and efficiently as possible. One of those
for K–12 was for fifth and sixth graders, for whom she created
a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)
curriculum to test whether it would inspire them to become
self-starters and embrace projects to do on their own, such as
writing their own code or building robots. Another program
aimed at college students was based on the hypothesis that
university students from lower income backgrounds often
didn’t optimize their potential to find a good job after school;
this happened because they lacked access to many of the
“soft” skills and networks more privileged students gained
organically through their parents and social circles, such as
how to network with people who could get you a job. Eubanks
Davis’s strong presentation of the theories behind the
approaches, and her plan to launch pilots to test them, won her
a coveted grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which
allowed her to go ahead.
In evaluating the effectiveness of the pilots, she looked for
answers to three primary questions: (1) Does strong content
help students learn better? (2) Can a coach and a team of peers
help take learning to a new level? (3) Were they able to shift
the broader system with the program? After about eight to nine
months, while all the programs produced good results, the data
clearly suggested that Braven’s college program would be the
most innovative and impactful. Eubanks Davis learned just
how desperate college students were for such programming
and also how little funding existed in this area. The lack of
funding might have been interpreted to mean the idea was too
risky and funds would be hard to come by, but she instead saw
a serious gap in services that Braven could help fill.
Additionally, Eubanks Davis discovered the need was far
greater than for a hundred thousand young people. Each year,
three out of four of the 1.2 million low-income and/or first-
generation college students are ending up either unemployed
or underemployed.
Eubanks Davis decided to start by launching two programs,
one at San Jose State University in California and the other at
Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. The programs
admitted primarily sophomores and transfer juniors as fellows,
offering a semester-long course teaching both hard and soft
skills, such as project management, how to use data to help
solve problems, how to communicate strongly using email,
how to network and how to build inner confidence. Groups of
five to seven fellows were assigned to leadership coaches,
volunteers from the workforce whom Braven had recruited
and trained. As part of the course, fellows found and applied to
high-quality internships to get experience that would help
them learn about the workplace and enhance their resumes.
From her time at Teach For America, a data-driven
organization, Eubanks Davis knew she should develop strong
metrics, from the beginning, for assessing how the programs
were working. With this goal in mind, one of her early moves
was to hire John Hsu, a former colleague from Teach For
America focused on strategic analysis, to help her develop
metrics and a performance management dashboard for
tracking and reporting on them. They divided their
performance measures into three categories: (1) overall growth
in skills and mindsets of fellows, (2) the coaches’ assessment
of the individual students and (3) the strength of the content to
engage students; they then created an evaluation rubric for
tracking a number of metrics on a monthly or weekly basis.
The methods of measuring were very refined. For example, for
the student assessments, one measure was whether the students
could write a compelling cover letter. To “grade” the students’
performance, Braven had teaching assistants, just as in other
college courses, that she provided with achievement-detailed
rubrics on which assignments were scored across eight
different categories on a ten-point scale. One of the most
important benchmarks was whether the coaches said they
would recommend the students to people within their network,
because such recommendations were so important in job
placement. Eubanks Davis also wanted to be sure she could
track students’ progress well after they finished the course, so
her team created alumni surveys and is using data from
LinkedIn to follow their career progress. Former participants
are encouraged to share job opportunities with each other on
the Braven LinkedIn and Facebook communities. She also
invites former students to alumni events, surveying them every
time they get together.
A particularly impressive aspect of Braven’s impact
measurement is that it also establishes a way to compare the
performance of its participants vis-à-vis student peers who did
not participate. Too many organizations fail to find a way to
create such comparative data, which is necessary to make a
truly compelling case about impact. Otherwise, you can’t be
sure that your programs in particular are the cause of the
results you’re tracking. You also must be sure your results
aren’t just a figment of a skewed selection of beneficiaries. For
example, say two nonprofits are offering very similar support
services to low-income high school students, with the aim of
helping them enter college. Nonprofit A reports a college
matriculation rate of 99 percent and Nonprofit B reports a rate
of 65 percent. Well, what if Nonprofit A has a more rigorous
application process and only accepts top-ranking students—
but Nonprofit B works with recently arrested, academically
unscreened participants? And further, what if statistics indicate
that 85 percent of mainstream students with the profile
Nonprofit A is working with go to college anyway, whereas
only 5 percent of participants with the profile Nonprofit B is
working with attend college? All of the sudden, Nonprofit B’s
work looks much more impactful.
The gold standard for comparative evaluation is the
randomized control trial, in which a researcher randomly
assigns people into two groups, one of which receives
whatever service or treatment is involved and the other
doesn’t. But such a formal study of program effectiveness is
extremely costly and has limitations.3 Eubanks Davis
creatively devised a low-cost and highly effective alternative.
The organization reached out to students at the same
campuses, who were demographically similar to its
participants, to form a comparison group, and gave them a $15
Amazon gift card in exchange for agreeing to respond
regularly to surveys about how prepared they felt for the job
market, how they were accessing networks and whether they
were obtaining internships and eventually jobs.
Due to her diligence, after less than two years of program
operation, by the fall of 2015 Braven was able to show that 96
percent of their inaugural spring 2014 fellows and 100 percent
of their 2014–15 fellows were persisting in college. This was
not Braven’s ultimate goal, but a promising early indicator that
their students were on track to graduating. Additionally, 73
percent of the fellows agreed that Braven greatly increased
their chances of getting their desired job, and 88 percent of
leadership coaches said they would professionally endorse
Braven’s fellows to their own network of friends and
colleagues. Perhaps most important, based on its comparative
data, Braven can show that its participants are two times as
likely as their peers to get internships, which the
organization’s theory and external research argues is a good
intermediary indicator of progress toward the ultimate
intended outcome of the fellows obtaining good jobs after
graduation.
When Eubanks Davis met the with Peery Foundation in
2015, the program staff awarded her $50,000 because they
were impressed by her background and passion for innovation,
her conviction in why the program should result in higher rates
of employment and the strong proxy indicators of impact, even
though the organization had no hard data at that point about
actual employment rates.

TAP OUTSIDE SPECIALISTS

While Eubanks Davis was able to hire a data specialist, many

of the tools she used could be implemented with or without an
expert; for example, developing a rubric for tracking how your
individual beneficiaries are progressing, creating a comparison
group and hosting an online forum on Facebook or LinkedIn
to facilitate tracking the progress of beneficiaries over time.
Many outside resources are available to help you develop
strong metrics. Hiring a part-time consultant can be a way to
achieve good results at a fraction of the cost of bringing in a
staff member. For our first ten years at Spark, we made the
mistake of not doing sophisticated impact measurement
because we didn’t think we had the resources to devote to the
job. We relied on simple metrics, like how many members we
had and how many people attended events, which told us
nothing about how those events were helping improve the
organizations our members supported. Eventually, we were
able to hire a consultant for $15,000, funded by one of our
donors. We now have an impact measurement strategy that
collects good information about results.
Another source of assistance with developing a metrics
strategy is students, who are eager to work with organizations
actually doing the social change work they study in the
classroom. Most organizations are in the vicinity of at least a
few colleges, many of which have programs in business
management or statistics. Reaching out to these programs and
asking for students’ assistance to craft metrics with you is a
win-win solution; the schools will be pleased to be asked, and
they may even be able to fit the work into class assignments.
Gemma Bulos started the Global Women’s Water Initiative,
which trains women in East Africa how to provide access to
water and sanitation for their communities. She enlisted
graduate students at Stanford University to develop a survey
tool to track water quality and sanitation interventions
implemented by the women the initiative trained;
improvements in hygiene and in sanitation knowledge; the
financial and health impacts in families and target groups; and
the women’s sphere of influence in their communities. Several
students were able to get funding from the university to travel
to Africa to administer the surveys and offer workshops in
data collection, and they came back to analyze the results for
her, using sophisticated statistics software and translating it
into compelling infographics. The survey data not only
allowed Bulos to prove her impact but also to make continual
improvements in her programming. Additionally, the data
helped reframe the traditional narrative of women as passive
recipients of water projects, and provided evidence of
significant impact when women were trained as water
providers.
Many struggling organizations get help from experts for
free. Of the social entrepreneurs surveyed who are measuring
their impact, 25 percent rely on a pro bono consultant (usually
an expert from the nonprofit field willing to donate their time)
to assist with that work. In addition, pro bono aggregator
organizations, such as Volunteer Match and the Taproot
Foundation, help find highly qualified volunteers.
More and more funders are also helping grantees with
impact measurement. Tipping Point, for example, the San
Francisco–based foundation I mentioned chapter 1, works
closely with its grantees to create customized measurements
that suit their organizational needs.

BE CREATIVE ABOUT YOUR INDICATORS OF PROGRESS

Aimée Eubanks Davis and John Hsu brilliantly devised ways

to obtain strong intermediary data. This is possible for all
organizations to do, at any point in their development, even if
the number of beneficiaries they serve is quite limited, and
even if proving substantial ultimate impact will require many
years. Another great case of applying creativity to this task is
the metrics developed by Rob Gitin, cofounder of At The
Crossroads (ATC), the homeless youth outreach organization
based in San Francisco discussed in the introduction. Gitin and
his cofounder, Taj Mustapha, did not approach establishing the
organization in the research- and data-driven manner Eubanks
Davis followed. It was quite the opposite. As I described in the
introduction, they started out as recent graduates of Stanford
University, and they saw the organization as a two-person
operation, having no larger vision for scaling its impact. Gitin
told me that he had never expected to get involved in
counseling work until he and Mustapha won an Echoing Green
fellowship to start the organization.
To start out, Gitin and Mustapha began reaching out to
community organizations and doing street outreach in various
neighborhoods in San Francisco to ask young people questions
and identify the level of need in each area. The street outreach
was so effective that they built their entire program around it,
holding one-on-one counseling sessions in restaurants and
cafes. Gitin and Mustapha always knew that their favorite
clients would be those who were the hardest to reach: the
youth who had fallen through the cracks of the city’s
traditional social services and were in desperate need of
support. But they were also the ones who took the most effort
to convince to come in for discussions. These kids had been
disappointed at every turn—by their parents, by the foster care
system and by society at large. Often the organization had to
encounter the kids many times out on their nighttime outreach
walks before earning their trust.
Gitin slowly learned that with funders looking for strong
metrics of success, targeting the most challenging cases was a
recipe for lots of funding rejections. The number of clients the
organization served was much lower than that of organizations
tackling the low-hanging fruit cases. Gitin attributes this to
what he calls the “creaming effect,” whereby nonprofits are
incentivized to target easy-to-reach populations in order to
boost their metrics. The other funding challenge At The
Crossroads faced was that the founders didn’t want to impose
their own goals on their youth, such as that clients would find
employment and a place to live. But that philosophy cut
against the grain of funders’ expectations. “The traditional
way of tracking outcomes didn’t work for us,” Gitin explained,
“because our whole mission is centered around not focusing
on predetermined outcomes, instead letting every single kid
we work with determine the things that they want to focus on
and supporting them in that.”
Finally, after many agony-filled late-night conversations,
the founders came up with a solution for how to stay true to
their mission and their values, while also strengthening the
way they evaluated the effectiveness of their programs. They
realized their solution would not only assist greatly with
fundraising, but also allow them to constantly improve upon
their model by developing a better understanding of what
practices worked best. They decided to create a set of phases
of achievement: the thinking stage (e.g., “I want to get off
drugs”); the planning stage (e.g., “I am signing up for rehab”);
the acting phase (e.g., “I have been clean for a week”); and the
maintenance phase (e.g., “I am still clean”). For each phase,
they created eight categories of progress, such as housing,
education, job networks, health, mental health and others. For
example, for housing the first phase would be a client deciding
that he wanted to get off the streets; the second phase would
be working with ATC to plan a pathway to finding a place to
live; the final phase would be that the client was continuing to
live in permanent housing months and years later. This
allowed ATC to track each client’s progress according to a
wide range of outcomes and many mini-steps. They also
tracked extensive qualitative data documenting the clients’
individual stories, their counseling conversations and progress
toward accessing the services they needed to improve their
lives. This way ATC could use both quantitative and
qualitative data to work together in harmony with their clients
to figure out how their programs were working and how they
could be better.
More than fifteen years later, Gitin and his team have
grown the organization on their own terms, attracting
sufficient funding by being able to present both a compelling
set of data and persuasive stories of individuals’ successes.
The organization is not large, with a staff of fourteen working
out of one office, but large scale was never their aim. Depth of
connection and quality of intervention were the goals, and on
those terms ATC has succeeded admirably, having counseled
thousands of kids. Its current goal is to increase the number of
clients they can counsel in one-to-one meetings from 60 to 150
per week. Gitin reports that the method of impact
measurement the organization devised has given him total
confidence in speaking to donors about how ATC is achieving
its goals and why it takes an intensive approach. As Gitin says,
“Our vision is centered around the idea that unconditional
support transforms lives. If you don’t believe that, don’t fund
us. And we are really okay with that.”

CREATIVELY LEVERAGING EXISTING RESEARCH

Another great model for developing creative metrics is the

method Row New York used to demonstrate positive impact,
which drew on extensive educational psychology research in
how the characteristic known as “grit” contributes
substantially to academic and life success. The organization
pairs rigorous athletic training with tutoring, and other
academic support, to empower young people from New York’s
underresourced communities by getting them involved in the
sport of rowing. Amanda Kraus had been a competitive rower
in college and fell in love with the sport. In 2002, with a
borrowed boat and eight rowers, Kraus started Row New York
to share her passion with others. Like many early-stage
founders, initially she tracked the organization’s progress with
the most obvious measures; in this case, the number of
participants in the program, the growth in their fitness levels
and how many of them were graduating from high school or
college. But core to Kraus’s concept was that the rigorous
program, which involved a demanding six-day-a-week rowing
regime, offered to participants for up to six years, was
developing their grit. She began to explore how she could
prove that, and she came up with a number of inventive
measures. For example, by keeping track not only of
attendance but of the daily weather conditions, the
organization can show which participants are showing up and
rowing even when it’s 38°F or pouring rain and which are not.
By measuring things that indicate grit, Row New York has
been able to make a compelling case that its programs are
contributing to kids’ propensity not only to get into college,
but to succeed while there.
Mining research data can produce remarkably persuasive
support for an organization’s approach well before the
organization can produce any strong intermediary measures of
impact. Take the case of SIRUM, which redistributes unused
pharmaceuticals from pharmacies and nursing homes directly
to community clinics serving individuals who cannot afford to
purchase them. When Kiah Williams and her cofounders
started SIRUM, they struggled to make a compelling case
about their impact. To do so was vital not only to obtaining
funding but to getting partners to participate in the program.
They were facing a catch-22: without enough drugs to
distribute, they couldn’t have impact, and without proof of
success, they couldn’t get enough drugs.
At first they tracked how many people registered on their
site, thinking organizations that registered would always
donate; but they weren’t tracking whether those organizations
had actually donated medicine. Their metric was essentially
meaningless, so they had to start tracking their sales funnel
much more closely; this included registrations, first and
subsequent medicine donations and the actual amount of drugs
donated. Once SIRUM did this, they saw that their numbers
still weren’t very high. If they wanted to get the attention of
funders, they would need to show they were on track toward
bigger impact. They realized that they could strengthen their
case by drawing on broader research conducted by
government, academia and other nonprofit organizations. A
survey had shown that producing just one kilogram of an
active ingredient in medicine generated up to 200 to 30,000
kilograms of waste.4
By redistributing rather than making new medicine, and
calculating how many pounds of medicine they were
redistributing, SIRUM could also talk about their impact in
terms of reducing waste. With that information, SIRUM has
been able to make a strong case that their redistribution
programs have prevented up to 72,300,000 pounds of waste. In
addition, by drawing from a National Institutes of Health study
showing that one in two personal bankruptcies involve
substantial health care debt,5 SIRUM was able to make the
case that the access to medicine it provides benefits the
economy as a whole, as well as the health of its registrants.

AS YOU BUILD UP YOUR COLLECTION OF DATA, KEEP DIGGING

DEEPER

The longer you are in operation, the more demanding funders

will be about proof of impact, and the more demanding you
should be about what your data can tell you, so you can
continue to improve your model. Demonstrating that you are
driven to probe ever more rigorously into how your programs
can achieve the greatest effect is a powerful way to build
stronger relationships, not only with funders but with all
stakeholders, as well as to provide rocket fuel for continuing
growth.
Rey Faustino is an exemplar of the payoffs of this ongoing
commitment to an intensive interrogation of data to refine
programs and boost results. Faustino is the founder of One
Degree, a Yelp-style website guide to social services. As the
son of Filipino immigrants, he grew up watching members of
his community struggle with how to access social services;
starting as a young child, he often acted as an intermediary to
help them navigate the complicated webs of local community
resources and state and federal benefit programs. He
developed the One Degree site to help those in need to help
themselves. The idea was strong enough that he was able to
get sufficient initial support from funders to build the site.
Before long, he could boast that an impressive forty thousand
people had visited it. But he saw that as just a “vanity metric.”
It wasn’t really a measure of how many people the
organization was actually helping to get services, let alone
how their lives were being improved because of gaining
access. Even digging deeper into the site visitation data to
examine what types of services visitors were searching for and
then clicking on, and whether they downloaded an application
to receive government benefits, wasn’t giving him the
information he wanted. He was determined to gather data
about how many of the site’s visitors actually accessed
services and, even more challenging, to discover how by
having done so, their lives were positively affected.

Demonstrating that you are driven to probe ever more

rigorously into how your programs can achieve the greatest
effect is a powerful way to build stronger relationships, not
only with funders but with all stakeholders, as well as to
provide rocket fuel for continuing growth.

Luckily, when Faustino received funding from Tipping

Point, one of the first things he did was to sit down with their
data analytics team, who had a lot of experience seeing
organizations move from tracking outputs to tracking
outcomes. Together they plotted how best to use One Degree’s
rich well of data. They developed a funnel to visualize a
beneficiary’s path from visiting the site to seeing an
improvement in their quality of life, and tracked all the metrics
indicating movement along the path, from inputs (finding
relevant resources) to outputs (accessing benefits) to outcomes
(reporting on their experience) to impact (lives improved).
One Degree has continued to refine its impact
measurement system, now tracking regular progress on goals
such as the number of new resources they add to the site, the
number of users and the total number of people who have used
One Degree, which they review as a team on a weekly basis.
They’ve also refined the service they provide; users can
personalize their experience with a “My Plan” page that allows
them to receive personalized resource recommendations, and
build a list of providers who can help them access resources.
Finally, the system allows users to report on their experiences
accessing services. Not only have these refinements provided
better service, but they have allowed One Degree to track
individuals’ specific paths toward outcomes, and ultimately to
provide better services for their users by personalizing their
recommendations.

DEVELOP STRONGER OUTCOME DATA BY SUSTAINING

RELATIONSHIPS

The longer organizations stay in touch with beneficiaries,

gathering information as to how the services provided have
assisted them in their lives, the more and more powerful a case
for impact they can make, and the better and better they can
refine their programs. But how can organizations develop
ongoing relationships? Some organizations find great ways to
allow past participants to continue to connect with the work,
such as creating opportunities for them to mentor current
participants, hosting reunion events where they can reconnect,
or offering ongoing services to help keep them afloat once
they complete the program.
One organization that has done a masterful job of
developing strong ties with its beneficiaries is Genesys Works,
which offers a work-training program for high school students
that places them in internships at major corporations during
their senior year in high school. The organization has
rigorously kept tabs on the success of their graduates over
time. At a high level, Genesys Works tracks two levels of
outcomes: (1) college attendance and persistence and (2)
success in the workforce. Eventually, they want to be able to
quantify the mindset shift as a result of participating in the
program, measured with metrics like grit and perseverance.
The first one, whether they attend and graduate from college,
is easy to measure through National Student Clearinghouse
data. They could not, however, gauge the long-term work
success of their students or the grit and perseverance they
picked up from the program without continuing input from the
students. When the organization was small and they had
serviced only a couple of dozen students, keeping in touch
with them and asking how their careers were progressing was
relatively easy. But as they grew to serve nearly three thousand
students per year, such personalized follow-up became
impractical. So the organization developed an annual survey
that it sends to former participants, including those who are
many years out, and elicits a remarkable 63 percent response
rate. The response rates nonprofits generally report for such
surveys are in the 10 to 20 percent range.
According to founder Rafael Alvarez, the reason Genesys
Works gets so many responses is that it has formed such a
strong ongoing connection with its beneficiaries. It does this in
many ways, such as continuing communication with alumni
through a texting platform; inviting them to alumni
programming events to hear speakers talk about job readiness
and letting them know the organization is there to help during
college if they need job advice or help with their resumes; and
helping them make connections by introducing them to
potential employers in the Genesys Works network. Their
surveys show that Genesys Works alumni feel a strong
emotional connection with the program, which the
organization believes is largely due to these forms of
continued outreach.

BE HONEST WITH YOUR DATA, AND PRESSURE TEST IT

Nonprofit leaders often fear being honest with funders about

their impact data when it isn’t as strong as they might like,
worried donors will pull their funding. But what I heard from
many of the leaders of breakthrough organizations is that
transparency about results, even when they are disappointing,
has the opposite effect, if they are demonstrating that they are
taking a rigorous approach to evaluation and using their
findings to improve their programs. And that’s not only true
regarding early-stage organizations and pilot programs, such
as D-Rev’s admonition that its pilot to develop a lower-cost
phototherapy device failed.
One person adamant about the importance of working hard
to verify the validity of results and being fully transparent
about findings is Nick Ehrmann, the founder of Blue Engine, a
New York–based organization that partners with schools to
create better support for teachers through an apprenticeship
model; its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of the
classroom experience for students and teachers alike. Instead
of pushing out success metrics in a vacuum, he is obsessed
with “developing the counterfactual,” as he puts it, by which
he means finding ways to evaluate whether or not a program is
actually driving results.
He learned the importance of this style of probing early in
his career, when he was finishing up his PhD dissertation
research. He was comparing the academic experience of the
students who had participated in a scholarship program he
developed as a fifth-grade teacher in Washington, DC, with the
experience of students who had not. He remembers sitting at
his desk, in the summer of 2008, hitting ENTER for his statistics
software. He learned that when it came to academic
achievement, absence rates, pass/fail rates and credit
accumulation, the scholarship students had fared no better than
the students who hadn’t participated in the program. “My
stomach hit the floor,” he recalled. “That experience laid bare
the assumption that good intentions and real results go hand in
hand: oftentimes, they don’t.”6 What made that moment even
more difficult was knowing that students were reporting
positive gains from participating—just not in the way he’d set
out to measure the gains. At that point he became committed,
and built an organization around the principle that energy and
resources should increasingly flow to places truly driving
positive, aligned outcomes in the lives of young people.
At Blue Engine, which has grown into a $6+ million
organization with twenty-six staff serving eighty-six teaching
apprentices, Ehrmann has set a standard of transparency about
all its results, with an annual release of data on 100 percent of
students served, and no cherry-picking of data or narrow
reliance on uplifting positive anecdotes in the absence of hard
data. Blue Engine regularly sends out impact statements to its
funders, saying where they think they’ve done well in addition
to where their efforts have tanked. Even when they obtain
positive results, they dive deeper to try to determine for sure
that they are due to Blue Engine’s intervention. For example,
in one year 65 percent of the class passed a certain
standardized test, and the next year 75 percent passed. Rather
than patting themselves on the back, the organization hired a
statistics consultant, for $100 an hour, to use districtwide data
to craft an analysis of how individual students would have
performed without participating in Blue Engine’s
apprenticeship, based on their prior test scores and
demographics. Blue Engine also works hard to obtain student-
level feedback so they can blend real, qualitative assessments
of their program; they also interview the teachers who conduct
the apprenticeships and the school principals to get their
insights. Ehrmann has infused the organization with a healthy
blend of deep student-facing belief and data skepticism, and is
convinced this culture of probing and commitment to
improvement has been critical to Blue Engine’s growth,
credibility and trust with key stakeholders.
Reporting persuasively about results is not only a matter of
transparency, of course. It requires mastering the art of
powerful data presentation, so that the data tell a clear and
impressive story. We’ll next learn about inventive ways to
achieve this.
 CHAPTER 6

With an arsenal of great data showing the incredible impact of

your work, you have to show it off. But one big problem is
that foundations request all sorts of different kinds of reports
from grant applicants and awardees. As a result, nonprofit
leaders often spend an awful lot of time and money doing one-
off reports to satisfy grant requirements, which often don’t
actually help them improve their services or tell their story to a
broader audience.
While nonprofits can’t change the way funders request data
from them, what they can do is get their own data house in
great shape to make both their internal reporting and review,
and their public reporting, as efficient and effective as
possible. As a widely read Stanford Social Innovation Review
article titled “Drowning in Data” highlighted a decade ago, the
push for better impact analysis and data reporting has left
many organizations feeling overwhelmed by unwieldy masses
of data they’ve gathered.1 But masses of data are in no way a
bad thing in themselves.
Though there has certainly been much hype about the
wonders of “big data,” the fact is that the tools to analyze data
are becoming ever more powerful and easily applied. So if
you’re not collecting rich data now, you may well find
yourself down the road unable to perform important analyses
that you have developed the capacity to do, or to pay someone
else to do. What’s vital is to carve out of the masses of data
only what you really need to regularly track and report. Many
organizations I studied have developed exemplary practices
for making data reporting more impactful and less crazy-
making.

MAKE LESS INTO MORE

One of the most powerful things you can do in reporting to the

public is to pare down the data you highlight to bite-sized
portions that people can easily digest. An organization that
does this masterfully is Room to Read, which is so committed
to data gathering and analysis that it has a full department
dedicated to the task. The organization has come a very long
way since founder John Wood made a 1998 life-changing visit
to a school in the Himalayas. He was an executive at
Microsoft at the time, and on a trek in rural Nepal he came
upon the school, which he discovered taught 450 children but
had only a handful of books. The school director challenged
him, saying, “Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with
books.” When Wood returned home, he solicited donations
from friends and family and bought three thousand books for
the school. A few years later, Wood left Microsoft to start
Room to Read, which is now a large nonprofit with a $50
million annual budget. Its programs have reached over 10
million children in ten countries in Africa and Asia over the
past twenty years.
The organization collects key data from thirty-five hundred
sites annually and has invested in randomized control trials to
prove their intervention is having a measurable impact on its
beneficiaries. But even with so much impressive data to
marshal, the presentation of impact statistics on its website is
streamlined and easy to follow. The main page focuses on just
one number: the 10 million children and their communities
that have benefited. For each of its two programs, one in girls’
education and one in literacy, the organization offers two
simple and graphically appealing dashboards, each
highlighting six additional statistics the organization has
determined offer the best snapshot of the impact achieved.
Cofounder and CEO Erin Ganju advises: “It’s really important
that you boil down, for each program, the two or three things
that people want to know about the most.”
An Example of a Room to Read Literacy Dashboard. Source:
Room to Read Global Monitoring Report, 2015.
 The website does offer a wealth of additional data, tucked
away and accessible through tabs for clicking through to take a
deeper dive. This includes free downloads of numerous videos
and research reports, which are also models of succinct and
engaging reporting, free of jargon and effectively highlighting
the most important findings. Overall, Room to Read has
figured out how to make vitally clear that measuring impact is
a critical focus of the organization, while also assuring its
presentation of data helps to tell a great story.

If you feel it’s important to display a fuller set of impact

measures on your website, you can still do so in a manner that
leads people through the information in a captivating manner,
telling a longer story but still a highly engaging one. An
organization that does this well is New Teacher Center (NTC),
based in Santa Cruz, California, which is dedicated to
improving teacher effectiveness through mentorship and new
teacher induction programs. When Ellen Moir first started the
program as director of Teacher Education at UC Santa Cruz,
she was seeing all her top students go into teaching and then
leave after a year or two. They complained about being
overwhelmed with classroom management and developing
curriculum, and of lacking the resources they needed. Moir
imagined, what if we could pair these new teachers with
mentors to help support them when they run into challenges?
Would that result in them staying? Within six years, upward of
97 percent of the mentored teachers stayed in Santa Cruz
County, compared to an overall state retention rate of just 50
percent. Today, NTC can show that teacher retention increases
by 30 percent after just two years of support; as a result the
program has been adopted widely in California and expanded
across the country, with an annual budget of $40 million.
 Source: “Our Impact,” New Teacher Center; available at
https://newteachercenter.org/our-impact/.

While teacher retention is still the organization’s most

important metric, Moir hired a data team to collect all sorts of
data about teacher effectiveness and student achievement
levels as well, and the website presents a compelling scroll of
impressive graphs comparing the student achievement and
teacher effectiveness of NTC-mentored teachers versus those
who didn’t participate. As rich as the information is, it can be
easily absorbed in just seconds.

STREAMLINE INTERNALLY TOO

Narrowing down your key indicators is important for your

internal reporting and assessment also. Mike Dugan, executive
director of Domus Kids, told a cautionary story of drowning in
data. The Stamford, Connecticut–based organization helps
children living in poverty create a path to success in school
and life. With such a challenging mission, involving so many
factors in children’s lives, it’s certainly understandable that the
organization had developed a wild proliferation of indicators.
Dugan said, “At one point I think we had eighty-nine
indicators that we were tracking, which as I look back were
really just a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper that made
us feel good. We thought, ‘Oh we have data, we have
outcomes, we can report that to funders,’ but really now we
look at them and we realize that it wasn’t very rigorous, and if
we hit a mark or didn’t hit a mark, we didn’t really do
anything with it.”2 After going through a theory of change
process, Domus Kids narrowed their focus down to just four
indicators that are sharp and directly connected to changing
the trajectory of the kids’ lives: (1) improved attendance; (2)
improved behavior; (3) improved social and emotional growth;
and (4) improved literacy skills. Their research showed these
were the factors that really got in the way of kids succeeding.
Certainly, program evaluators must dive periodically into
the full range and depth of an organization’s data, but for day-
to-day operations, a tight focus on key indicators facilitates
clarity about the progress toward goals. Creating an effective
data dashboard, made widely accessible around the
organization, is the best way to harness your data so you are in
command of it rather than it commanding you.

MAKE YOUR DASHBOARD A LIVING DOCUMENT

Data dashboards have become ubiquitous in the nonprofit

world, and I won’t belabor in discussing them. But a few key
points are important to highlight.
While elaborate columns of data can be oppressive, a
dashboard really can be as remarkably powerful a tool for
internal tracking and program improvement as it is for external
validation. Many organizations I interviewed develop a
standard two- to three-page deck of indicators that they use to
update their results on a quarterly, monthly or even weekly
basis to make sure they are on track toward achieving their
impact goals, and to be on top of any red flags that might arise.
The key to making the process easily manageable is to develop
a disciplined approach to updating it, and to make it widely
accessible, so the staff responsible for having a detailed
command of various elements of the data can consult it, and
perhaps also update it independently.

Creating an effective data dashboard, made widely accessible

around the organization, is the best way to harness your data
so you are in command of it rather than it commanding you.

An organization that has led the field in dashboard

management is BELL, which offers summer and after-school
tutoring and mentoring programs nationally to pre-K through
eighth-grade students from underprivileged backgrounds. CEO
Tiffany Cooper Gueye has been vigilant about using a data
dashboard to help improve the organization’s performance.
When Gueye and her team started measuring outcomes nearly
twenty years ago, they were doing it on a shoestring budget,
using homemade surveys they administered themselves during
site visits. Eventually, they purchased a standardized
achievement test to track student performance using a
validated tool. As they began to collect more and more data,
they migrated it to Salesforce.com, which offers its cloud-
based database services for free to nonprofits. BELL then
developed a system to automate the collection of their data.
To make the most efficient and effective tool for seeing
what the data has to reveal, BELL created a regional
performance quarterly dashboard that lists BELL’s goals with
respect to student service, philanthropic donations,
sustainability and long-term impact. The results are color
coded green for the “celebrates,” yellow for the “monitors”
and red for the “act nows” (where they missed a milestone and
need to adjust). This allows the senior management team and
board of directors to quickly see where the organization is on
track and where it is not.
Sample Performance Dashboard from BELL Showing Key
Performance Indicators
 This dashboard has facilitated many discoveries. For
example, when they started to collect more rigorous academic
data from the students participating in their programs, BELL
realized there was quite a bit of variability in outcomes across
school sites. They did some further surveys and found this was
due to the variability in how each of the sites implemented the
program. Using the data, they were able to see where they
were achieving the best outcomes and why, and then use those
strategies across other programs to create more consistencies.
It also led them to develop a more comprehensive training
department to share best practices in program delivery, and as
a result they started seeing more consistency in their
outcomes.
Creating an effective dashboard of this kind doesn’t have to
be complicated or expensive, with so many free services
available, such as Google Sheets and Salesforce.com.
Purchasing more elaborate options may also be worth it in the
long run. Many colleagues told Tess Reynolds of New Door
Ventures they thought she was crazy when she spent $70,000
on a software system to track the outcomes of their programs.
She told me that by that point they were paying an analyst
almost as much to do manual data entry of their program
surveys, so the expense made good sense, even in the near
term. And it has ultimately reaped much richer rewards as the
organization has been able to perform analysis on data in their
system dating back nearly ten years.

COMMUNICATE YOUR DATA PERSON TO PERSON

With so many great communication tools available for live

conferencing, some organizations have been capitalizing on
the ability to communicate with funders and donors about
results on a more personal level than through a written report.
Leila Janah of Samasource has taken a page from the business
world and hosts “quarterly learnings” calls (her version of
quarterly earnings reports) in which her impact measurement
team communicates about whether they are hitting their target
numbers and, if not, their hypotheses about why. Scott Warren
of Generation Citizen Year communicates with his foundation
supporters using a webinar format. According to Warren, this
is not only wonderfully efficient, allowing all his funders to
receive the information in one place at one time, but it also
facilitates getting real-time feedback from donors, engaging
them in the process and making them feel even more invested
in the work.
Of course, reporting persuasive data is only one part of the
challenge of seeking funding. With competition for grants so
fierce, and with so many organizations for individual donors to
choose from, nonprofits must be highly strategic and creative
about their approaches to generating financial support. In the
next part, we’ll dive into an exploration of a wide range of
funding approaches organizations have used to break through
the $500,000 barrier.

