Third Sector Connector Blog

I woke up thinking about Tinker Toys this morning. Those little wheels, spokes, connectors, and green fans were “the bomb.”  Often, my sister and  I would build fully-loaded little farms complete with animals, trucks, windmills, and barns. Or sometimes we created huge cellular-looking blobs with random hubs and spokes, together sculpting a funky abstract nexus of modern art.   Whatever emerged from our play, it always had its own “je ne sais quoi” of connectivity.

The creation of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0 has filled me with the same sense of wonder about its potential for connections. For those of us who are web-connected (or web-addicted), the world is now flat and our degrees of separation continue to shrink. We routinely connect globally with colleagues on LinkedIn and Twitter, and we swap stories, pictures, and videos on FaceBook. We StumbleUpon, Digg, Buzz, and Wave.  Hand-written letters and cards were first replaced by email, and now are down to cheery 140-character tweets and text messages.  Brief repeated encounters with an amazing variety of people now pepper our online days and nights.  Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has diagrammed his network of global friends and I find that it looks like the string art I made in my post-Tinker Toy days.

While we find new ways to connect globally, the very essence of our humanity also draws us nearer to each other. As social beings, we live, love, and work in communities.  Whether in rural communities of farmers, small towns populated with multi-generational families, or large urban cities surrounded by suburbs, we still rely on local connections for much of our day-to-day lives. Connections, that for many of us, are forged by nonprofit community-based organizations.  They are:

• The local hospitals and clinics that provide us with medical care.
• The free-standing libraries where we research and read, and access the Internet if we can’t afford access at home.
• The performing arts organizations that foster our love for music, dance and theatre.
• The advocates that preserve our local habitats and protect our waterways.
• The day care centers and the after-school programs that serve our youth.
• The adoption centers where we find our furry family members.
• The helping hands that provide us with emergency food and housing assistance and keep us safe during disasters.

These organizations don’t work in isolation, though.  Together, they form a network of resources that allow all of us to remain fully participating and thriving members of our communities. They inform and refer us, provide critical services, and collaborate  in ways that benefit us all. They are the neurons that are the basic building blocks of our communities.

So, Tinkers Toys took me to string art and neurons, and I now find myself thinking about the tapestry of humanity:

• How can we take our global string art and weave it into our local neural networks?
• How do we find ways to benefit from this new tapestry?
  
• And, what does that tapestry look like?
  

Would love to hear your thoughts.

–Laura

p.s. Thanks to @askdebra for a comment that she made yesterday during the #NPCons twitter chat about, “Humanity opening doors.”  It was part of my day residue and inspired some of my thoughts.

At the beginning of the new year, sector guru Beth Kanter posted her three words for 2010, and invited her blog readers to post theirs in response.  I violated the rules by posting four, but it was only three concepts so I still think it’s legitimate: “Challenge, Change, and Collective Co-Creation.”

Challenge: When we launched, we invited you to join us and help us build a site that would be valuable for community-based nonprofit organizations and those who serve them. You took us seriously, and almost all of your feedback was focused on improving access to our Nonprofit and NGO tips.  Here’s a list of the top requests that you made:

Can you make it easier to navigate to the tips?
Can you break out the tips by categories/subject matter?
Can we get email notification every time a new tip is posted?
Can we subscribe to comments on tips so that we can follow the dialogue?
Can you make it easier for us to share the tips with others?
Can you give us guidelines so that we can contribute tips ourselves?

Changes:

• There’s now a “Tips” tab built into our site navigation on every page.
• When you click on that tab, you’ll find our detailed categories and subcategories.  We’ll add to this as we go.
• Members can now receive notification of new tips by email.  Here’s how.
• Members can now log in and subscribe to comments in individual tips. It’s as simple as checking a notification box at the bottom of each tip.
• Sharing a tip is easy!  Each tip has a “share” button that makes it easy to share via popular social media sites, and other locations on the Web.
• New visitors and folks who haven’t logged in can also click a “like” button to let us know the tip is a favorite.
• Read our FAQ for members who want to submit tips. Even if you have your own blog or website, there are several advantages to being a Third Sector Connector Tipster, too.

