This Is How to Advertise Your Impact

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I had the pleasure of exchanging emails with Autumn Hays at Partnership for Working Families today. I was particularly struck by her email signature, which opens with:

The Partnership improved the lives of 1.5 million people last year!

This is so smart on so many levels. First, it shows that the Partnership has a clear impact goal and are tracking it in a compelling way. It’s just good storytelling. I’d love to see more transparency in how they’re coming up with their numbers, but I’m a geek, and I’m nitpicking. The fact that they’re doing this at all is great.

Second, they are intentionally drawing people’s attention to their impact in a simple, innovative way. I’m sure Autumn sends lots of emails, and every one of the recipient now has some sense of the Partnership’s impact. It’s the nonprofit version of the McDonald’s “billions served” sign.

I would love to see others do stuff like this. I’m totally planning on stealing this.

October Progress Report on Balance and Impact

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve been on quite the adventure since I last reported on my journey toward life balance and greater impact five months ago. In a nutshell:

  • My mentor passed away this past July. I was already in a reflective state, but Doug’s passing kicked it up a notch, and it reminded me why I’m doing what I’m doing.
  • I completed a second pilot of Changemaker Bootcamp, and I felt ready to take it to the next level. That process turned out to be simultaneously discouraging and hopeful. It was discouraging in that I wasn’t able to get the enrollment I had hoped for. It was hopeful in that I think I understand why, I felt a tremendous amount of support from most of my peers, and I feel a renewed commitment to making this happen. I just started a third pilot this past week, and I have strong interest from a few organizations to do a cohort bootcamp for them.
  • I started doing weekly checkins with my friend, Seb Paquet, which are about to evolve into a much larger experiment on new, networked ways of working. More on this soon.
  • I’m launching a new website next week. More on this soon.
  • I recently took on a consulting project.

Yes, that’s right, I’m consulting again. Up until last month, I had been very disciplined about turning down consulting opportunities, staying laser-focused on my own experiments. Then, two things magically aligned. First, I started actively seeking organizations interested in doing a cohort version of bootcamp. Second, Rick Reed of Garfield Foundation made me an offer I almost, but ultimately couldn’t refuse.

The philanthropic and nonprofit sectors are notoriously poor at collaborating. The problems are both cultural and structural, and they are particularly frustrating given the social mission of these sectors. I’ve mostly avoided these sectors — particularly philanthropy — because I think there are bigger leverages for change with less structural and cultural baggage, and I’d rather focus my energies there. However, I’ve obviously made exceptions.

In 2003, the Garfield Foundation launched an initiative that would eventually be called RE-AMP (“Renewable Energy Alignment Mapping Project”). The goal was to reduce global warming emissions across eight states in the Midwest, but the approach was markedly different from other initiatives in the sector.

Garfield spent several months convincing other organizations — both foundations and nonprofits alike — to sit at the table together as peers and to go through a strategic planning process together to see what they would learn. It was a long, arduous process with missteps along the way, but in the end, these organizations aligned around a common strategy. The collective strategy was different from what many organizations — including Garfield — had originally set out to do, and it required these organizations to take a long look in the mirror to see if they were truly committed to letting go of control and following what had emerged from the group.

More importantly, the group developed networked structures for working together. Rather than creating a new, centralized organization to manage processes and make decisions, they found ways to pool resources and build the capacity of existing organizations within the network.

This investment in network alignment and capacity has helped shut down a number of coal plants and resulted in many new clean energy regulations throughout the Midwest, results that would not have been possible without these organizations working in concert with each other.

Rick Reed, the initiator of this project, has his roots in sustainability activism, but his current mission is to change the way philanthropy works so that it is more collaborative. RE-AMP was a great success, and now he — along with his co-conspirator, Ruth Rominger — want to see if the model can work in other areas. Earlier this year, Garfield Foundation put out a call to find networks of nonprofits and foundations looking to solve complex problems together. For the next three years, Garfield wants to work side-by-side with one of these networks, providing both financial and knowledge resources, to help it achieve its goals.