BENCHMARKS FOR SOCIAL STARTUP SUCCESS: MEASURING

Have you brought together your staff, board and/or external

stakeholders for a theory of change workshop?
Does your theory of change clearly articulate the causal
links among your program activities, your intermediate
outcomes and your vision?
Do you have an illustration of your theory of change to
provide to partners, donors and other supporters?
Have you developed SMART (specific, measurable,
attainable, relevant and timely) indicators of progress you
hope to see as a result of your programs, such as changes in
behavior?
Have you developed a plan to track your indicators, such as
by surveying beneficiaries or using proven assessments?
Have you developed a dashboard using a platform like
Google Sheets and/or Salesforce.com to track your key
performance indicators and measure your progress over
time?
Have you considered bringing in an outside consultant to
assist you with developing and/or pressure testing your
theory of change work?
Do you have a plan to be honest with your data if it is not
showing you the results you hoped for?
Have you distilled your performance data into bite-sized
chunks supporters can easily digest in a few seconds?
Do you have ways of communicating your impact data
internally to staff and board, such as through a quarterly
dashboard summary report?
Do you have ways of communicating your impact data
externally to supporters, such as through an annual impact
report or quarterly impact calls or webinars?
 PART 3

FUNDING
EXPERIMENTATION

Attracting funding is by far the biggest barrier to scale. In fact,

81 percent of the social entrepreneurs I surveyed identified
access to capital as their most pressing problem. Nonprofits at
all levels struggle to get noticed by new funders. What
separates the best organizations is a culture of testing a variety
of funding streams to figure out what works. By purposefully
experimenting with revenue, they discover a funding model
both authentic to their mission and effective at raising money.
Earned income such as selling products or services is fertile
ground for experimentation. My survey revealed that
successfully developing an earned-income strategy was one of
the ways organizations broke through the $2 million annual
revenue barrier. The responses showed that while
organizations typically start out with mostly philanthropic
support, with just 8 percent of their budget coming from
earned income, as they grow past $2 million in revenue, they
are more likely to report that a higher percentage of their
budget is covered by earnings; on average about 30 percent.
These findings indicate that testing earned-income strategies
should be a key ingredient of efforts to scale. But my research
into how nonprofits generated earned income also highlighted
that the process is fraught with challenges, and is more viable
in some subsectors, such as education and health care, than
others.
And caution is advised. The argument that nonprofits
should function more like businesses, and even that a for-profit
business approach is preferable for tackling some social
problems, has often been pushed to the extreme. As the
Bridgespan Group’s William Foster and Jeffrey Bradach wrote
in their Harvard Business Review article “Should Nonprofits
Seek Profits?”: “Many philanthropic foundations and other
funders have been zealously urging nonprofits to become
financially self-sufficient and have aggressively promoted
earned income as a means to ‘sustainability.’… Despite the
hype, earned income accounts for only a small share of
funding in most nonprofit domains, and few of the ventures
actually make money.”1 Social entrepreneurs are, by
definition, working to solve problems resulting from market
and government deficiencies. A purely market-based approach
cannot always work. If bringing clean water to the 800 million
people who don’t have access to it, or selling mosquito nets to
the 200 million suffering annually from the scourge of malaria,
were profitable ventures, private companies would be doing it.
Expecting social entrepreneurs to figure out how to devise
profit-making solutions to such problems, when even the
behemoths of modern-day capitalism can’t do so, is misguided
wishful thinking.
My survey indicated that earning income is much more
viable in some subsectors than others. Although, on average,
earned income accounts for 30 percent of the budgets of the
larger organizations I surveyed, 78 percent of those
organizations earned only 10 percent of their income. My
sample size wasn’t large enough to make broad
generalizations, but it does reflect a broader trend that earned
income typically works better in certain sectors, such as
education, where 48 percent of nonprofits have earned revenue
that accounts for over 20 percent of their budget, followed by
health (27%), global development (24%) and youth
development (22%). On the flip side, in my experience human
rights, criminal justice and environmental organizations are
particularly unlikely to find sources of earned income, whether
because their clients cannot afford to pay fees or because
making any sort of profit from the work is widely considered
inappropriate.
For years, some funders suggested that Accountability
Counsel, the San Francisco–based organization representing
grassroots communities globally in human and environmental
rights cases against big companies, try to figure out ways to
generate earned income; for example, by charging fees for
their expert advice. Founder Natalie Bridgeman Fields was
clear from the start that these strategies would not work
because of inherent conflicts of interest between serving their
clients and being paid by corporations or other large
institutions. But with this clarity, today Accountability
Counsel has broken through the $2 million in annual revenue
mark by relying primarily on foundation funding. In chapter 9,
we will explore how they did it.
For organizations like Accountability Counsel that can’t
rely on earned income, revenue testing focuses more on
attracting philanthropic capital through foundations and
individual donors. Here, finding more effective ways to reach
out to funders and developing better leveraging opportunities
to meet funders and potential individual donors are vital skills
to build. We will consider a number of innovative strategies
breakout organizations have employed for bringing in more
philanthropic funding as well.

While organizations that want to scale substantially should be

driving toward finding one or two primary sources of reliable
ongoing revenue, they should get there by testing a good
diversity of approaches as they’re growing.

The vast majority of organizations under $3 million in

annual revenue will rely on a combination of funding sources
to come up with a model that fits their unique mission and
values. In one of the most widely read Stanford Social
Innovation Review articles, titled “Ten Funding Models,”
William Foster and his Bridgespan colleagues reveal that of
the 144 nonprofit organizations created since 1970 that have
grown to $50 million a year or more in size, each grew by
more narrowly pursuing sources of funding, typically
concentrating on one particular source: what they call the
“natural match.”2 For example, the Sierra Club relies on
membership fees.

Dominant (>50%) Funding Sources for Organizations of

Different Sizes. Source: Adapted from William Foster, Ben
Dixon and Matthew Hochstetler, In Search of Sustainable
Funding: Is Diversity of Sources Really the Answer?

A key point to highlight, however, is that their research

also shows that organizations typically do not begin to
transition to dominant funding sources until around $3 million
in annual revenue.3 This underscores the point that while
organizations that want to scale substantially should be driving
toward finding one or two primary sources of reliable ongoing
revenue, they should get there by testing a good diversity of
approaches as they’re growing. The chapters in part 3 offer a
wealth of strategies for this testing.
 CHAPTER 7

Many of the organizational leaders I interviewed remember the

great recession of 2008 like it was yesterday. Virtually
overnight, foundations that had promised multiyear grants
reneged on their funding because their endowments had
tanked along with the Dow Jones. Earned income was critical
to many of them in order to stay afloat. Beyond providing a
financial cushion, earned income helps bridge the gap lying
before so many organizations: the funding they’re able to raise
versus the amount they need in order to invest adequately in
growth. Another benefit is that demonstrating your capacity to
generate reliable income appeals to funders, many of whom
have come to see earned revenue as a vital part of the “path to
sustainability.” But before an organization begins playing with
potential earned-income streams, it must establish the right
expectations.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY MAY NOT COME

Building a paying client base or a market of retail customers

takes every organization, whether for-profit or nonprofit,
substantial effort and time. Many, many entrepreneurs have
run headlong into the “if you build it they will come” trap.
They’ve launched their businesses, maybe even with a grand
promotional flourish, and found that virtually no paying
customers have shown up. Studies of for-profit startups have
shown that in general they earn relatively minimal revenue, if
any, for two to three years, even those that go on to become
runaway successes. In the nonprofit sector, finding paying
customers can be even more challenging because so many who
are the most likely targets, the beneficiaries of programs, can’t
afford to pay, or can pay only a minimal amount. More about
that shortly.
Experimentation is crucial when it comes to earned
income, and organizations for the most part should expect
some failures along the way. Honing products or services to
generate an appreciable base of paying clients or customers
can take substantial time and effort. Those launching an
organization with a business venture as a core part of its
model, or launching a service or product line for an existing
organization, should plan on philanthropic funding covering a
significant portion of operating expenses for at least a couple
of years, if not more. And even once revenue is coming in and
a venture is thriving, it is likely that earnings will not be
sufficient to totally cover the organization’s expenses, or all
the services it wants to provide, no matter how appealing and
well-devised the products or services are.
Take the case of successful Hot Bread Kitchen, a training
facility for low-income women who want careers in the food
industry, founded by Jessamyn Rodriguez. She smartly played
to her strengths in conceiving the organization, after having
worked for a decade in international development before she
came up with the concept. A passionate foodie, she landed an
internship in renowned chef Daniel Boulud’s kitchen. That
happened by serendipity. She was interviewing for a job at a
microfinance organization called Women’s World Banking,
when a friend misheard her as saying Women’s World Baking.
The idea of an international women’s baking collective struck
her, and it is now located in the heart of Harlem in La
Marqueta, a historic produce market dating back to 1936,
which had fallen into decline until the organization
redeveloped it. The space is divided into three separate areas
of operation: a kitchen that hosts a six-month job-training
program for low-income women, an area where they bake
bread products for sale and an incubator where small-business
owners in the food industry can rent space to make products
they sell throughout the city, from grocery stores to markets.
 Rodriguez told me the key reason the business has been
successful is that they don’t sacrifice quality despite the fact
they are mission driven, and after tasting their multigrain
pepita bread I can attest to that. In fact, the organization sells
its bread to a number of major retail outlets, such as Whole
Foods and JetBlue, as well as some of the top restaurants in
New York City. But even with a top-quality product and a
strong personal network for building the market, she initially
overestimated the extent to which profits from bread sales
would support the organization. While at first she envisioned a
model where her bread sales and cafe operations would cover
close to 100 percent of her operating expenses, she realized
quickly that goal would be hard to accomplish. She had
underestimated the costs of the training, and overestimated the
profit margins on selling bread. She was forced to reset her
expectations, and had to go back to her donors with a new
model that would continue to rely on philanthropic donations
to support 35 percent of the program budget. Rodriguez told
me that “in talking with our donors, I realized that people were
attached to our strong outcomes and that was most important,
not being 100 percent sustainable. Over time, my
understanding of the economics of the business have changed
a lot,” she told me, “and I realized that there is actually a huge
benefit that comes from philanthropic funding that allows us to
do more for the women we serve, such as providing child care
during the classes.”
Foundations and donors, and organizational leaders
themselves, must not put organizations under unrealistic
pressure to fund more and more of their operations by selling
products and services. Recall that in my survey, most of the
organizations that had scaled to over $2 million in annual
revenue reported that earned income accounted for 30 percent,
which therefore is a reasonable target for many organizations
to shoot for during the initial phase of growth.

The bottom line: plan on grants and donations to almost

entirely sustain your efforts for at least the first couple of
years, as you experiment with building your revenue stream.
 The bottom line: plan on grants and donations to almost
entirely sustain your efforts for at least the first couple of
years, as you experiment with building your revenue stream.

THE HYBRID IDEAL AND MISSION DRIFT

One of the ways the social entrepreneurship community has

sought to facilitate earning more funds through business
ventures is by developing the hybrid organizational model.
The concept has become so popular, Echoing Green reported
that in 2016 nearly half of all applications for its fellowships
were from organizations proposing for-profit and hybrid
business models.1 But just exactly what they are has become a
somewhat murky subject. Gaining clarity about hybrid
organizations and the challenges of operating them is
important, especially given how much interest there is in
starting them, and the mistakes that can be made. The good
news is that many good models have been developed.
The term “hybrid organization” originally arose to describe
social enterprises that paired a charitable 501(c)(3)
organization, which could receive tax-deductible donations,
with a for-profit “arm” that could take investment capital and
pay investors a financial return, while also earning unlimited
(theoretically) income. The concept was that this hard division
into two separate operations allowed mission-driven
organizations to break free from constraints on sources of
funding and the portion of earned revenue 501(c)(3)s were
subject to. (In essence, in order to claim tax-exempt status,
501(c)(3)s could not earn a “substantial” portion of their
income from activities unrelated to their mission. The details
are more complicated, and organizational leaders must learn
about them in detail.) Nonprofits were also not allowed to
issue equity shares to investors, which of course limited their
funding pool substantially.2 Another perceived benefit of the
dual structure was that the for-profit part of the organization
could donate some of its earnings to the nonprofit part and
claim tax exemption (up to a point) for the donation; in turn,
the nonprofit part could purchase goods or services from the
for-profit (subject to the regulation that they be purchased at
reasonable cost), which in theory could help the for-profit
business to thrive.
The hybrid model is ingenious, but it’s proven quite
difficult to manage, with the complexity of the legal issues
alone being very arduous. This can put organizations at a
disadvantage when they approach foundations, which may
perceive that their money is better spent going to organizations
unable to support themselves with earnings.3 Running a for-
profit business also means you are under more intense
competitive market pressures. For these reasons, over time,
most nonprofits seeking to earn income have not gone this
route, and as a wider menu of options for combining nonprofit
and for-profit operations has emerged, the meaning of hybrid
has evolved to a much looser term that refers to any nonprofit
organization that has revenue generation, regardless of its legal
structure.
We won’t dive deeply into the details of all the legal
structures, as there are plenty of resources to help nonprofits
navigate them. For one, Rob Wexler, a prominent lawyer in the
field of social entrepreneurship, wrote a very thoughtful piece
called “Effective Social Enterprise—A Menu of Legal
Structures,” available free online, in which he includes the
brilliant table on the following pages describing the options.4
Even this chart does not fully reflect all of the various hybrid
legal structures that could come from combining the various
forms. What’s most important is that organizational leaders
considering earned-income strategies learn the details of these
different structures, and get professional legal and tax advice
as they pursue options.
Legal Structure: For-profit corporation
Tax Factors: Taxed on net income
Management and Control: Shareholders elect a board of
directors, which delegates to committees and staff
Sources of Capital: Investment capital from shareholders and
sometimes program-related investments (PRIs) from
 foundations in the form of equity or loans
Distribution of Funds Not Used for Programs: Dividends to
shareholders; charitable contributions deductible up to
10% of net income
Liquidation: Net assets to shareholders, after paying creditors
Legal Structure: Limited liability company (LLC)
Tax Factors: Items of income and expense passed through to
members
Management and Control: Management committee or single
manager, typically elected by the members
Sources of Capital: Investment capital from members; possible
PRI funding
Distribution of Funds Not Used for Programs: Distributions to
members; charitable contributions deductible on members’
own returns
Liquidation: Net assets to members, after paying creditors
Legal Structure: B-Corp (a for-profit corporation with a social
mission)
Tax Factors: Same as for-profit corporation above
Management and Control: Same as for-profit corporation
above
Sources of Capital: Same as for-profit corporation above; may
be in a better position to attract PRI money
Distribution of Funds Not Used for Programs: Same as for-
profit corporation above
Liquidation: Net assets usually to shareholders, but also
possibly to charity
Legal Structure: L3C (LLC that is formed as a low-profit
limited liability company)
Tax Factors: See LLC above
Management and Control: See LLC above
Sources of Capital: See LLC above; plus set up to accept PRI
money more easily
Distribution of Funds Not Used for Programs: Distributions to
members and grants for charitable purposes
Liquidation: Net assets to members and 501(c)(3) charities
Legal Structure: Nonprofit corporation 501(c)(3)
Tax Factors: Not taxed on income unless it is unrelated
business taxable income (UBTI); can offer tax deductions
to donors
Management and Control: Board of directors controls
Sources of Capital: Charitable contributions and grants; easily
eligible for PRI money
Distribution of Funds Not Used for Programs: Grants for
charitable purposes
Liquidation: Net assets to another 501(c)(3) charity with like
exempt purposes
Legal Structure: Nonprofit corporation 501(c)(4)
Tax Factors: Not taxed on income unless it is UBTI, no tax
deduction to donors
Management and Control: See 501(c)(3) above
Sources of Capital: Nondeductible contributions, grants;
possible PRI money
Distribution of Funds Not Used for Programs: Can make
grants for charitable and social welfare purposes
Liquidation: Net assets to another 501(c)(4) or to a 501(c)(3),
in either case with like exempt purposes
Social Enterprise Legal Structures. Note that tax laws in this
area are constantly evolving, so organizations should seek
formal legal advice to determine which structure is most
appropriate for their needs. Source: Adapted from Robert
Wexler, “Effective Social Enterprise—A Menu of Legal
Structures,” Exempt Organization Tax Review, June 2009.
 The differing strategies pursued by two highly successful
organizations—Embrace, the developer of a low-cost baby
warmer for hypothermic infants in developing countries, and
Hot Bread Kitchen—illustrate some of the considerations
organizations face when deciding on their legal structure.
After operating for some time as a 501(c)(3), Embrace decided
to transition to the classic hybrid dual structure, creating a for-
profit company to further develop and sell its warmer.5 A key
reason it did so was that the development of the warmer
required so much capital, and the constraints of raising money
as a nonprofit were holding back development. Creating the
for-profit allowed the organization to pursue funds from
venture capital firms and impact investors, and speed up R&D.
Founder Jane Chen highlights, though, that making the
transition was difficult and the complexity of managing two
different operations was a real challenge. By contrast, Hot
Bread Kitchen elected to incorporate as a 501(c)(3) because as
Jessamyn Rodriguez tested her model, she discovered that the
size of her market and the earnings she could bring in were not
sufficient to cover costs, and she was going to need donations
and grant money to supplement her revenue from the bakery
and incubator. In addition, in the early years the administrative
burden, such as the legal costs of operating a hybrid
organization, were too great.
However you decide to structure a hybrid, execution can be
fraught with complications. A big problem is “mission drift,”
meaning the tendency that running the business part of the
organization will pull focus and resources away from your
core purpose: the social impact you are striving to achieve.
Many of the social entrepreneurs I interviewed cautioned
about an inherent tension between maximizing impact and
maximizing profits. A thought-provoking article on the hybrid
model in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, titled “In
Search of the Hybrid Ideal” by Julia Battilana and Matthew
Lee of Harvard Business School and John Walker and Cheryl
Dorsey of Echoing Green, showcased this danger.6 In it they
make the case that the best way to limit the tug of mission drift
is to run a business venture directly related to your social
mission and integral to furthering it. Hot Bread Kitchen is
offered as an exemplar of this “hybrid ideal.” Teaching the
beneficiaries to bake bread and help run the for-profit part of
the organization is at the very core of its mission to provide
women with job skills that will facilitate their obtaining
gainful employment. New Door Ventures is another case in
point. Their T-shirt printing and bicycle repair businesses
provide valuable job skills, as well as income to the
beneficiaries; earnings from the ventures help pay for other
skill building and support for the beneficiaries, such as
educational tutoring.

The Hybridization Movement. Source:

From Battilana, Lee, Walker and
Dorsey, “In Search of the Hybrid
Ideal.”

It’s important to appreciate, though, that even when the

business venture and the mission are in good alignment,
managing the tensions of mission drift can be difficult. Hot
Bread Kitchen founder Jessamyn Rodriguez told me that, at
first, when the business was not as profitable as she would
have liked, she tried cutting hours, keeping people in the
program longer to increase efficiency, and anything else that
could make ends meet. But as she did that she realized she was
making cuts at the expense of the mission. That’s when she
decided to put more emphasis on grants and donations.
Keeping these cautions top-of-mind, there are a number of
great methods for earning income that social startups can
experiment with. We’ll dive into them next.
 CHAPTER 8

Organizations have many potential sources of earned income:

from beneficiaries, the general public, other organizations
(whether nonprofit or for-profit businesses) or government.
The media has directed lots of attention in recent years to
innovative products developed by social enterprises, like the
Embrace baby warmer, but that is not the most common
strategy—selling services is.

SELL YOUR SERVICE EXPERTISE

The vast majority of the nonprofit organizations with earned-

income streams I interviewed are raising money from service
delivery. Some of them are able to charge their beneficiaries,
while others rely on third-party payers, such as government
entities like schools, but also private firms.
While some organizations’ beneficiaries truly have no
money to pay up front, some can pay a moderate fee and will
readily do so as long as you convince them there is real value
in your service. For example, Planned Parenthood charges for
its services using a sliding scale based on household size and
income. Other organizations like National Public Radio
operate using a voluntary donation model, where users can
decide whether they want to give and how much.
Professor Gregory Dees, one of the leading pioneers of the
discipline of social entrepreneurship, addressed this topic in a
wonderful chapter he wrote with colleagues for Strategic Tools
for Social Entrepreneurs.1 Titled “Developing Viable Earned
Income Strategies,” this is the best single source I have found
about basic approaches to try and challenges to be aware of.
He and his coauthors argue that charging appropriately
calibrated fees to beneficiaries can be empowering to them,
affording them the dignity of paying. They also highlight that
it can be productive in helping to screen out those not getting
much value out of the program, allowing you to focus better
on those who are finding it more helpful. It can also increase
beneficiaries’ commitment to your services, because they have
some financial skin in the game; and because they are paying,
they may also be more forthcoming with feedback, which can
be so important to improving your offerings.
Third-party payers are often willing to pay for services
largely because they have an interest in the mission’s success.
We saw this with CareMessage, which partners with hospitals
to offer follow-up care via mobile technology to its patients.
Hospitals are willing to pay CareMessage because they have a
financial stake in patients showing up for their follow-up
appointments. The government can also be a third-party source
of earned income, particularly in the education, health and
youth development sectors, which we will discuss more later
in this chapter.
Many of the issues nonprofits address are also relevant to
the challenges of private sector firms. Laura Weidman Powers,
cofounder of Code2040, smartly capitalized on negative
publicity about the low percentage of minority workers in
many Silicon Valley companies. The organization’s fellowship
program places black and Latinx college- and graduate-level
students with excellent technical skills in summer jobs in tech
companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley; this helps
them develop the work skills and build the networks they need
to succeed. When Google released dreadful diversity numbers,
highlighting the recruitment and retention problems of
minority staff in Silicon Valley, and creating a mountain of bad
press, Powers seized the day. The executives in many tech
companies began scrambling to increase their hiring of
minorities, and Code2040 was there to help them.
When Powers first hatched her idea with cofounder Tristan
Walker, she was very clear about pitching the pipeline problem
to companies: blacks and Latinx earn nearly 18 percent of
computer science bachelor’s degrees, but make up only about
5 percent of the technical workforce at top tech companies.
She also very smartly pitched the business case to companies,
showing them that by failing to have a more diverse work
environment, they were missing out on top talent that could
help boost profits; they were also falling prey to expensive
employee turnover. Powers shrewdly realized that by asking
tech companies to pay for partnerships with Code2040, not
only would she obtain significant funding, but their
willingness to pay would send a strong message to other firms,
as well as to funders and donors, about the value of the
service. It would also make them more invested in creating a
more diverse and inclusive workforce.
It took Code2040 a few years to figure out their precise
revenue model. The first year they did not charge because they
were running a pilot, though they explicitly told tech
companies this was a limited-time offer. In year two, they
began charging companies whatever amount they decided to
pay; Code2040 wanted to test what range of fees seemed
viable. Based on the results, they developed a tiered pricing
structure, with fees dependent on the size of the company and
its capacity to host interns. For example, at one point they
developed a sliding scale where a “bronze sponsor” hosted one
student for $5,000, a silver sponsor could host up to three for
$15,000 and so on. In addition, the companies paid the
students’ salaries directly from their payroll. The services
Code2040 provided include vetted and trained candidates,
talks to the company and manager trainings about diversity
and inclusion, and volunteer opportunities for their employees.
The companies also got branding and marketing benefits from
getting to say they were working with Code2040. Tech
companies have snapped up the service, and in just five years
Code2040 has become an $8 million a year organization
working with Silicon Valley leaders such as Twitter, Pandora
and Airbnb.
 Another organization that has seized the opportunity to
earn revenue by providing a service to corporations is Genesys
Works, the national organization that places disadvantaged
high school students in internships at major corporations
during their senior year in high school. When Rafael Alvarez
founded the organization, he was determined to support the
program with revenue from companies that would partner with
Genesys. Integral to his pitch is that the organization provides
the service for less money than other for-profit service
providers. “Our model works,” Alvarez told me, “because we
are providing a cost-effective solution to businesses, while
affecting people’s lives forever.” As a result, Genesys Works
served more than twenty-eight hundred students in 2016 alone,
resulting in a college enrollment rate of 94 percent.

COMBINE FREE AND PAID

One of the biggest challenges of charging fees is that you may

be lured away from serving the neediest clientele in favor of
those who can afford to pay. This is one reason that adopting
the “freemium” model of offering a free service with add-on
premium services at cost can be a good idea for nonprofits. It
allows you to offer your service for free, or perhaps for a very
moderate fee, to those who can’t pay, and at a greater cost to
those who can. This also solves another common problem
organizations run into. Lance Fors, an expert on social
entrepreneurship who has successfully helped a number of
social startups scale, points out that organizations too often
start out by offering all their services for free. “Nearly
everybody wants to give their services away in the beginning.
They see a problem, they’re passionate about the cause, and
they want to get it out there, but they price it as if it has no
value.” If an organization later imposes fees, it can provoke a
backlash. Many technology startups have also struggled with
this problem; because they initially offered their products for
free, working out how to earn revenue became a major
stumbling block. That was the motivation for the innovation of
the “freemium” model, employed to breakthrough success by
leaders in that sector such as LinkedIn and Dropbox.
The Open Media Project is making good use of a version of
the model. Their mission is to make government proceedings
transparent by providing users with software that searches
online efficiently through the morass of available proceedings
data. It charges on a sliding scale, offering the software free to
municipalities serving populations of five thousand or less and
for $6,000 annually to larger communities of over fifty
thousand; it also offers a number of add-on services, such as
training sessions, for fees ranging from $900 to $3,000.
In deciding on your fee scale, it’s important to keep in
mind that even if you don’t cover the total costs of your
services this way, covering part of them can be a vital
complement to your philanthropic income. You should feel
free to set your prices according to a combination of market
demand and ability to pay, not according to the profit
standards of private business. You can also decide to “compete
on price” by charging somewhat less for your service than for-
profit competitors, or perhaps nonprofit competitors, are
charging. This is one of the real advantages nonprofits have in
competing for customers; because they receive income from
grants and donations, and they don’t have to be concerned
with shareholder value, they don’t need to price according to
for-profit standards.

OFFERING SERVICES ON A LOAN BASIS

Microfinancing has paved the way for this earned-income

strategy. Core to this model is that you are providing some
means for your beneficiaries to eventually repay you, ideally
by training them in skills or providing them with equipment
that allows them to improve their income. Microlenders such
as Kiva have discovered that many of those who seek funds
respect the principle that once they have benefited and can
afford to, they should begin to pay outlays back. As a result,
Kiva’s loan repayment rate is 97.1 percent for all borrowers.
Beneficiaries may even prefer to receive assistance on a loan
basis.
 One Acre Fund is an excellent example of making this
model successful. Founder Andrew Youn was visiting a
nongovernmental organization (NGO) in a remote village in
western Kenya when he started talking with farmers about
their challenges growing enough food for their families. He
became really interested in how people could learn to sustain
themselves on an acre of land; so when he was there he
launched a pilot to see what kinds of resources would be
helpful to them. He came back to the United States and while
attending business school, developed a business plan for the
organization, envisioning a world where all farmers had the
skills and resources they needed to lift themselves out of
poverty. He was interested in building a nonprofit that could
sustain itself for the long term, so he crafted a model that drew
on a bundle of services, including financing for the purchase
of farm capital; direct distribution of seed and fertilizer;
training in techniques for increasing yields and negotiating
favorable terms for sales; and direct assistance in taking goods
to markets.
As of this writing, One Acre Fund serves half a million
families per year. One of its beneficiaries is a woman named
Ruth, a hard-working farmer and mother of eight from western
Kenya. She was only able to raise enough corn to fill a few
small bags each year, not enough to feed her children. So she
would buy a bag of potatoes from her village and travel to the
nearest market to sell french fries, earning about $5 per week,
just barely enough to sustain her family. In her first planting
season after she started working with One Acre Fund in 2009,
her crop yielded ten bags of maize, enough to feed her family
for an entire year, with some left over to sell. With the money
she made she was able to pay for her eldest son to attend high
school, the first in the family to do so.
She has paid back One Acre Fund their initial loan for her
farm supplies, which funding they will use to help another
farmer, multiplying their impact. In fact, 99 percent of the
farmers working with One Acre Fund have paid their loans
back, covering 73 percent of its direct program operating
expenses. Grants and donations cover the remainder of
program costs. The organization hopes to eventually sustain
the programs entirely through farmer repayments, by
implementing cost-cutting measures and taking advantage of
economies of scale. This goal has also been critical for raising
additional money from foundations, which are eager to see
sustainable financial models in the organizations they support.

RETAIL INNOVATIONS

Chuck Slaughter was a successful businessperson, the founder

of TravelSmith, which he grew to $100 million in sales and
sold in 2014, before he decided to launch a social venture. The
organization he founded, Living Goods, is pioneering one of
the most successful retail innovations ever developed in the
nonprofit sector. As Slaughter had traveled around the world
and learned how poverty affected so many people, he began
looking for ways to leverage his business skills to tackle the
problem. One issue that struck him was the lack of medicines.
“Children under the age of five were dying in the developing
world every day for lack of medicines that cost less than a cup
of coffee,” he told me. “It was hard for me to look at these
children and not see my own children.” While advising the
HealthStore/CFW shops, a chain of drugstores in Kenya that
was struggling to get people in the door, he had an ah-ha
moment. Hold on, he thought, there is a hugely successful
retail model that doesn’t require getting people in the door—
Avon.
As he began researching the idea of applying the Avon
model to medicine delivery, Slaughter learned that Avon, a
$10 billion business operating in a hundred countries, had
actually started in rural America in the 1880s as a response to
poor access to quality goods in small towns. Living Goods,
which he launched in Uganda in 2007, recruits and trains
community health entrepreneurs to go door to door to sell life-
saving products; this creates a cost-effective supply chain and
distribution system to the rural poor in Africa, delivering
goods such as drugs to combat the leading diseases killing
children; family planning; fortified foods; and money-saving
tools like solar lights.
The organization uses its buying power to reduce costs to
consumers and saves families valuable time and money by
delivering to the home. The organization has also created
successful products of its own, such as a fortified porridge
called Healthy Start that provides children with vitamins in
which they are badly deficient. These branded products are
Living Goods’ best sellers. Meanwhile, the community health
entrepreneurs earn a percentage of the margin of profit from
sales, providing much needed income that is transforming the
lives of their families and communities. The model doesn’t
just sound good, independent research proves its substantial
impact. In a randomized control trial of eight thousand
families from more than two hundred villages conducted over
three years, Living Goods reduced child deaths by 25 percent.
And due to the income the organization earns, the net cost is
less than $2 per person reached. As Slaughter says, “That’s an
unbeatable value in public health.”
One reason Living Goods community health agents have
been so successful is that they use digital enabled distribution.
Digital technology has positively disrupted virtually every
other sector, from books to travel to taxis. Now a kind of Uber
of health delivery, Living Goods is taking the power of digital
enabled distribution to increase health for the poorest,
providing every agent a smartphone with their ground-
breaking Smart Health™ app. The app’s intelligent algorithm
automates diagnoses of the three diseases killing the most
kids. This ensures accuracy and consistency, enabling the
organization to deploy capable health workers at a fraction of
the cost to train a nurse or doctor. Like Uber, the app uses big
data to optimize agents’ efforts, sending them to the highest
risk patients each day. It enables any manager to see the
performance of any agent in real time on any device. And also
like Uber, Living Goods empowers an army of independent
entrepreneurs to rapidly scale networks.
Living Goods took on one of the biggest challenges of any
business: distribution. As venture capitalist Peter Thiel says in
his book Zero to One, “Superior sales and distribution by itself
can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.
The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product—
even if it easily fits into already established habits and
anybody who tries it likes it immediately—you still must
support it with a strong distribution plan.” The Living Goods
model is one brilliant solution. Benetech experimented its way
to another.
Benetech hit product distribution challenges from the start.
Founder Jim Fruchterman was working at a tech company
called Calera Recognition Systems when he helped invent the
first successful machine that could read just about any printed
text. Fruchterman and his team used this technology to
develop a reading machine for the blind, a transformative
product in 1989. He founded Benetech as a nonprofit to sell
the product at a low cost. The organization almost failed to
take off because of a misguided distribution strategy.
According to Fruchterman: “We started out doing direct sales
[to users], when we realized it would be much more cost
effective and impactful to sell the product through dealers and
distributors. When we made that change, they sold the hell out
of our product and our venture went from zero to $5 million in
sales in just three years.” The lesson here is that nonprofits
may be able to tap the existing mechanisms of for-profit retail
rather than create their own sales operations, even though
they’re selling products at costs favorable to consumers.

Nonprofits may be able to tap the existing mechanisms of for-

profit retail rather than create their own sales operations, even
though they’re selling products at costs favorable to
consumers.

TEACHING BENEFICIARIES TO FISH

If you decide to sell a product that does not itself provide a

social good, then per the earlier discussion of mission drift, the
best practice is to follow the “teach a man to fish” philosophy,
and create a business that provides truly valuable work and life
skills to your employee beneficiaries. Key here is assuring that
the types of skills the business will allow you to train people in
will in fact facilitate their obtaining employment elsewhere.
New Door Ventures has operated according to this model,
and their experience highlights that organizations should
expect some of the businesses they attempt to create will be
much more successful than others; they should run pilots in
order to focus on those that will work best and have the
greatest impact before launching them full-scale. New Door
Ventures initially created several businesses in addition to the
screen-printing business and bicycle shop it runs now, such as
restaurants and a resale shop. When Tess Reynolds became
CEO in 2003, she decided to focus on their most successful
enterprises. She performed a cost-benefit analysis that
involved not only an assessment of how much demand there
was for the business’s products or services and their
profitability, but their benefits to the youth employees they
were training. They scaled down to just the two businesses
they run today. They can boast that both have strong revenues
that pay for most business costs; that 89 percent of its program
graduates are employed and/or in school six months after
completing training; that 91 percent of them had retained
stable housing six months after the program; and that 96
percent had not reoffended six months after the program.

COLLABORATE WITH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

Government agencies and affiliated organizations are one of

the biggest sources of income, especially in certain sectors,
such as education and health services, in which federal, state
and local government agencies are mandated to spend certain
amounts of money on issues many nonprofits are tackling.
Many government agencies also have extensive experience in
partnering with nonprofits.
For many of the organizations I studied, government
partnerships were critical to scaling. BELL, the organization
that provides after-school programs to underperforming
students, is one of these. Founded by Tiffany Cooper Gueye in
1992, it showed strong results in its first ten years of operation,
but by 2002 it was funded purely on philanthropy, and the
leadership began to consider earning income in order to grow
faster. Around the same time, President George W. Bush came
into office and championed the No Child Left Behind Act,
which provided vouchers to support underperforming
elementary and secondary school students. One provision was
that low-performing, high-poverty schools could spend up to
$1,500 per child on tutoring at the government’s expense. As
an organization that provides tutoring, BELL decided to
explore whether it could access any of this new funding.
The organization hired an expert in government grants to
evaluate its eligibility. When the consultant told them that
hands down the organization’s work was not a fit because
college students were doing the tutoring, whereas the bill
required tutors with college degrees, BELL was determined to
overcome that obstacle. By hiring certified teachers to deliver
instruction, BELL successfully made its case to the
government. In one fell swoop, the organization grew, in New
York City for example, from serving two hundred kids on a
Friday to serving eleven hundred kids the following Monday,
and it has continued to grow from there.
Gueye cautions that obtaining government funding requires
“tedious, compliance-oriented applications about technical
aspects of your programming, such as how many vendors you
employ and whether they are minority and women friendly.”
She recommends hiring a technical expert to help navigate the
process. It is important to think outside the box about how to
partner with governments to tap into sources of earned
income. As she points out: “No government bill is written with
your name on it. You have to think creatively about how to
make them work for you.”
One way you can do this is by actually working with
government bodies to understand their needs and convince
them to write policy into law to fund your operations. Raj
Panjabi has done this brilliantly in Liberia with Last Mile
Health, which, as you will recall, trains community health
workers. Since 2007, Panjabi has worked hard to develop
connections within the government. He felt the ministry of
health needed to hear the harrowing stories from the front lines
about how the lack of access to basic health care was affecting
the population, particularly with regard to the AIDS epidemic.
So he chronicled people’s stories in a document he sent to the
minister of health, highlighting how bad the distribution of
medicine was, and the devastating implications.
Later that year, with the country in crisis, the government
held a meeting, organized by the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS,
to determine how to distribute antiretroviral drugs. To
Panjabi’s surprise, during the proceedings ministry of health
officials actually cited the patients he had written about by
name, proclaiming how desperate they were for treatment.
Realizing that he had gained credibility with the government,
he approached officials and suggested they support a pilot in a
government hospital testing the use of community health
workers to treat patients. The hospital had only one physician,
who alone could not administer treatment to all its patients.
The program was wildly successful, and as a result Last Mile
Health partnered with government to fund its work. As Panjabi
recalls: “We thought if we could get paid to do valuable work,
but we also were then helping the ministry of health write its
national health policy to reflect this model we had tested
together which actually worked, it was a win-win.” It most
definitely was. Having then expanded from hospitals into ten
districts in rural areas over the next five years, ultimately the
community health care workers were invaluable in stopping
the reach of Ebola during the 2012 crisis.
Many of the most successful social entrepreneurs in the
United States have partnered with government and helped
shape programs. The youth service programs run by City Year
were so successful, for example, that they helped inspire the
federal program AmeriCorps, which has eighty thousand
members serving in 21,600 unique sites across the country.2 In
2015, federal AmeriCorps funding represented approximately
$33 million of City Year’s $142 million annual budget.