Collective Co-Creation: Here’s where we’ve been spending the most time, although it’s been mostly under the hood.  We’ve been working closely with the members of our first Get Local community in Coastal South Carolina to improve and expand our services before we roll them out to other communities.  What started as a separate website that was a matching service for community-based nonprofits and the businesses that serve them has taken on an entirely new dimension.  Our programmers have integrated the first version of our local service into our global site, and it is now easily scalable and replicable within other communities.

Within our Get Local communities, our nonprofit members can now:

• Interact with other local nonprofits in private local-only forums set up just for nonprofit leaders within a specified geographic region.
• Post to a shared calendar of events and trainings that can be viewed by the general public.
• Reach out to the community via our local nonprofit directories.
• Easily find and hire nonprofit-friendly businesses and service providers.
• Access Third Sector Connector’s global news, tips and forums from one integrated Web interface.

Read more about the benefits of having a Get Local community and how to get one.

We’re still working out some minor nits and bugs, and we hope you’ll let us know if you find any problems. In any case, we hope you’ll take a look around, share some tips, help us spread the word, and join us if you haven’t already done so.  After all, we’ve still got more than half the year to go, and plenty of room for more challenges, more changes, and more collective co-creation!

What is the best way for donors to choose a community-based organization to support?

“Charity Rating Systems”? BUZZ! Wrong answer.

• According to a recent comment by Ken Berger from Charity Navigator, “…60% of all the revenues in the sector go to 2/10ths of 1% of all the 501(c)3s.” Berger says, “That is about 2,000 or so organizations. In addition, about 94% of all revenues go to 6% of them.”



• That means that the vast majority of the nonprofit organizations that are at work in your community won’t show up on ratings or top 10 lists even if they are producing outstanding results. For instance, Charity Navigator only reviews ~5,000 of the ~ 1.1 million charitable nonprofit organizations in the United States. In order to be listed, Charity Navigator requires organizations to have more than $500,000 in public support and total revenue of more than $1,000,000 in the most recent fiscal year.
• Most experts agree that the use of “overhead ratios” as an indicator to guide donors has resulted in a mistaken belief that funding “lean” organizations is a better investment than funding organizations who invest in their infrastructure. Yet, most of the existing nonprofit/charity rating systems are still based, in part, on these ratios, and use of these ratios continues to mislead donors and harm the sector as a whole.

What about “Nonprofit Expert Evaluators”? BUZZ! Also wrong.

• In fact, some so-called “evaluation experts” at a new “independent, nonprofit charity evaluator” have only a few years of work experience within the hedge fund industry and have limited experience within the nonprofit sector.
• This can lead to poor advice and reliance by donors on incorrect and uninformed information. For example, this same new evaluator recommends a specific healthcare organization to donors while at the same time saying it has, “little formal evidence regarding the quality and outcomes” of the organization’s programs and believes that they are outside of a reasonable range of cost-effectiveness.

In fact, most rating systems and expert evaluators do not evaluate actual program outcomes produced by the organizations, but instead look exclusively at financial data that is reported on nonprofit tax returns.

There are better ways to choose a nonprofit or NGO to support.

The data points above are included in Ready to Choose a Community-Based Organization to Support? Look Beyond “Charity Rating Systems” and “Nonprofit Expert Evaluators“, a new “tip sheet” designed to help guide donors to better ways to choose which organizations to support. The document is still in draft form, and is being circulated for public input, review and feedback before finalization. Since Third Sector Connector is committed exclusively to helping local community-based organizations thrive, we’re pleased to be part of the growing group of “Supporters of Effective Community-Based Philanthropy” that created the draft and is seeking feedback at our Facebook Group.

Here are some of the current tips for donors who want to support local community-based organizations that are making a difference:

• Reach out to community leaders. Contact program officers at your local United Way or community foundation and ask them which organizations are doing innovative work in your areas of interest (e.g. arts, basic needs, education, employment, environment, children and youth).
• Review nonprofits’ websites, annual reports, and other materials. Locate information about their visions, missions, goals, and programs. Check their rosters of Board members and directly contact any that you know.
• “Google” the organizations that best match your interests. Get on the Web and look for positive press and discover any concerns that have been publicly raised. Do a general web-based search and also search for recent news.
• Make direct contact with organizations. Once you have a few organizations identified, contact staff leaders and ask to be put in touch with one or two current donors who are giving at the level that you intend to give. Ask them what their experience with stewardship has been. Have they received timely acknowledgments of their support? Do they get updates on how the funds were used? Is the staff team responsive?
• Take a field trip. If possible, visit the programs and services provided by the organization to experience their work directly. If it is a direct service program, speak directly with people who have received services to understand their experiences with the program.
• Look for evidence of community engagement, collaboration and impact. Ask for copies of any public planning documents, results from community surveys, and outcome measurement reports. Contact partner organizations and other community collaborators to ask about their working relationships.
• Ask for a copy of the organization’s most recent budget and financial data. If you are making a substantial gift, consider asking your financial advisor to review it and share any questions or concerns with you.