I first met Rick a few years ago at a talk he and Heather McLeod Grant (who wrote a wonderful case study about RE-AMP) gave. Heather invited me to join Rick and Jennie Curtis, Garfield’s Executive Director, for dinner afterward. As it turned out, Rick was aware of some of my work, about which he had some kind and generous things to say.

When Garfield put out its call for proposals earlier this year, Ruth called me to explore the possibility of getting involved with the project. The obvious thing would have been for me to be part of the pool of potential consultants for the network that emerges from this process, but I put the kibosh on that idea. I wasn’t consulting anymore.

Still, we had a wonderful conversation. I was curious to hear more about what they wanted to do, and I was taken by how much of a learning mindset Ruth (and, as I would later discover, Rick) possessed. They did not make presumptions about their past success, nor did they apologize for it. They had a sense of conviction around the basic principles in which they did their work, but they were also very conscious of how nonlinear their learning was, and they were not looking to impose a recipe onto others. They are both smart, creative, and passionate, and they both have a very nice presence.

Flash forward to this past August. I was ready to test the Changemaker Bootcamp model on cohorts, and I was looking for pilot groups, so I started calling up various people I knew — including Ruth — whom I thought might know of potential groups. As it turned out, both Ruth and Rick were intrigued by the bootcamp idea and thought that whichever network emerged from their process might be a good candidate.

Furthermore, Garfield was just about finished whittling down its 62 applicants to ten, but Rick was feeling a desire to bring in some external thinking to help raise the quality of their evaluation and possibly prune the list further. So he came up with the following ideas:

  • Invite some network thinkers and doers to gather together for a day and to provide feedback on the potential finalists. He wanted to use this process as an excuse to surface a diverse set of experienced viewpoints into a robust evaluation framework.
  • Invite some of these guests to participate in the subsequent site visits with the finalists.

They ended up organizing a workshop with three of my favorite people in the field — Taj James, Nancy White, and Odin Zackman. That alone was reason for me to participate, but I had two other selfish reasons. First, I am on an ongoing quest to synthesize my thinking into usable frameworks. Second, I wanted to see Rick and Ruth in action.

As you might imagine, that day was amazing. Rick subsequently invited me to participate in the site visits, working around my schedule so that I could visit as many of the candidates as possible. We’ve also been exploring the possibility of me joining the “brain trust” for next year. I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but I love the spirit of their intent, and if all the cards fall in the right places, I’m going to do it.

This project is different in significant ways from my past consulting projects, but the reality is, it’s still consulting. I left consulting for a reason, and for me to come back to it, the project needed to align strongly with some very specific goals. Truthfully, I struggled with this. I was hypersensitive about the possibility of rationalizing my participation rather than being disciplined and strategic about my choices.

I discussed my quandary with some close colleagues — Seb and Rebecca Petzel in particular — which helped quite a bit. But it was something that my friend, Mariah Howard, shared with me that really helped me see more clearly.

Improv is among Mariah’s many talents. She explained that, in improv, audiences love to watch performers scramble. A classic improv technique is to throw unexpected curveballs that force the performers to think on their feet. This opportunity, Mariah suggested, was one of those curveballs — new information that I didn’t have before when I was formulating my strategy and making decisions. She encouraged me to play rather than obsess.

My goal is to help as many people as possible improve their collaborative literacy by focusing on two specific leverage points: practice and artifacts. Those happen to be two things that Rick and Ruth value tremendously. I need a testbed on which to experiment with ideas. Rick and Ruth have created an amazing testbed in which the stakes are meaningful, and they have been extremely generous in inviting me to play with them. If we’re successful, it will be both a learningful and impactful experience.

I’m going to continue developing Changemaker Bootcamp (which will hopefully overlap with the Garfield work). I will continue to pursue my other experiments (although I’ve had to whittle down the list, always a good discipline). I’m going to leverage the tools and practices I’ve developed over the past year to stay focused on my goals, to adapt in thoughtful ways, and to live a balanced life. I’m going to take the time to reflect on and to share what I’ve learned. I’m going to take lots of pictures.

Most importantly, I’m going to have fun! I feel extremely blessed to even have the opportunity to do this kind of work with such incredible people, and I do not take that lightly. I love the whole range of projects in which I’m engaged right now. I’ve already walked away from the Garfield site visits inspired and challenged, and I’m looking forward to sharing more!