CAREFULLY PLAN YOUR STRATEGY

If you decide you want to experiment with earned income, you

should undertake a rigorous strategic analysis and a pilot
program. Gregory Dees and his coauthors lay out this five-step
process for developing a viable earned-income strategy I
highly recommend:3
Step 1. Reaffirm your organization’s mission.
As we’ve discussed, earned-income strategies work best for
nonprofits when they are highly aligned with their mission. To
assure that ideas are serving the mission well, Dees and his
colleagues advise performing an assessment of how clear your
mission is by asking five or so people (a mix of staff and other
stakeholders such as a board member and a funder) to describe
the mission, without referring to your website or materials
describing it. You could do this with a simple email request or
perhaps by calling them. The responses will tell you whether
or not you should spend some time aligning everyone on the
objectives of the organization. Going through the theory of
change process outlined in part 2 is another way to ensure you
have clearly articulated your organization’s goals.
Step 2. Brainstorm your options.
Bring together your full team (staff, board and even external
stakeholders) to brainstorm a variety of potential sources of
income, and whittle them down to just a few to evaluate
further. Think about the various categories of revenue. Can
you charge your beneficiaries for services you already
provide? Is there an invested third party such as a company or
a government entity that might be willing to pay for those
services? Does it make sense to launch a new business
venture? What other types of revenue relationships can you
form in your network?
Step 3. Assess total mission impact.
Evaluate whether the proposed activities are likely to enhance
or detract from the pursuit of your goals, and assess the
potential net financial gain (or loss) of each idea.
Step 4. Evaluate feasibility.
Analyze the internal capacity of your organization to conduct
the required activities, considering whether you have the
human resources and necessary experience, the financial
stability and the appetite for the risk involved, as well as the
likely demand for your products or services. Then assess likely
funder support, which might involve making some calls to
trusted funder advisors.
Step 5. Develop an action plan.
Develop a design for a pilot program, following the steps for
testing introduced in part 1. Solicit feedback about the design
from professionals with experience in nonprofit earned-
income programs as part of your testing process, perhaps by
working with a paid or pro bono consultant, and also be sure to
seek the advice of an attorney to assure you fully understand
the tax implications.
 CHAPTER 9

Across the board, my survey revealed that the largest source of

capital, an average 43 percent of annual revenue, for nonprofit
social startups is grantmaking foundations. For organizations
below $500,000 in annual revenue, the proportion of their
budget coming from grants is even larger, at 52 percent.
Individual donors also make up a critical percentage of
income, coming in at about 20 percent overall for the
organizations I surveyed.
Optimizing the time, resources and energy you spend on
applying for grants and soliciting individual donors is vital,
but also a very tough challenge. That’s especially true for
smaller organizations, given the odds they’re up against. A
great deal of philanthropic capital goes to larger, well-
established organizations that have strong relationships with
the people allocating resources. Fledgling organizations
generally don’t have those connections to program officers or
major donors. In fact, when asked to name their top challenges
in raising money from foundations, 71 percent of my survey
respondents reported difficulty gaining access. Challenges
with individual donors were similar: two-thirds of
organizations cited securing large donations as a top challenge
and 61 percent said it was getting noticed.
The methods for soliciting contributions, pursuing grants,
awards and prizes are generally quite well known, even if
executing well on them inevitably requires experiencing some
hard knocks, and a lot of learning. Many good books and
online resources that survey the landscape of foundations and
competitions are available; they offer detailed guidelines for
effective grant proposal writing and pitching, and strategies for
individual donor outreach. Rather than offer a broad survey of
best practices, I will focus here on a few key recommendations
that came out of my study about how to improve results.
A number of particularly vexing difficulties came to the
surface. One of the trickiest issues is deciding how much to
diversify efforts. Organizational leaders can easily find
themselves spread too thin, chasing after more and more
grants they’ve discovered or trying to finish with demanding
grant proposal processes while also going through the hoops of
a competition, all the while working on an annual campaign
soliciting individuals. On the flip side, some organizations
reported nearly disastrous cases of having focused too much
on one source. One of these is NBA Math Hoops, which seeks
to help low-income students improve their math skills by
playing a board game in which they learn the statistics of their
favorite NBA and WNBA players; they form their own teams,
progressing through a series of tutorials about the importance
of statistics to a winning team-building strategy. As founder
Khalil Fuller recounted: “We lost a funding opportunity we
had been pursuing for eleven months and had every indication
was going to go through.” This is an all too common story.
Another organization, Reach Incorporated, a nonprofit that
trains teens to serve as elementary school literacy tutors,
described a rocky road of having three times lost funding from
one major source. The CEO told me: “We had to be honest,
regroup and seek new opportunities.” They then diversified
their fundraising plan.

It’s important to have clear conversations with your

prospective donors about whether or not you are on a path
toward getting funding.

These stories underscore that it’s important to have clear

conversations with your prospective donors about whether or
not you are on a path toward getting funding. It’s also
important to carefully guard yourself against wasting time in
unproductive meetings with prospects. This is a particularly
common problem in approaching foundations, which can often
take many years to commit to a new grantee. To avoid this
dance, one founder I met, Carmen Rojas of the Worker’s Lab,
has established a “two meeting rule” for herself. In her second
meeting she asks directly whether or not the relationship is
likely to lead to funding, to set expectations on all sides. We’ll
cover more about how to make the “ask” later in this chapter.
But first, for wrestling with the diversification of your efforts,
you need a good plan.

DEVELOP A MULTIYEAR STRATEGIC FUNDRAISING PLAN

All organizations in the early growth phase should surely be

pursuing multiple funders, and doing so is always going to be
something of a juggling act. The best way to make sure you’re
not overextending yourself, and that you plan your time
optimally, is to develop a detailed road map that plots your
efforts out by the calendar; ideally this should be a two- or
three-year plan. This will help assure that you have enough
prospects to yield the funding you need to meet the
organization’s budget goals.
Making the plan multiyear also helps with getting out of a
mentality of yearly “restarts” to the fundraising cycle and of
being on a relentless treadmill. Though longer-term funding
can be quite difficult to secure, by at least mapping out a
multiyear strategy to grow your budget, you will be better able
to step back from the day-to-day grind and spot opportunities.
One founder I talked to had a memorable way of discussing
this issue. In 2010, Abby Falik started Global Citizen Year,
which is reinventing the “gap year” between high school and
college as America’s launch pad for global leaders. It has
raised over $15 million and grown the organization’s budget to
over $4 million in that time. She told me: “Most people
approach nonprofit fundraising as though they’re filling a
bathtub spoonful by spoonful until the end of the year. And
when January 1 arrives? You drain the bathtub and start over.
This mentality leaves many of us constantly chasing dollars.
To break this cycle, I’ve focused on building a revenue engine
that doesn’t require starting from scratch every time we hit a
new year.”
Typically, a process for developing a fundraising plan looks
something like this:
1. Target strategically. The most successful fundraisers
concentrate intensively on funding directly devoted to their
mission goals, as opposed to chasing after sources that require
them to bend over backward to meet funder priorities.
2. Rate your prospect list. Your list of prospective funders
should include all the foundations and individual donors
you’ve researched, and should be divided into categories by
whether they are “hot” (you have had more than one meeting
and they seem interested in your work), “warm” (you have had
an initial conversation and need to follow up) and “cold” (no
initial contact and/or connections to the funder).
3. Create a realistic gift table. Break this down into the
amount of money you think you can realistically raise based
on your relationships with foundations and donors and their
level of resources. This is a powerful device for staying alert
to not focus too much on one or another type of source. A
well-diversified group of prospects might break down as in the
table on the next page, with the ratios of anticipated gifts to the
number of prospects based on a well-established norm that,
assuming you have a compelling mission, model and pitch,
you can expect to receive around one in three of the gifts you
solicit.
4. Plan your outreach calendar. A general rule of thumb
is that it takes six touch points throughout the year to cultivate
a donor, ranging from high-touch contacts, such as an in-
person meeting, lunch or hosting an event, to lower-touch,
such as an e-blast, a video release, an impact report or an end-
of-year letter. Develop a personalized outreach plan for each
of your prospects that calendars each of the six touch points.
With this disciplined basic game plan, you can step back to
consider trying out a number of innovative approaches to
fundraising.
Gift Level: $100,000
# of Gifts: 1
# of Prospects: 3
Amount: $100,000
Gift Level: $50,000
# of Gifts: 2
# of Prospects: 6
Amount: $100,000
Gift Level: $25,000
# of Gifts: 4
# of Prospects: 12
Amount: $100,000
Gift Level: $10,000
# of Gifts: 8
# of Prospects: 24
Amount: $80,000
Gift Level: $5,000
# of Gifts: 15
# of Prospects: 45
Amount: $75,000
Gift Level: $1,000
# of Gifts: 45
# of Prospects: 135
Amount: $45,000
TOTAL: $500,000
Sample Gift Table. Source: Adapted from Fundraising
Fundamentals, Section 6.4, Higher Education Funding
Council for England; available at
http://www.case.org/Publications_and_Products/Fundraising_
Fundamentals_Intro.html.

CONSIDER COLLABORATION, CAREFULLY

In recent years, the concept that nonprofits should collaborate

to apply for grants has been widely promoted. The idea is that
crafting collaborations in programming allows organizations
to optimize their impact while also optimizing the cost-
effectiveness of foundation money. This trend toward
collaborative funding has risen hand in hand with the theory of
collective impact, which argues that organizations cannot
change the larger economic and political factors behind social
problems, unless they work together with a common agenda
and engage in mutually reinforcing activities.
Championed in an influential 2011 Stanford Social
Innovation Review article titled “Collective Impact,” by John
Kania and Mark Kramer of the FSG consultancy, the argument
has inspired many organizations to try new forms of
collaboration.1 And funders are taking notice. Grantmakers for
Effective Organizations argues, for example, that
“grantmakers achieve far greater impact by partnering with
other organizations in pursuit of common goals and providing
grantees with support for collaborative efforts.”2 A 2014
survey about nonprofit collaboration conducted by the
Bridgespan Group found that “both nonprofit and
philanthropic leaders expressed a great deal of appetite for
participating in or supporting future collaborations,” and that
evaluations by nonprofit CEOs of collaborations their
organizations engaged in, as well as those of funders that
backed collaborations, were quite positive overall.3 The
authors of a report on the study write that “the most surprising
finding was the overwhelming success that CEOs ascribed to
the collaborations they participated in and that foundation
officers ascribed to those they funded—70 percent or better in
both cases.”4
But caution is advised. The reason the authors say the
findings were a surprise is that collaborations can be fraught
with complications. Looking into opportunities to secure grant
money through collaboration is definitely advised, but
organizations should do so very strategically, and must go into
collaborations with eyes wide open about how hard they can
be to manage.
One collaboration that navigated the complexities of
partnership with ultimate success was the effort among
California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), the Center for
Youth Wellness (CYW), the San Francisco Child Abuse
Prevention Center (the Prevention Center) and Tipping Point
Community (Tipping Point) to create an integrated center for
children’s health, wellness and advocacy.
The concept launched in 2008 when city leaders asked the
Prevention Center to lead an initiative to create a children’s
advocacy center for victims of child abuse: a center that would
promote justice and healing by conducting forensic interviews
in a child-friendly and safe location, embedded with mental
health and victim advocates to avoid repeated trauma to the
child. In some communities, the welfare system required
victims to report their story repeatedly, sometimes to more
than a dozen parties—their teacher, a school counselor, a child
protective services social worker, the police, a doctor, a nurse,
a mental health professional, the district attorney, the city
attorney, their own lawyer—before these various agencies
could develop a plan to ensure the safety of the child. City
leaders and the Prevention Center envisioned a “one stop
shop,” a national best practice, where children could tell their
story directly to a trained and licensed expert in the privacy of
a specifically designed, developmentally appropriate setting,
while the other agencies that needed to hear the child’s story
listened behind a two-way mirror. The children would receive
everything from immediate health care treatment to mental
health support in one place. The idea had been developed for
decades, but the Prevention Center needed the right time to
rally the necessary funding and community support to achieve
such an audacious goal.
At the same time, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris was envisioning
a new center to promote the wellness of children living in San
Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood who had been impacted by
adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Through her pediatric
practice, Burke Harris had been caring for children whose life
expectancy and health were negatively impacted when the
adversity they experienced—abuse, neglect, exposure to
violence in their homes or on the streets, drug use,
incarcerated parents, loss, grief, or the simple fact of poverty
—led to the chronic overactivity of their biological stress
response, a condition called “toxic stress.” Having founded
CPMC’s Bayview Child Health Center, a pediatric clinic to
support Bayview families, she was now working to launch the
Center for Youth Wellness to focus on averting the long-term
health consequences of childhood adversity.
Later that same year, then–San Francisco district attorney
Kamala Harris brought together Prevention Center executive
director Katie Albright and Burke Harris, suggesting they
collaborate. District Attorney Harris knew kids needed a safe
start in life to ensure they succeeded in school, avoided risky
behavior and stayed out of jail. Albright and Burke Harris had
not worked together in the past, but shared the common goal
to keep children safe from trauma. They decided to partner.
Albright and Burke Harris, along with their colleagues,
spent hours envisioning what an integrated children’s wellness
and advocacy center, which joined the pediatric focus of the
Bayview Child Health Center, the trauma-focus of the Center
for Youth Wellness, and the healing and justice focus of the
Children’s Advocacy Center, might look like. They calculated
that it would require millions of dollars in seed funding and
massive collaboration, not only among their organizations but
also with the local hospitals, other government agencies and
funders. They determined that the best way to secure funding
would be to partner with an existing funder who would
champion their project. They turned to Tipping Point, which
had funded both programs and was invested in improving the
lives of underserved children in San Francisco. CEO of
Tipping Point Daniel Lurie was immediately drawn to the joint
project and led his organization to raise an extraordinary $4
million from individual donors at its annual gala event.
Within two years, the partners successfully opened the
dream center they had envisioned. The warm, welcoming and
vibrant community space was child-centered and family
friendly. The Bayview Clinic and the Center for Youth
Wellness occupied the second floor, working together to
provide coordinated health care for all children in the
community; and the Children’s Advocacy Center occupied the
light-filled third floor to provide state-of-the art, one-stop
services for kids who had had an acute experience of abuse or
neglect. At the grand opening, Lurie issued a warm welcome
to attendees including the mayor, the chief of police and health
care executives.
This milestone event came on the heels of the partners’
navigation of substantial challenges behind the scenes. Though
they had come together to create an integrated center, the
organizations themselves were not operationally integrated.
The partners realized that while they held similar values and a
shared agenda to keep children in San Francisco safe from
violence and trauma, they had very different immediate goals.
The CYW was focused on the national agenda of how to treat
ACEs and, as a startup, was in the process of raising additional
seed money to launch its organization. The Prevention Center,
an established organization serving San Francisco’s
community for decades, was focused on local partnerships and
the best practices of running a children’s advocacy center. This
led to conflicts regarding timelines and priorities. Though the
partners had done extensive planning on fundraising and
communications for their shared agenda, creating a one-stop
health and wellness center for families, they hadn’t agreed on
how best to make it clear to external stakeholders and donors
when they were communicating about the partnership and
when they were talking about a specific agenda for their
individual organization.
When a new funder came calling, how was it determined
whether they should be directed to the partnership, and what
were partners to do if it seemed like the donors’ interests were
more aligned with the initiative of an individual organization?
When news media came calling, which program would be
spotlighted? Perhaps the biggest challenge became apparent in
the area of donor stewardship; the groups had been so
successful at creating a united front that donors ended up
confused as to which organization they were supporting, a key
question in San Francisco’s relatively small community, where
organizations often relied on funding from many of the same
donors. This lack of clarity became problematic when Albright
and Burke Harris later approached donors for their individual
fundraising efforts.
To carry them through these sometimes challenging issues,
the two organizations kept their end vision in mind: providing
best-in-class pediatric, mental health, forensic and advocacy
programs under one roof; ensuring excellent services to
families and the community; and launching a national agenda
to focus on raising awareness about the impact of adverse
childhood experiences.
Albright and Burke Harris ultimately decided to cease joint
fundraising and communications efforts to avoid confusion
among donors and key stakeholders. Each developed
messaging to help donors clearly understand the scope of their
work, so donors could clearly understand what each
organization was offering. Though the partners continue to
collaborate on some core functions, they do so via “back
office” partnerships, with members of their staff working
closely to ensure that families have a seamless experience, and
fund these initiatives from their individual operating budgets.
Despite the challenges, they have accomplished much of
their original vision. Their work and collaboration serves as a
national model. In 2016, the Prevention Center secured
additional funds to purchase their building and secure a
permanent home for their collective work.
While they know that their work is not done, they could not
have gotten this far without working together. As Albright
stated: “The Children’s Advocacy Center and our haven for
children in the Bayview is more impressive and more
visionary than I could have imagined because our two
organizations, with the support and guidance of Tipping Point,
pushed each other to dream big.” Their partnership ultimately
led to bigger funding sources to support their visionary idea,
which they would not have been able to pull off on their own.
To consider organizations that might be especially well-
suited collaborators, you can start with a competitive analysis.
Organizations are generally very well aware of who their
direct competitors are, both in seeking funding and in serving
beneficiaries; considering more broadly the landscape of
organizations that have overlapping missions, and particularly
those offering complementary services, is a good mechanism
for organizations to identify the ones with whom they can
develop jointly beneficial programs. One way to start is by
looking at other organizations in your domain that your
existing funders are also funding, as the Center for Youth
Wellness and San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center
did with Tipping Point.
Before entering into an agreement, both organizations must
carefully consider the value each is adding, and create a plan
for dividing up the work, which should include detailed
written expectations of everyone’s role, including whether the
organizations plan to have joint decision-making authority or
whether one organization, often referred to as the “backbone
organization,” will take that lead role.5 Finally, organizations
should create a plan for fundraising both individually and
collaboratively going forward to avoid confusing their donors.

The range of funders is so vast, and their priorities differ so

much, that organizations simply do not need to see each other
as inherent competitors; they should feel free to share advice
and connections.

SHARE FUNDER INTRODUCTIONS

The challenges of formally collaborating with people at other

organizations may not appeal to you, but you can still gain a
great deal of assistance from them; leaders at peer nonprofits
can be a font of valuable information regarding funders to
pursue, personal introductions, and ideas for successful
strategies they’ve employed. The range of funders is so vast,
and their priorities differ so much, that organizations simply
do not need to see each other as inherent competitors; they
should feel free to share advice and connections. While those
in the nonprofit sector involved in fundraising have learned
very well that they have to make the “ask” to foundations and
private donors, many are not optimizing the opportunities to
ask one another for creative problem-solving assistance in
pursuing grant money.
Correcting this omission is a goal of Natalie Bridgeman
Fields, founder of Accountability Counsel. As a veteran
Echoing Green fellow, having won a fellowship in 2009 that
helped her start her organization, she has taught an Echoing
Green workshop to incoming and seasoned fellows on the
importance of maximizing peer relationships to help connect
them to funders. She divides twenty-five classroom
participants into groups of five based on the issue areas they
support. She then tells them to look to their left, look to their
right, and recognize that these are the people who are going to
be their biggest fundraising allies. Fields then asks everyone to
find a partner sharing issue overlap and have a discussion
reviewing their current funders, exchanging their views of
which might be good prospects for the other person, for
example, if the funder is supporting a related aspect of their
peer’s work. Following her example, as you do this, in
addition to tapping your existing network of organization
founders and staff, you can also check foundations’ portfolios
to see if you know people at other funder organizations who
may be good candidates for offering recommendations.
In her workshops, Fields encourages the fellows to limit
their requests for introductions to one or two funders, to
minimize the work they’re requesting, and that they include a
brief explanation of why they think the funder would be a
good fit. Note that such explanations may be the basis of a
pitch template you can largely cut and paste into an email to
the funder. Perhaps most important, those making the ask
should always offer to reciprocate, and in fact be proactive in
doing so. In cases where people demure, perhaps telling you
they don’t feel comfortable recommending a funder, or that
they have a delicate relationship with the funder you’re asking
them to help connect with, it is important to respect their
preference and not push them further.
Another method of building up a network of peer support is
to create a team of peer executive directors in your issue area
and meet with them once a month to compare notes about new
funding opportunities, and successes and failures and creative
approaches others have taken. Your current funders are also
your best allies in providing introductions to other funders in
their circle who may be interested in hearing about your work.
If they fund you already they are likely to be some of your
biggest champions.
In short, you do not have to be so alone in the fundraising
endeavor, but the onus is on you to surround yourself with
people who can help you.

GETTING COMFORTABLE WITH THE “ASK”

One of the hardest aspects of approaching funders is that

personal relationships with donors, which many young leaders
do not have, are so important. Additionally, there is an
unwritten set of “rules of the game” that more experienced
organizational leaders and those who have developed strong
connections, perhaps by getting a degree in the field or
through family, can leverage. Author Chris Rabb writes about
these personal resources in his book Invisible Capital: How
Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity, which I
highly recommend.6 He discusses how success in
entrepreneurship, whether in the private or public sectors, can
be largely attributed to the ability to tap such a set of
connections; being well versed in the unwritten rules; and
having a high level of comfort with making pitches, because of
that web of connections and general savvy. Women and people
of color are particularly disadvantaged when it comes to
“invisible” capital; in fact, data from Echoing Green 2016
applicants shows that male-run U.S.-based organizations that
have reached a proof of concept stage report raising twice as
much money as those run by women.7 This trend is also
displayed when comparing U.S.-based organizations run by
self-identified white and black applicants: in 2016, 56 percent
of white applicants had already raised funds at the time of
application, whereas only 36 percent of black applicants had
reached the same milestone.
This is a key reason why fellowships and competitions,
such as those sponsored by Echoing Green, Draper Richards
Kaplan, Ashoka and so many others, are valuable. They go
way beyond the monetary support provided, offering not only
top-quality coaching but greatly helping to open the door to
other funders. I think a less appreciated aspect of their rewards
is that they also introduce recipients to a network of peers,
whether in the current group of recipients or those from past
years; these peers can be wonderful resources for advice about
the challenges of growing an organization (e.g., how to get
introductions to funders and learning how to make a good
“ask”). As Cheryl Dorsey, the CEO of Echoing Green, says,
“The gaps in capital and in the perception of who is fundable
are a reality that entrepreneurs face that slow social progress.
To mitigate some of that, we leverage our network and
facilitate peer-to-peer learning and support among our fellows.
Our role is to not only to support the ongoing development of
our fellows, but also to build out this social innovation
ecosystem where these barriers are confronted, understood and
dismantled to give these leaders their best chances to achieve.”
Those fellowships and awards are, of course, extremely
competitive. There are over three thousand organizations
applying for just twenty-five spots in the Echoing Green seed-
stage fellowship, for example. And even experienced social
entrepreneurs who have made it into these networks through
winning a fellowship or prize may continue to struggle with a
lack of invisible capital.
 One founder who generously shared about her challenges
with this issue is Gemma Bulos, who cofounded A Single
Drop for Safe Water. The organization provides technical and
organizational expertise to help villages and municipalities
identify, design, build and manage their own community-
driven water projects. Bulos showed enormous courage in
building the organization. She had no intention of becoming a
social entrepreneur when she got the idea, and had no training
or special connections in the field, but she acted vigorously to
capitalize on a serendipitous turn of events.
Bulos was a preschool teacher in New York City by day
and a jazz singer by night. On September 11, 2001, she was
supposed to be at the World Trade Center for a meeting, but
she called in sick. In response to the tragedy she wrote a song
called “We Rise,” inspired by the way New Yorkers came
together and celebrated their goodness and generosity. Then
she quit her jobs and began traveling around the world to build
the Million Voice Choir, eventually mobilizing voices from a
hundred cities and sixty countries to sing “We Rise” at a
designated time on September 21, 2004, to celebrate the UN
International Day of Peace and the Global Cease Fire Day.
Because the song uses the metaphor “it takes a single drop of
water to start a wave,” it became her rallying cry to bring
people together in peace, and Bulos began getting calls to
present at water conferences, including the UN Water for Life
Conference.
At the time, she knew virtually nothing about the water
crisis afflicting so many communities around the world. But as
she discovered the importance of developing strong water,
sanitation and hygiene practices (WASH), she learned how to
build simple clean water technologies. She went back to her
native Philippines to help develop a training program for
women about water, sanitation and technology. She drew on
her personal connections there for early support, and within a
year was able to win an Echoing Green fellowship, as well as
contracts with the Canadian embassy, UNICEF and OXFAM,
even though she didn’t know anyone at any of those
organizations. She had simply cold-called them and asked,
“Who should I talk to about my project?” The work of A
Single Drop of Safe Water continues to touch the lives of tens
of thousands of people annually.
After four years, Bulos left the organization in the
Philippines when it reached the milestone of no longer being
dependent on charitable aid; she set her sights on taking the
training model to communities in Africa and cofounded
Global Women’s Water Initiative. Even though she followed
all the right steps, launching pilot programs with groups of
women in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and producing strong
data about their effectiveness, this time the fundraising was
much more difficult. She didn’t feel as comfortable
approaching funders in the United States as she had in the
Philippines. She told me that as a Filipina American she “felt
personal insecurities about being brown around rich, white
people, and about not having a relevant college degree,”
despite the numerous social entrepreneur awards she’s won
and the significant impact her programs had had. Her
immigrant parents had instilled in her the values of being
hardworking, self-reliant and not asking for help. Help equaled
“begging” in her mind, and that affected her view of
fundraising. She told me that she had trouble thinking of
herself as a “fundraiser” and said, “I know that I could be a
good fundraiser if I wanted, but I haven’t been able to click
into it, and I’m still figuring out how to approach it without
feeling like I’m begging.”
While Global Women’s Water Initiative is going strong and
having enormous award-winning impact on the communities
they work with in East Africa, fundraising remains a
challenge, and Bulos still isn’t able to pay herself a salary,
prioritizing program delivery over a paycheck. She works a
separate day job to sustain the organization, which she runs in
the evenings and weekends.
So many founders deal with the same kinds of insecurities
and discomfort about fundraising that Bulos felt so deeply,
despite her astonishing success and the courage with which
she made those early cold-calls to funders. There are
numerous psychological and emotional challenges nonprofit
leaders face when forced to ask for money, which stem from
societal taboos associated with discussing money, fear of
rejection, power imbalances and embarrassment about “being
in need,” to name a few.8

In her popular Harvard class Exponential Fundraising, Jennifer

McCrea promotes a mental shift by nonprofit leaders to begin
thinking differently about their relationships with money and
with donors. As McCrea told me, most people start by infusing
money with values like scarcity and control. With this
mentality, money becomes a dark, scary thing. McCrea
explains: “If you grew up in a family that equates money with
safety, when you ask people for money you may feel like you
are asking them for their safety.” To solve this problem, she
suggests “recasting fundraising as a dynamic relationship
between organizations and their philanthropic partners that is
designed from the start to be cocreative and generative.” She
encourages nonprofit leaders to start thinking of foundations
as part of their philanthropic team of “partners” as opposed to
donors—a way to shift the power dynamic, putting the work at
the center of the relationship as opposed to the money. After
all, everyone has the same goal of making social change, and
arguably the nonprofit leaders have an even more critical role
in that journey than the funders.
Even once you make that mental shift, you can’t get around
having to make the ask of donors for their financial support.
McCrea provides some examples of tips she gives to make the
ask less scary, including things like making one ask a day to
develop the asking “muscle.” As she says, “An ask simply
requires twenty seconds of courage, so just try it.”
Another of her tips is to think about resources in terms of
abundance. It’s so easy to say that social entrepreneurs must be
bold in asking for financial support, and of course it’s a whole
lot harder to do, especially when pitching the biggest name
funders. But it must be said that working hard to develop your
confidence in asking for introductions and making pitches is
likely to pay off in spades. Again and again in my meetings
with breakout organizational leaders, I was impressed by their
spirit of fearless determination and their attitude that financial
resources are plentiful if you are bold enough to go after them
with confidence.
One such founder is Abby Falik. When I asked her how
she’s been so successful in growing Global Citizen Year to
over $4 million in annual revenues so fast, she insisted it is
because she approaches her work from a perspective that
founders have to be bold and committed to scaling their
impact to the size of the problems they’re trying to solve. She
says that when she sits with very early stage social
entrepreneurs, she can usually spot those who seem likely to
“break through” based on their ability to think and act, without
constraints.
Laura Weidman Powers, the cofounder of Code2040, told
me that from the very beginning, she felt Code2040 was “a
huge organization living in the body of a small organization,”
and that this mindset affected every interaction she had from
the start. A great example is that after Google and Apple
released their abysmal diversity numbers, Powers asked a
board member for an introduction to Jeff Weiner, the CEO of
LinkedIn, and invited him to dinner so she could discuss
Code2040’s approach to inclusive hiring. He agreed. She told
me: “My mentality has always been that of course I should be
going out to dinner with people like Jeff Weiner, because we
are on the forefront of a movement that is much bigger than
ourselves.” This confidence also led her cofounder Tristan
Walker to ask high-powered venture capitalist Ben Horowitz
of Andreessen Horowitz to be on the board of Code2040. He
agreed, and Horowitz has been instrumental to the
organization’s credibility, access and growth.
Jennifer Pitts from the founding team at Tipping Point told
me: “When you ask an organization, ‘What would you do if
you had $10 million?’ there’s a big difference between the
CEOs who can give you an immediate answer and the ones
that get stuck. At Tipping Point, our job was to really push
people to think big, because this is where the exciting stuff
comes out.”
Such a confident mindset is second nature to some social
entrepreneurs, of course, but for those who struggle with
boldly making the ask, it’s vital to develop the muscles. This
mindset shift has been incredibly helpful to Gemma Bulos.
She now realizes that one reason she was spinning her wheels
was that she was mostly chasing smaller donations in the
$5,000 to $10,000 range, which took much too much time.
Meanwhile, she knew they weren’t going to get her over the
funding hump to scale the organization to sustainability. She
has begun to ask for bigger grants, which she finds makes
donors take her more seriously, and results in bigger payoffs.

GET OTHERS TO MAKE THE ASK FOR YOU

When someone mentions a nonprofit fundraiser, we

immediately conjure up an image of people sitting around
banquet tables in a downtown hotel eating dinner or looking at
their watches as they listen to a program where people talk far
too long, albeit about important social issues. The top-
performing social startups have turned this kind of “rubber
chicken” fundraising dinner into a thing of the past.
Fundraising 2.0 involves a much more creative approach to
raising money from individuals that taps into a broader
audience, increasing organizations’ pie of donations. For
example, John Wood, the founder of Room to Read, developed
a model where other people would actually become actively
involved in fundraising for Room to Read.
John Wood has become a fundraising legend. Some of the
social entrepreneurs I interviewed even said they try to
channel Wood in their meetings with individual donors, asking
themselves, What would John Wood do in this situation? How
much money would he ask for? Wood’s success in breaking
the mold of nonprofit fundraising is perhaps attributable to his
roots in the corporate world, as a former executive at
Microsoft. When he first described his idea, many people told
him his model would never work, that it wasn’t sustainable to
try to raise money from individuals for libraries. He insisted
that he was selling something donors wanted, and that if he
packaged it in the right way, to create a one-to-one connection
between the donors and the individuals they were supporting,
they would eagerly respond. According to Room to Read’s
cofounder Erin Ganju, that packaging was really important to
the organization’s success with individuals. “We started a
model where you could support a school, you could support a
library, you could support a local-language book being
published in Nepal or Vietnam, and you knew exactly where
that $5,000 or $10,000 check was going, and even got a couple
of reports back throughout the year with photos of the school
library being set up in that school or children reading those
books.” This approach made donors feel strongly connected to
the mission and the results.
Room to Read’s supporters felt so connected, in fact, that
they wanted to do more. The organization started setting up
chapters across the country and around the world to engage
their supporters in raising even more money for the
organization. These volunteer fundraisers commit to
participating in geographic chapters based in cities around the
world. Each chapter has a couple of leaders that go to San
Francisco every year, at their own expense, for a leadership
conference where Room to Read helps them develop their
annual plan for their individual market. For example, they
decide how many events they want to do, who their target
audience is and how much money they plan to raise from
them. In addition, Room to Read uses the gathering as an
opportunity to energize these champions, much like a
corporate annual sales conference, sharing motivating stories
about the organization’s impact they can take back to their
chapters, and revealing the organization’s key objectives for
the year. The chapter model has been so successful for Room
to Read that they now have chapters in over sixteen countries
in over forty cities, which in close collaboration with their
staff help raise about 25 percent of the organization’s $50
million annual budget.

INCREASE THE PHILANTHROPIC PIE

Another way you can try to increase donations from

individuals is by being responsive to the skepticism many
potential donors feel about how nonprofits would spend their
money. This was a key to the success of charity: water, which
builds wells and other water projects to bring clean drinking
water to people in developing countries. Charity: water’s New
York City gala events, which raise millions of dollars in one
night, have become the envy of many in the nonprofit world.
But a vital early strategic choice founder Scott Harrison made
about soliciting funds was a lynchpin to early growth.
At the time he was starting the organization, Harrison
learned a startling statistic: 43 percent of Americans distrust
charity. When he asked friends about their views, many said,
“I don’t know where my money goes” or “Charities are black
holes, and very little money actually reaches the people who
need it.” This inspired him to innovate a new funding
approach with which to target that 43 percent of nongivers,
one where a few major donors or board members covered
operating expenses so that other donor contributions went
directly to cover program expenses, like building water wells;
this left no doubt as to how their money would be used. This
form of fundraising is now commonly called the “100 percent
model.”
Harrison also innovated by applying the standards of for-
profit advertising to building the charity: water brand. His first
hire after a program officer was a creative director. While
many people in the sector balk at spending money on
nonprofit marketing, Harrison sees it as a necessary way to
engage people in the cause. “A junk food company can spend
hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing food that is
killing us,” he told me, “and the most important life-saving
causes in the world have these anemic brands, ineffective
websites and a poverty mentality that they can’t look too good,
or else people will think they are spending the money
unwisely.” It wasn’t that the organization was pouring
significant money into marketing, but by being scrappy and
creative, while also being conscious of branding, charity:
water was able to achieve enormous success from word of
mouth.
Harrison has continued to innovate, also developing
creative ways his donors could get other people to give. For
example, with the birthday donation program, donors can ask
their friends on Facebook to donate the amount of their age
($35 for a thirty-five-year-old) in lieu of throwing a big party
or accepting gifts. They also host an annual gala called charity:
ball. One feature, which drew a great deal of press coverage a
few years back, was asking guests to walk down a fashion
show–like catwalk, referred to as the “waterwalk,” with two
yellow five-gallon jerry cans of water to simulate what it’s like
for those who have to walk miles a day with these jugs to
provide water for their families. More recently, they made five
hundred virtual reality headsets available at their event so that
all five hundred guests could experience “being” in Ethiopia
together at the same time. Collectively, these efforts have
allowed the organization to raise over $240 million in the ten
years since their founding.
Scott Harrison is certainly not alone. Every single
organization I spent time with during my study has brought
great creativity to raising money. Harrison has helped raise the
game in a number of ways, and all organizations can apply that
kind of ingenuity to doing the same.