What would you add to this list or change? Either comment below or join the Supporters of Effective Community-Based Philanthropy Facebook Group, and provide your input there.
Further Reading

My worst nightmare is now true: sloppy ratings of nonprofit effectiveness in Haiti by Gayle Gifford (which catalyzed this current initiative)

Beware The Nonprofit Watchdog – Charity Navigator by Don Griesmann

The Overhead Question: The Future of Nonprofit Assessment and Reporting – A February, 2010 conference call sponsored by NTEN. Get the recording here.

Charity Navigator Fixes Its Compass by Dan Pallotta (make sure and read the comments, too)

Do you ever have moments where all of the signs, arrows, and flashing lights keep pointing in the same direction no matter which way you turn? That’s what happened to me recently, and they were all pointing toward the flashing neon sign in my brain that said (blink-blink, blink-blink) “Servant Leadership.”

First, I received a ton of great feedback on my recent post about “18 Traits for Successful Nonprofit and NGO Leaders.” Some folks thought that the list set the bar too high, but most of our site members and social media pals thought that the list could still be further enhanced so they added even more traits like compassion, empathy, and humility, just to name a few. Upon reflection, I realized that even if executive search teams aren’t specifically identifying these additional traits in job postings, it may be because there is an assumption that nonprofit and NGO leaders already possess the common characteristics of “servant-leaders,” a term first-coined by Robert Greenleaf in the late 1960s.

Next, I read an interesting post by John Copps on the New Philanthropy Capital blog called,”Are charity CEOs too powerful?” , that expressed worries that if shared governance is not present, then “it risks a situation where the CEO is the undisputed top dog and doesn’t receive enough challenge to his or her decisions.” It left me wondering about how the nonprofit shared governance model impacts the concept of servant-leadership, and how to cultivate servant-leaders, not just in our CEOs, but also in our Boards so that this fear simply becomes unfounded.

The third arrow in the quiver was a delightful phone conversation yesterday with Michael Kumer, who is the associate dean of the School of Leadership and Professional Advancement at Duquesne and is also the Executive Director of Duquesne’s Nonprofit Leadership Institute. Every word spoken during our entire conversation reminded me that I choose to teach for Duquesne because of their emphasis on cultivating authentic, capable leaders who are committed, excited and prepared to serve in their communities. How do they do it? They intentionally model servant leadership at an organizational level…no small feat within a large educational institution.

Since the neon sign in my brain was now blinking at strobe speed, I dusted off my copy of Robert Greenleaf’s seminal essay, “The Servant as Leader,” which was written in 1970 and which strongly influenced me during my early days as a young nonprofit leader. Although something new stands out for me each time I read it, the most well-known quote from the essay always has the most impact on me time and time again (perhaps that’s why it so well-known, huh?):

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”

10 Characteristics of Servant-Leaders

In the many other works that followed Greenleaf’s first essay, these traits and characteristics of servant-leaders were further fleshed out. They include:

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Awareness
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to the growth of others, and
10. Building community

5 Cross-Sector Servant-Leadership Questions
Anyone who knows me also knows that I believe that asking questions provides a powerful opportunity for introspection, reflection and learning. So, Greenleaf’s questions and a refresher on the 10 characteristics above stimulated yet another set of questions from me about servant leadership across all sectors (government, for-profit, community-benefit/Third Sector, and the emerging 4th sector).

• What if every local community made it a priority to identify, cultivate and reward true servant-leadership in businesses, government, and the nonprofit/NGO sector?
• What if local nonprofit leaders (both Board and staff) had a safe “place” to gather to talk about how best to serve their communities collaboratively, without the defensiveness and territoriality that frequently comes with such meetings?
• What if local foundations, business leaders and human services coalitions joined forces to provide ongoing training to existing and next-generation leaders in all sectors about servant-leadership?
• What if, alongside Math and English, Servant-Leadership became part of the core curriculum for all middle-schoolers, high-schoolers and college students?
• What if servant-leadership became the norm in our society?