Noble Pursuit Syndrome

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Earlier this week, I told my friend, Jeff Mohr, about a strange result from a survey that we took last year about nonprofits’ experiences working with consultants. As Rebecca Petzel noted in her writeup of the results, the nonprofits we surveyed generally expressed a high degree of satisfaction in the quality of their consultants’ work, but the majority also said that the work had not stuck. (Here’s some additional analysis performed by a larger group of participants at a followup workshop.)

How could organizations be satisfied with the work if it didn’t stick?

Jeff’s response was to cite a term that his dad, Mike Mohr, likes to use: “Noble Pursuit Syndrome.” It seems that folks in the social change space often rationalize work by suggesting that the intentions were good, therefore the work could not have been bad.

Not only is this something I observe others do all the time, it’s something I personally do all the time! My higher self is aware of this and tries to counterbalance it, which is a big reason why I ultimately left consulting. But it’s also a big reason why I stayed in consulting so long. I and my team would work our butts off on an inspiring project, and at the end of the project, we would review our often softly-framed success metrics, discuss all of the things that we thought went well, then collect our checks and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.

I always felt (and still do feel) completely validated from a market standpoint. But it was hard to truly assess the quality of our work from a social impact standpoint. While I tried (and am still trying) to be thoughtful and rigorous about impact, I often found (and am still finding) myself falling back on Noble Pursuit Syndrome. It’s a challenge, and I believe it’s a serious problem in this space.

Jeff said that Mike has threatened to write more about the syndrome. I, for one, would love to hear what he has to say, and I hope that others share their thoughts and experiences with this as well.

Lean Social Entrepreneurship: Lessons from Changemaker Bootcamp

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My plan for figuring out what I want to do next consists of:

  1. Going slow. Giving myself time to rest, reflect, and play.
  2. Listening. Trying to understand the challenges that changemakers are facing, and learning what cool things others are doing in the world.
  3. Experimenting. Learning aggressively, and sharing what I learn openly.

I’ve been applying the principles from The Lean Startup as a way to carry out my experiments in a disciplined way. I’m also determined to do my experiments in an open way, so that people who are curious and motivated can see what I’m doing and learn from every step and misstep along the way.

My primary goal is to figure out ways to scale collaborative literacy. My hypothesis is that information is a less critical need than experience.

There are a thousand books, articles, and blog posts that correctly outline the skills and mindsets that changemakers need to be successful. There are also top-down trainings focused on delivering information. On the other end of the spectrum, there are leadership development programs and other kinds of retreats. Finally, there’s coaching, which is the closest thing out there to supporting the kind of practice I’m talking about.

There’s a huge gap in the middle for what I’m calling balance bikes for changemakers — safe opportunities to practice real skills repeatedly with real-time feedback.

My initial experiment has been Changemaker Bootcamp. It’s designed to be a safe, structured place for changemakers to get more intentional about the work that they’re doing and to practice skills needed to work skillfully with groups.

My role is guide, not teacher. I’m designing workouts that do not require an “expert” to do, just as you don’t need an expert to teach you how to run. I’m also sharing those workouts openly, so that people can do them on their own, organize their own workouts, or even start their own bootcamps. This is part of my strategy to scale, which is to start a movement rather than attempt to own a market.

If I do decide to try to build a business around this, I see this openness as a differentiator rather than an obstacle. People appreciate an ecosystem, community-oriented mindset, and I believe my experience and reputation will draw plenty of great people. (It behooves me to prove the latter.) This is the Internet-equivalent of a platform play, except without the subversive creepiness around monetization and privacy.

I’m now on my second iteration of my experiment with Changemaker Bootcamp, and I’ve been keeping detailed notes of what I’ve been learning on that website. Here are some metanotes about what I’ve been learning and about my process overall.

Practice Works

Practice indeed works. I’m trying to be more disciplined about quantifying impact, but thanks to the weekly feedback loop, I can see firsthand people developing skills that they are immediately putting into practice.

This work feels fundamentally different than any of my consulting projects ever did. As a consultant, I focused on crazy, complex projects that benefited from my unique experience. I was applying my college-level skills toward a specific goal, while also trying to help my clients move their own skill levels from junior high to high school.