BENCHMARKS FOR SOCIAL STARTUP SUCCESS: FUNDING

Does your organization have a clear mission that your staff

and board can easily describe?
Have you gathered your staff, board and/or external
stakeholders to brainstorm potential earned-income
sources?
Have you tested charging your beneficiaries for services
you already provide?
Are there any third parties—government entities or
companies—invested in your case that might be willing to
pay for services you already provide?
Do you have a multiyear fundraising plan?
Have you assessed your organizational capacity to ensure
you have the capacity within the organization—human
resources, financial stability, appetite for risk—to achieve
your fundraising goals?
Is your funding model consistent with your organizational
mission and values as opposed to detracting from them?
Have you engaged an attorney to explore potential legal
structures (i.e., nonprofit, for profit or a hybrid
combination) to accomplish your goals?
Have you created a realistic gift table with a corresponding
prospect list?
Have you developed an outreach calendar with a
personalized outreach plan for each prospect on your list?
Have you considered collaborating with other organizations
to pursue joint funding?
Have you connected with peers and/or existing funders to
brainstorm foundation introductions they may be able to
make for you?
Have you assessed your plan to make sure you are
dreaming big?
Have you, your staff and/or your board practiced making an
ask with trusted colleagues?
Have you considered other champions for the organization
who may be willing to fundraise on your behalf?
Have you considered fundraising from potentially untapped
sources?
 PART 4

LEADING
COLLABORATIVELY

One of the trickiest challenges in scaling any organization is

that you suddenly have to start managing people. A founder
usually works like a whirling dervish to get things off the
ground, either alone or with a partner, playing all roles:
program director, publicist, fundraiser, finance manager and
receptionist. But before long, to keep growing, it’s imperative
to start hiring people and creating a management structure. My
study showed this was the area in which most founders
believed they had made the most mistakes. Probing into the
problems they reported, I discovered there were three key
errors they made: (1) continuing to play too dominant a role in
the messaging about the organization and in running it; (2)
failing to hire people with the right expertise at the right time;
and (3) appointing the wrong people to the board. The leaders
of breakthrough social startups had done a better job of
managing these challenges, though many of them had also
made these mistakes at first and had to make course
corrections. In this set of chapters, we’ll explore the leadership
approaches and specific methods of team building that allowed
organizational leaders to free up their time so they could focus
on top priorities such as fundraising and strategic planning.
We’ll also learn how they hired the right people to do the right
jobs at the right time, and fostered a high level of engagement
and commitment to the mission. Finally, we’ll see how some
leaders created truly active boards, with expertise the
organization needed, and how invaluable that can be in
navigating leadership challenges.
 CHAPTER 10

One of the liabilities of starting a social enterprise is

succumbing to the pressures of the “cult of the social
entrepreneur.” Founders have become a new type of celebrity.
Think about Teach For America’s Wendy Kopp and Toms
Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie. When the media tells the
stories of successful organizations, the emphasis is usually
placed squarely on the remarkable passion and drive of their
founders, as though they alone made the organizations work.
The many prizes and fellowships given to founders from
Echoing Green, the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, the
Schwab Foundation, Ashoka, the Skoll Foundation and others,
though certainly to be applauded, also contribute to the
glamorization of founders. The effects are pernicious,
fostering a “trying to be superhuman” syndrome among
founders, and also leaving the crucial contributions of other
staff out of the limelight. Every successful founder will tell
you they couldn’t possibly have made their idea work if it
weren’t for the incredible contributions of their staff.
There is no question that founders of social enterprises
must be prepared to be the face of the organization, at least in
the early growth phase. They’ve got to take a leading role in
fashioning the message and spreading it, as well as in meeting
with funders to build support. But they’ve also got to learn to
distribute responsibility for building the organization and
credit for doing so throughout all levels of staff. Early on,
they’ve got to shift some of the weight from their own
shoulders. And they’ve got to provide all those working for the
organization with meaningful opportunities to contribute, and
to see the difference their contributions are making. In a study
of top-performing nonprofit organizations, Leslie Crutchfield
and Heather McLeod Grant found that “wise CEOs recognize
that they must share power if they are to unleash and magnify
the potential of their organizations. They learn to let go to have
greater impact.”1 Similarly, my study found that for early-
stage organizations in particular, collective leadership is
critical to allowing the CEO to focus on the fundraising and
strategic planning efforts that fuel growth.
As the great leadership scholar Warren Bennis once said,
“There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and
dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and
dancers can flourish.”2 To distribute responsibility and to
create an environment in which people feel empowered and
appreciated, and where social creativity flourishes, leaders can
draw on one of the most important innovations in business
leadership in recent years: doing away with the rigid top-down
hierarchical leadership model that came to dominate business
in the twentieth century, and giving staff more autonomy and
decision-making authority.

REVERSING THE PYRAMID

Many of the most dynamic organizations I studied are

incorporating elements of the “reverse pyramid” leadership
structure. The inverted leadership model was spearheaded by
the Nordstrom department store chain because, as Jim
Nordstrom says in The Nordstrom Way: “People will work
hard when they are given the freedom to do their job in the
way they think it should be done, when they treat customers
the way they like to be treated. When you take away their
incentive and start giving them rules, boom, you’ve killed their
creativity.”3 Recognizing that an engaged sales staff that felt
respected and empowered was the key lever to driving up
revenue, Nordstrom leadership gave them more autonomy in
their day-to-day work, and also asked for their views about
potential improvements in the company.
 The Nordstrom Reverse Pyramid
Model Where Everyone in the
Company Works to Support the Sales
Staff. Source: Robert Spector and
Patrick D. McCarthy, The Nordstrom
Way.

This same reverse pyramid has been adopted by many

technology companies in Silicon Valley, such as Netflix,
because it makes them more nimble, able to adapt more
readily to the rapid-fire changes they’re constantly facing in
their businesses. They can make decisions more quickly, and
more good ideas for improvements to products and services
are proposed by staff, because people understand that
leadership will hear their voices and actually listen to them.
What’s more, employees are energized by a new sense of
purpose, trust and appreciation.
Some of the social entrepreneurs I talked to also have put
more decision-making responsibility in the hands of staff, at
all levels, and they told me that doing so paves the way for fast
growth. One of these is Premal Shah, who came on board as
CEO of Kiva in 2006, after working as an executive at PayPal
for several years. After Kiva founders Jessica Jackley and
Matt Flannery appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007,
Kiva went into growth overdrive. Shah says he felt he had no
choice but to rely heavily on his frontline staff and volunteers
to help steer the ship. He told me: “If I were to distill Kiva’s
leadership style down to its essence, now that we have a
hundred staff and about five hundred volunteers at any point in
time, it’s all about ownership and allowing our staff to act like
owners.”

Some of the social entrepreneurs I talked to also have put

more decision-making responsibility in the hands of staff, at all
levels, and they told me that doing so paves the way for fast
growth.

One way Kiva does this is to have employees decide on

and manage their own metrics. They also allow staff to show
those metrics in a very public way, such as at staff meetings or
on their internal website, a wiki where anyone on the team can
update it at any time, so the team can learn from how others
are succeeding as well as failing. As Shah describes it: “It is a
very low cost, and simple thing, but it’s so essential to help
equip people to learn from the past, preserve their institutional
knowledge and feel like they have a resource to turn to when
they feel over their head.”
Another organizational leader who emphasizes the
importance of staff developing its own metrics is Nick
Ehrmann of Blue Engine, the teacher-mentoring program
based in New York City. He says doing so is not just about
empowerment; it’s also a more effective way to gauge whether
the programs are actually working. “I used to look at the data
and come up with theories with our program director about
why something was or wasn’t working. Now it’s upside down.
Frontline staff are the experts; they’re driving all of the
theories up and determining what they think is happening and
then I chime in after that.” In addition to being a more accurate
interpretation of an organization’s performance, Ehrmann says
this way of measuring success also builds a collective
responsibility to learn and get better. When people are in
charge of their own metrics, all of a sudden “the purpose of
data isn’t some kind of pure accountability mechanism to
distinguish between people who fail and people who succeed.
It’s about how can we all succeed together.”
Hand in hand with devolving authority, the leadership must
also foster a sense of accountability and responsibility. As
Nordstrom wrote on page 1 of the chain’s employee handbook,
that essentially comes down to inspiring people to “use good
judgment.”4 One way to foster responsibility is by creating
more mechanisms for transparency about operations and for
giving feedback. Kiva has established structured feedback
loops, not just top-down from the boss, but horizontally in
every direction. One example of how they solicit feedback is a
ritual they call Kiva Love: every month they pass a microfilm
recorder around the entire office, and staff members praise
each other for acts of courage and things they’ve done to be
selfless, which might have affected their own metric
negatively, but advanced the whole. According to Shah: “This
horizontal accountability system appears to be much more
impactful than our standard performance management system.
Whatever we can do to continue to make it easier for people to
see and recognize each other horizontally and support each
other seems to support this notion that everyone is an owner
and should act like an owner, and as Nordstrom would put it,
‘use good judgment.’”
Technology provides many great ways to establish more
transparency. One example is a method used by Watsi, a
crowdfunding platform for people with health care needs
around the world. Watsi was launched three years ago in the Y
Combinator accelerator (an intensive coaching program for
early-stage companies culminating in a Demo Day where they
present their ideas to a by-invitation-only audience) and has
now recruited 21,733 donors to fund life-changing health care
for 10,789 people. To put as much information as possible in
the hands of their staff, the organization has created group
emails for each department, and every time a team member
sends an email, internally or externally, they are required to
bcc (blind carbon copy) the list. People of course don’t read
every single email, but anyone at the organization can
subscribe to any list, and that way learn all about what each
department is working on at any time. This radical
transparency has been critical to empowering the staff at every
level to feel connected to the work of everyone at the
organization.
 BE AN EGOLESS LEADER

A culture of collective leadership involves not only how the

organization is structured and the allocation of responsibility,
but also the style of leadership from the top. Here the key is
what Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill dubbed
“leading from behind.” She was drawing on a phrase used by
South African president and legendary leader of the movement
against apartheid, Nelson Mandela. He wrote that a great
leader “stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out
ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along
they are being directed from behind.” Hill argues that this
leadership style is the best way to motivate people and to
unleash their creative potential.
One founder who works hard to try to lead from behind is
Rob Gitin of At The Crossroads. After Gitin’s cofounder
decided to leave the organization to attend medical school in
2001, Gitin found himself struggling to manage operations. He
decided to build a culture of collective leadership in which
everyone deeply understood the mission, was dedicated to
furthering it, and was given responsibility and credit for the
organization’s success. My visit to the offices clearly
conveyed how successfully he’s fostered a spirit of
engagement and empowerment. The energy in the room
exuded wholehearted passion. Indeed, every desk and corner
of the office displayed client mementos. Some of the staff
have been with the team for ten years or more.
It’s important to highlight that, as Linda Hill writes:
“Leading from behind doesn’t mean abrogating your
leadership responsibilities.” The heads of social startups
absolutely do need to be public promoters. Appearing in media
stories, speaking at conferences and generally presenting a
charming, charismatic public face for the organization’s larger
mission are vital. Founders must usually also take primary
responsibility for strategic planning and fundraising, at least at
the start. Funders usually expect to meet with founders, for
example, rather than other staff.
 Rob Gitin has certainly taken all his responsibilities as
founder of At The Crossroads seriously. But being a strong
leader who is the face and voice of an organization in no way
rules out also putting the spotlight on others and attributing
success to them. Gitin has often purposefully deflected
attention from himself to the organization as a whole. “When
you are a founder,” he told me, “people identify you as the
organization. I have been conscious that the less important I
make myself, the stronger and more sustainable the
organization is.” Asked how he’s done that, he offered a
number of insights. “Part of it is using ‘we’ language rather
than ‘I’ language, saying ‘we are engaging in this process’
rather than ‘I am leading this process.’” That goes for
communication outside the organization as well, such as in
meetings with funders or even clients. For example, if a client
says to someone on the team, “You are the only person that
really cares for me,” counselors are trained to respond, “Yes I
do care about you, and there is an entire team of people at this
organization that care about you too.” Gitin acknowledged that
it’s important for founders and executive directors to build a
high public profile, and that “you have to be comfortable using
your status to open doors, but as soon as you walk through
those doors, you start making the conversation about the
organization.”
Gitin is constantly creating ways to put his staff out in front
so he can lead from behind. He tries to identify when he is the
only one who has a relationship with a partner or a supporter
and takes his staff members to meetings with that person so
they too can develop their own relationship. When ATC
publishes its biannual newsletter, Gitin makes sure the stories
mention staff members other than himself, so readers can hear
their voices and appreciate that it’s not just him, but a whole
team of experts making the organization work. For example, in
a recent newsletter, ATC highlighted the story of a client
named Bubbles, whose five children ended up in adoptive
families after she became homeless due to drug addition.
Bubbles has been working with ATC for sixteen years to
transform her life. The newsletter highlights the work of
ATC’s program manager Shawn Garety to develop the
relationship with Bubbles. As Shawn says, “Bubbles’
profound wisdom, sharp wit and tenacity have kept me and
ATC on our toes, laughing through and through. Over the
years, we have been able to find humor in the darkest and
brightest of our times together.” By highlighting Garety’s
strong personal relationship with her clients, Gitin allowed her
to take center stage, as opposed to hogging it for himself. He’s
realized that not only is this important from a morale
perspective, to make the staff feel appreciated, but also from a
practical perspective. He explains: “It’s dangerous if I’m the
only person talking to the outside world, because it creates a
bottleneck.” Now, instead of Gitin having a line of people
waiting to meet with him, At The Crossroads accomplishes
much more with multiple team members acting as the faces of
the organization, including Garety.
Gitin is also continuously looking for opportunities to
transfer responsibilities from himself to his staff. It’s not easy
to establish which responsibilities to retain and which to give
up, and it’s an evolving process. He says he’s always
recalibrating. For example, in 2012 when he took a seven-
week sabbatical from the organization, he delegated his
responsibilities to senior staffers. When he returned, he took
back only about half the things he had delegated. He also told
me that when he devised a new strategic plan with a key
funder, his leadership team asserted their views about changes
that should be made to it. “They came to me and they laid out
all these things they felt we needed to do, and it was
awesome.”
Jim Collins sagely wrote in his business management
classic Good to Great: “You can accomplish anything in life,
provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.” Rob Gitin
and At The Crossroads are a great testament to that wisdom.

YOU CAN HAVE A LIFE

Leading from behind is important not only because it allows

staff to take more ownership over the mission of the
organization, but because it helps prevent exhaustion. One of
the biggest problems I heard about in my survey of social
enterprise leaders was that they felt burned out, or close to it.
Tomás Alvarez, the founder of Beats Rhymes and Life, a hip-
hop therapy organization that serves youth in West Oakland,
told me that when he left his organization after ten years of
working seven days a week, it took him a year of
decompression to recover. He said that at the time it felt
virtuous to work so hard to make his community a better
place, but ultimately it was unhealthy. “When you’re a social
entrepreneur, the idea of prioritizing yourself feels so
counterintuitive because the issues we’re trying to solve are so
pressing, and we don’t want people to have to suffer. But
because I didn’t set boundaries, I ended up burning myself
out.” This is one of the great benefits of learning to diffuse
responsibility. It allows you to make time in your life for
family and friends and the other passions that energize you.
You really can right-size your time commitment. Louise
Langheier, for example, has maintained a great work life
balance even as she’s founded and built a highly successful
collective management structure for Peer Health Exchange.
Founded fourteen years ago, Peer Health Exchange has an
annual operating budget of $7.9 million, employs sixty people
and has trained more than eighty-five hundred college student
volunteers to deliver effective health education to more than
115,000 public high school students in New York City, Boston,
Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. In
recent years, funding for wellness and sex education classes
has been slashed, leaving teens vulnerable to unintended
pregnancy, rape and sexual assault, drug addiction and other
health-related problems. Through the strategic intervention of
Peer Health Exchange, Langheier envisions a future “where
health education is just a part of what a school provides its
kids. Where it is required and funded and has a really high set
of standards for what it teaches.”
I visited Langheier at her office, located in a small San
Francisco alleyway called Gold Street, the historical hub of the
gold trade during California’s gold rush era. I say “her office,”
but she doesn’t actually have one. When I walked into the
large, open-plan loft-style space, with nineteenth-century
exposed brick walls and long rows of tables, she popped up
from smack dab in the middle of the room, waving to greet
me. The open space gives no indication as to who in the room
is a manager and who is an assistant. The room bustles with
activity, like the trading floor of an investment bank.
Right from the start, even before she created this office
space, Langheier sought to share her leadership responsibility.
She launched the pilot for Peer Health Exchange, alongside
her peers, while she was a student at Yale University. When
the school district cut funding for health education, a public
high school teacher in New Haven, Connecticut, asked Yale
students to teach health workshops, hoping college students
would be more relatable than he was, as an older educator.
Langheier and five other students took on the challenge, and
enjoyed the experience so much that they began holding health
workshops at many other high schools around New Haven.
Langheier realized she found the work stimulating far beyond
the scope of a simple extracurricular activity, so she decided to
continue with it after she graduated. But she didn’t want to do
it all by herself. She convinced another student, Katy Dion, to
join her as the cofounder of a nonprofit. Because she had a
cofounder, she explains, she always felt accountable to
someone else, and when they started the work of getting the
company up and running, they established a practice of giving
each other regular, no-holds-barred feedback.
As the organization took off, they extended their
partnership outward and started sharing responsibility with the
growing staff. “The cofounder model is part of our DNA,”
Langheier says. Every time they decided to bring in a new
employee, they made the recruit feel like a team member, not
someone coming in as a subordinate to an all-powerful
founder. Langheier and Dion thought seriously about ways to
divvy up responsibilities so they could give all their people a
strong sense of ownership, whether over a new program or a
fundraising campaign or a staffing decision.
The trust she’s placed in her team has greatly motivated
employees, and it’s been a powerful recruiting tool. Highly
talented applicants flock to openings at Peer Health Exchange
because they know they will be given authority over high-level
decisions, whereas in many other organizations planning is the
domain of the founder or board. Many team members stay on
for years, even though they have great prospects elsewhere.
“Our VP of programs has been here for nine years,” Langheier
tells me proudly. “She could be doing anything because she’s
so talented, but she stays because she feels she owns this
program.”
The remarkable strength of the structure and culture is
probably best demonstrated, though, by the decision Langheier
made in 2004, only a year after the organization’s inception.
Peer Health Exchange was headquartered in New York at that
time, and Langheier lived nearby. That year her mother, who
lived in San Francisco, was diagnosed with cancer, and
Langheier decided she wanted to spend as much of her time as
possible enjoying her mother’s company back in San
Francisco. She commuted to the West Coast every weekend,
doing her best to manage her responsibilities remotely when
necessary.
As it turned out, because Dion and Langheier had shared
many of their relationships with funders and other partners,
Dion was able to seamlessly take over working with them
when Langheier could not be there. For example, Dion and
Langheier had written the curriculum and designed the
trainings together, so Dion was able to pick up and run the
health education programming. They had also participated
together in many external meetings with board members and
donors, so when Langheier’s mom passed away and she could
not be in those meetings because she was busy making funeral
arrangements with her family, Dion could easily handle them.
When Langheier did return to New York full time, the
organization was all the stronger because others had taken
charge; they had become even more proficient managers of the
mission.
In recent years, Langheier has established an enviable
balance between her work and personal life, reserving her
nights and weekends for sacred family time. “It doesn’t even
occur to me to work on a weekend,” she says, “unless the
organization is facing some crisis or we have a special
program training I want to attend alongside our staff.” She
hasn’t even come close to the burnout many social
entrepreneurs struggle with, claiming that fourteen years later
she still feels “genuinely excited to come in to work every
day.”
Of course, Langheier’s less-controlling role within Peer
Health Exchange is not without its challenges. She’s met with
some criticism for largely staying out of the media spotlight.
Her board, for example, has suggested that she seek more
press and emphasize her own story and role in interviews. Her
staff has also sometimes told her they would like to get more
direction from her about important decisions. Finding the
sweet spot in delegating responsibility is always a challenge,
and the right mix is a moving target. When an organization is
launching a major new initiative, for example, the founder or
executive director should undoubtedly play a prominent role in
promoting it.
Langheier thinks the benefits of her approach have far
outweighed any difficulties. And she constantly receives
support for that conviction, both from inside and outside the
organization. At a recent leadership summit where Langheier’s
senior team presented the organization’s strategic plan to forty
of Peer Health Exchange’s top funders, they were thrilled to
see the depth of the leadership bench. On her most recent
maternity leave, Langheier left feeling confident the
organization would continue to thrive in her absence, in the
very capable hands of her five-person senior leadership team,
which comprises a chief of sites, chief of shared services, vice
president of programs and strategic partnerships, vice
president of external affairs and vice president of finance, tech,
and operations—and thrive it did.
 SPEND QUALITY TIME ON HIRING

Of course, giving employees at all levels more responsibility

requires they be well equipped to exercise that responsibility.
It’s vital that people have the right skills, and in nonprofit
work the right degree of passion for the mission as well.
Leaders must make hiring decisions carefully and strategically.
One of the biggest pitfalls early-stage organizations
reported in my study was hiring people who weren’t right for
the job. Throughout my interviews, I heard story after story
about hiring and staff development mistakes. Sarah
Hemminger, the founder of Thread, which supports
underperforming high school students through mentoring,
succinctly stated that in the beginning she had “absolutely no
clue how to hire the right people.” Carolyn Laub, the founder
of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, ticked off her mistakes
in rapid fire: “I made bad hires, I wasn’t good at managing, I
was losing members of my team, who were burned out.”
Bad hiring decisions can be horribly costly. A Harvard
Business Review study estimated that mistakes in hiring, such
as a poor skills match, account for 80 percent of employee
turnover; and research shows that for a nonprofit, the average
cost of a single bad hire, whether the person remains with the
company doing subpar work or needs to be replaced, is tens of
thousands of dollars.5
To combat the disruption and expense of such mistakes, a
hiring strategy is enormously helpful, not only in identifying
the right people, but in communicating to them what their
roles will be, precisely what your expectations are and your
plans for continuing to grow the organization with their help.
With a comprehensive and clearly communicated hiring
strategy, expectations are clear on both sides, and great people
are more likely to accept jobs, because they have confidence
you’ve got a good growth plan.
One leader who learned this lesson the hard way is Thread
CEO Sarah Hemminger. She got the idea for Thread from
having watched a friend in his first year of high school. Once a
varsity athlete and straight-A student, he began to struggle and
missed more than thirty days of school after a devastating car
accident left his mother temporarily paralyzed, unable to work,
addicted to prescription medications and forced to move into
public housing. Fortunately for him, his teachers intervened.
“A group of them got together and said, ‘Look, we’re just not
going to let this happen,’” Hemminger recalls. They began
driving to his house, making sure he had breakfast, and driving
him to school. Her friend, Ryan, turned his life around and was
able to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. But the success story
doesn’t end there. Eventually, Hemminger convinced her
friend to date her—they have been married for eighteen
years.6
Thread began as an all-volunteer organization. Hemminger,
who felt lonely and isolated after moving to Baltimore to
pursue her PhD in biomedical engineering, was volunteering at
a high school and met many students like Ryan: exceptional
individuals in extraordinarily challenging situations. As she
connected with these students, she quickly realized that
forming genuine relationships might offer her the loving
community she was missing and them the kind support that
had helped Ryan years before. These students became the first
cohort of Thread, which targets students academically
performing in the bottom 25 percent of their freshman class,
with an average GPA of 0.15 on a 4.0 scale, and who face
significant barriers outside the classroom. As the program
grew, Hemminger recruited volunteer mentors from her
graduate school program. She asked them to conduct after-
school tutoring sessions, and quickly had enough volunteers to
assign just one mentee to each mentor, a great one-to-one
model. As more and more people volunteered and they had
more volunteers than students to counsel, they changed the
model and paired multiple volunteers with each student, which
is how the Thread concept of a “family” of support was born.
Today, students are paired with up to five volunteers who do
things like pack their lunches, give them a ride to school, tutor
them and help them find a summer job. “Anything you would
do for your own child is basically what we do for our
children,” Hemminger says.7
Although the program was booming, Hemminger soon
realized that the model would be unsustainable unless they
began hiring staff. Never having hired before, she started by
dividing all the work she had been doing into new staff
positions. “We had absolutely no clue how to really do a needs
assessment or create job descriptions, let alone profile the right
people for the right roles.” As a result, Hemminger made some
terrible hires. “It wasn’t that these were bad people, it was just
that we didn’t know what we wanted or needed or how to
select effectively.” Once she realized that things weren’t
working, Hemminger went to her board, to her funders and to
anyone who cared about the mission who had human resources
expertise and was willing to advise her. With their guidance,
Thread created processes to make sure they brought in people
with the right skills and passion for the mission; that system
has worked well as the organization has continued to grow.
Being strategic about hiring requires taking more time,
which can be a difficult self-discipline. As Abby Falik of
Global Citizen Year told me: “It can be so tempting to make
quick hires because it relieves the pain of not having someone
in a critical role.” One of the best ways to evaluate whether
someone is fit for a job is to ask them to do an assignment.
Abby Falik advocated this practice and gave some great
examples. “If the role is managing finance, you could ask
them to build a financial model and present it in easy to
understand terms to some members of your team. Or if you’re
hiring for a sales or fundraising role, you could have them
develop a pitch and actually make it to a group of people on
your team or your board. If the role is strategic planning, you
could ask that they develop the rubric they would use for
evaluating your program and presenting a new strategy to the
board.” This also allows you to spread responsibility for hiring
to your team, getting valuable feedback from them about
whether the person is the right match for the job.
Another piece of advice leaders gave is that it’s vital to take
the time while interviewing to evaluate whether or not
someone is a good fit, not only according to skills but also for
your organization’s culture. That is of course easier said than
done. One way of clarifying this is to talk very openly with
candidates about your culture; include not only aspects that
just about anyone would find appealing, such as that you
emphasize collaboration and support of colleagues, but also
those that might be challenging, like transparency. Some
people might not like a culture that encourages subordinates to
speak up with critiques.
Many leaders I interviewed told me they have developed
one key question that helps them evaluate cultural fit, along
the lines of the favorite question venture capitalist Peter Thiel
says he likes to ask: “Tell me something that’s true, that almost
nobody agrees with you on.” This helps him find employees
who aren’t afraid to speak their minds. Abby Falik always asks
interview candidates to tell her about their first job ever,
because “it’s typically not on their resume, or a response they
have practiced. The question is disarming and forces someone
to drop into presenting something fresh and authentic about
themselves. It helps me read whether this person can be
vulnerable and also puts them in a more grounded, and less
habitual, place for the rest of the interview.” That’s an
important quality in staff, given that self-reflection is at the
heart of Global Citizen Year’s mission. She also asks
candidates, “What would you do if you didn’t have to work for
money?” to see where their passions really lie.
Other leaders ask interview questions that get directly at
whether someone is a team player. For example, Premal Shah
of Kiva screens for optimism by asking a candidate: “How
many bad days would you say you have in a given year?” As
he reveals: “I’m looking for people who honestly struggle to
come up with an answer or who would put it at a very few
number of bad days a year, because our work is really hard so
optimism is critical to creating the climate where we can get
our work done.” For Charles Best at DonorsChoose, his
question is “Who are you most grateful for?” This question
screens out a huge number of candidates: “You’d be shocked
at the proportion of candidates who cannot list more than their
mom when asked that question.” For DonorsChoose this
question is important because it’s a very good proxy for
humility and gratitude, and the kind of person you want to
work with. “Don’t you want to work with the person who can
rattle off ten people they’re grateful for, like their coach, their
former teacher, the manager of their last job?”

CORRECT MISTAKES QUICKLY

Even after implementing these practices, you will almost

inevitably discover that you’ve hired some people who aren’t
good fits. Don’t fret about it; take action. The rule of thumb
I’ve heard over and over from nonprofit leaders is that you
must be “slow to hire and quick to fire.” If someone isn’t
working out, you can give them a chance to improve, but
drawing it out over several months when you know in your gut
they aren’t a match for your team isn’t helpful to anyone. This
is a hard rule for many nonprofit leaders to follow because
they tend to be so empathetic and also to think of their staff as
family. That sometimes makes letting people go very tough.
Rob Gitin from At The Crossroads, who faced many early
hiring challenges, ultimately realized that hiring and firing
decisions must be only about the mission, not about making
people happy. That realization was game changing for him. He
told me: “Especially as a leader, one of the biggest things you
can do in helping the organization accomplish the mission is to
find a way to quickly transition people out when they’re not
the right fit. They can be amazing people, but that might not
make them the right fit. Every single person on the staff has to
have one reason for being there: to accomplish the mission.”

PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR LEARNING AND BONDING

Once you have all the right people on board, you have to
spend quality time helping them bond and develop their
talents. Great teams don’t just happen. They are the product of
very deliberate team-building efforts. With such pressing
workloads, taking time to focus on your people rather than
your program and supporters can be a real challenge. As a
result, many nonprofit leaders end up putting team building on
the back burner. That’s a big mistake. Providing opportunities
for socializing with colleagues and for learning, taking people
away from the daily grind for a respite, not only energizes and
bonds people, but also helps prevent burn out. Carolyn Laub,
who started the Gay-Straight Alliance Network when she was
barely out of college, told me: “Over and over I had staff leave
that I desperately wanted to stay but they were burned out;
clearly the pace of the work that I was willing to do was not
the same that staff were expecting.” Providing opportunities
for your staff to learn and bond is also critical to developing a
culture where people have each other’s backs and feel
connected to the organization, not just the cause, in an
emotional way.

Great teams don’t just happen. They are the product of very
deliberate team-building efforts.

Rafael Alvarez, founder of Genesys Works, is a huge

proponent of creating ways for his staff to socialize.
Particularly important was bringing people from different
offices together as the organization expanded. Alvarez started
to see early signs of friction between his founding team and
the new additions. “I knew I had to nip it in the bud,” he said.
He decided to invest in a three-day retreat for the entire team.
The event was a huge success, and Alvarez told me that “it
wasn’t anything fancy, but had it not been for that retreat we
would not exist today, I guarantee you that.” The retreat has
become a yearly event, even as the organization has grown
much larger over the years.
Many other organizations I talked to hold similar annual
retreats. Alan Khazei, the cofounder of City Year, talks about
the organization’s annual retreats as critical to building a
common culture during its founding years. “We had an
extremely diverse corps, from people who hadn’t graduated
from high school to Harvard graduates, so we realized early on
that we had to build a very unique culture that would bring
everyone together.” Today, retreats and trainings are key to the
effective delivery of City Year’s service in more than three
hundred schools nationwide.
Charity: water connects its staff to the cause by taking
everyone on its staff, regardless of what department they work
in, from accounting to engineering to product design, at least
once on a one-week trip to visit its water projects around the
world. As CEO Scott Harrison says, “No one is going to get
rich working for charity: water, so our job is to connect them
to the mission, because that’s the reason they’re here.”
Genesys Works, CityYear and charity: water are all large
organizations that can afford these kinds of national and global
all-staff retreats, but team-building does not have to be
expensive. Global Citizen Year, for example, has borrowed
from Acumen Fund to hold all-hands meetings on Mondays,
when they bring in someone inspiring from the field to make a
presentation. According to Abby Falik: “Because I’m in an
external-facing role I spend a lot of my time getting inspired
about the work from other people outside of our organization,
but that’s not true for most of our staff.” Bringing the staff
together once a week to learn from outside experts helps them
to think in new ways about the organization’s work, and to feel
invested not only in the cause but also in the organization,
because it is investing in their professional development.
Charles Best from DonorsChoose has developed an online
system for his staff to connect using the tech platform Slack,
through which staff can create conversation threads around
common areas of interest. For example, they have a channel
for parents, a channel for fitness buffs and a channel for
inspirational projects where people can say, “Did you see this
amazing project a teacher created?” This allows the staff to
stay connected to each other and to continually be inspired by
the organization’s mission. Ultimately, he says, being engaged
and feeling connected is what makes people stay.
In order to optimize the potential of these organizational
and culture-building methods, founders and CEOs need the
help of a strong executive team. Reversing the pyramid does
not mean an organization should have no management
structure at all; in fact, it works best when departments each
have their own strong leaders to guide them. We’ll see in the
next chapter how a number of leaders have built strong
executive teams and benefited hugely from being able to
delegate so much responsibility to them.
 CHAPTER 11

Transmitting responsibility and autonomy throughout an

organization does not require a radically “flat” management
structure. In fact, in order to diffuse responsibility widely, you
must have the right expertise in the right key senior positions,
at the right time. Think of these managers as the tent poles that
allow you to keep widening the tent and inviting others into
the management team. You’ll need to exercise astute judgment
about who you can ask to take charge of what. If you’ve got an
experienced program director, for example, they can figure out
how responsibilities for particular parts of projects can be
apportioned without overloading staff, and can also make sure
they get the right training and guidance. Someone with less
expertise in developing programs won’t know about certain
pitfalls and may make bad decisions about giving people
responsibility. Rob Gitin, for example, in the early days of
bringing on staff made the mistake of giving counseling
responsibility to some people who weren’t appropriately
matched for street outreach. Initially, he thought that
someone’s passion about the work would be enough to make
them a strong counselor. But he quickly realized that their
having certain important traits, such as self-awareness, was
essential. For example, one of his early counselors took
criticism very personally and had a hard time implementing
feedback. This might have been fine for a structured
organization, but it did not work for At The Crossroads, where
street outreach was very unstructured and required its
counselors to hold themselves accountable.

Bringing in people with expertise for certain roles frees a

 founder to focus on the most important work he or she should
be doing, which in the early growth phase is generally building
relationships with major funders and figuring out overall
strategic planning.

Bringing in people with expertise for certain roles frees a

founder to focus on the most important work he or she should
be doing, which in the early growth phase is generally building
relationships with major funders and figuring out overall
strategic planning. Too many founders get so swamped by
attending to the day-to-day operations that they don’t have
time to think about the big picture.

YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE WORLD ALONE

Jim Collins famously wrote in Good to Great that CEOs who

took their companies to a higher “great” level of performance
“first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the
bus, and the right people in the right seats.”1 He stressed that
these CEOs prioritized getting the senior people they needed
in place before they focused on developing the strategy for
taking the organization to the next level. In my study, I
interviewed several founders who told me they prioritized this
way, and that it made all the difference in scaling up faster.
One such founder is Laura Weidman Powers, who started
Code2040. Early on, the company had a hard time keeping up
with fundraising. “By the end of 2013, we were headed to
running out of cash,” Powers recalls. “I realized that if I didn’t
turn 100 percent of my time to fundraising, we would run out
of money.” She hired two senior managers, a vice president of
programs and a vice president of operations, so she could
devote herself entirely to that mission. “I left the program in
the hands of my capable staff. Six months later, we had raised
a million and a half dollars, and by the end of the year we
closed on $2.5 million.” Meanwhile, the operations of the
organization hadn’t suffered.
When she brought her focus back to the operations side of
things, Powers saw that her vice president of programs had
done an excellent job of keeping the fellowship program afloat
while she was preoccupied. She realized that fundraising had
been occupying too much of her time, when what she really
needed to do was focus on external relations and strategy. By
permanently handing over the bulk of the programming work
and hiring additional fundraising staff, Powers has freed up an
enormous amount of her time, allowing her to focus on high-
level fundraising and partnership development with tech
companies. The shift in roles has also given her the space to
think more strategically about how to address the larger
problem of diversity in the tech industry, rather than having to
spend so much time in the weeds of internal management
systems. Code2040, meanwhile, is flourishing; by 2017 it had
grown to an annual budget of $8 million with a staff of thirty-
two, which has matched over 250 fellows with seventy-five
tech companies since its inception.
While some organizations may require senior staff to boost
their programming, nonprofits with a technology angle may
require senior staff to lead their tech platform. Another
founder who invested early in hiring senior leadership is Rey
Faustino, who started One Degree in 2012. Faustino’s $80,000
in seed money came from an Echoing Green fellowship he
won for his plan to develop an innovative technology
platform. The platform bridges the gap between social services
agencies and the myriad people who need those services, but
don’t access them; on the site people can easily find local
offerings, such as food banks, medical clinics, after school
activities and counseling.
As he began to put the grant to work, Faustino understood
that the development of an efficient and appealing website was
crucial to One Degree’s success. But he had little experience in
information technology, so he decided to bring in a chief
technology officer. “I could have brought on someone with
basic engineering expertise to just build whatever I told them
to build,” he told me. “Or I could have outsourced it. But I
knew I wanted a version of me, but technical. Someone who
was visionary, who could build the architecture of this product
and the future product while I built other parts of the
organization, whether on the operations side or on the
fundraising side.”
Hiring a talented person for the role required the majority
of his $80,000 funding, so Faustino paid himself very little and
lived largely off ramen noodles for the first year. But by the
end of that year, his chief technology officer had rebuilt their
entire product, developing stronger feedback loops within the
site to figure out who was visiting it and how best to serve
their customers. By 2017, he’d brought the organization to
$1.2 million in annual revenue.
Of course, not every founder realized the wisdom of
bringing on senior managers so quickly. In fact, the number
one mistake founders identified in looking back at their
organizations’ trajectories was failing to delegate to qualified
senior staff early on. Carolyn Laub is one of them. She started
the Gay-Straight Alliance Network when she was just twenty-
three years old, having come out as bisexual in college; shortly
afterward she founded a support group for lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) youth
in high school. As a young adult, she joined a youth-driven
effort to advocate for a California statewide school
nondiscrimination law and experienced firsthand the power of
young people advocating for themselves. While running the
support group, she got inspired by a young woman group
member who had started a Gay-Straight Alliance
extracurricular student club at a Palo Alto high school that was
vigorous in standing up for LGBTQ students. When teachers
failed to protect LGBTQ students from their peers’
harassment, the group asked for and won the opportunity to
train all the teachers on how to intervene in incidents of
bullying. Emboldened by the group’s success, Laub decided to
create a formal organization and work to grow it to national
scope. But she can see now that for years growth was
hampered by her failure to build a strong upper management
team. For many years, the only staff she brought in were
organizers to work directly with student groups. She hired no
one to help with fundraising or communications or staff
development, taking all those responsibilities on herself.
The result was that by the time the Gay-Straight Alliance
Network was seven years old, although it was doing good
work, she had only been able to raise enough funding to hire
six staff members, and she was still doing nearly all the high-
level work herself. To scale the California-based program
nationally, on the one hand she knew she needed support staff
for the fundraising, marketing and communications work, but
on the other hand she could not afford to hire people. It wasn’t
until 2005, when she created a national plan for growth with
the help of a consultant, that she realized she needed to hire a
national program manager to manage the programming as well
as the development and communications staff, which would
allow her to focus on her personal strengths for fundraising
and strategy. Within a year, Gay-Straight Alliance Network’s
revenue began to take off, and the program expanded into
dozens of states and eventually become a nationwide
organization.
In addition to assuring an organization has the needed
expertise and freeing up the founder or CEO’s time, there is
another important reason to bring in senior managers early.
Research on startups shows that their growth has a “path
dependent” nature, meaning the early nature of an organization
tends to become fixed in its DNA, and that can make changing
the style of management down the road quite difficult. In fact,
studies show this is a key reason why many organizations go
through difficult growing pains, sometimes to the point of
threatening their continued existence. Say that for the first few
years, the founder hires no senior managers and takes direct
responsibility for all the key management functions. All the
staff are direct reports, and build trust and respect for the
founder as a supervisor. Now, if the founder brings in someone
to take over direct management of staff, staff may resent
getting less face time with the founder. Their antipathy toward
the new boss, and to the new procedures, or changes in
programming, may undermine their sense of belonging and
commitment. That resentment can in turn make the new senior
manager’s job a good deal harder. Often, valuable employees
leave at this juncture, taking vital organizational knowledge
and camaraderie with them. By setting up a strong
management structure early, you avoid this shock to the
system.