Wouldn’t servant-leadership lead to stronger, healthier, more vibrant communities? Couldn’t servant-leadership connect all of our sectors with a shared leadership agenda? What do you think?

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead

Since our launch in September, 2009 (was it really just five months ago?), we’ve gathered your suggestions and feedback so that we can improve the site. We’ve listened, and within the next few weeks, we’ll have a new-and-improved Third Sector Connector site to accompany the launch of our Nonprofit Local 2.0 service for communities. Alongside the many creative ideas for site enhancement, we’ve also been fielding some additional questions about why we’re focused on local, grassroots and community-based nonprofits and NGOs. We realized that we had shared our mission and vision, but that we hadn’t yet articulated our shared values, not only for our site, but for the sector as a whole. That stimulated this post and the creation of our “Third Sector Connector Creed,” which you’ll find below:

Third Sector Connector Creed

• We believe that local nonprofits and NGOs are capable of creating amazing outcomes within our communities, and that we don’t do it alone or in side-by-side silos.
• We believe every local organization is part of an interwoven network of organizations with unique-yet-related missions that together act as a “connection and communication backbone” within neighborhoods and communities.
• We believe that with a strong backbone to support them, every local organization stands shoulder-to-shoulder and on the shoulders of others who are also serving the community.
• We believe that strengthening one organization also benefits every organization in the network, and ultimately benefits the community as a whole.
• We believe that one way to strengthen organizations is to put information and resources in the hands of Board members, staff, and program volunteers so that they have a “capacity-building toolkit” at the ready.
• We believe that there is an amazing, yet overwhelming body of information, advice, and collective wisdom already “out there” and that new resources and tools are being created every day.
• We believe that Third Sector Connector can help get those resources and tools into your hands so that you can use them to drive change.
• We believe that the World Wide Web and social media have “flattened” our world and that nonprofits and NGOs can reach across the globe to learn new ways of thinking and doing, and to simultaneously strengthen governance, leadership, and infrastructure.
• We believe that local connections and collaboration are critical to building strong community-based programs and creating healthy, vibrant communities.
• We believe that as we grow and add new members we can collectively create a resource that has increasing value, reach and impact for local organizations over time.
• We believe that we’re just scratching the surface of finding new ways to connect and build capacity for the Third Sector, and that it is an exciting time for coming together.
• We believe that together we can change the world.

Dear members, visitors, and early supporters -

Just a little more than two months ago, we put up the beta version of the “Nonprofit Local” website and, thanks to the early support of members like you, we’ve had more than 13,000 global visitors from more than 100 countries and our traffic numbers continue to grow every day.

As members began to join our site, we realized that we had an unexpected challenge which could also be an opportunity (see our blog posting back in October). Since then, our international base has continued to grow, with almost 18% of our site visitors coming from countries outside the U.S., many of whom don’t use the term “Nonprofit” for community benefit organizations, and instead use a variety of terms like “Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)” or “Civil Society Organizations.”Since the site was in “beta” and hadn’t officially launched, we still had the opportunity to be responsive and to encourage and acknowledge our global visitors. As a result, we will officially be moving out of our “beta” phase and launching this coming week, with a new name, “Third Sector Connector.”

Why “Third Sector Connector” you ask?

The nonprofit, voluntary, and community-benefit sector is considered to be the third sector in most countries, providing the necessary complement of services to the private (commercial) sector and the governmental sector. It is a term recognized not only in the U.S., but also in the UK, in Asia, and throughout the European continent. See Wikipedia for more. The “Connector” part of our new name demonstrates our continued commitment to connecting nonprofits and NGOs with high quality resources and information, with other organizations within local communities, and with like-minded organizations across the globe.

Thanks to all of you for your early support and for being our cheerleaders as we went through our beta phase. We are grateful to each and every one of you.

Warm regards,

Laura and Mark Deaton, Co-Founders

Third Sector Connector

http://www.ThirdSectorConnector.org

P.S. You’ll still see “Nonprofit Local” used in the Get Local section of our website as we roll out version 2.0 of our local community services in May, 2010.