Now, I’m removing myself from the equation. This is about helping others go from second grade to third, from third grade to fourth. No shortcuts. But by moving slowly and deliberatively, I think I can have a much greater impact.

Frankly, even though I worked with top leadership on my consulting projects, I feel like I have more leverage helping the changemakers I’m helping now. It doesn’t sound as sexy as working on California water issues or leading a culture change process for a global biotech Fortune 500 firm, but it feels more meaningful. I’m loving it!

Minimal Viable Product, Working Openly, Building Ownership

Being disciplined about Minimal Viable Product is challenging. I’ve had to be very focused about what I’m trying to learn, and to move even before I feel ready. In the two bootcamps I’ve done, we’ve had four different locations, and we’re moving to our fifth location next week.

The workouts are still rough and will need many more iterations before I feel confident about their effectiveness and replicability. But that’s the point. I wouldn’t be able to refine them by simply thinking really hard about them. This is practice for me, and it’s what’s allowing me to refine the model.

The website is well below my standards, but it’s serving its purpose as a vehicle for sharing learning, and I’m getting a remarkable number of newsletter subscriptions. (This is further evidence of how we often throw away money on aesthetics rather than being laser focused about what we actually want our websites to do.) Working through these iterations has helped me shift my design priorities to things that I think will have a higher impact.

The biggest returns have been from working openly — making my participants and my followers partners in my experiment. It’s easy to feel self-conscious about wanting to deliver value, but my participants seem to appreciate that I’m practicing with them and that I don’t know whether this is going to work. Simply by participating, they are helping me, but they’ve all gone above and beyond that, finding different ways to support what I’m trying to do. I don’t know that this would have been the case had I been proprietary about this process or if I had tried to project an aura of polished expertise as opposed to incomplete learning.

Market Questions

Last month, I surveyed my network to try to better understand the obstacles that changemakers are facing. (I’ll publish a full synthesis next week.) Only two out of 107 respondents even mentioned the word “practice.” No one’s been clamoring for something like Changemaker Bootcamp.

I’m essentially trying to define the market, which is a high-risk, high-reward place for an entrepreneur. It’s contingent on me to explain my vision clearly, to connect it to the real challenges that people are experiencing, and to see if people find it compelling.

I’ve been relatively quiet about recruiting participants, as I’ve been focused on a specific demographic (currently in an organization, but no C-level or executive leaders). I’ve managed to find enough participants for my initial experiments, but I’m nervous about my ability to recruit participants at a wider scale once I start doing this “for real” (probably the next bootcamp) with a fixed price and many more available spots.

My sample size is way too small to draw any conclusions, but there have been two noticeable patterns. First, of my six participants so far, one comes from a social venture, the rest are from nonprofits and philanthropy. I think this work is hugely beneficial for businesses in a way that translates into profit as well as impact, but I haven’t drawn that crowd so far. I also think the bootcamp would benefit from that diversity of experience.

My friend, Justin, has correctly pointed out that my language is very social-sector oriented. For example, people in companies don’t necessarily identify with “changemaker,” even if that’s exactly what they are. I’d rather not do a focused offering specifically for for-profits, but I may have to explore that.

Second, all of my participants have been women. I’ve had one man apply, and a few others express interest, but it’s been predominantly women. There are probably reasons for this, and my sample size is too small to draw conclusions anyway. The bigger question is, what have I learned from this?

In this bootcamp, my participants have mentioned multiple times how great it is to be in the space with a great group of women. I’m wondering whether I should be more intentional about marketing this toward women or even doing women-only offerings (which again, I’m reluctant to do). I had actually been thinking about giving all of my participants — men and women — copies of Lean In, so maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.

Focus, Focus, Focus

I have a long list of experiments in mind, but I’ve been forcing myself to focus on one at a time. That’s counter to my personality, but it’s been a very positive discipline, and I think it’s really helped Changemaker Bootcamp evolve.

I’m about ready to try a second experiment, however. The challenge for me, as always, is to focus on just one, and to take it slow.

If you have thoughts on what I’m doing now or what I should do next, post them below!