CREATE A VISION FOR YOUR IDEAL SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAM

Senior positions, and the responsibilities they entail, should be

tailored specifically to each organization and founder, and
designed to complement the founder’s strengths and
weaknesses. There is no standard template leaders can follow
to make these decisions; each organization must develop a
specific hiring strategy. As we saw in the examples above,
while Laura Powers benefited most from hiring a high-level
program administrator to take charge of running workshops
and training classes, Rey Faustino really needed a chief
technology officer to help him launch One Degree. We all tend
to have some biases about our own abilities, so making the
assessment requires a founder to engage in an honest analysis
of his or her own strengths, as well as those of the existing
staff. Spending time to develop a plan for what you want your
senior leadership team to look like is key to success.
One founder described an especially helpful method for
doing this. Abby Falik developed her idea for Global Citizen
Year while she was still a student at Harvard Business School.
Her inspiration for the organization came from her experience
after graduating from high school, when she wished she could
have taken some time before starting college to travel and get
experience out in the world. She entered the Harvard Business
School Pitch for Change competition, outlining her vision of a
bridge year before college. When she won first place, she
immediately began raising seed capital. Global Citizen Year,
now in its sixth year of operation, has assisted hundreds of
fellows to raise the money to take a bridge year.
Falik lacked experience in hiring and developing staff, but
realized early on that she needed to be strategic about it. She
quickly began working with a pro bono leadership coach, who
assigned her an interesting exercise. “He told me to take a
week and map out everything I did with my time that gave me
energy, and then to note the things that depleted me or took my
energy. At the end of the week, I took it back to him and he
said, ‘Your job is simple: build a team that sets you up to be
doing exclusively the things that give you energy.’” He
encouraged her to write job descriptions for all the work that
depleted her and hire people who were instead energized by
those tasks. Through this analysis process, Falik realized that
what she really loved was being a “professional inspirer,”
working with people to spread the message of the
organization. Yet most of her time was being sucked up by
internal operations and management, which she dreaded. She
developed a plan she says has been her “North Star” as she has
grown the organization over the last five years.
Her first step was to bring in an executive administrative
assistant to support her. While this might seem like a luxury
for a founder in the early growth phase, Falik reports that it
allowed her to do much more of the work she’s best at, in
particular, freeing her to do more fundraising. She realized: “If
I’m paying someone $4,000 a month in an executive
administrative role, that might pay for itself, if I’m able to take
a couple of extra donor meetings a year.” Looking at other
young social startups, Falik says that many starve themselves,
failing to think boldly and hire the expert team they need to
drive strong growth. “By definition you have to be a risk
taker,” she reflected, and part of that is spending the money to
hire the right people earlier than you may be entirely
comfortable with.

You can be creative with job descriptions and titles. Don’t get
restricted by traditional titles like “chief financial officer” or
“development director”; instead, learn how to embrace
people’s unique qualities and let that translate into the titles
you give them.

So how does an early-stage organization craft a clear hiring

plan for its senior team? First, examine your own strengths and
weaknesses. As Falik constantly tries to do, be honest about
what you are good at and what gives you energy. Bring in
people who can complement your strengths and compensate
for your weaknesses. Many organizational leaders hire
management coaches to help them with this process. New
leaders in particular can benefit from a management coach
who knows how to work side by side with them to develop a
great hiring plan. You can be creative with job descriptions
and titles. Don’t get restricted by traditional titles like “chief
financial officer” or “development director”; instead, learn
how to embrace people’s unique qualities and let that translate
into the titles you give them. For example, Beth Schmidt from
Wishbone wanted to hire a development director, but when she
posted the job description using that title she had a hard time
getting great candidates for the job. After she changed the title
to “director of partnerships” she attracted a lot of people from
the business world who had been in business development
roles.

LEARN TO LET GO

Even once you have a great senior team in place, one of the
hardest things to do, especially for the founder of an
organization, is to let go of trying to have their hands in
everything that is happening. Even Premal Shah, CEO of
Kiva, who managed an enormous team of staff almost from
the start, constantly struggles with how to let go of
micromanaging. He learned a good discipline from Meg
Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard: at the start of every month
he writes down everything he is doing and examines the list to
see what he can uniquely do best, where he is the most
valuable. He asks himself, What are the things other people
could do? and finds ways to shift those tasks off his plate. This
has allowed both him and his senior leadership team to
flourish.
Abby Falik of Global Citizen Year learned a similar lesson
from Michael Brown, the cofounder of City Year. He told her
that as a founder your inclination is to hold on tightly to
everything, to want to control it all. At some point as you hire
senior people specialized in the areas where they work, it
becomes natural to start letting go and delegating, because you
know the organization can only thrive when you do so. That
said, Brown’s instruction to her was to always know the three
things you’re going to be obsessive about, the three things
you’re never going to let fully out of your control. According
to Falik: “For me it’s been around our vision, our external
branding and messaging, and our hiring. I just know that I
can’t take my eye off those three functions at any level, but if
it doesn’t fall within those parameters, I need to be willing to
let it go.”
Even when people know they have to let go, it can be very
hard to do so. In fact, some weren’t able to until
circumstances, such as going on maternity leave, forced their
hand. Leaders can achieve this by design by taking a
sabbatical, as Rob Gitin did at At The Crossroads. “By taking
that time off I had to identify which of my responsibilities
would lay fallow during that time versus which ones would be
taken up by others.” As Gitin recalls in hindsight: “If we’ve
built a place that relies on us too much, ultimately it will fail.”
Having the courage and the skill to let your senior staff
succeed without you, even if only temporarily, just might be
the most important thing you can do as a leader.
 CHAPTER 12

Another way the fast-growth organizations I studied leveraged

talent was by appointing highly engaged board members with
valuable connections and expertise, and drawing actively on
that expertise. Too often, nonprofit leaders describe building a
relationship with their boards as a waste of time. They report
that preparing for board meetings, attending committee
gatherings and meeting one on one with board members fails
to yield significant payoffs. Many also look to their boards
exclusively for fundraising assistance, selecting members
purely for their marquee value in impressing donors, and their
ability to tap their networks for funds. This leads to frustration
because while some board members are vigorous in offering
this assistance, many are not. In fact, only 15 percent of survey
respondents reported their boards were involved in
fundraising, with 66 percent saying they wished their board
would help more on fundraising. This is a huge disconnect.
One reason this happens is that many early-stage social
entrepreneurs take the “friends and family” approach to
building their boards, rather than putting in the work to find
board members with relevant expertise. By contrast, many of
the founders who scaled their organizations quickly made
great use of their boards, recognizing that the right board
members could offer invaluable advice as well as provide
important introductions and, yes, help significantly with
fundraising too. These founders appointed board members
with accounting expertise to help create a financial model for
growth, as well as members with experience in
entrepreneurship and hiring, who were willing to work their
connections. In particular, a strong working relationship
between the board chair and executive director can be a huge
catalyst for growth.

Areas Where Nonprofit Leaders Say

Boards Offer Helpful Input versus
Areas Where Nonprofit Leaders Would
Like Boards to Be More Helpful

How do nonprofit leaders get the most out of their boards?

It all starts with recruiting the right people.

RECRUITING STRONG BOARD MEMBERS

Only about half of the respondents to the survey reported that

they thought their board members had the expertise the
organization needed to meaningfully contribute to its growth.
This failure to access talent on boards is thwarting the
potential of the entire sector.
Nonprofit leaders face three primary challenges when it
comes to recruiting strong boards. First, despite being
connected to the communities they serve, leaders may feel
they don’t have access to the caliber of people who can help
them raise money. Second, nonprofit leaders may not be sure
of exactly what kind of expertise is needed for their
organization’s board. And finally, it can take a long time to
recruit new board members; the process of finding the right
people, meeting with them to assess interest and waiting for a
board meeting to officially vote on them can take several
months.

Many of the founders who scaled their organizations quickly

made great use of their boards, recognizing that the right
 board members could offer invaluable advice as well as
provide important introductions and, yes, help significantly
with fundraising too.

A common myth is that the people able to recruit strong

board members just happen to be more connected than the rest
of us. My experience is that this isn’t always the case; there
are a lot of nonprofit leaders out there who hustle to find
people who can be useful to them. Ellen Moir, the founder of
New Teacher Center, came from humble roots. Her mom
didn’t graduate from high school and her father barely did,
spending his life scraping by selling men’s clothing. She
started her organization as a former teacher and based it in the
sleepy tree-lined downtown heart of Santa Cruz, where her
office was sandwiched between the Sockshop and Awesome
Granola. She did not have opportunities to hobnob with
nonprofit power brokers there. But she didn’t let that stop her,
spending many of her early days driving over the hill to
Silicon Valley where she could network with tech executives.
At one point, when the organization already had a relatively
large budget of $10 million, Moir received a $100,000 grant
from Silicon Valley Social Ventures (SV2), a network of
engaged philanthropists who donated their time and talents as
well as their treasure. Moir’s team gave her grief about
spending time on what they saw as a small grant in
comparison to their budget. But Moir understood that the grant
was about much more than money. “It was about the
intellectual and social capital,” she told me.
Sure enough, at an SV2 networking event she was invited
to, Moir sat down with Lance Fors, a technology entrepreneur
who was immediately drawn to her story. As Moir remembers:
“He told me we were at a real ‘inflection point’… I didn’t
know what that meant, but I did know that we were on what I
would call ‘a roll’ and that Lance really wanted to help us.”
Fors was elected board chair shortly thereafter and helped the
organization spin off from the University of California at
Santa Cruz, where it was based at the time. He has continued
to work side by side with Moir to scale New Teacher Center to
the $40 million organization it is today. Moir says she has
relied heavily on Fors, in the beginning calling him multiple
times a week, even sometimes multiple times a day, to work
through opportunities and challenges the organization was
facing, from fundraising to human resources. Although Moir
certainly believes it was luck that she sat next to Fors at the
event, she stresses that the serendipity of the meeting was a
direct result of her avid networking.
The first step in recruiting strong board members is to
identify your needs. Too often conversations about board
recruitment start with “Who do we know?” as opposed to
“Who do we need?”1 Jan Masaoka from Blue Avocado talks
about how an organization should ask two questions: (1) What
are the three most important things for our board to
accomplish this year? and (2) Do we have the right people on
the board to make that happen? Your answers will give you the
clarity with which to write good job descriptions to show to
potential candidates. A board matrix to assess current board
members’ skills and roles that you would like to fill can also
be a great way to home in on who you are looking for. This
way, instead of reaching out to your contacts and asking, “Do
you know anyone who would like to join our board?” you can
be more specific and say, “Do you know of any Latina women
in the fundraising business who would like to join our board?”
Another powerful resource for finding board candidates is
LinkedIn, which has an excellent function that lets you type in
the skills you are looking for and spits out results from your
own network of people who have them.2 You can also ask
current board members, senior staff and existing funders who
are, after all, already invested in the success of the
organization, to suggest potential candidates.
Once you have some potential candidates in the hopper,
you should go through a due diligence process. I always create
projects to test potential board members; the exercise not only
illuminates their skills and level of commitment but also
allows them to discover their own level of interest in the
organization. One mistake organizational leaders often make is
trying too hard to encourage a board member to join, without
having a clear sense of whether they are going to step up and
get to work. For example, you could informally ask a potential
board member to help review a marketing piece and provide
comments, help cohost an event or even ask them to serve on a
committee. In the months leading up to her organization’s
launch, Beyond 12’s Alexandra Bernadotte recruited advisors
on everything from organizational finances to strategy, whom
she planned to later invite to join as board members. She saw
her advisors as a key part of the process of devising her
concept and crafting her model, and she made sure they had
skills that complemented her own. Because she engaged them
so early on in the development process, she was able to get
enormous buy-in from them, so that by the time she invited
them to become board members they were already highly
invested in the organization’s success. Keep in mind that it’s a
lot harder to fire a board member than to hire one, so the extra
work to assure a good fit will spare you much anxiety.

CREATING CLEAR EXPECTATIONS

It doesn’t matter who you have on your board; if you don’t

have a framework for what you want them to accomplish, you
won’t achieve anything together. This was a struggle that
Emily Arnold-Fernandez experienced firsthand when she
started her organization, Asylum Access, which advocates
globally for better treatment of refugees. In 2005, she had been
part of a working group brainstorming opportunities to support
legal refugee aid, particularly in Egypt and Uganda. She was
in her twenties, and recalls that she didn’t really know any of
the others in the group well, but that, like her, they all seemed
young and passionate about the refugee issue. They decided to
start the organization and agreed she should be the executive
director, and the rest would make up the board of directors.
Looking back, while she deeply respected these people on a
professional level, she didn’t know them well or have a strong
relationship with them. And most important, like many other
organizations that begin with a “starter board,” none of them
had board experience.
She remembers how green she was in the early days: “I
didn’t even know what a board was supposed to do, and no
one knew what decisions were my decisions versus board
decisions.” She also struggled with the fact that the board
wasn’t invested in the same way she was. For example, when
it came time to grow the organization, she would plead with
them: “If we don’t get some money we’re going to have to
shut this down. I can’t keep doing this for free.” Sometimes
they were responsive, but other times she felt like they just
didn’t have the same kind of skin in the game. And they had a
huge reluctance to do the fundraising; this made Arnold-
Fernandez feel extremely resentful, since she was putting
herself on the line in all her relationships by asking for money,
whereas her board was not doing the same.
In hindsight, Arnold-Fernandez realizes that tensions
stemmed from a lack of clear expectations. There were no
guidelines about how much the board should be fundraising,
and none of them had any experience raising money.
Ultimately, she determined she had to create a whole new
board. “I needed to bring on people with more capacity to
write checks and fundraise, but we couldn’t do that if we were
not requiring our existing board members to do the same.” She
geared herself up for some hard conversations, but when she
actually sat down with each of them, it wasn’t that bad. In
talking with them, she realized they too had been feeling bad
that they hadn’t met her expectations. For a couple of board
members who really wanted to stay, she made sure they
committed to the new fundraising requirements.
The transition to a high-performing board involved some
fits and starts. She brought on a couple of new board members
who had strong giving capacity and/or connections, but found
she didn’t feel comfortable telling them what to do. One board
member came on and actually took too much control, making
inappropriate requests of Arnold-Fernandez and her team, and
criticizing staff in front of funders, creating a toxic
environment for the rest of the board members. The problem
got so bad that Arnold-Fernandez lost a major funder she had
been quite close with, who sent a note saying they could no
longer fund the organization because it was not “well run.”
Arnold-Fernandez felt this was an unfair characterization: the
problem wasn’t with the quality of the work itself, for which
she had won numerous awards. It was just that she didn’t
know how to run a board.
It wasn’t until Arnold-Fernandez engaged an executive
coach in 2012 that she realized her board would never work
properly until she created a clear set of expectations, not just
around fundraising but all aspects of board membership. “I
had just assumed that a board member would know what they
should be doing because they had been a C-level officer in a
company. Obviously this wasn’t the case, but it took me a long
time to learn this lesson.” She realized that developing clearer
roles would change everything, and it did. She had one of her
interns do a literature review on how to run a board and also
read a lot of the fundamental texts, turning to Board Source, a
clearinghouse of best practices for nonprofit boards. Then the
board created a committee to develop a governance structure,
and came up with multiple policies, including a board policy,
which laid out more clearly the members’ roles and
responsibilities. She now has a small but active group of five
board members who are clear about their goals and support her
in all the ways she had always dreamed, including as strategic
advisors and fundraisers. The organization has expanded into
Africa, Asia and Latin America and is a leader in global
refugee policy.
In their book Governance as Leadership, which reframed
the way nonprofits think about board management, Richard
Chait, William Ryan and Barbara Taylor set forth a board’s
three modes of governance: fiduciary, strategic, and generative
modes. As they say, “When organizations reframe governance
as leadership, the board becomes more than a fiduciary of
tangible assets and more than management’s strategic partner,
as vital as those functions are. The board also becomes a
crucial and generative source of leadership for the
organization.”3
Three Modes of Board Governance
1. Fiduciary Mode
Accounting assessments
Ensuring legal and tax compliance
Prepare for audits
Create board committees
Oversee executive director’s annual review
2. Strategic Mode
Strategic-plan focused
Identify key metrics of success Track progress toward goals
Monitor programmatic outcomes
Establish strategic priorities
3. Generative Mode
Understand the broader ecosystem
Focus on organizational learning
Foster collaboration with partners
Make data-driven decisions
Focus on the endgame
Source: Based on the modes established in Richard Chait,
William Ryan and Barbara Taylor, Governance as Leadership.
Nonprofit leaders should be asking themselves in which of
these three categories their board has skills, and then fill those
gaps. Maybe you have a board that is meeting its fiduciary
responsibilities, but you wish they were asking more hard
questions about your long-term strategy. That is the sort of
analysis you should do.
Before you can engage your board members, you must
have “jobs” to assign them. This starts with establishing a
strong committee structure. At a minimum, every board should
have (1) a governance committee to recruit new board
members, maintain the policies of the organization and
oversee the executive director review process; and (2) a
finance committee to oversee the budget process and long-
term financial planning. As the board grows and needs evolve,
you may also decide to set up other committees, such as an
audit committee, strategic planning committee or fundraising
committee. By requiring that board members sit on at least one
committee, with chairs managing them, the board will
naturally take on the governance role Chait, Ryan and Taylor
describe.
Finally, the most critical element of successful board
engagement is the board policy. A good board policy should
be succinct and clearly lay out roles and responsibilities,
including but not limited to the following:
• commitment to the mission of the organization;
• term of service;
• fiduciary duties (including the obligation, if any, to make
a personal financial contribution, introduce potential
donors to the organization, etc.);
• commitment to active involvement (including meeting
attendance and committee participation requirements);
• board meeting practices; and
• board-staff interactions.
Each board member should have a clear understanding of
the expectations laid out in the board policy before they agree
to serve and should sign the policy every year to renew their
commitment. This not only presents the board expectations in
one place so that people know what they are signing up for,
but also gives you a clear accountability mechanism for letting
go of board members who are not meeting expectations.
Annual board self-assessments are also a great way to allow
board members to reflect on whether they feel they are
meeting expectations and, if not, you can look into what you
can do to help them, or perhaps relieve them of their positions.

DEVELOPING ENGAGEMENT TAKES TIME

Effective board engagement requires a lot of nurturing and

follow-up. You should work hard to involve members in ways
both interesting to the board members and useful to the
organization. One way you can create this kind of win-win
relationship is by developing an annual board engagement
plan. Tiffany Cooper Gueye, CEO of BELL in Boston, loves
board engagement plans so much that she sits down with each
of her fourteen board members at the beginning of every year
and creates an individualized, written plan for what they hope
to accomplish. When I commented on how much time this
must take, she responded that it’s absolutely worth it. “Before
we did [the reviews], people weren’t clear on whether they
were even being useful, or how they could be more helpful.”
The plans have helped her find ways for everyone to
contribute, no matter what their skills. She noted: “One of my
board members, for example, doesn’t have deep pockets or
deep networks, but he comes into the office on Saturdays to
help frame our strategic choices and create slide
presentations.”
When developing your board engagement plan, you should
consider not only how the board member can help the
organization, but also how they can grow personally from the
experience. After all, it’s a two-way street; it’s not just about
what they will give but what board members will get out of
serving.
Another way to encourage your board members to be more
active is by providing opportunities for them to constantly
learn about the substance of the work. Board members not
only need to know about the issues you’re working on in order
to make effective decisions for the organization, but to help
them feel more connected to the cause. You can do this by
taking them on trips to see your work locally or around the
world, share relevant articles and set aside a few minutes at the
beginning of a board meeting to reflect on a substantive
discussion prompt.
Board meetings should not simply be reporting sessions
from the CEO; they should be interactive-learning meetings
that draw on the skills and experience of members. The key to
making your board meetings substantive is to use a “consent
agenda”; in it you include all the substantive organizational
updates in the board packet, which you provide in advance.
This way, during the meeting you can focus the discussion on
substantive issues. IDEO.org, for example, spends the first
thirty minutes of their board meetings talking about an article
they assign in advance. This helps board members feel the
organization is using them for their strategic advice, not just
their network and fundraising.
Finally, the best boards I’ve seen know the importance of
being social. Creating opportunities for board members to get
to know each other outside the board room is critical to
developing the camaraderie that inspires more active
engagement and the commitment to have your back when you
need it. Some boards go for dinner after every meeting or go
on a hike or an offsite visit once a year. Getting your board
together once or twice a year outside the boardroom can make
a huge difference.
Whether you are just starting an organization or already in
the thick of growth, it is critical that you constantly take stock
of your board to ensure they are bringing you the resources
you need for scaling.

BENCHMARKS FOR SOCIAL STARTUP SUCCESS: LEADING

Does your organization create ways for staff to operate with

autonomy and decision-making authority?
Does your staff have clear metrics for success within their
roles, which, ideally, they help to create?
Does your organization have processes to give horizontal
feedback?
Do you use “we” as opposed to “I” language when talking
about the organization?
Does your organization create opportunities for all team
members to act as the face of the organization in some
capacity?
Do you create boundaries between your work and personal
life to avoid burnout?
Do you have strong processes in place for hiring and firing?
Do your interview questions assess whether potential
candidates fit your organizational culture?
Does your organization provide opportunities for learning
and bonding?
Do you have a vision for your ideal senior leadership team
based on your personal strengths and weaknesses?
Do you have a strategy to allow other staff to assume
organizational duties that are not dependent on you?
Do you have a strong recruitment process to bring on board
members with relevant expertise?
Do you create ways to “test” board members before they
commit to joining the organization?
Do you have a committee structure in place to engage board
members?
Do you have a board policy in place to create clear
expectations for your board?
Do you create opportunities for your board to be social with
each other outside the boardroom?
 PART 5

TELLING COMPELLING
STORIES

Marketing expert and best-selling author Seth Godin famously

said, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make,
but the stories that you tell.” The nonprofit community has
embraced the wisdom of telling a good story, and also the
bounty of new means of telling them, from streaming video to
the more recently harnessed immersive storytelling power of
virtual reality. The short virtual reality film Clouds Over Sidra
was created under the auspices of the United Nations and
directed by UN advisor Gabo Arora and Hollywood filmmaker
Chris Milk. It paints an indelible portrait of the life of a
twelve-year old Syrian girl living in the Zaatari refugee camp
in Jordan along with 130,000 other Syrians who fled their
country’s civil war.1 Viewers have reported that the experience
was so vivid, they felt they could smell the bread baking in the
makeshift ovens and feel the heat of the dry desert wind.
Yet many nonprofit leaders have not taken full advantage
of the opportunities to tell a more compelling story about the
work they’re doing. Andy Goodman, an expert in the field of
public interest communications and the author of Why Bad
Presentations Happen to Good Causes, conducted extensive
research, traveling around the country listening to
presentations by nonprofit leaders to answer the question
“Why are so many of our colleagues—decent, well-educated,
well-intentioned folks—so good at being so boring?”2 His
research uncovered three primary reasons: (1) people didn’t
prepare enough: 53 percent of people said they spent less than
two hours preparing for a speech, and only 10 percent said
they had a “significant amount” of training; (2) people were in
denial about the quality of their presentation abilities: 49
percent claimed they were delivering good-to-excellent
presentations, while 82 percent said they were not seeing
good-to-excellent presentations; and (3) most people imitated
the style of presenting they’d seen at nonprofit conferences
rather than crafted their own distinctive style.3
It may seem that some people are just born storytellers and
that most of us can’t expect to truly wow an audience. I would
have said that myself before I conducted my research for this
book. But what I discovered by talking with many
organizational leaders who were powerful storytellers was that
it’s more the product of a whole lot of preparation and practice
than of an innate talent.
A great case in point is Nadine Burke Harris, founder of
the Center for Youth Wellness. Her TED talk titled “How
Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime” has been
viewed over 2.5 million times, and counting.4 That’s an
astounding accomplishment for a talk about such a serious
subject with which the public has so little familiarity, and in
which she does not shy away from imparting a great deal of
medical information, even using the rarefied language of
medicine to educate her listeners. She explains, for example,
about the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and how it
controls the fight-or-flight response, which accounts for the
long-term damage of childhood trauma. She also does not
employ the common device of telling a particular child’s story
to tug at the hearts of her listeners. How did she make the talk
so compelling? She worked hard at learning the techniques of
storytelling and public speaking. As she told me, she realized
that “I could be speaking the gospel coming straight from the
Lord, but if I say it in a way that is boring, no one is going to
invite me to speak.” She made it her mission to get better at
public speaking, and says, “I see myself as a professional
athlete, but my sport is public speaking.” She is constantly
pushing herself to speak in situations where she might be
scared, worried that she’s out of her league. She also studies
other people’s presentations, live at conferences and on video,
the way sports coaches study tape of games.
The good news about the work required is that there is so
much great expertise for learning techniques to turn to: many
good books, rich online resources and a host of workshops. In
the next chapter I will offer highlights from leading experts
about the elements of a great story and introduce practices
adopted by some organizations to develop great storytelling
talent in their staff and also empower their beneficiaries to be
compelling storytellers.
 CHAPTER 13

Powerful storytelling matters so much that in her exponential

fundraising class, Harvard professor Jennifer McCrea devotes
an entire section to storytelling techniques. She brings in
Marshall Ganz, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of
Government, a specialist in the methods of promoting social
movements, including how people can craft a strong “public
narrative.”1 Ganz was a leader in developing methods of
organizing and protest in the civil rights movement in the
1960s; he also played an important role in the farmworkers’
rights movement, working alongside Cesar Chavez. Ganz
writes that “all stories have three elements: a plot, a
protagonist, and a moral.”2 Many stories also have an
antagonist, which is a great device for making them more
emotionally gripping, adding dramatic tension and inspiring
listeners to engage with the fight. Who doesn’t love to see a
villain vanquished? For nonprofits, the problems we combat
are the chief antagonists.
Thinking about the key message we want to convey is
enormously helpful in crafting a presentation. While the plot
of certain stories is relatively easy to fashion, such as the many
stories of particular beneficiaries told so well on so many
organizations’ websites and in so many fundraising
campaigns, sometimes seeing a plot in the information we
have to impart is more challenging. That was the case for
Nadine Burke Harris when she was creating her TED talk. She
could have started by telling a heart-wrenching story of how
an early trauma led to debilitating health problems for a
particular person. Doing so would have been very effective.
But instead she led with hard information:
In the mid-1990s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente
discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the
risk for seven out of ten of the leading causes of death
in the United States. In high doses it affects brain
development, the immune system, hormonal systems
and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.3
She quickly proceeded to explain that this “exposure” was
not to toxic chemicals, as might be expected, but to childhood
trauma. With that opening salvo, she had introduced her
antagonist, and she had succinctly and potently conveyed how
nefarious it was. As her talk proceeded, she continued to
introduce a wealth of medical information, truly teaching her
audience about the problem, and she managed to do so in a
way that was both intellectually and emotionally engaging
throughout.
When I asked her how she had crafted her talk, she told me
the process of developing and giving it was transformational to
her style of speaking, because she learned how to incorporate
the elements of storytelling. “Prior to TED, I would get up
there and say, ‘Here’s a great big idea. And it’s wonderful, and
here’s why.’” The team at TED taught her that her talk should
include all these characteristics, much in keeping with what
Ganz advises, but put in somewhat different terms: a narrative
arc, a protagonist and a challenge; that she should share about
herself and her vulnerabilities; and she should make the
audience part of the solution. Her protagonist was herself; she
used her personal story of digging into the problem of early
trauma to open up about herself and introduce her
vulnerabilities, namely her inability for some time to figure
out what was wrong with some of the children she was trying
to diagnose. As she said, “Somehow I was missing something
important.” Her narrative arc was a journey of discovery,
recounting step by step how she learned about key findings
that led to understanding the magnitude of the problem of
early trauma and its many horrible longer-term effects. For
including the audience in the solution, she closed with a
rousing call to action: “The single most important thing that
we need today is the courage to look this problem in the face
and say this is real and this is all of us. I believe that we are the
movement.” The result was so powerful that she received an
offer to write a book on the subject, which will of course help
her continue to reach out to the public and build the
movement.
Another helpful insight Marshall Ganz offers about telling
a great story is to think of three stories within our overarching
story: the story of self, what is unique about each of us, the
challenges we’ve faced and how we’ve overcome them in our
own lives; the story of us, describing an experience common to
all of us; and the story of now, conveying the urgency of the
problem. He advises that as part of the story of now, we should
address the question of whether the problem can be solved,
and to “answer that question in the spirit of hope.”4
As Jennifer McCrea and her coauthor Jeffrey Walker point
out in their book The Generosity Network, President Obama
followed this model in his 2004 Democratic National
Convention speech.5 He told the story of self by recounting his
unusual family history: the son of a Kenyan father and an
American mother who decided to name their son Barack. He
told the story of us by declaring that his story was the
“American story,” describing how we all share the value of
hope. And finally he told the story of now by saying, “We
have more work to do.” He put a fine point on that spirit of
inclusion with his rallying cry during the 2008 election: “Yes
we can.” That was a brilliant piece of oratory, strategically
designed to engage all his followers in the solutions to the
social problems he was fighting for.

KNOW YOURSELF

Many social entrepreneurs are hesitant to talk about

themselves and their personal journeys because they feel that
promoting the mission shouldn’t be about them; it should be
about the cause. But opening up about ourselves, being
vulnerable and telling our story, and importantly, why we
became devoted to the cause, creates a personal connection
with our audience. As part of telling her personal story, Nadine
Burke Harris talks about growing up in Palo Alto, raised by
her Jamaican father, who was a chemist, to love science. That
isn’t integral to informing her audience about childhood
trauma, but it helps create a spirit of intimacy.

Opening up about ourselves, being vulnerable and telling our

story, and importantly, why we became devoted to the cause,
creates a personal connection with our audience.

Jennifer Pitts, former managing director of

communications and development for Tipping Point,
explained to me that another reason many social entrepreneurs
don’t tell their own stories is that “most people don’t know
what is interesting about themselves; people don’t get into the
work of nonprofits because they’re so fascinated by their own
story.” Pitts works with nonprofit leaders to help them with
self-discovery, and she finds that everyone has a personal
narrative relevant to promoting the cause, whether it’s about
how they grew up, the lessons their parents taught them or
perhaps the conversations they had at the dinner table. She
argues that organizational leaders should feel no discomfort
about getting help in telling their personal stories, saying, “If
you can hire a speechwriter or a communications expert to
help you develop your story, that doesn’t make you any less of
a leader.” If you feel uncertain about how much of your story
to tell and which aspects, getting expert advice is well advised.
As Pitts also points out: “Making really clear choices about the
stories you tell is critical, because they are all opportunities for
connection or disconnection.”

GETTING TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Most people who sit down to prepare a presentation ask

themselves, “What do I want to say?” as opposed to “What
does my audience need to hear?” Andy Goodman recommends
that you get to know your audience in advance, such as by
interviewing the conference organizer who scheduled your
session, or finding someone on the inside of the organization
where you’ll be speaking to provide insight.6 Here is a key set
of questions he suggests:
• Who will be in the audience?
• What do they know or believe that I can build on?
• What do they know or believe that I have to overcome?
• By the end of my presentation, what do I want them to
have learned?
• By the end of my presentation, what do I want them to
feel?
Knowing the answer to these questions will allow you to tailor
your remarks so you can bring your audience along with you
more powerfully.
It’s also important to be cognizant that people have
different learning styles, in particular that some people will be
most engaged and impressed by hard data while others will be
more receptive to emotionally engaging storytelling. You
should combine the styles and speak to both the head and the
heart. Jennifer Pitts keeps this in mind by envisioning two
people in the audience: “One is the grumpiest, most analytical
numbers person in the room and the other is the bleeding
heart, the crier. I know that if I can make the crier think and
the thinker feel, I’ve covered everyone in between.”
Erin Ganju, cofounder and CEO of Room to Read, swears
by the magic of combining the head and the heart: “Every
presentation has to have great data for the analytic types who
are going to be skeptics. You have to put those critics to bed,
but then it’s all about following up with the heart.” For
example, when she tells the story of their reading programs,
she’ll talk about the 781 million people on the planet who are
illiterate, but she knows the number would fall on deaf ears
without telling a story to go along with it, such as “the one
child, in a community in rural Nepal, whose father passed
away, whose mother is illiterate, who has three brothers and
sisters, whose school was insufficient and who wasn’t learning
to read until Room to Read came to the village, started a
library program, trained their grades one and two teachers, and
now a year later he’s one of the best readers in the school and
he checks out a book every day from the library.” As Andy
Goodman says, “Nobody ever marched on Washington
because of a pie chart.” The story is an important bridge
between the data and people’s hearts, to inspire action.

It’s also important to be cognizant that people have different

learning styles, in particular that some people will be most
engaged and impressed by hard data while others will be
more receptive to emotionally engaging storytelling.

CONNECT THE STORY TO THE POPULAR NARRATIVE

In looking for ways to tell the story of now, of why taking

action is urgent now, it’s important to harness the power of
news coverage related to your mission. One of the most
powerful ways to create a sense of urgency is to connect your
message to a current issue in the news; in other words, craft a
“news hook,” which will also help you immensely with your
pitches to get coverage from the media. As journalist David
Henderson once said, “Just because you are worthy, doesn’t
mean you are newsworthy.”7
Wendy Kopp did a masterful job of connecting her mission
to the broader public narrative about the education problem
when she started Teach For America.8 She had been inspired
to start the organization when she learned about the inequities
in educational outcomes that persisted on racial and economic
lines. But that didn’t mean that her first pitch for support was
met favorably. As part of her undergraduate thesis at
Princeton, she had created a plan and put together a budget,
requiring $2.5 million to launch, and she decided to see if she
could get federal support. She wrote to President George H. W.
Bush suggesting he create the new teacher corps she was
proposing, but received only a rejection letter in return. When
she read in Fortune that the magazine had hosted a summit
where corporate leaders expressed their commitment to
education reform, she reached out to all those quoted in the
article, sending them a copy of her proposal and a letter
requesting a meeting. The CEO of Union Carbide, which had
just formed a task force to explore education reform,
responded to her proposal and offered her donated space and
connections to other executives. Mobil Oil awarded her
$26,000 in seed money, and before long she was off and
running. She had seized an opportunity to take advantage of a
new public narrative. As she says, “These executives had
committed themselves to taking on education reform but
didn’t yet know what to do.”