New friends,

Since our site went live just a few short weeks ago, we’ve had an incredible response. Without much promotion and without even an official launch, we’ve already had more than 2,500 visits to our site from more than 50 countries in every corner of the globe (can a globe have corners?).

Many of you have been generous with both praise and feedback, and we’re already starting to incorporate your suggestions into changes that will make the site even better before we officially launch. That’s what this “beta” phase for the site is all about – making it a resource that you use and find helpful.

Our first major overhaul is in our forums. We realized that they were way too detailed and overwhelming, and we’ve simplified them, with just seven main forums for now. Although we encourage transparency, we’ve also added the ability for registered members to post anonymously by just checking a box before you post. This may be especially useful as a comfortable way to share specific concerns or worries about your organization. The new forums are:

• The Welcome Mat – The first stop for basics about how to use the forums and share your suggestions.
• Best Practices Pavilion – What’s working? Here’s a place to find and share effective practices, policies, and procedures. No need to re-invent the wheel if you can modify it, instead!
• Connection Café – If you’re looking to connect with someone from another community benefit organization (nonprofit or NGO), here’s the place to do it.
• Emergency Room – Are you struggling or in crisis? You can come here to ask for ideas and support.
• Fundraising Corner – This forum is a place to swap ideas about the best way to sustain and build your organization’s financial assets.
• Leadership Roundtable – Got governance or leadership issues? Come share them with your colleagues, and get valuable advice in return.
• Marketing Meetup - Come here for exchanges on all things marketing-related, including web 2.0 and social media.

We’ll continue to listen to everything you share, and incorporate your suggestions and feedback. Just stop by The Welcome Mat in the forums and leave us your feedback or contact us using our suggestion form on the site.

Thanks so much for your warm welcome and input so far!

–Laura

p.s. Now that we’ve got so much interest from outside the U.S., we realize our name may not be “global” enough. We’re working on that…stay tuned!

I never know exactly where my work will lead me, but somehow I’m always called to help local nonprofit organizations build capacity and thrive. Perhaps it’s because I started my nonprofit career in a small, local organization in Brown Deer, Wisconsin where I advocated for and alongside children and adults with developmental disabilities and their families. New to the nonprofit world and just out of graduate school, I learned more from the families I served than they learned from me, not the least of which was that each of us has amazing potential to create value in this world if we’re given the tools we need to succeed. Since that time, I’ve spent most of my career serving mission-focused organizations (more here). Whether as a paid staff person, a consultant, or a board member, I’ve witnessed firsthand the lack of capacity-building resources in most local nonprofit organizations. Generally, every last dollar is put directly into programs, leaving very few resources for training, networking, learning about effective strategies that other nonprofits are using, or even catching up on the latest trends.

In May of 2009, we launched Pluff Mud Connect in coastal South Carolina (read more about it here) as our first web-based service designed to create a new tool to build capacity for local nonprofit organizations. Not only does it efficiently connect local nonprofits with local consultants and service providers, it also allows us to fund small capacity-building projects and creates a true WIN/WIN/WIN for nonprofits, local businesses, and the community as a whole. During our early due diligence and research for Pluff Mud Connect, and as we started to explore our next location for a local connection site, we began to realize that not only do most nonprofits struggle with finding local resources, but there also isn’t a free and centralized service that connects them on an ongoing basis with leadership tips, nonprofit sector news, and a way to share “best practices” with other organizations outside their communities.

Being the capacity-builder that I am, I began to ask myself, “What if every staff person at every nonprofit had access to good advice and a place to come together to share good ideas? What if nonprofits could connect locally through our connection sites, and then also connect with other organizations across the United States, and perhaps even across the globe?” I began to ask others the same question, including friends, family, and colleagues in the sector. The answer was a resounding, “That would be fundamentally awesome.” I recruited my husband Mark Deaton to join the team as our technology guru, and bada-bing, Nonprofit Local was born!

We’re launching today as a beta site, with daily tips, aggregated news, and discussion boards on a wide variety of nonprofit sector topics. Won’t you join us? Post in our discussion boards and give us feedback about the site. Email us with your questions, ideas or suggestions. If you’re a nonprofit board member, staff person, or a program volunteer, we’ve built this site for you.

Welcome to Nonprofit Local.

–LD

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons: Per Erik Strandberg