The Networked Nonprofit Board

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve served on the board of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) for four years now, and I recently became the board chair. The thing I love most about LLC is how it models its principles. It doesn’t just talk about how leadership should be. It practices it, and it shares its learnings, both good and bad.

Deborah Meehan, LLC’s founder and Executive Director, recently wrote a blog post about our most recent board meeting, where we spent an afternoon thinking about what it would mean to the board if LLC were a more networked nonprofit.

Of course, simply talking about the idea among ourselves would have been interesting, but not as gratifying. Instead, we modeled the idea by inviting guests to think with us. (Beth Kanter, one of our guests, reposted Deborah’s post on her blog.) Even though I and other board members (notably Grady McGonagill) spend a lot of time thinking about networks, the truth is that the LLC staff deserves all the credit for moving us forward in this way.

At the end of her post, Deborah tells an anecdote about me, which I’ve heard her share often:

Two years ago, when we extended an invitation to our community to join the design team for our national meeting over 20 people responded and our board chair, Eugene Eric Kim, had the radical idea about selecting the team, take everyone! Well, that would be an interesting approach to board recruitment wouldn’t it?

She always refers to this idea as “radical,” which always amuses me. What was so radical about it? Organizing a national meeting is super hard, so why would you turn down help? The more the merrier, right?

Those who answer “no” are generally designing for the worst case scenario. If your group is too large, you might get sidetracked. You don’t want to accept a bad seed. Etc.

These are all valid concerns, but designing for the best case scenario is equally valid. You can do more work with more hands. The larger the group, the more likely you are to attract a diamond in the rough. Etc.

I prefer to design for the best case scenario, but I’m no pollyanna. I’ve seen processes get hijacked, even by people with the best of intentions. If you’re going to design for the best case scenario, you want favorable conditions. In my experience, you want the following:

  • Crystal clear goals
  • A strong core group of committed, facilitative individuals
  • A strong network with shared language

If you have these three things, you should be designing for the best case scenario, not the worst. In the case of the Creating Space conference two years ago, we had all three:

  • People knew exactly what the conference was about and what organizing it would entail. It was the ninth time LLC was organizing this conference, so there was plenty of experience
  • The LLC staff was fully committed, and it had hired one of the best facilitators in the business, Odin Zackman (who also attended our board discussion on networks). There were also a few committed, experienced volunteers we knew we could count on, regardless of who else ended up volunteering
  • As its name suggests, LLC’s biggest asset is its diverse community, which is full of brilliant people who are strongly aligned around its values and who have fostered strong relationships and shared language with each other over the years

Like I said, given these circumstances, the idea of accepting everyone who wanted to participate didn’t seem too radical to me.

How can we apply this thinking to boards on a networked nonprofit?

There are obvious places where this applies, and there are places where it’s extremely challenging. The obvious possibilities center around leveraging domain expertise. For example, nonprofits often choose board members who bring specialized knowledge in certain areas, such as finance, fundraising, or technology. In this capacity, board members are acting as advisors, but also network weavers — people who connect the organization to their networks. There’s no reason why you couldn’t open up this role to anyone in the network who was willing to play it.

The biggest challenge centers around governance. Nonprofit boards typically have fiduciary and oversight responsibility. How would you handle this in a more networked way? Network-oriented organizations (membership networks, for example) generally approach this by making some number of their board seats elected positions.

I think a more radical shift is possible. Jack Ricchiuto’s essay on going beyond consensus beautifully describes how to move from planning to activation. I believe there’s a model that builds on this thinking, delegating as much as possible to small groups, with the board acting as weavers.

That all sounds well and good, but the devil is in the details. I don’t know what that model looks like, and I realize that there are some huge obstacles, including some legal ones, that make this very challenging.

Technically, as Deborah notes in her post, LLC does not have this problem. It’s a project of the Tides Center, which means that our board is technically an advisory board, even though we operate as an oversight board. This gives us a bit more leeway to play.

And play we will! At the end of the day, we won’t get to the answer by sitting in a room and thinking really hard. We’ll get there by staying clear about the overall goal, taking small, concrete steps, and repeating the cycle, failing early and often.