STAYING ALERT FOR NEWS HOOKS IS VITAL

Few of the organizations I studied had an in-house public

relations team. Instead, the leaders themselves constantly kept
their tentacles out in the news stream, also crowdsourcing the
effort to all staff, who contributed relevant news links to
platforms like a Slack channel as they found them. We covered
how Laura Weidman Powers of Code2040 pounced on the
news that Google had released abysmal diversity numbers. Her
first step was to write an opinion piece, accepted by the San
Jose Mercury News, in which she challenged Silicon Valley to
bring more blacks and Latinx into the tech industry.9 The
larger news coverage of the problem was also integral to her
ongoing presentations about the organization to funders and
the public. When Abby Falik of Global Citizen Year saw that
Bill Gates had written in his annual letter that the Gates
Foundation would be “focused on global citizens,” or that
Malia Obama had decided to take a bridge year before
attending Harvard, she used those stories to help promote her
message that an immersive global year between high school
and college is not remedial or a “gap,” but an aspirational next
step for our country’s emerging leaders.10 The more topical
you can make a presentation or a pitch, the more convincing
your call to action will be. And following the news cycle this
way will help you to get a good deal more press. On that note,
the OpEd project, founded by Katie Orenstein to increase the
range and quality of voices we hear in the media, offers
invaluable resources and workshops for learning the art of
getting this kind of coverage.11

STRENGTHEN YOUR STORYTELLING MUSCLES

Practice is critical to making a truly captivating presentation.

Nadine Burke Harris practiced her fifteen-minute speech for
six months. Looking back, she laughs, saying, “By the time I
gave the talk, I had practiced it so many times I am sure my
husband had it memorized and could have given it for me.”
Jennifer Pitts recommends that her clients practice in front of a
neutral audience “again, and again, and again” in the two
weeks before they deliver.
Practice is critical to making a truly captivating
presentation. The work here should involve not only gaining a
command of your content, but also honing your style of
delivery. In Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes,
Andy Goodman provides a wealth of tips on how to improve
your delivery, such as how to connect with the audience
through eye contact, how to modulate your voice for dramatic
effect and how to use body language to help hold people’s
attention. I highly recommend the book and his downloadable
booklet as well.12

TEACH ALL YOUR PEOPLE TO TELL THE STORY

Many of the organizations I studied created opportunities not

only for their CEOs, but also for their staff to practice
storytelling on a regular basis. IDEO.org cofounder Patrice
Martin told me the organization has held storytelling
workshops with their entire team, helping them craft a
personal story about why applying design thinking to
remediate poverty matters. Another interesting way the skills
are built is with what they call “Storytelling Roulette.” At
every weekly staff meeting, a member of the communications
team spins a wheel with everyone’s name on it, and whoever’s
name it lands on is tasked with telling a story at the next
meeting, about a project the communications team has picked.
This practice has had the added benefit of creating institutional
memory. As Martin told me: “Because we have grown so
quickly, many of the staff who weren’t here two years ago
don’t know how we talk about our work. We need to make
sure that everyone on our staff can talk about all of the stories
of IDEO.org, not just the projects that individuals happen to
work on. We view everybody here as a brand ambassador.”
D-Rev also regularly practices storytelling with their staff.
Staff rotate organizing what they call “TED Talk Thursdays,”
collectively watching a TED talk relevant to their work and
analyzing not only the substance of the talk but the details of
delivery. Krista Donaldson, the CEO, also works regularly
with a speaking coach to help her practice her skills, and
because of all of the coaching she has received, she is now
able to coach staff members herself. When people tell her what
a good speaker she is, she always chuckles a bit to herself, and
tells them: “You have no idea how much coaching I’ve had!”
It is also important to make sure that your board is well
practiced in delivering the story of the organization so that
they too can be ambassadors of your cause. At Accountability
Counsel, we have brought in outside friends of the
organization to listen as each of our board members makes a
two-minute pitch, as if they were meeting someone new at a
cocktail party and telling them about the organization’s work.
Our board members report that these practice sessions have
made them better at advocating for the organization in front of
potential partners, funders, board members and beyond.

ASK YOUR BENEFICIARIES TO TELL THEIR STORIES

The other people you should engage in telling your story are
your beneficiaries. Many organizations of course tell stories
about their beneficiaries, but having them tell their own stories
is a powerful practice.
 The cofounders of City Year, Michael Brown and Alan
Khazei, did a great job of this and were able to get Bill
Clinton’s support largely because he was so impressed by
hearing the stories of their participants. In 1992, during his
first presidential campaign, then-governor Clinton planned a
visit to the offices of City Year to explore the idea of creating a
federal policy to support national service across America.
Although no one could have predicted with just 3 percent of
the democratic primary polls at that point that Bill Clinton
would eventually become president, Khazei and Brown knew
this was a huge opportunity to infuse their mission into the
national dialogue. They pulled out all the stops to get the right
people in the room. Mitt Romney, then CEO of Bain and
Company and a City Year supporter, mayor of Boston Ray
Flynn, and Hubie Jones, one of the top social justice leaders in
Boston, agreed to attend and help promote City Year’s work.
Also seated at the table were a number of corps members who
told their stories of participating in the program. According to
Khazei, who wasn’t even at the table himself, instead sitting in
the back of the room, these corps members were the key to
convincing Clinton. Khazei told me: “What really turned
Clinton on was listening to these young people from all these
diverse backgrounds serving together.” Once Clinton became
president he established AmeriCorps, using City Year as a
model, by signing the National and Community Service Trust
Act of 1993.13 Since that time, more than one million young
people have participated in AmeriCorps, contributing over 1.4
billion hours of public service.14
The corps members were so effective at telling their stories,
in fact, that City Year began to showcase them more and more
with the media and with other visitors to the organization. As
Khazei said, this was also helpful for the movement-building
component of the organization: “No one knew what national
service was at the time; it really didn’t exist except in small
pilot programs. So we made it part of the corps members’
responsibility to advance the cause of national service, asking
them to go out, tell their story, what they learned, how they’ve
grown, what’s been hard and where they made a difference.”
 While asking your beneficiaries to speak on your behalf
can be enormously powerful, doing it well also requires
careful thought and preparation. There are ethical issues
involved. You must assure that they are willingly consenting to
speak, not feeling coerced, and that they not only feel
comfortable doing so but are well prepared and in good mental
and physical shape for coping with the stress of public
appearances. It is also critical to set them up for success by
making sure they are sufficiently prepared to tell the story
well.

SELECTING AND PREPARING YOUR SPOKESPEOPLE

When selecting beneficiaries to speak on an organization’s

behalf, Jennifer Pitts advises a rigorous selection and
preparation process, beginning with a set of in-depth
interviews in which you talk with a range of beneficiaries. It’s
best to consider people who have been out of the program for
a good period of time, to prevent the possibility of
retraumatization, and because they can speak to the longer
term impact of the program.
The conversations should be kept strictly confidential, and
Pitts says it’s important to let beneficiaries own the interview
process and reveal only the parts of their story they want to
reveal. She makes it clear that they are not required to talk
about anything they don’t feel comfortable sharing. With that
condition, she guides the interviews with a set of basic
questions: “What was your life like before you found this
program? What did you like about the program? How does it
compare to other programs like it? How has your life changed
since starting this program? And most importantly, what
would be different for you if you hadn’t found this program?”
Pitts also argues that it’s helpful to ask for permission to
record the conversations so she can recall details, and assure
they are speaking in their own words if they’re going to be
giving speeches. She argues that it’s important to help them
craft their stories, but imperative that they speak truly in their
own voices.
Jennifer Pitts also recommends that organizations assist
beneficiaries with crafting speeches. Helping them to be
prepared is in their best interest as well as yours. “They are an
expert on their story,” she says. “You are the expert on the
audience.” Many organizations are so honored that a
beneficiary has agreed to share their story that they feel it’s
contrived or disrespectful to ask what the person plans to
share. But the biggest mistake you can make is to put someone
on stage to represent your organization without a clear idea of
what they plan to say. A particular problem is that
organizations also often fail to give time constraints and then
allow practice time to ensure the time limit has been met. The
impact of a story is watered down when it goes on too long or
fails to include the right details.
You should also help beneficiaries with their delivery,
which must include preparing them for exactly how an event
will unfold. Pitts says, “It’s important that you cover every
detail with them so that you are not putting someone in a
situation where they are surprised or caught off guard by the
room, the audience or how much money you’re trying to
raise.” Even make sure they don’t need help getting
appropriate clothing or a ride to the event.
While Tipping Point has an internal communications team
that helps prepare their beneficiaries to speak at their annual
events, you can also hire outside consultants or speaking
coaches to help them through the process. Or as
Accountability Counsel once did, bring in friends of the
organization to listen to your beneficiaries speak and provide
advice for free.
Storytelling isn’t just about raising money or courting
supporters; it is about building a movement for change. You
cannot build a movement without lighting a fire in the people
who are poised to spread your message, whether it’s donors,
partner organizations, media or policy makers. As Steve Jobs
brilliantly said, “The most powerful person in the world is the
storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of
an entire generation that is to come.” We all have the power
within us to be great storytellers for the causes we care about;
we just have to work hard to bring those talents out.

BENCHMARKS FOR SOCIAL STARTUP SUCCESS: STORYTELLING

Do you have a clear sense of the key message your

organization needs to convey?
Have you developed a story of self that connects you to a
cause and creates intimacy with the audience?
Have you developed a story of us that connects the audience
to the cause?
Have you developed a story of now that conveys the
urgency of the problem?
Do you follow the news cycle intentionally to find ways to
connect the problem you’re addressing to current events?
Do you create opportunities for your staff to practice their
own stories?
Do you create opportunities for your beneficiaries to tell
stories on behalf of the organization?
When beneficiaries tell their stories on behalf of the
organization, do you work with them to help them practice
in a way that is respectful and honors their story?
 CONCLUSION

Conducting the research for this book has been an incredible

journey. I’ve been able to spend time with so many inspiring
leaders who wake up every day charged up to make our world
a better place. I have been so impressed with their ingenuity in
leveraging all the assets they can find to impact as many lives
as possible. I had loads of admiration for social entrepreneurs
before I embarked on this journey, but learning more about
their work and watching them in action up close has made me
respect them all the more.
The journey has also made me even more keenly aware of
how many nonprofits are operating on a month-to-month
basis, scrambling to raise money to sustain themselves. While
so much innovation has occurred in the nonprofit world in
recent decades, my conversations with organizational leaders
and my observations of their daily routines have impressed
upon me how considerable the challenges any nonprofit faces
are, no matter how innovative its model or impactful its
services. I have often looked back to nights I spent around my
family’s dinner table, when my parents would talk about the
many organizations they were involved with, and how the
organizations were barely squeaking by and could hardly serve
all the people who needed their services.
I grew up in the small town of Napa, California, the
daughter of a community banker and a schoolteacher. As Irish
Catholics, we did our best to make it to church every week,
but more often on Sundays you could find my sisters and me
tagging along with our parents to serve meals at the homeless
shelter or checking people into the free health clinic. My
parents were always attending nonprofit board meetings or
collecting auction items for an upcoming fundraiser. My dad
was known around town as the “cleanup guy” for struggling
nonprofits, the one they begged to join their board to help
them get their house in order when they were on the brink of
failure. I hope the lessons I’ve shared from the modern
nonprofit community will help organizations avoid the tough
straits my dad helped so many nonprofits recover from.
But it’s not just organizations seeking to scale that can
benefit from these lessons. We can all find better ways to
support causes for social good using the tools in this book. Bill
Drayton, the founder of Ashoka and often called the
“godfather” of social entrepreneurship, lives by the mantra that
“everyone is a change maker.” I hope the stories I’ve told will
inspire support for social change organizations. Busy as we
are, we can all find some way to contribute. Students tell me
all the time: “I really love social entrepreneurship and I want
to make a difference in the world, but first I’m going to get
some corporate work experience.” I thought the same way
when I was in college. I didn’t understand that the two paths
are not mutually exclusive until I cofounded Spark while also
practicing corporate law. When I think back to my parents’
community activities, I realize I should have seen that it was
possible to have a thriving career and also be involved in
social causes—and find it extremely fulfilling. I had regretted
choosing the corporate path after law school, and thought I’d
sold out because I didn’t go to work for the ACLU or Human
Rights Watch. But in founding Spark, I saw that just as my dad
was able to use his skills as a community banker to help
nonprofit boards, I too could use my professional skills and
connections to rally my peers for our cause.
We all have something we can give to make this world a
little bit better. I hope the profiles of the creative and
determined leaders I’ve shared, and the stories of the
remarkable impact they are having, will encourage you to seek
organizations you can spend time supporting.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I am profusely indebted to my collaborator

in writing this book, Emily Loose. Emily, you have been by
my side since the infancy of this project and remained an
extraordinary thought partner throughout. You knew when to
push me hard to produce my best, and when to cheer me on to
keep me going. Your skillful hand in editing these pages has
helped me find my voice and structure my thinking in a way
that can be useful to the world. I am eternally grateful for all
of your support.
Thank you to my phenomenal agent, Lisa DiMona at
Writer’s House, who truly understood what I wanted to
achieve with this book and has been a fountain of innovative
ideas about how to turn my vision not only into an incredible
book, but also a movement. Thank you also to her amazing
colleague Nora Long, whose early editing vastly improved my
proposal and sample chapters. And I am so thankful to my
editor, Dan Ambrosio at DaCapo Press, for taking a chance on
me and believing in this book every step of the way, and to the
rest of the Da Capo team Miriam Riad, Kevin Hanover,
Matthew Weston and Raquel Hitt for supporting this book in
so many ways. Thank you to Christine Marra and her highly
capable team at Marrathon Production Services for making
this finished product such a beautiful work of art. And to the
team at Digital Natives, thank you for all that you have done to
set this digital immigrant up for success.
This project never would have existed without the founding
of Spark, which taught me so much about how to be an
activist, a risk taker, a team player, a fundraiser and a social
entrepreneur. It has been such an amazing adventure since one
of my oldest friends Maya Garcia Lahham sat me down over a
glass of wine in 2004 to tell me about this “idea” she had for
an organization to support women’s empowerment, and I have
been so lucky to be on this journey along with cofounders
Fiona Hsu, Rohini Gupta, Nealan Afsari, Karen Hennessy and
Mona Motwani, as well as so many other Spark leaders who
have kept the organization alive and thriving, including
Shannon Farley, Jackie Rotman, Amanda Brock, Jamie
Allison Hope, Gayle Karen Young, Carlo DaVia and so many
more.
I am so grateful to Valerie Threlfall for teaching me how to
navigate the art of survey design, along with Meredyth Sneed
and Elizabeth Kelley for helping me to lead the most
comprehensive survey of seed stage social entrepreneurs ever
conducted. Thank you also Echoing Green, especially Cheryl
Dorsey, Teresa Vasquez, Andrea Davila and Janna Oberdorf;
and Silicon Valley Social Ventures, especially Jen Ratay and
Elizabeth Dodson, for opening up your portfolios to us for the
social entrepreneurship survey and for being such steadfast
supporters of this project every step of the way. And of course
this survey would not have been possible without the
participation of the hundreds of social entrepreneurs who took
time out of their busy schedules to fill out the questions—I am
so appreciative of them.
So many other funders of social entrepreneurship were
helpful during the survey and other research for this book,
including Scott Thomas and Sammy Politziner of Arbor
Brothers; Bill Drayton, Michael Zakaras and Clair Fallender at
Ashoka; Christy Chin, Stephanie Khurana and Robin Richards
of Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation; Kevin Starr and Laura
Hattendorf at Mulago Foundation; Vanessa Kirsh and Kim
Syman at New Profit; Jayson Morris at Peery Foundation;
Sally Osberg at Skoll Foundation and Anne Marie Burgoyne
and Beth Schmidt at Emerson Collective.
I am also grateful to the people who inspired me to believe
that writing a book was even possible, such as Peter Sims,
whose kind introduction to Emily Loose kicked off this whole
project, and Courtney Martin, an incredible cheerleader who
forced me to open my first Twitter account to jump into the
conversation.
Each and every person that I interviewed for this book has
been a huge source of information, opening their hearts and
their minds to my research and being so eager to help in so
many ways. It is one thing to lead a successful organization,
but it is quite another to be so thoughtful about the strategies
that lead to its success, so thank you for taking the time away
from your work to reflect with me. Although I could not
feature every single organization whose representatives I
interviewed in the book, each and every story certainly
influenced my thinking and framing of the concepts herein.
I am eternally grateful for all of the opportunities that
Stanford University has provided me to be able to do the social
change work that I care about so deeply. In particular, Larry
Diamond, Deborah Rhode, Tom Schnaubelt, Megan Swezey
Fogarty, Luke Terra and Julie Reed have all been such fierce
champions of the Program on Social Entrepreneurship in
partnership with the Haas Center for Public Service and the
Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. The
Program on Social Entrepreneurship never would have
happened without the brilliant vision of Kavita Ramdas and
the ongoing commitment of Sarina Beges, both of whom have
also been such staunch supporters of this book throughout its
writing. My teaching assistants—Gilat Bachar, Erin Raab,
Sarah Shirazyan and Shea Streeter—have made it possible for
me to teach every year; you blow me away with your
thoughtfulness, diligence and commitment to the work you do.
And Deborah Rhode, you have been such an amazing mentor
to me since I started teaching at Stanford Law School ten years
ago. The Program on Social Entrepreneurship would not exist
without your guiding light, and I cherish the words of wisdom
that you provide on our long walks around the Stanford
campus.
To the team at Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil
Society, especially Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, Rob Reich,
Paul Brest, Lucy Bernholz, Kim Meredith, Annie Rohan and
Cristina Alfonso, thank you for your trail-blazing vision and
deep commitment to developing an entire field in academia
dedicated to strengthening philanthropy and civil society. The
world is a better place because of your work. And to the staff
at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, in particular Eric
Nee, Johanna Mair and Jenifer Morgan, thank you for paving
the way for academic research on social entrepreneurship,
including my own.
Thank you to those who took the time to read drafts of my
chapters, and for pushing me to make them better—Ayesha
Barenblat, Louise Langheier, Heather McLeod Grant, Alexa
Cortés Culwell, Jennifer Pitts, William Jackson, Sarina Beges,
Jackie Rotman, Emily Dillon, Kendall Romaine, Tashrima
Hossain, Ayushi Vig and Sofia Filippa.
My student research assistants never cease to amaze me;
they were instrumental in helping to develop a comprehensive
literature review of the social entrepreneurship field, and
transcribed hundreds of pages of interviews. Thank you for all
the hard work—Devanshi Patel, Marly Carlisle, Sophia Jaggi,
Jacqueline Wibiwo, Emily Dillon, Kendall Romaine, Carly
Hayden, Tashrima Hossain, Ayushi Vig, Anna Wohl, Sofia
Filippa, Delaney Overton and Miriam Natvig. Thank you also
to Sheeroh Murenga, my partner halfway across the world
who also transcribed so many other interviews for me.
When people ask me who my closest mentors are, I always
give the same reply: my girl squad. You are my biggest
inspirations, and I am eternally grateful to my dearest friends
for always being my mirror, helping me to see my blind spots,
supporting me through challenging times and rooting for me
every step of the way—Sarah Ray, Kirsten Green, Akshata
Murty, Carolyn Cassidy, Anja Manuel, Nadine Burke Harris,
Natalie Fields, Lateefah Simon, Jennifer Siebel Newsom,
Alexandra Wolfe, Liv Mills Carlisle, Jennifer Bennett,
Caroline Cameron and so many others.
This book might not have happened were it not for the
support of my beloved writers’ group, Anja Manuel, Kori
Schake, Sarah Thornton and Ana Homoyoun, who have
provided meaningful and constructive feedback in the absolute
nicest and most supportive way over the past three years. I
always looked forward to our monthly dinners and feel so
lucky to count each of you as a colleague and friend.
I have given birth to three babies since deciding to write
this book. As such, none of this would have been feasible
without the amazing childcare providers who love my children
as if they were their own and make it possible for me to do all
of the work I love—Alyssa Jennings, Evelyn Sagastume, Mica
Crittendon, Laura Pedley and Gabriela Boff, not to mention all
of the phenomenal teachers and staff at Cow Hollow School.
I am also indebted to the always positive and effusively
kind staff at Saint Frank Coffee for keeping me sufficiently
caffeinated and providing an inspiring space where I wrote
much of this book.
It is said that one of the greatest gifts in life is to be
surrounded by unconditional love. I am so blessed to have
received this gift in abundance in my life. My parents, Brian
and Maggie Kelly, have always believed in me, modeling and
teaching me from a young age that I could accomplish
anything in life with hard work. I cannot imagine life without
my sisters, Megan and Jen, and their families, Manuel, Todd,
Lolo, Alex, Lucas, Carolina, Jordan, Taylor, Carter and Rita,
as well as my husband’s family, Ted, Bill, and Teresa.
My own children, Lara, Eleanor and Teddy, are the lights
of my life and already impress me daily with their kindness
and generosity toward each other and the world. I hope that I
can instill in you the value of citizenship and the importance of
giving back that my parents gave to me.
Last but not least, to my dearest Ted: my dreams came true
the day I met you. I never knew it was possible to be fulfilled
in so many ways by a single person. I am so lucky to get to
spend my life with you by my side. Table 51 forever.
 Praise for Social Startup Success

“Social startup, including social business startup,

success will be an important catalyst for training the
next generation of social entrepreneurs on how to
change the world. Kathleen Kelly Janus eloquently
brings to life the best practices that all social
entrepreneurs must embrace to maximize their impact.
The pressing social problems we face today require
creative leadership now more than ever, and this book
will teach you what you need to know to be a good
social entrepreneur.”
—MUHAMMAD YUNUS, Nobel Peace Prize winner
and author of the New York Times bestseller
Banker to the Poor
“Challenging inequality in the modern world demands
that nonprofit leaders equip themselves with proven
strategies to maximize impact. Social Startup Success
reveals the secret sauce behind the most influential
nonprofits of our time, telling their stories in memorable
ways that every nonprofit leader can learn from.”
—DARREN WALKER, President, Ford Foundation
“What Crossing the Chasm did for the business sector,
Social Startup Success will do for the nonprofit sector.
In this vital guide, Kathleen Kelly Janus shows how to
scale an impact organization and, in so doing, change
the world for the better.”
—CHARLES BEST, Founder and CEO,
DonorsChoose
“Social Startup Success provides both inspiration and
practical advice. Based on extensive research, Kathleen
Kelly Janus features some of the most important lessons
that many of us have learned along our leadership
journeys, so that organizations can accelerate their
impact to meet the pressing social needs of today. This
book is an invaluable resource for the next generation of
changemakers.”
—WENDY KOPP, Founder, Teach for America, Co-
Founder and CEO, Teach for All
“Kathleen Kelly Janus weaves brilliantly crafted stories
of transformational social entrepreneurs into an
invaluable roadmap of how to transform ideas and
vision into execution and impact. Social Startup
Success is an inspiring must-read, with an empathetic
voice, for all of us aspiring to maximize our social value
through our organizations, work and lives.”
—LAURA ARRILLAGA-ANDREESSEN, Founder and
President, laaf.org; author, Giving 2.0;
Founder/Chairman, Stanford
PACS;Founder/Chairman Emeritus, SV2;
Lecturer in Business Strategy/Philanthropy,
Stanford Graduate School of Business
“Synthesizing a range of stories of leading social
entrepreneurs, Kathleen Kelly Janus has created an
insightful and highly useful guide that breaks down how
organizations maximize their impact and create lasting
change. An important contribution to the field.”
—DAVID BORNSTEIN, CEO, Solutions Journalism
Network and author, How to Change the World:
Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New
Ideas and Social Entrepreneurship: What
Everyone Needs to Know
“Social Startup Success is a playbook I wish we had
when we founded Kiva! This book serves emerging and
established social entrepreneurs looking to integrate
cutting-edge best practices into their organizations—
based on a unique account of top-performing social
enterprises and academic research. When you’re
building an airplane as you’re flying, time is precious.
Social Startup Success provides key insights into things
we all struggle with: creating a culture of innovation,
measuring impact and cultivating collective leadership.
Kathleen Kelly Janus takes us behind the scenes at
some of the world’s top-performing social
entrepreneurs, providing a fun and inspiring read for
anyone who cares about making the world a better
place.”
—PREMAL SHAH, President and Co-Founder,
Kiva.org
“Social Startup Success is an important read for
aspiring social entrepreneurs seeking to shift the unjust
equilibria that some of the best social entrepreneurs
have been fighting for years. By shedding light on the
stories of inspiring leaders like Raj Panjabi of Last Mile
Health, Chuck Slaughter of Living Goods, and Andrew
Yoon of One Acre Fund, Kathleen Kelly Janus draws on
her extensive research to pull back the curtain for those
seeking to change the world.”
—SALLY OSBERG, President and CEO, Skoll
Foundation
“Written from the wellspring of technology and now
social innovation in Silicon Valley, Kathleen Kelly
Janus’ Social Startup Success is a comprehensive and
clearly written synthesis of the fundamental forces
shaping social entrepreneurship today: design thinking,
theory of change and strategic leadership, impact
measurement, storytelling, new business and financial
models. The ‘must-read’ book on social
entrepreneurship for the next decade.”
—WILLIAM F. MEEHAN III, Lafayette Partners
Lecturer in Strategic Management at the
Stanford University Graduate School of
Business, Director Emeritus of McKinsey &
Company, and co-author, with Kim Starkey
 Jonker, of Engine of Impact: Essentials of
Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector
“Kathleen Janus has written a practical, inspiring, and
empirically grounded guide for social entrepreneurs,
drawing valuable lessons from actual stories of success
and failure.”
—PAUL BREST, Professor Emeritus, Stanford Law
School, and co-author, Money Well Spent
“I’m always on the hunt for valuable tools and
resources that tomorrow’s social change leaders can use
as a guide as they begin their social impact journeys. I
predict that Social Startup Success will very quickly
become a must-have for those building and scaling the
best social impact nonprofits. Kathleen Kelly Janus has
made a significant contribution to our field by not just
focusing on the “who” but on the “how-to.” She has
presented all those committed to the work of the world
with five practical and actionable strategies that are best
practices for driving social impact. This book is an
inclusive call to action that uses the inspiring stories of
creative and committed social change leaders to not
only educate other fellow travelers but also spark the
involvement of the rest of us to get engaged with these
nonprofit organizations so worth supporting.”
—CHERYL L. DORSEY, President, Echoing Green,
and 1992 Echoing Green Fellow
“Social Startup Success is a marvelous compilation of
stories of some of the most inspiring leaders of our
time. In her brilliant step-by-step process for how to
make impact, Kathleen Kelly Janus shows how all of us
can maximize our potential as changemakers.”
—BILL DRAYTON, CEO, Ashoka: Everyone a
Changemaker
“Social Startup Success makes an important
contribution to the field. It’s compelling, easy to read,
and fills a gap in the current literature by addressing the
critical first few years of nonprofit startup life. Janus
covers all of the important building blocks—like having
a proven model, measuring impact, and cultivating
leadership—that are necessary for early stage
organizations to succeed and build a strong foundation
for further scale. Drawing on numerous examples of
other nonprofit start-ups, Janus gives social
entrepreneurs all the practical tips and advice they need
to succeed. This book will no doubt help them in their
efforts to change the world.”
—HEATHER MCLEOD GRANT, Co-founder, Open
Impact, and author, Forces for Good
 APPENDIX A

Cast of Characters

Accountability Counsel, founded by Natalie Bridgeman

Fields, defends the environmental and human rights of
marginalized communities around the world.
Year Founded: 2009
Issue Area: Human Rights/Environment
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $2 million
Number of Staff: 14
Impact: Directly supported nearly a million people in thirty-
seven countries around the world to challenge abuse;
advocacy improved global accountability policy at
multilateral development banks, federal agencies and
institutions.
Website: www.accountabilitycounsel.org
Aspire Schools, founded by Don Shalvey and led by
Carolyn Hack, seeks to grow the charter school
movement by opening small, high-quality charter schools
in low-income neighborhoods.
Year Founded: 1998
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Oakland, California
Current Budget: $200 million
Number of Staff: 2,006
Impact: Serves 16,000 students grades TK through 12 across
California and Tennessee, with 100 percent of high school
graduates accepted into a four-year university.
Website: www.aspirepublicschools.org
Asylum Access, founded by Emily Arnold-Fernandez, is an
innovative international nonprofit dedicated to making
human rights a reality for refugees.
Year Founded: 2005
Issue Area: Human Rights
HQ: Oakland, California
Current Budget: $3.5 million
Number of Staff: 85
Impact: Legal assistance to over twenty thousand refugees
annually; policy change impacting over 2 million to date.
Website: www.asylumaccess.org
At The Crossroads, founded by Rob Gitin, reaches out to
homeless youth and young adults and works with them to
build healthy and fulfilling lives.
Year Founded: 1997
Issue Area: Poverty/Homelessness
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $1.6 million
Number of Staff: 17
Impact: 90 percent of counseling clients achieve one or more
of their life goals, including getting into stable housing,
building a healthy community, managing substance use
issues or finding employment.
Website: www.atthecrossroads.org
BELL, founded by Earl Phalen and under the leadership
of CEO Tiffany Cooper Gueye, seeks to transform the
academic achievements, self-confidence and life
 trajectories of children living in underresourced
communities.
Year Founded: 1992
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Boston, Massachusetts
Current Budget: $22 million
Number of Staff: 58
Impact: Students attending BELL programs demonstrate
improved achievement in reading and math, as opposed to
suffering summer learning loss, outpace their peers in
gaining academic skills and demonstrate improved social-
emotional skills. BELL’s impact has been validated and
continuously improved through two randomized control
trial studies to date.
Website: www.experiencebell.org
Benetech, founded by Jim Fruchterman, is a nonprofit that
empowers communities in need by creating scalable
technology solutions.
Year Founded: 2000
Issue Area: Human Rights/Technology
HQ: Palo Alto, California
Current Budget: $17 million
Number of Staff: 74
Impact: Benetech has driven large scale change in education,
human rights and the environment, including delivering
over 10 million accessible books to more than half a
million people with disabilities such as dyslexia or
blindness, with more than 535,000 titles in thirty-two
languages.
Website: www.benetech.org
Beyond 12, founded by Alexandra Bernadotte, uses
technology and student coaching to give students the
 academic, social and emotional support they need to
succeed in higher education.
Year Founded: 2009
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Oakland, California
Current Budget: $4.2 million
Number of Staff: 25
Impact: In partnership with K–12 and higher education
institutions, tracking the progress of more than fifty
thousand students; coaching close to two thousand students
on 180 college campuses, 82 percent of whom have
persisted to their third year of collage compared with 59
percent of first-generation college students nationwide.
Website: www.beyond12.org
Blue Engine, founded by Nick Ehrmann, partners with
schools to unlock human potential by bringing together
teams of teachers working in historically oppressed
communities to reimagine the classroom experience for all
students.
Year Founded: 2009
Issue Area: Education
HQ: New York, New York
Current Budget: $6 million
Number of Staff: 26
Impact: Currently supporting eighty-six Blue Engine teaching
assistants and sixteen hundred students, students achieve
an additional seven to nine months of learning per year,
leading to spikes in pass and college-ready rates on state
exams; 40 percent of alumni base currently teaching.
Website: www.blueengine.org
Braven, founded by Aimée Eubanks Davis, is a semester-
long credit-bearing course followed by a post-course
 experience that lasts until college graduation for
underrepresented university students, which builds the
skills, mindsets, experiences and networks necessary to
excel in the workforce.
Year Founded: 2013
Issue Area: Education and Workforce
Staff: 19
HQ: Chicago, Illinois
Current Budget: $4.1 million
Impact: 540 fellows, nearly two times as likely to obtain a
strong internship in comparison to peers; 66 percent land
strong, first jobs post-college within six months, in
comparison to 49 percent of their peers within twelve
months.
Website: www.bebraven.org
CareMessage, founded by Vineet Singal and Cecilia
Corral, creates a powerful communications channel
between health care organizations in medically
underserved areas and the patients they serve.
Year Founded: 2012
Issue Area: Health
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $8.9 million
Number of Staff: 40
Impact: Reached more than 1.2 million patients through
relationships with two hundred health care organizations in
more than thirty-five states and exchanged nearly 15
million messages with those patients.
Website: www.caremessage.org
Center for Youth Wellness, founded by Nadine Burke
Harris, fights against adverse childhood experiences and
toxic health by preventing, screening and healing.
Year Founded: 2010
Issue Area: Health
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $7.9 million
Number of Staff: 27
Impact: Developed an ACEs (adverse childhood experiences)
screening tool that has been shared with over fifteen
hundred clinicians in twenty-four countries; launched a
practice community of a thousand pediatricians to screen
300,000 children for ACEs; and operates a community-
based clinic screening nine hundred children annually for
ACEs, treating three hundred through intensive integrated
care.
Website: www.centerforyouthwellness.org
charity: water, founded by Scott Harrison, seeks to solve
the water crisis in our lifetime.
Year Founded: 2006
Issue Area: Access to Clean Water
HQ: New York, New York
Current Budget: $40 million
Number of Staff: 75
Impact: 22,936 water projects funded; 7 million people get
clean water working with twenty-five local partners in
twenty-four countries.
Website: www.charitywater.org
City Year, cofounded by Michael Brown and Alan Khazei,
seeks to help students in high-poverty communities reach
their potential through individualized support.
Year Founded: 1988
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Boston, Massachusetts
Current Budget: $152,000,000
Number of Staff: 998
Impact: A national study showed that schools partnered with
City Year are two times more likely to improve on state
English assessments and up to three times more likely to
improve proficiency rates in math.
Website: www.cityyear.org
Coalition for Queens (C4Q), founded by Jukay Hsu and
David Yang, fosters the Queens tech ecosystem to increase
economic opportunity and transform the world’s most
diverse community into a leading hub for innovation and
entrepreneurship.
Year Founded: 2011
Issue Area: Job Development
HQ: Long Island City, New York
Current Budget: $4.3 million
Number of Staff: 30
Impact: In under a year, graduates go from making $18,000 to
over $85,000 post-program, shifting from poverty to the
middle class in the process, and working at leading
companies such as Pinterest, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Jet and
JPMorgan Chase. Participants are representative of the
diversity of the New York City community with over 50
percent women, 60 percent African American or Hispanic,
50 percent immigrant and 50 percent without a college
education.
Website: www.c4q.nyc
Code2040, founded by Laura Weidman Powers and
Tristan Walker, creates pathways to success for blacks
and Latinx in the innovation economy.
Year Founded: 2012
Issue Area: Economic and Racial Equity
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $8 million
Number of Staff: 32
Impact: 250+ Fellows matched with 75+ tech companies and a
community of 5,000 students, allies, volunteers and
supporters.
Website: www.code2040.org
D-Rev, led by Krista Donaldson, a nonprofit medical device
company focused on closing quality healthcare gaps for
underserved populations.
Year Founded: 2009
Issue Area: Health
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $2.1 million
Number of Staff: 11
Impact: With Brilliance, D-Rev’s newborn jaundice product,
225,000 babies have been treated, averting three thousand
deaths and disabilities; and with Re-Motion Knee, D-Rev’s
amputee mobility product, 7,501 amputees have been fitted
with the knee, reporting an 86 percent satisfaction rate.
Website: www.d-rev.org
DonorsChoose, founded by Charles Best, is an online
platform where anyone can help a classroom in need,
moving toward a nation where students in every
community have the tools and experiences they need for a
great education.
Year Founded: 2000
Issue Area: Education
HQ: New York, New York
Current Budget: $14 million
Number of Staff: 92
Impact: Vetted and fulfilled over 890,000 classroom projects
across the nation ranging from butterfly cocoons to
robotics kits to Little House on the Prairie.
website: www.donorschoose.org
Embrace, founded by Jane Chen, integrates appropriate
technology with training and monitoring to support health
workers and facilities in low-resource settings.
Year Founded: 2008
Issue Area: Health
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: Private company
Number of Staff: 5
Impact: Helped over 250,000 babies
Website: www.embraceglobal.org
Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network (GSA Network,
previously Gay-Straight Alliance Network), founded by
Carolyn Laub, is a next-generation LGBTQ racial and
gender justice organization that empowers and trains
queer, trans and allied youth leaders to advocate, organize,
and mobilize an intersectional movement for safer schools
and healthier communities.
Year Founded: 1998
Issue Area: LGBTQ
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $2.3 million
Number of Staff: 20
Impact: In California, GSA Network has grown the network of
GSA clubs from forty to over nine hundred clubs,
impacting more than 1.1 million students in 61 percent of
California’s public high schools and a growing number of
middle schools; nationally, GSA Network has united over
forty statewide organizations supporting GSAs to
 accelerate the growth and impact of the GSA movement in
four thousand schools nationwide.
Website: www.gsanetwork.org
Generation Citizen, founded by Scott Warren, works to
ensure that every student in the United States receives an
effective action civics education, which provides them
with the knowledge and skills necessary to participate in
our democracy as active citizens.
Year Founded: 2008
Issue Area: Civic Engagement
HQ: New York, New York
Current Budget: $2.6 million
Number of Staff: 30
Impact: 10,500 students impacted
Website: www.generationcitizen.org
Genesys Works, founded by Rafael Alvarez, transforms the
lives of disadvantaged high school students through skills
training, meaningful internships and impactful
relationships.
Year Founded: 2002
Issue Area: Job Training
HQ: Houston, Texas
Current Budget: $25 million
Number of Staff: 130
Impact: 94 percent of program alumni go on to college, of
which 71 percent persist. Five years after program
completion, 74 percent of alumni are working full time
earning a median annual income of $45,000.
Website: www.genesysworks.org
GiveWell, founded by Elie Hassenfeld and Holden
Karnofsky, is dedicated to finding outstanding giving
 opportunities and publishing the full details of their
analyses to help donors decide where to give.
Year Founded: 2007
Issue Area: Philanthropy
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $2.4 million
Number of Staff: 17
Impact: More than $100 million to top charities in 2015
Website: www.givewell.org
Global Citizen Year, founded by Abby Falik, is reinventing
the “gap year” between high school and college as
America’s launch pad for global leaders.
Year Founded: 2010
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Oakland, California
Current Budget: $4.4 million
Number of Staff: 40
Impact: 530 alumni
Website: www.globalcitizenyear.org
Global Women’s Water Initiative, founded by Gemma
Bulos, is building a movement of local women water
experts to address the issue that affects them most: water.
Year Founded: 2011
Issue Area: Gender Equality/Water
HQ: Oakland, California
Current Budget: $650,000
Number of Staff: 5
Impact: Invested in twelve teams of rural African women and
trained them in water, sanitation and hygiene techniques
 that will result in clean water and sanitation for 40,600
people.
Website: www.globalwomenswater.org
Hot Bread Kitchen, founded by Jessamyn Rodriguez, is a
workforce development and business incubation program
that seeks to train low-income women in food careers,
supporting its programming through bread sales and
kitchen rentals.
Year Founded: 2008
Issue Area: Gender Equality/Job Development
HQ: New York, New York
Current Budget: $5 million
Number of Staff: 15 admin, 50 production/trainees
Impact: Since moving to East Harlem in December 2010, Hot
Bread Kitchen has trained 156 low-income women from
thirty-six countries and graduated sixty-six into full-time
jobs with benefits. Its culinary incubator has provided
commercial kitchen space and technical assistance to
support the growth of 169 food businesses. Hot Bread
Kitchen has created over two hundred jobs in a
neighborhood with one of the highest rates of joblessness
in New York City.
Website: www.hotbreadkitchen.org
IDEO.org, founded by Jocelyn Wyatt and Patrice Martin,
designs products, services and experiences to improve the
lives of people in poor and vulnerable communities with a
practice of human-centered design.
Year Founded: 2011
Issue Area: Poverty Alleviation
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $13.25 million
Number of Staff: 65
Impact: 434,570 people impacted through its sixty-four design
projects in twenty-three countries in sectors as varied as
water and sanitation to financial opportunity, agriculture
and reproductive health.
Website: www.ideo.org
Kiva, founded by Premal Shah, Jessica Jackley and Matt
Flannery, works with microfinance institutions on five
continents to provide loans to people without access to
traditional banking systems.
Year Founded: 2005
Issue Area: Economic Empowerment
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $16 million
Number of Staff: 105
Impact: To date, Kiva has facilitated nearly a billion dollars in
loans to 2.3 million microentrepreneurs across ninety
countries. The repayment rate is 97 percent and the
average loan size is $800.
Website: www.kiva.org
Last Mile Health, founded by Raj Panjabi, delivers care in
the world’s most remote communities.
Year Founded: 2007
Issue Area: Health
HQ: Boston, Massachusetts
Current Budget: $9.7 million
Number of Staff: 100
Impact: Trained over three hundred community health
professionals, bringing health care to over two hundred
remote communities and fifty thousand people and
increasing, for example, access to diarrhea (by 48%),
malaria (by 29%) and pneumonia (by 53%) treatment
among children.
Website: www.lastmilehealth.org
Living Goods, founded by Charles Slaughter, supports
“Avon-like” networks of microentrepreneurs empowered
with their Smart Health app who go door-to-door selling
life-changing products such as simple treatments for
malaria and pneumonia, fortified foods, family planning,
clean cook stoves and solar lights.
Year Founded: 2007
Issue Area: Health
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $16.3 million
Number of Staff: 206
Impact: Supports over sixty-five hundred community health
promoters, serving a population of 5 million. In 2016,
Living Goods supported 213,000 pregnancies and treated
681,000 children under five years old for deadly diseases.
A randomized control trial showed Living Goods is cutting
child mortality by over 25 percent and reducing stunting
by 7 percent.
Website: www.livinggoods.org
New Door Ventures, under the leadership of Tess Reynolds,
provides skills training, meaningful jobs, education
assistance and personal support to help disconnected youth
get ready for work and life.
Year Founded: 1981
Issue Area: Job Training
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $6.45 million
Number of Staff: 50 (or 250 including youth interns)
Impact: 89 percent of program graduates from 2012 to 2016
were attached to next-jobs or continued education six
months after program completion (after previously not
 working nor in school). Of those with backgrounds of
homelessness, 94 percent retained stable housing six
months after program completion. Of those with prior
justice-system involvement, 96 percent did not reoffend by
the six-month follow-up.
Website: www.newdoor.org
New Teacher Center, founded by Ellen Moir, is dedicated to
accelerating student learning by improving teacher
effectiveness through mentoring and new teacher induction
programs.
Year Founded: 1998
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Santa Cruz, California
Current Budget: $40 million
Number of Staff: 209
Impact: NTC operates in thirty-three states and roughly six
hundred school districts. In fiscal year 2016, NTC reached
over forty thousand teachers and seventy-five mentors and
coaches, thereby impacting over 3.4 million students.
Website: www.newteachercenter.org
One Acre Fund, founded by Andrew Youn, battles hunger
and poverty by increasing the productivity of smallholder
farmers in East Africa.
Year Founded: 2006
Issue Area: Food Security/Economic Development
HQ: Bungoma, Kenya
Current Budget: $83 million
Number of Staff: 5,000
Impact: One Acre Fund has served 310,000 farm families in
East Africa, whose incomes have risen by $135 and who
paid back loans at a rate of 99 percent.
Website: www.oneacrefund.org
One Degree, founded by Rey Faustino, is a nonprofit
technology-driven organization revolutionizing the way
low-income families access community resources.
Year Founded: 2012
Issue Area: Poverty Alleviation
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $1.2 million
Number of Staff: 8 full time, 14 part time
Impact: 185,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area have
used OneDegree, or one in six people in need.
Website: www.1degree.org
Peer Health Exchange, founded by Louise Langheier,
empowers young people with the knowledge, skills and
resources to make healthy decisions by training college
students to teach a skills-based health curriculum in
underresourced high schools across the country.
Year Founded: 2003
Issue Area: Health
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $6.5 million
Number of Staff: 50
Impact: Statistically significant positive results on knowledge,
skills and help-seeking behavior, particularly in sexual and
mental health and use of health resources.
Website: www.peerhealthexchange.org
Room to Read, founded by John Wood, Dinesh Shrestha
and Erin Ganju, seeks to transform the lives of millions
of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy
and gender equality in education.
Year Founded: 2000
Issue Area: Education
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $54 million
Number of Staff: 1,400
Impact: Impacted more than 10 million children by developing
literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school
children and by supporting girls to complete secondary
school with strong life skills.
Website: www.roomtoread.org
Row New York, founded by Amanda Kraus, is teaching
young people in underresourced communities the sport of
competitive rowing—and through it, the values of
teamwork, tenacity and commitment to self and others.
Year Founded: 2002
Issue Area: Education
HQ: New York, New York
Current Budget: $3.4 million
Number of Staff: 23 full time, 19 part time
Impact: 100 percent of students who completed the Row New
York program in 2016 graduated from high school in four
years and 92 percent matriculated to college.
Website: www.rownewyork.org
San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center, led by Katie
Albright, prevents child abuse and its devastating impact.
Year Founded: 1998
Issue Area: Children, Youth and Families
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $7 million
Number of Staff: 51
Impact: The Prevention Center seeks to end child abuse and
 reduce its devastating effects by providing evidence-
informed family support and education to more than
twelve thousand children, parents, caregivers and
community members annually and by working with public
and private partners to improve the abuse prevention and
response system.
Website: www.sfcapc.org
SIRUM, founded by Kiah Williams, Adam Kircher and
George Wang, uses an innovative technology platform to
save peoples’ lives by allowing health facilities,
manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies to donate
unused medicine rather than destroy it.
Year Founded: 2011
Issue Area: Health
HQ: Palo Alto, California
Current Budget: $1 million
Number of Staff: 5
Impact: Since its inception, SIRUM has repurposed over $7
million of medicine, enough for over 150,000
prescriptions.
Website: www.sirum.org
Springboard Collaborative, founded by Alejandro Gac-
Artigas, closes the reading achievement gap by coaching
teachers, training family members and cultivating reading
habits so that our scholars have the requisite skills to
access life opportunities.
Year Founded: 2013
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Current Budget: $7 million
Number of Staff: 13 full time, 134 seasonal staff
Impact: By training parents and teachers to collaborate,
 Springboard more than doubles students’ annual reading
progress and puts them on track to close the reading
achievement gap by fourth grade, which is among the
strongest predictors of high school completion, college
graduation and earning potential.
Website: www.springboardcollaborative.org
Teach For America, founded by Wendy Kopp, finds,
develops and supports a diverse network of leaders who
expand opportunity for children in classrooms, schools,
and every sector and field that shapes the broader systems
in which schools operate.
Year Founded: 1989
Issue Area: Education
HQ: New York, New York
Current Budget: $287,000,000
Number of Staff: 1891 full time, 31 part time
Impact: More than 53,000 corps members and alumni are on
the leading edge of expanding opportunity for children in
urban and rural communities.
Website: www.teachforamerica.org
Thread, founded by Sarah Hemminger, engages
underperforming high school students confronting
significant barriers outside of the classroom by providing
each one with a family of committed volunteers and
increased access to community resources.
Year Founded: 2004
Issue Area: Education
HQ: Baltimore, Maryland
Current Budget: $4.14 million
Number of Staff: 35 full time, 12 part time
Impact: Weaving together 303 students and alumni, 850-plus
volunteers and 350-plus collaborators, doing whatever it
 takes to help students realize their potential.
Website: www.thread.org
Watsi, founded by Chase Adam, enables individuals to
directly fund low-cost, high-impact medical care for
people in need.
Year Founded: 2012
Issue Area: Health
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $2 million
Number of Staff: 16
Impact: In its first three years, 16,700 donors have contributed
over $5.5 million on Watsi’s platform to fund care for
nearly seven thousand patients in twenty-two countries.
Website: www.watsi.org
Wishbone, founded by Beth Schmidt, sends low-income
high school students from Connecticut, New York City,
Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area to
extracurricular programs.
Year Founded: 2012
Issue Area: Education
HQ: San Francisco, California
Current Budget: $2.3 million
Number of Staff: 7
Impact: Since 2012, they have helped 1,582 students raise over
$3 million in funding for summer programs.
Website: www.wishbone.org
 APPENDIX B

Methodology

PHASE 1: THE LITERATURE REVIEW

In the first phase of my research, over the course of 2013

through 2015, I worked with several of my student research
assistants to pull together hundreds of articles related to best
practices in the nonprofit world, to learn what experts were
saying about the path to scale. During that process, we
discovered about a dozen key strategies at the heart of
nonprofit growth, from impact measurement to funding to
innovation. We also realized through our research that very
little actual data existed about how organizations grow,
especially in the early stages. This led me to administer my
own survey to collect relevant data to better understand the
key elements of nonprofit scale.

PHASE 2: THE SURVEY

The second phase of my research was to test several variables

we had uncovered in Phase 1 to determine which strategies
were most important in the early path to scale. To download
the full results of the survey, “Scaling the Social Startup: A
Survey of the Growth Path of Top-Performing Social
Entrepreneurs,” go to www.kathleenjanus.com/resources. The
survey had two primary objectives: First, we wanted to
understand the practices and tools used by social entrepreneurs
at different stages of organizational progress. Secondly, we
wanted to gather social entrepreneurs’ perspectives on the key
supports and challenges they had encountered along their path
to building multimillion-dollar organizations.
Survey Instrument Development

Our initial survey was developed over a multimonth period in

late 2014. Survey experts Valerie Threlfall and Elizabeth
Kelley of Threlfall Consulting led the survey drafting, while I
provided strategic guidance and ongoing feedback to
instrument development. As part of the process, I consulted
many practitioners and funders of social entrepreneurial
organizations including:
• Andrea Davila, Echoing Green
• Christy Chin, Draper Richards Kaplan
• Elizabeth Dodson, Silicon Valley Social Ventures
• Fay Twersky, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Heather McLeod Grant, coauthor of Forces for Good
• Johanna Mair, Stanford University
• Katie Albright, San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention
Center
• Kim Syman, New Profit
• Lance Fors, Social Venture Partners Network
• Lindsay Louie, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Michael Lombardo, Reading Partners
• Paul Brest, former president of the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation
• Reshma Saujani, Girls Who Code
• Shannon Farley, Fast Forward
In 2016, we removed select questions from our survey and
added some additional demographic questions, based on our
survey experience in 2015.

Survey Administration

We administered our core survey to two separate samples in

2015 and 2016.

Echoing Green and Silicon Valley Social Ventures (SV2)

Portfolios
• In 2015, we surveyed social entrepreneurs who received
either an Echoing Green fellowship or an SV2 grant. We
selected recipients from these portfolios, as both
selecting organizations have thoughtful selection criteria,
which place a premium on innovation and preliminary
evidence of effectiveness. Echoing Green or SV2
administered the survey to the members of their
portfolios in January 2015.
• Of the 597 people surveyed, 147 responded for a 25
percent overall response rate across the two portfolios.
Respondents represent 141 organizations, 124 of which
are Echoing Green fellowship recipients and 17 of which
are SV2 grantees.
• Survey respondents received multiple reminders from
their sponsoring organization, Echoing Green or SV2,
during the period of survey administration. Respondents
were also eligible to receive a $25 gift card for successful
completion of the survey.

Additional Social Entrepreneurial Portfolios

• In 2016, we built a convenience sample of high-
performing social entrepreneurs affiliated with eight
major grant portfolios whose contact information was
available through network outreach and/or Internet
research. It’s important to note that in 2016, we did not
conduct outreach in affiliation with the sponsoring
organizations like we did in 2015. We contacted chief
executive officers/executive directors of organizations
from the following portfolios:
 - Arbor Brothers
- Ashoka US
- Blue Ridge Foundation
- Draper Richards Kaplan
- Echoing Green (only those who had not responded to
prior survey)
- Fast Forward
- Mulago Foundation
- New Profit
- Peery Foundation
- Skoll Foundation
- SV2 (only those who had not responded to prior
survey)
• The goal of adding these individuals was to explicitly
increase the number of participating organizations in our
survey. We selected respondents from these well-
recognized grant/award portfolios so we could learn from
the best practices of some of the most successful leaders
and organizations.
• Convenience sampling is a nonprobabilistic,
nonrandomized sampling methodology that leverages
available contacts and is commonly used in exploratory
work and/or when there is no way to access an entire
eligible survey population.
• In September 2016, we administered a survey to these
individuals, knowing that our method of convenience
sampling would likely result in a lower response rate. Of
the 685 respondents contacted, 239 had been asked to
complete the 2015 survey, but had not responded. Three
hundred sixty-one emails bounced and there were 72
responses for a response rate (net of bounce-backs) of 22
 percent.
• Survey respondents received multiple reminders from
Kathleen Kelly Janus during the period of survey
administration. Respondents were also eligible to receive
a $25 gift card for successful completion of the survey.

Survey Sample

• Overall, our aggregate combined sample includes 219

individuals from 210 organizations.
• Of the 685 respondents contacted in 2016, 239 had been
asked to complete the 2015 survey, but had not
responded. This means that across the two
administrations, we contacted 727 unique individuals.
With 219 total responses, we had an overall response rate
of 30 percent.
• The attributes of these individuals and their
organizations are summarized below:
- As the overall portfolios included some original
founders who may no longer be with their
organizations, we only included feedback from
individuals who are still with their organizations in our
analysis. Ninety-two percent of respondents are the
original founders of social entrepreneurial
organizations (still with their organizations).
- Survey respondents represent organizations across our
target budget spectrum of $500,000 to $3,000,000.1
(Organizational annual budgets range from $15,000 to
$50,000,000 with a median budget of $1,000,000.
Organizations surveyed have been in operation for
varying amounts of time, ranging from zero to fifty-
one years, with a median tenure of ten years in
operation. Organizations report having between zero
to twenty-five hundred full-time employees, with a
median of twelve full-time employees.)
 - Only respondents who indicate their organization is a
501c3 nonprofit, a 501c3 hybrid (a 501c3 organization
with a for-profit arm), or another type of nonprofit
organization (e.g., an international nonprofit) are
included in the sample. Respondents who indicate
their organization is a for-profit, for-profit hybrid or a
501c4 are excluded from the analysis.
- Survey respondents represent a spectrum of
geographic focus areas, with 24 percent reporting a
local (U.S.) focus, 18 percent reporting a regional
(U.S.) focus, 28 percent reporting a national (U.S.)
focus, and 30 percent reporting an international (non-
U.S.) focus.
Below are some charts describing our final sample in greater
detail.
Survey Sample: Field of Focus
Field of Focus: Arts/Culture
Percentage of Respondents2: 7%
Field of Focus: Civil Rights
Percentage of Respondents: 19%
Field of Focus: Community Improvement
Percentage of Respondents: 23%
Field of Focus: Education
Percentage of Respondents: 48%
Field of Focus: Employment
Percentage of Respondents: 16%
Field of Focus: Environment
Percentage of Respondents: 14%
Field of Focus: Global Development
Percentage of Respondents: 15%
Field of Focus: Health
 Percentage of Respondents: 22%
Field of Focus: Housing
Percentage of Respondents: 7%
Field of Focus: Human Services
Percentage of Respondents: 12%
Field of Focus: Public Benefit/Advocacy
Percentage of Respondents: 15%
Field of Focus: Youth Development
Percentage of Respondents: 26%
Field of Focus: Other
Percentage of Respondents: 31%
Survey Sample: Target Geography
Target Geography: International (non-U.S.)
Percentage of Respondents: 30%
Target Geography: Local (U.S.)
Percentage of Respondents: 24%
Target Geography: National (U.S.)
Percentage of Respondents: 28%
Target Geography: Regional (U.S.)
Percentage of Respondents: 18%
Survey Sample: Grant Portfolio Affiliation3
Portfolio: Arbor Brothers
Percentage of Respondents: 7%
Portfolio: Ashoka
Percentage of Respondents: 35%
Portfolio: Blue Ridge Foundation
Percentage of Respondents: 4%
 Portfolio: Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation
Percentage of Respondents: 22%
Portfolio: Echoing Green
Percentage of Respondents: 67%
Portfolio: Fast Forward
Percentage of Respondents: 7%
Portfolio: Mulago Foundation
Percentage of Respondents: 7%
Portfolio: New Profit
Percentage of Respondents: 10%
Portfolio: Peery Foundation
Percentage of Respondents: 4%
Portfolio: Silicon Valley Social Ventures
Percentage of Respondents: 12%
Portfolio: Skoll Foundation
Percentage of Respondents: 8%
Portfolio: Stanford Social Entrepreneurs in Residence
Percentage of Respondents: 3%
Characterization of Sample Based on Organization Annual
Budget
Organizations Size: Less than $500K
Count of Organization in Segment: 44
Proportion of All Organizations: 21%
Average Number of Years in Operation: 4
Organizations Size: $500K–$2MM
Count of Organization in Segment: 54
Proportion of All Organizations: 26%
 Average Number of Years in Operation: 12
Organizations Size: $2MM+
Count of Organization in Segment: 54
Proportion of All Organizations: 26%
Average Number of Years in Operation: 11

What We Can (and Cannot) Say from This Dataset

This dataset allows us to understand the most common

practices and approaches used by social entrepreneurs, as well
as dominant perspectives from social entrepreneurs about
issues such as growth and scaling. However, it is hard to elicit
“best practices” from the dataset, beyond being able to
document how the practices of larger organizations differ from
those of smaller organizations, given the lack of data about
comparative social impact among respondent organizations.
While we do believe there is some opportunity to assume that
the organizations presented in our survey population are
among the most successful, given the fact that they met the
selection criteria of these competitive grant or award
processes, we cannot assume they are all high-performers.
In addition, while we cannot assume that scaling or an
increase in organizational budget is a proxy for organizational
impact, we believe this dataset allows us to elicit the most
common practices used by organizations as they sought to
become sustainable multimillion-dollar organizations. We
believe that providing descriptive data about these practices is
useful for the field, given the lack of comprehensive data
about social entrepreneurs’ practices; however, the data by
itself should be used cautiously to make normative statements
about best practices.

PHASE 3: THE INTERVIEWS

Between May 2015 and March 2017, I interviewed nearly one

hundred social entrepreneurs, academics, funders and other
experts, asking them a simple question: “What is the key to
nonprofit success?” Their stories helped shed light on some of
the data we found in the survey and led me to develop the five
primary strategies that tended to come up again and again in
the interviews as critical to scale: testing, measuring, funding
experimentation, leading collectively and storytelling. A
complete list of the interviews I conducted for this book is as
follows:
Social Entrepreneurs
Adam, Chase: Watsi
Albright, Katie: San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center
Alvarez, Rafael: Genesys Works
Arnold-Fernandez, Emily: Asylum Access
Bernadotte, Alexandra: Beyond 12
Best, Charles: DonorsChoose
Bulos, Gemma: Global Women’s Water Initiative
Burke Harris, Nadine: Center for Youth Wellness
Corral, Cecilia: CareMessage
Donaldson, Krista: D-Rev
Ehrmann, Nick: Blue Engine
Eubanks Davis, Aimée: Braven
Falik, Abigail: Global Citizen Year
Farley, Shannon: Fast Forward
Faustino, Ray: One Degree
Fields, Natalie Bridgeman: Accountability Counsel
Forti, Matt: One Acre Fund
Fruchterman, Jim: Benetech
Gac-Artigas, Alejandro: Springboard Collaborative
Ganju, Erin: Room to Read
Gitin, Rob: At The Crossroads
Gueye, Tiffany Cooper: Bell
Harrison, Scott: charity: water
Jackley, Jessica: Kiva.org
Janah, Laila: Samasource
Karnofsky, Holden: GiveWell
Kassalow, Jordan: Vision Spring
Khazei, Alan: City Year
Kirsch, Vanessa: Public Allies
Kopp, Wendy: Teach For All
Langheier, Louise: Peer Health Exchange
Laub, Carolyn: Gay-Straight Alliance
Lublin, Nancy: Crisis Text Line
Martin, Patrice: IDEO.org
Moir, Ellen: New Teacher Center
Nesbit, Josh: Medic Mobile
Panjabi, Raj: Last Mile Health
Powers, Laura: Code2040
Reynolds, Tess: New Door Ventures
Rodriguez, Jessamyn: Hot Bread Kitchen
Schmidt, Beth: Wishbone
Shah, Premal: Kiva.org
Shepard, Lisbeth: Green City Force
Simon, Lateefah: Center for Young Women’s Development
Singal, Vineet: CareMessage
Slaughter, Chuck: Living Goods
Warren, Scott: Generation Citizen
Williams, Kiah: SIRUM
Wyatt, Jocelyn: IDEO.org
Yang, David: Coalition 4 Queens
Youn, Andrew: One Acre Fund
Academics and Experts
Bornstein, David: Author, How to Change the World
Brest, Paul: Stanford Law School
Cortés Culwell, Alexa: Open Impact
Fors, Lance: Social Venture Partners (SVP)
Foster, William: The Bridgespan Group
Mair, Johanna: Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil
Society
McCrea, Jennifer: Author, The Generosity Network
McLeod Grant, Heather: Author, Forces for Good
Meehan, Bill: Stanford Graduate School of Business
Seelos, Christian: Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil
Society
Rodriguez Heyman, Darian: Nomi Foundation
Shah, Sonal: Georgetown Beeck Center for Social Impact
Wexler, Rob: Adler & Colvin
Funders
Burgoyne, Anne Marie: Emerson Collective
Chin, Christy: Draper Richards Kaplan
Davila, Andrea: Echoing Green
Dorsey, Cheryl: Echoing Green
Drayton, Bill: Ashoka
Farley, Shannon: Fast Forward
Hattendorf, Laura: Mulago Foundation
Kher, Renuka: Tipping Point
Kirsch, Vanessa: New Profit
Klein, Matt: Blue Ridge Foundation
Khurana, Stephanie: Draper Richards Kaplan
Lurie, Daniel: Tipping Point
Morris, Jayson: Peery Foundation
Niklaus, Andrew: Tipping Point
Osberg, Sally: Skoll Foundation
Pitts, Jennifer: Tipping Point
Politziner, Sammy: Arbor Brothers
Ratay, Jennifer: Silicon Valley Social Ventures (SV2)
Starr, Kevin: Mulago Foundation
Syman, Kim: New Profit
Thomas, Scott: Arbor Brothers
Walker, Darren: Ford Foundation
 APPENDIX C

Additional Resources

GENERAL

Arrillaga-Andreessen, Laura, Giving 2.0: Transform Your

Giving and Our World (Jossey-Bass, 2012).
Bornstein, David, How to Change the World: Social
Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford
University Press, 2007).
Bornstein, David, and Susan Davis, Social Entrepreneurship:
What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press,
2010).
Dees, Gregory, Jed Emerson and Peter Economy, Enterprising
Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs (Wiley,
2001).
, Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs (Wiley, 2002).
Janus, Kathleen and Valerie Threlfall Consulting, Scaling the
Social Startup: A Survey of the Growth Path of Top-
Performing Social Entrepreneurs, available at
www.kathleenjanus.com/resources.
Kanter, Beth and Allison Fine, The Networked Nonprofit:
Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change (Jossey-
Bass, 2010).
Keohane, Georgia Levenson, Social Entrepreneurship for the
21st Century: Innovation Across the Nonprofit, Private
and Public Sectors (McGraw Hill, 2014).
McLeod, Grant, Heather and Leslie Crutchfield, Forces for
Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits
 (Jossey-Bass, 2012).
Meehan, Bill and Kim Starkey Jonker, Engine of Impact: The
Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector
(Stanford University Press, 2017).
Osberg, Sally and Roger L. Martin, Getting Beyond Better:
How Social Entrepreneurship Works (Harvard Business
Review Press, 2015).

WEBSITES AND BLOGS

Blue Avocado blog, www.blueavocado.org.

Board Source, www.boardsource.org.
Bornstein, David. New York Times “Fixes” Column,
www.nytimes.com/column/fixes.
(The) Bridgespan Group, Transformative Scale Resource
Center,
www.bridgespan.org/insights/initiatives/transformative-
scale/transformative-scale-resources.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, www.philanthropy.com.
Compass Point, www.compasspoint.org.
Harvard Business Review—Ideas and Advice for Leaders,
www.hbr.org.
Huffington Post, Huffpost Impact,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/impact/.
Inside Philanthropy, www.insidephilanthropy.com
Kanter, Beth, Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social
Media, www.bethkanter.org/welcome/.
LinkedIn for Good, LinkedIn blog,
http://blog.linkedin.com/topic/linkedin-for-good/.
Nonprofit Quarterly, www.nonprofitquarterly.org.
Stanford Social Innovation Review, www.ssir.org.
 PART 1: TESTING

Brown, Tim & Jocelyn Wyatt, “Design Thinking for Social

Innovation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter
2010.
Brown, Tim, Change by Design: How Design Thinking
Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
(HarperBusiness, 2009).
Chesborough, Henry, Open Innovation: The New Imperative
for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Harvard
Business Review Press, 2005).
Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit, IDEO.org,
2015, downloadable at www.designkit.org.
Drucker, Peter F., “The Discipline of Innovation,” Harvard
Business Review, August 2002.
Farson, Richard and Ralph Keyes, “The Failure Tolerant
Leader,” Harvard Business Review, August 2002, available
at https://hbr.org/2002/08/the-failure-tolerant-leader.
Lean Impact: Lean Principles for Nonprofits and Social
Enterprises, www.leanimpact.org.
Levitt Cea, Joanna and Jess Rimington, “Creating Breakout
Innovation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer
2017.
Ries, Eric, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use
Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful
Businesses (Crown Business, 2011).
Seelig, Tina, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity
(HarperOne, 2012).
Tantia, Piyush, “The New Science of Designing for Humans,”
Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2017.
 PART 2: MEASURING

B Analytics Compare Software, http://b-

analytics.net/products/benchmark-and-report.
Brest, Paul, “The Power of Theories of Change,” Stanford
Social Innovation Review, Spring 2010.
Developing a Theory of Change (revised March 2014), NPC
and Clinks.
Epstein, Marc J. and Kristi Yuthas, Measuring and Improving
Social Impacts: A Guide for Nonprofits, Companies and
Impact Investors (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014).
Hunter, David E. K., Working Hard—and Working Well
(Hunter Consulting LLC, 2013).
McKinsey on Society, Social Impact Assessment Portal,
http://mckinseyonsociety.com/social-impact-assessment/.
Morino, Mario, Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an
Era of Scarcity (Venture Philanthropy Partners, 2011).
Mulgan, Geoff, “Measuring Social Value,” Stanford Social
Innovation Review, Summer 2010.
Outcome Focused Grantmaking: A Hard-Headed Approach to
Soft-Hearted Goals, William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, March 2012.
Snibbe, Alana Conner, “Drowning in Data,” Stanford Social
Innovation Review, Fall 2006.
“Theory of Change Basics: A Primer on Theory of Change,”
Act Knowledge, March 2012.
Theory of Change Community Library Resources,
http://www.theoryofchange.org/library/.
Tools and Resources for Assessing Social Impact (TRASI),
Foundation Center, http://trasi.foundationcenter.org.
 PART 3: FUNDING

Battilana, Julie, Matthew Lee, John Walker and Cheryl

Dorsey, “In Search of the Hybrid Ideal,” Stanford Social
Innovation Review, Summer 2012.
Bell, Jeanne, Jan Masaoka and Steve Zimmerman, Nonprofit
Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial
Viability (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Foster, William, Ben Dixon and Matthew Hochstetler, “In
Search of Sustainable Funding: Is Diversity of Sources
Really the Answer?” Nonprofit Quarterly, March 21, 2007.
Foster, William, Peter Kim and Barbara Christiansen, “Ten
Nonprofit Funding Models,” Stanford Social Innovation
Review, Spring 2009.
McCrae, Jennifer and Jeffrey Walker, The Generosity
Network: New Transformational Tools for Successful
Fund-Raising (Deepak Chopra Books, 2013).
Panas, Jerold, Asking: A 59-Minute Guide to Everything Board
Members, Volunteers and Staff Must Know to Secure the
Gift (Emerson & Church, 2013).
Rodriguez Heyman, Darian, Nonprofit Fundraising 101: A
Practical Guide with Easy to Implement Ideas and Tips
from Industry Experts (Wiley, 2016).
Tierney, Thomas J. and Joel L. Fleishman, Give Smart:
Philanthropy That Gets Results (PublicAffairs, 2012).
Wexler, Robert, “Effective Social Enterprise—A Menu of
Legal Structures,” Exempt Organization Tax Review, June
2009.
 PART 4: LEADING

Brinckerhoff, Peter, Mission-Based Management: Leading

Your Not-for-Profit in the 21st Century (Wiley, 2009).
Chait, Richard, William Ryan and Barbara Taylor, Governance
as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards
(Wiley, 2004).
Collins, Jim, Good to Great (HarperBusiness, 2011).
, Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to
Accompany Good to Great (HarperCollins, 2005).
Drucker, Peter, Managing the Nonprofit Organization
(HarperBusiness, 2006).
Kotter, John, “What Leaders Really Do,” Harvard Business
Review, December 2001.
Letts, Christine et al., High-Performance Nonprofit
Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact
(Wiley, 1999).
Light, Paul, “Reshaping Social Entrepreneurship,” Stanford
Social Innovation Review, Fall 2006.
Masaoka, Jan, Best of the Board Café: Hands-On Solutions for
Nonprofit Boards (Fieldstone Alliance, 2009).
Rodriguez Heyman, Darian, Nonprofit Management 101: A
Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and
Professionals (Jossey-Bass, 2011).
 PART 5: STORYTELLING

Aaker, Jennifer and Andy Smith, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick,

Effective and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive
Social Change (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Duarte, Nancy, HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations
(Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).
Ganz, Marshall, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership,
Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker
Movement (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Goodman, Andy & Cause Communications, Why Bad
Presentations Happen to Good Causes: And How to
Ensure They Won’t Happen to Yours, available for
download at
http://www.thegoodmancenter.com/resources/.
The OpEd Project, www.theopedproject.org.
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1. Brice S. McKeever and Sarah L. Pettijohn, “The Nonprofit Sector in Brief 2014: Public
Charities, Giving and Volunteering,” Urban Institute, 2014.
2. For a full list of the cast of characters, along with their organizational information, see
Appendix A.
PART 1—TESTING IDEAS
Chapter 1: The Discovery Phase
1. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to
Create Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Business, 2011).
2. Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires
Innovation (HarperBusiness, 2009).
3. Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from
Technology (Harvard Business Review Press, 2005).
4. Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit, IDEO.org, 2015; downloadable at
www.designkit.org.
5. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
6. “Bryan Stevenson Urges USCA Audience to ‘Get Proximate,’” Black AIDS Institute blog,
2015; available at https://www.blackaids.org/news-2015/2527-bryan-stevenson-urges-usca-
audience-to-qget-proximateq.
7. “Gates Foundation Commits More than $500 Million to Tackle the Burden of Infectious
Disease in Developing Countries,” November 2, 2014; available at
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2014/11/ASTMH-Address.
8. Jill Tucker, “Oakland Preschool on Wheels Seeks to Bridge Access Gap,” San Francisco
Chronicle, November 27, 2015; available at http://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/Oakland-
preschool-on-wheels-seeks-to-bridge-6660902.php.
9. Sam Milbrath, “Co-creation: 5 Examples of Brands Driving Customer-Driven Innovation,”
Vision Critical blog, August 5, 2016; available at https://www.visioncritical.com/5-examples-how-
brands-are-using-co-creation/.
10. “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime,” TEDMED 2014; available at
https://www.ted.com/speakers/nadine_burke_harris_1.
11. The Accountability Resource Guide; available at
http://www.accountabilitycounsel.org/resources/arg/.
Chapter 2: Engaging All Stakeholders
1. Carole Cadwalladr, “The Guy Behind the Kony 2012 Video Finally Explains How Everything
Went So Weird,” Business Insider, March 3, 2013; available at http://www.businessinsider.com/the-
guy-behind-the-kony-2012-video-finally-explains-how-everything-went-so-weird-2013-3.
2. Polly Curtis and Tom McCarthy, “Kony 2012: what’s the real story?” Guardian, March 8,
2012; available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/reality-check-with-polly-
curtis/2012/mar/08/kony-2012-what-s-the-story.
3. Kony 2012, video available at https://invisiblechildren.com/kony-2012/.
4. Samantha Grossman, “‘Kony 2012’ Documentary Becomes the Most Viral Video in History,”
Time, March 12, 2012; available at http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/12/kony-2012-documentary-
becomes-most-viral-video-in-history/.
5. Polly Curtis and Tom McCarthy, “Kony 2012: what’s the real story?”
6. Michael Deibert, “The Problem with Invisible Children’s ‘Kony 2012,’” Huffington Post blog,
March 7, 2012.
7. Lauren Raab, “‘Kony 2012’ Group Invisible Children Is Shutting Down,” Los Angeles Times,
December 15, 2014; available at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-invisible-children-
kony-2012-20141215-story.html.
8. Jim Fruchterman, “Landmine Detector Project Lessons Learned,” Beneblog: Technology
Meets Society, December 2, 2007; available at http://benetech.blogspot.com/2007/12/landmine-
detector-project-lessons.html.
9. More information is available at https://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/americorps.
Chapter 3: Reframing Failure as Learning
1. Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes, “The Failure Tolerant Leader,” Harvard Business Review,
August 2002; available at https://hbr.org/2002/08/the-failure-tolerant-leader.
2. Ibid.
3. Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit, www.designkit.org.
4. Krista Donaldson, “Failure, Design & Impact,” LinkedIn, September 10, 2015; available at
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/failure-design-impact-krista-donaldson.
5. Tanya Raukko, “8 Questions with: Garrett Spiegel/D-Rev,” Imprint, March 24, 2014;
available at http://www.imprintlab.com/8-questions-with-garrett-spiegel-d-rev/.
6. Garret Spiegel, “Learning from Comet: rural clinics and home-care aren’t ready for
phototherapy,” D-Rev blog, October 21, 2014; available at http://d-rev.org/2014/10/learning-comet-
rural-clinics-home-care-arent-ready-phototherapy/.
7. “Raj Panjabi: Post Conflict Health,” PopTech, 2010; available at
https://poptech.org/popcasts/raj_panjabi_postconflict_health.
8. Jonny Price, “Kiva Zip Pilot in Kenya Winding Down,” Kiva blog, September 16, 2015;
available at https://borrow.kiva.org/blogs/200, accessed May 25, 2017.
9. “Our Mistakes,” Givewell.org; available at http://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes.
10. “GiveWell and Good Ventures,” The GiveWell Blog, June 28, 2012; available at
http://blog.givewell.org/2012/06/28/givewell-and-good-ventures/.
11. Laurie Michaels and Judith Rodin, “Embracing Philanthropy’s Risky Business,” Stanford
Social Innovation Review, Summer 2017.
PART 2—MEASURING IMPACT
1. Tris Lumley, “Raising the Bar on Nonprofit Impact Measurement,” Stanford Social Innovation
Review, July 10, 2013.
2. The Robin Hood Poverty Tracker is available at http://povertytracker.robinhood.org/#home.
For information about how the foundation streamlines the impact metrics of its grantees, see also
Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving (Columbia
University Press, 2013).
3. “The State of Data in the Nonprofit Sector,” EveryAction and Nonprofit Hub, 2016.
4. Peter Buffett, “The Charitable-Industrial Complex,” New York Times, July 26, 2013.
Chapter 4: Crafting a Compelling Theory of Change
1. John Sawhill and David Williamson, “Measuring What Matters in Nonprofits,” McKinsey
Quarterly, May 2001.
2. Cathy James, “Theory of Change Review, a report commissioned by Comic Relief,”
September 2011.
 3. “Developing a Theory of Change,” NPC and Clinks, revised March 2014; available at
http://www.clinks.org/sites/default/files/TheoryofChangeGuide.pdf.
4. James P. Connell et al., “New Approaches to Evaluating Comprehensive Community
Initiatives,” Aspen Institute, 1995.
5. Available at http://www.theoryofchange.org.
6. Mario Morino, Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity (Venture
Philanthropy Partners, 2011).
7. David E. K. Hunter, Working Hard—and Working Well (Hunter Consulting , 2013).
Chapter 5: Maximizing Use of Data
1. G. T. Doran, “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives,”
Management Review 70, no. 11, 1981, 35–36.
2. Allison Gauss, The SMART Way to Create Fundraising Goals, Classy blog,
https://www.classy.org/blog/the-smart-way-to-create-fundraising-goals/; and Mike Morrison,
History of SMART Objectives, RapidBi (June 22, 2010), https://rapidbi.com/history-of-smart-
objectives/.
3. See, for example, Maria A. May, “RCTs: Not All That Glitters Is Gold: A look at the
limitations of randomized control trials,” Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, August 28, 2012;
and Peter York, “Fueling Nonprofit Innovation: R&D Vigor Trumps Randomized Control Trial
Rigor: Research and development can help more nonprofits learn, innovate, and reach goals faster
and for less money,” Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, August 16, 2011.
4. Mae Wu et al., “Dosed without Prescription: Preventing Pharmaceutical Contamination of our
Nation’s Drinking Water,” NRDC White Paper, December 2009.
5. Becky Briesacher et al., “Out-of-Pocket Burden of Health Care Spending and the Adequacy of
the Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy,” Med Care, 2010 June; 48(6): 503–9, available at
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3084515/; and Dan Mangan, “Medication Costs
Fuel Painful Medical Debt, Bankruptcies,” CNBC.com article, May 28, 2014.
6. My Stomach Hit the Floor; video available at http://leapofreason.org/video-gallery/video-nick-
ehrmann-my-stomach-hit-the-floor/.
Chapter 6: Making Your Data Tell a Story
1. Alana Conner Snibbe, “Drowning in Data,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2006.
2. From 89 Indicators to 4, video available at http://leapofreason.org/video-gallery/video-mike-
duggan-from-89-indicators-to-4/.
PART 3—FUNDING EXPERIMENTATION
1. William Foster and Jeffrey L. Bradach, “Should Nonprofits Seek Profits?” Harvard Business
Review, February 2005.
2. William Foster, Peter Kim and Barbara Christiansen, “Ten Nonprofit Funding Models,”
Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2009.
3. William Foster, Ben Dixon and Matthew Hochstetler, “In Search of Sustainable Funding: Is
Diversity of Sources Really the Answer?” Nonprofit Quarterly, March 21, 2007.
Chapter 7: Laying the Foundation to Experiment with Earned Income
1. “2016 Snapshot: For-Profit and Hybrid Echoing Green Fellowship Applications”; available at
http://www.echoinggreen.org/pubs/Echoing-Green-Snapshot-For-Profit-Hybrid-2016.pdf.
2. Robert Wexler, “Effective Social Enterprise—A Menu of Legal Structures,” Exempt
Organization Tax Review, June 2009.
3. Julie Battilana, Matthew Lee, John Walker and Cheryl Dorsey, “In Search of the Hybrid
Ideal,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2012.
4. Wexler, “Effective Social Enterprise—A Menu of Legal Structures.” See also Robert Wexler
and David Levitt, “Using New Hybrid Legal Forms: Three Case Studies, Four Important Questions,
and a Bunch of Analysis,” Exempt Organization Tax Review, January 2012; and John Tyler and
Robert Wexler, “Update on Hybrids and Social Enterprise Organizations,” 32nd Annual
Representing and Managing Tax-Exempt Organizations, April 23, 2015.
5. “Embrace: Deciding on a Hybrid Structure, Global Health Innovation Insight Series Case
Study,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2013.
6. Julie Battilana, Matthew Lee, John Walker and Cheryl Dorsey, “In Search of the Hybrid
Ideal,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2012.
Chapter 8: Testing Earned-Income Strategies
1. “Developing Viable Earned Income Strategies,” in Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs:
Enhancing the Performance of Your Enterprising Nonprofit, eds. Greg Dees et al. (Wiley, 2002).
2. See https://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/americorps/current-members/americorps-
week/americorps-week-2017#third.
3. Ibid.
Chapter 9: Optimizing Fundraising Efforts
1. John Kania and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review,
Winter 2011.
2. “Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter?” Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, November 19,
2014.
3. Alex Neuhoff, Katie Smith Milway, Reilly Kiernan and Josh Grehan, “Making Sense of
Nonprofit Collaborations,” Bridgespan Group and Lodestar Foundation, December 2014.
4. Alex Neuhoff and Katie Smith Millway, “Collaboration-palooza,” Stanford Social Innovation
Review, December 17, 2014.
5. Kania and Kramer, “Collective Impact.”
6. Chris Rabb, Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity
(Berrett-Koehler, 2010).
7. Ben Beers and Lindsay Booker, “Data Evolution: What We Learn from Fellowship
Applicants,” Echoing Green, blog, April 19, 2016; available at
http://www.echoinggreen.org/blog/data-evolution-what-we-learn-fellowship-applicants.
8. Jennifer McCrea and Jeffrey Walker, The Generosity Network (Deepak Chopra Books, 2013).
PART 4—LEADING COLLABORATIVELY
Chapter 10: Cultivating Collective Leadership
1. Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of
High-Impact Nonprofits (Jossey-Bass 2012).
2. Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader (Basic Books, 2009).
3. Robert Spector and Patrick D. McCarthy, The Nordstrom Way: The Inside Story of America’s
#1 Customer Service Company (Wiley, 1996). For more on the inverted pyramid of management
and how it applies in the nonprofit sector, see Peter C. Brickerhoff, Mission-Based Management:
Leading Your Not-for-Profit in the 21st Century (Wiley, 2009).
4. Spector and McCarthy, The Nordstrom Way.
5. Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer, “Maximizing Your Return on People,” Harvard Business
Review, March 1, 2007.
6. Edwin Warfield, “A Video Conversation with Sarah Hemminger, CEO and Co-Founder of
Thread—Part I,” Baltimore citybizlist, May 11, 2016; available at
http://baltimore.citybizlist.com/article/350685/a-video-conversation-with-sarah-hemminger-ceo-
and-co-founder-of-thread-part-i.
7. Edwin Warfield, “A Video Conversation with Sarah Hemminger, CEO and Co-Founder of
Thread—Part II,” Baltimore citybizlist, May 16, 2016; available at
http://baltimore.citybizlist.com/article/350686/a-video-conversation-with-sarah-hemminger-ceo-
and-co-founder-of-thread-part-ii.
Chapter 11: Bringing in Senior Leadership Early
1. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
(HarperBusiness, 2011).
Chapter 12: Building an Active Board
1. Jan Masaoka, “Ditch Your Board Composition Matrix,” Blue Avocado: A Magazine of
American Nonprofits; available at http://blueavocado.org/content/ditch-your-board-composition-
matrix.
2. LinkedIn for Nonprofits, http://nonprofit.linkedin.com/content/me/nonprofit/en-us.
3. Richard Chait, William Ryan and Barbara Taylor, Governance as Leadership: Reframing the
Work of Nonprofit Boards (Wiley, 2004).
PART 5—TELLING COMPELLING STORIES
1. Mike Butcher, “UN Launches Powerful, First Ever, VR Film following Syrian Refugee Girl,”
TechCrunch, January 23, 2015.
2. Andy Goodman and Cause Communications, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good
Causes: And How to Ensure They Won’t Happen to Yours, available for download at
http://www.thegoodmancenter.com/resources/.
3. Ibid.
4. Nadine Burke Harris, “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime,” filmed
September 2014, available at https://www.ted.com/speakers/nadine_burke_harris_1.
Chapter 13: Creating a Compelling Narrative
1. McCrea and Walker, The Generosity Network.
2. Marshall Ganz, “What Is Public Narrative?” 2008,
chutzpahportfolio.yolasite.com/resources/WhatIsPublicNarrative08.pdf.
3. Harris, “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime.”
4. McCrea and Walker, The Generosity Network.
5. Ibid.
6. Goodman and Cause Communications, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes.
7. David Henderson, Making News: A Straight-Shooting Guide to Media Relations (iUniverse
Star, 2006).
8. For more on the Teach For America story, see Wendy Kopp, One Day, All Children… the
Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way (PublicAffairs, 2001).
9. Laura Weidman Powers, “Google and Diversity: Be Careful What You Say About It,”
Mercury News, June 9, 2014.
10. See, for example, Abigail Falik, “Malia’s Decision to Take a Gap Year Isn’t Just Good for
Her—It’s Good for the Country, Entrepreneur Says,” Washington Post, May 2, 2016.
11. Available at www.theopedproject.org.
12. Goodman and Cause Communications, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes.
13. See https://www.nationalservice.gov/about/who-we-are/our-history.
14. See https://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/americorps.
APPENDIX B. METHODOLOGY
1. For purposes of this analysis, we define small organizations as organizations having less than
$500,000 in annual budget; medium organizations are organizations with a $500,000 to $2 million
annual budget, and large organizations are those that have an annual budget greater than $2 million.
2. Respondents were able to select multiple answers to this question, with the result that
responses do not total to 100 percent.
3. Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents report being part of multiple portfolios.
 INDEX

Access Code, 59–60, 61 (fig.)

Accountability Counsel, 21, 30–31, 60, 62–63, 95, 196, 199
Acumen Fund, 163
Adam, Chase/Watsi, 221
Airbnb, 4, 110
Albright, Katie/San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center,
127–130, 219
Alvarez, Rafael/Genesys Works, 79, 110, 162, 214
Alvarez, Tomás/Beats Rhymes and Life, 153
AmeriCorps program, 32, 119
Andreessen Horowitz, 137
Annie Casey Foundation, 54
Arbor Brothers, 56, 58–60, 61 (fig.)
Armstrong, Rachel/Farm Commons, 7–8
Arnold-Fernandez, Emily/Asylum Access, 177–179, 208
Asana, 43
Ashoka, xiii, 133, 145, 202
Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change, 54–55
Aspire Public Schools, 9, 12, 13–14, 13 (fig.)
Asylum Access, 177–179
At The Crossroads (ATC), ix–x, 72, 73–74, 150, 151–152,
164–165
Avon, 113–114
Bain and Company, 197
Battilana, Julia, 104–105
Beats Rhymes and Life, 153
BELL, 88, 89 (fig.), 90, 117–118
benchmarks for success, 44–45, 91–92, 141–142, 183–184,
199–200
Benetech, 26, 27–28, 115–116
Bernadotte, Alexandre/Beyond 12, 14–16, 177, 209
Best, Charles/DonorsChoose, 17–19, 160, 163, 212
Beyond 12, 14, 15–17, 177
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 9, 194
Blue Avocado, 176
Blue Engine, 80–81, 148–149
Board Source, 179
boards, 173–174, 180 (fig.)
board policy and, 181
clear expectations and, 177–181
committee structure and, 180–181
engagement and, 182
expertise/advice and, 173–174
fundraising and, 173, 174, 174 (fig.)
help areas and, 174 (fig.)
hiring vs. firing, 177
myth of connections and, 175
and tests for potential members, 177
recruiting/main challenges, 174–175
recruiting overview, 174–177
 as two-way street, 182–183
Boulud, Daniel, 98
Bradach, Jeffrey/Bridgespan Group, 94
brainstorming, 6
funding experimentation/earned income strategy and, 120
stakeholder engagement and, 29
Braven, 65–70, 72
Brest, Paul, 43, 55
Bridgespan Group, 94, 95–96, 125–126
Brilliance devices, D-Rev, 36–37
Bring Music to our Classroom, 18
Brown, Michael/City Year, 31, 172, 197, 211
Brown, Tim/IDEO, 4, 35
Buffet, Peter, 48
Buffet, Warren, 48, 146
Bulos, Gemma/Global Women’s Water Initiative, 71, 134–135,
138, 214
Burke Harris, Nadine/Center for Youth Wellness, 19, 20–21,
22, 126, 127–130, 186–187, 188–190, 191, 195, 210
bus as classroom. See preschool program example
Bush, George W., 117, 193
C4Q (Coalition for Queens), 59–60, 61 (fig.)
Calera Recognition Systems, 115
California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), 126, 127–130
Canadian embassy, 135
CareMessage, 8, 108
CDC, 189
Center for Youth Wellness (CYW), 19, 20–21, 126, 128–130.
 See also Burke Harris, Nadine
Chait, Richard, 179–180, 180 (fig.), 181
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 67
Change by Design (Brown), 4
charities and American distrust, 140
charity: water, 22–23, 140–141, 162–163
Chavez, Cesar, 188
Chen, Jane/Embrace, 104, 213
Chesbrough, Henry, 4
City Year, 31–32, 119, 162, 172, 197–198
Clark, Heléne, 55
Clinton, Bill, 32, 41, 197
Clooney, George, 25
Clouds Over Sidra (film), 185
cocreation, 19, 21–22
Code2040, 108–110, 137, 165–166, 194
Colbert, Stephen, 18
collaborative funding, 125–126, 128–130
“Collective Impact” (Stanford Social Innovations Review), 125
Collins, Jim, 152, 165
Comet device, D-Rev, 36–37, 37
Corral, Cecilia/CareMessage, 8, 210
cost-benefit analysis, 116
Crutchfield, Leslie, 146
Culwell, Alexa Cortés, 49
D-Rev nonprofit, 35–37, 80, 196
data
 benchmarks for success, 91–92
communicating person to person, 90–91
“drowning in data,” 82, 87
data dashboards (overview)
advice on, 87–88, 90
BELL example, 88, 89 (fig.), 90
data/measuring impact, 47–50, 53–54
data honesty/Blue Engine example, 79–81
for-profits vs. nonprofits, 48–49
funding and, 47, 52–53
outcomes vs. outputs, 51–53, 52 (fig.)
See also theory of change
data/telling your story, 82–83
foundation requests and, 82
impact measures/NTC example, 85–86, 86 (fig.)
reporting to public/Room to Read example, 83, 84 (fig.), 85
data use, maximizing
beneficiaries connections example, 78–79
Braven example, 65–70
comparative evaluations and, 68–69
continuing/One Degree example, 76–78
creativity/indicators of progress, 72–74
existing research and, 74–76
funding and, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79–80, 81
outside specialists and, 68, 70–72
SMART goals and, 65, 66
stakeholders and, 76, 77, 81
Dees, Gregory, 108, 119
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 27
Deibert, Michael, 26
“Developing Viable Earned Income Strategies” (Dees and
colleagues), 108
Dion, Katy/Peer Health Exchange, 154–156
Domus Kids, 87
Donaldson, Krista/D-Rev, 35–36, 196, 212
DonorsChoose, 17–19, 160, 163
Doran, George, 65
Dorsey, Cheryl, 104–105, 133
Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, xiii, 133, 145
Drayton, Bill, 202
Dropbox, 111
“Drowning in Data” (Stanford Social Innovation Review), 82
d.school, 4
Dugan, Mike, 87
earned income. See funding experimentation/earned income
eBay, 47
Ebola outbreak (2012), 40, 119
Echoing Green/fellowships, ix, xiii, 72, 100, 104–105, 131,
133, 145, 166
Edison, Thomas, 34
“Effective Social Enterprise—A Menu of Legal Structures,”
101, 102–103 (fig.)
Ehrmann, Nick/Blue Engine, 80–81, 148, 209
Einstein, Albert, 48–49
Embrace/baby warmer, 104, 107
Equal Justice Initiative, 6
Eubanks Davis, Aimée/Braven, 65–70, 72, 210
Face It Together, 28
Facebook, 15, 22, 31, 43, 47, 68, 70, 141
“failure”/lessons for success
“Biggest Failure” competition (Hewlett Foundation), 43
D-Rev medical device company example, 35–37
data needs and, 44
focusing on optimal impact, 37–40
funding and, 33, 40–44
innovation process and, 34, 35–37
Kiva and, 41–42
Last Mile Health and, 38–40
“Our Mistakes” (GiveWell), 43
reasons for not changing approach, 33–34
transparency and, 41–44
“failure-tolerant leaders,” 34
Falik, Abby/Global Citizen Year, 123, 137, 159–160, 163,
169–171, 172, 194, 214
Farley, Shannon/Fast Forward, xii
Farm Commons, 7–8
Farson, Richard, 34
Faustino, Rey/One Degree, 76–78, 166–167, 218
feedback, 6, 21–22. See also cocreation
Field Guide to Human Centered Design (IDEO.org), 5
Fields, Natalie Bridgeman/Accountability Counsel, 21, 62–63,
131–132, 207
Flannery, Matthew/Kiva, 41, 147–148, 215
Flynn, Ray, 197
Ford Foundation, 54
Fors, Lance, 110, 175–176
Fortune, 194
Foster, William/Bridgespan Group, 94, 95–96
Fruchterman, Jim/Benetech,, 26, 27–28, 209
Fuller, Khalil, 122
funding
catch-22 with, 3
recession (2008) and, 97
source statistics (summary), 121
sources/by organization size, 96
funding experimentation/earned income, 93–96, 96 (fig.)
collaborating with government agencies/examples, 117–119
feasibility analysis and, 120
“freemium” model, 110–111
hybrid models/problems, 100–101, 102–103 (fig.), 104–106
hybridization movement, 105 (fig.)
legal issues and, 100–101, 102–103 (fig.), 120
mission drift and, 104–106
organization mission/impact and, 119, 120
retail innovations/examples, 113–116
selling services/examples overview, 107–110
services on loan basis, 111–113
shareholder value and, 111
sliding scale, 107, 110–111
strategy planning/steps, 119–120
 subsectors and, 94–95
“teach a man to fish” philosophy, 116
warnings/advice, 93–95, 97–100
funding for social startups
catch-22 with, 3, 75
“failure” and, 33, 40–44
scarcity of, 3, 33
fundraising optimization
asking for money/challenges, 132–138
benchmarks for success, 141–142
collaborative funding and, 125–130
diversifying efforts/problems, 122
focusing on one source/problems, 123
gender differences, 133
gift table and, 124, 125 (fig.)
mission goals and, 124
multiyear plan development/steps, 123–124
outreach calendar, 124
peer relationships and, 131–132
tips on, 136–138
volunteer fundraisers, 138–139
Gac-Artigas, Alejandro/Springboard Collaborative, 29–30, 53,
220
Ganju, Erin/Room to Read, 85, 192–193, 218
Ganz, Marshall, 188, 189, 190
Garcia, Maya, xi
Garety, Shawn, 152
Gates, Bill, xii, 194
Gates Foundation. See Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Gay-Straight Alliance Network, 157, 162, 167–168
General Electric, 27
Generation Citizen Year, 91
Generosity Network, The (McCrea and Walker), 190
Genesys Works, 78–79, 110, 162
Gitin, Rob/At The Crossroads, ix–x, 72–74, 150, 151–152,
164–165, 172, 208
GiveWell, 43
Giving (Clinton), 41
Global Cease Fire Day, 134
Global Citizen Year, 123–124, 137, 159–160, 163, 169–170,
170–171, 172, 194
Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, 118
Global Women’s Water Initiative, 71, 135
Godin, Seth, 185
Goldman Sachs Foundation, 19
Good to Great (Collins), 152, 165
Good Ventures, 43
Goodman, Andy, 186, 192, 193, 195
Google and staff diversity numbers, 108–109, 137, 194
Google Docs dashboard, 63
Google Impact Challenge Award, 20–21
Google Sheets, 90
Google Surveys, 21
Google.org, 9, 20–21
Governance as Leadership (Chait, Ryan, and Taylor), 179–
 180, 180 (fig.)
Grant, Heather McLeod, 146
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, 125
grit and academic/life success, 74–75
Gueye, Tiffany Cooper/BELL,, 88, 117–118, 208
Hack, Carolyn/Aspire Schools, 207
Harris, Kamala, 127
Harrison, Scott/charity: water, 140–141, 162–163, 211
Harvard Business Review, 34, 94, 157
Harvard Business School Pitch for Change competition, 169–
170
Harvard Graphics, 49
Hassenfeld, Elie/GiveWell, 214
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Stanford University, 4
Healthy Start, 115
Heinz Award, 19
Hemminger, Sarah/Thread, 157–159, 220
Henderson, David, 193
Hewlett Foundation, The, 9, 43
Hewlett Packard, 171
Hill, Linda, 150
Horowitz, Ben, 137
Hot Bread Kitchen, 23, 98–99, 104, 105–106
Hsu, John, 68, 72
Hsu, Jukay/Coalition for Queens, 59–60, 211
human-centered design, 3–5, 7 (fig.)
scalable success and, 3–4
 Silicon Valley and, 3
See also specific components; specific examples
Humanism in Medicine Award, 19
Hunter, David, 58
IBM, 34
ideation phase, 10. See also brainstorming
IDEO, 4, 5, 16. See also specific individuals
IDEO.org, 5, 183, 195–196
impact. See data/measuring impact; specific social startups
“In Search of the Hybrid Ideal” (Stanford Social Innovation
Review), 104–105, 105 (fig.)
InDesign, 16
Indiegogo, 19, 21
International Advocates Working Group, 30–31
International Day of Peace, 134
Intuit, 62
Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial
Opportunity (Rabb), 132–133
Invisible Children, 25–26
Jackley, Jessica/Kiva, 41, 147–148, 215
Janah, Leila, 91
Janus, Kathleen Kelly, x, xi–xii, 62–63, 201–202, 223–231
JetBlue, 99
Jones, Hubie, 197
Kaiser Permanente, 189
Kania, John, 125
Kardashian, Kim, 25
Karnofsky, Holden/GiveWell, 43, 214
Keyes, Ralph, 34
Khazei, Alan/City Year, 31–32, 162, 197–198, 211
Kher, Renuka, 9, 14
Kickstarter, 19, 21
Kirby, Kevin, 28
Kircher, Adam/SIRUM, 219
Kirsch, Vanessa, 40–41
Kiva, 41–42, 147–148, 149, 111–112, 160, 171–172
Kiva Love, 149
Kiva Zip, 41–42
Kony 2012 video/problems, 25, 26
Kony, Joseph, 25–26
Kopp, Wendy/Teach for America, 145, 193–194, 220
Kramer, Mark, 125
Kraus, Amanda/Row New York, 74–75, 219
Langheier, Louise/Peer Health Exchange, 153–156, 218
Last Mile Health, 38–40, 57 (fig.), 118–119
Laub, Carolyn/GSA Network, 157, 162, 167–168, 213
leadership , 143–144
benchmarks for success, 183–184
egoless leader and, 150–152
“energy” exercise, 169
firing staff and, 161
founders’ celebrity and, 145
hiring and, 157–160
“leading from behind” and, 150, 152, 153
mistakes and, 143, 161
 Nordstrom department store example, 146–147, 147 (fig.),
149
Nordstrom Way, The, 146–147, 147 (fig.)
reverse pyramid and, 146–150, 147 (fig.)
sabbaticals and, 152, 172
sharing responsibilities, 145–156, 147 (fig.)
staff learning/bonding opportunities and, 161–163
staff managing metrics, 148–149
strengths/weaknesses of leader and, 171
technology and, 149–150, 163
transparency and, 149–150
work life balance and, 153–156
leadership/senior positions
early timing and, 168–169
founders letting go and, 171–172
need for, 164–169
vision for, 169–171
Lean Startup, The (Ries), 4
Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity
(Morino), 58
Lee, Matthew, 104–105
LEGO, 19
LGBTQ students, 167. See also Gay-Straight Alliance
Network
LinkedIn, 4, 31, 68, 70, 111, 137, 176
Living Goods, 113–115
Lords Resistance Army (LRA), 25
Lurie, Daniel, 128
McCrea, Jennifer, 136–137, 188, 190
Management Review, 65
Mandela, Nelson, 150
Martin, Patrice/IDEO.org, 195, 196, 215
Masaoka, Jan, 176
Mercury News (San Jose), 194
Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, 9
microfinancing overview, 111–113
Milk, Chris, 185
Million Voice Choir, 134
mission drift, 104–106
Mobil Oil, 194
Moir, Ellen/New Teacher Center, 85–86, 86 (fig.), 175–176,
217
Morino, Mario, 58
Moskovitz, Dustin, 43
Mustapha, Taj, ix–x, 72
Mycoskie, Blake, 145
National Public Radio, 107
National Student Clearinghouse data, 79
Nature Conservancy, The, 52–54
NBA Math Hoops, 122
New Door Ventures, 49–50, 105, 116
New Profit, 40–41
New Schools Venture Fund, 15
New Teacher Center (NTC), 85–86, 86 (fig.), 175
No Child Left Behind Act, 117
nonprofits summary information, 207–222
Nordstrom department store and leadership, 146–147, 147
(fig.), 149
Nordstrom, Jim, 146
Nordstrom Way, The, 146–147, 147 (fig.)
NTC. See New Teacher Center (NTC)
Obama, Barack, 190
Obama, Malia, 194
Office of Naval Research, 27
Omidyar, Pierre, xii, 47
One Acre Fund, 22, 112–113
One Degree, 76–78, 166–167, 169
OpEd project, 195
Open Innovation (Chesbrough), 4
Open Media Project, 111
Oprah Winfrey Show, The, 41, 147–148
Orenstein, Katie, 195
OXFAM, 134–135
Pandora, 110
Panjabi, Raj/Last Mile Health, 38–40, 118–119, 216
PayPal, 147
Peer Health Exchange, 153–156
Peery Foundation, 70
Phalen, Earl/BELL, 208
Pinterest, 4
Pitts, Jennifer, 137, 191, 195, 198–199
Planned Parenthood, 107
Politziner, Sammy, 56, 58–59
Powers, Laura Weidman/Code2040, 108–109, 137, 165–166,
169, 194, 212
preschool program example
Aspire Public Schools and, 9, 12, 13–14, 13 (fig.)
beneficiaries and, 10, 11–12
brainstorming session, 10–11
bus as classroom, 10–13, 11 (fig.)
impact, 14
pivoting approach, 14
prototype/pilot, 12–13
researching the problem, 9–10
T Lab and, 9–10, 11 (fig.), 12 (fig.), 13 (fig.), 14, 31
Tipping Point Community and, 10, 12, 13, 14
Prevention Center (San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention
Center), 126, 127–130
Quantum Magnetics, 27
R&D, 9, 10 (fig.). See also specific examples; specific
organizations
Rabb, Chris, 132–133
randomized control study, 69, 114
Reach Incorporated, 122
ReMotion Knee, 35
researching problems
beneficiaries and, 5–6, 8–9
CareMessage and, 8
Farm Commons and, 7–8
resources overview, 233–237
retreats, 62, 162, 163
Reynolds, Tess/New Door Ventures, 49–50, 90, 116, 217
Ries, Eric, 4
Robin Hood Poverty Tracker, 48
Rodriguez, Jessamyn/Hot Bread Kitchen, 23, 98, 99, 104,
105–106, 215
Rojas, Carmen, 123
Romney, Mitt, 197
Room to Read, 83, 84 (fig.), 85, 138–139
Row New York, 74–75
Ruiz, Christina, 42
Russell, Jason, 25
Ryan, William, 179–180, 180 (fig.), 181
Salesforce.com, 88, 90
Samasource, 91
San Francisco Chronicle, 12–13
Saving Lives at Birth, USAID, 36
Schmidt, Beth/Wishbone, 17, 171, 221
Schwab Foundation, 145
Shah, Premal/Kiva, 41, 147, 148, 149, 160, 171, 172, 215
Shalvey, Don/Aspire Schools, 207
Shrestha, Dinesh/Room to Read, 218
Sierra Club, 96
Silicon Valley, 3, 6, 34, 108, 109–110, 137, 147, 175, 194. See
also specific companies; specific individuals
Silicon Valley Social Ventures (SV2), xiii, 175
Singal, Vineet/CareMessage, 8, 210
Single Drop for Safe Water, A, 134–135
SIRUM, 75–76
Skoll Foundation, xiii, 145
Slack, 163, 194
Slaughter, Chuck/Living Goods, 113–115, 216
SMART goals, 65, 66, 91
Smart Health app, 114–115
social media
feedback and, 21–22
stakeholder engagement and, 31
See also specific types
social startups summary information, 207–222
Spark, x, xi–xii, 70, 202
Spiegel, Garrett, 37
Springboard Collaborative, 29, 30, 53–54
stakeholders engagement
Benetech/land mines and, 26, 27–28
importance, 24–32
Invisible Children/Kony 2012 video problems, 25–26
recommendations, 29
Stanford Social Innovation Review, 82, 95–96, 104–105, 125
STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) curriculum,
66
Stevenson, Bryan, 6
storytelling, 185–187, 199–200
about ourselves/vulnerabilities, 190–191
all staff and, 195–196
audience and, 191–193
 benchmarks for success, 200
beneficiaries and, 196–199
creating narrative, 188–190
head and heart, 192–193
news hooks and, 193–195
practice and, 195
Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs, 108
SurveyMonkey, 21
T Lab, 9–10, 11 (fig.), 12 (fig.), 13 (fig.), 14, 31
Taproot Foundation, 71
Taylor, Barbara, 179–180, 180 (fig.), 181
Teach For America, 29–30, 58, 65, 68, 145, 193–194
Technology for Our Troops’ Kids, 18
TED talks, 20, 186–187, 188–190
“Ten Funding Models” (Stanford Social Innovation Review),
95–96
testing ideas
benchmarks for success, 44–45
Beyond 12 and, 15–17
Center for Youth Wellness, 19, 20–21
community connection and, 22–23
discovery phase overview, 3–23
DonorsChoose, 17–19
human-centered design overview, 3–4
pilot program overview, 6–7
preschool program and, 10, 12–14
prototypes (in human-centered design), 4–5
 steps for optimal results, 5–7
website templates and, 18
Wishbone and, 17
See also cocreation; specific examples; specific methods
theory of change
Access Code example, 61 (fig.)
Accountability Counsel, 60, 62–63
Arbor Brothers, 58–59
dashboard/monitoring and, 56, 59, 60, 63
dashboard on Google Docs, 63
definition/description, 54–56, 56 (fig.), 91
funding experimentation/earned income strategy and, 119
Last Mile Health, 57 (fig.)
measuring impact and, 54
steps to create, 60
workshop elements for, 64
Thiel, Peter, 115, 160
Thomas, Scott, 56, 58–59
Thread, 157–159
Tipping Point Community, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 71, 77, 126, 128,
130, 137, 191, 199. See also T Lab
Toms Shoes, 145
toxic stress in children, 20, 127, 189
Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE)/screening survey
and, 20–21, 128
See also Burke Harris, Nadine
Tuna, Cari, 43
Twitter, 22, 31, 110
Uber, 4
Uganda and Invisible Children, 25–26
UNICEF, 134–135
Union Carbide, 194
United Nations, 134, 135, 185
USAID, 36
Venture Philanthropy Partners, 58
Village Enterprise Fund, 41
Volunteer Match, 71
Walker, Jeffrey, 190
Walker, John, 104–105
Walker, Tristan/Code2040, 109, 137, 212
Wang, George/SIRUM, 219
Warren, Scott/Generation Citizen, 91, 213
waste reduction and SIRUM, 76
Watsi, 149–150
Watson, Thomas, 34
“We Rise” (song), 134
Weiner, Jeff, 137
Wexler, Rob, 101, 102–103 (fig.)
Whitman, Meg, 171
Whole Foods, 99
Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (Goodman),
186, 195
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 9, 43
Williams, Kiah/SIRUM, 75, 219
Winfrey, Oprah, 25, 41, 147–148
Wishbone, 17, 171
W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 54
Wood, John/Room to Read, 83, 138–139, 218
Worker’s Lab, 123
Working Hard, Working Well (Hunter), 58
Wyatt, Jocelyn/IDEO.org, 215
Y Combinator accelerator, 149
Yang, David/Coalition for Queens, 59–60, 211
Youn, Andrew/One Acre Fund, 22, 112, 217
Zero to One (Thiel), 115
Zuckerberg, Mark, xii, 47