This tool is one I developed for a quick session I taught at Tamarack’s recent learning gathering in Vancouver, Community Engagement: The Next Generation. It provides an overview on the NetPromoter score, Likert Scales, the Semantic Differential Scale and Visual scales for collecting and measuring feedback from those you are engaged with.
Precarious Work
When an employer won’t allow a worker more than 25 hours a week but requires that worker to be available for work 7 days a week, people become little more than commodities on the open market of Precarious Employment.
Lately I have made an effort to talk with folks that work at places like Shopper’s Drug Mart, Home Depot, and Save-on Foods and none of the workers I have talked to get an eight hour shift. My partner’s son just landed a job at 30 hours per week, no benefits of any kind.
Efforts like the Living Wage movement are gaining traction but large corporations seem slower on the uptake than do small business owners. When will the incessant desire to keep wages low by major businesses end up hurting the economy on which these low wage employers depend? There is a tipping point somewhere down the road – for everyone.Continue reading “Precarious Work”
Why Strategic Planning Goes Wrong
reprinted by request
As a consultant, executive staff member, board director, and teacher, I have had the opportunity to engage in a lot of strategic planning. I think about it, research it, and look for ideas to make it work better than how it tends to work.
It has always bothered me to know that more often than not strategic planning efforts go awry. In another article I wrote on this topic, I stated the biggest reason why strategic plans fail is that people don’t do them. While there is truth in that, the story doesn’t end there of course. It’s why people and organizations fail to do successful strategic planning that deserves some attention.
The difference between Strategy and Plan
Let’s start with what I suggest are some fundamental misconceptions about strategic planning. The biggest misconception is that strategy and planning are one in the same. How often, for example, do you hear people equate strategic planning with a “blueprint” or a “roadmap?” While those words are good metaphors for the word, “plan,” they fail substantially in capturing the meaning of “strategic” or “strategy.”Continue reading “Why Strategic Planning Goes Wrong”
Journey Maps
Journey maps are used often in the private sector to map out a customer’s experience of a product or service. It identifies customer needs and wants, motivations, and interactions with the product or service from beginning or end.
In terms of a journey map for you collaborative or collective impact initiative, here are some of the things it can do for you:
- Tell the story of your collaborative journey from initial start through engagement, to where you are today
- Can be the whole story or part of the story.
- Identify key milestones, interactions, successes, set backs and other key touchpoints
- Provide history for new comers
- Deepen/expand understanding of what works and what doesn’t or of choices that were made or need to be made.
- Helps visualize where the journey is going.
Journey Maps are visual treatments in which key steps, milestone, and decision points are identified in relationship to each other.
Engaging in Strategic Dialogue
I recently wrote this info sheet on Strategic Dialogue, which is a riff off of the good work of David Bohm. It provides some great guidelines for group thinking and conversation.
Download it HERE.
More about the Game-Changer Approach to Poverty Reduction
As some of you know, I have written about and I am continuing to work on what I call a Game-Changer Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategy and Evaluation. You can read my initial paper HERE. And a recording of a webinar I did with Mark Cabaj is HERE.
I have been asked about the difference between Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) and this game-changer approach I am working on with my colleagues at Vibrant Communities Canada. The game-changers we have identified are Housing, Transportation, Education, Health, Income and Jobs, Food Security, Financial Empowerment, and Early Childhood Development. All of these are aligned with SDoH, but there is, I suggest, more to what we are exploring than social determinants of health.
The Game-Changer Approach also is stressing the importance of avoiding the creation of “thin” strategies among a host of other “thin” strategies that, in effect, can lead to an overall poverty reduction strategy that is a mile wide and an inch deep.
The notion of prioritizing our efforts is one that is often accepted as necessary but in practice not emphasized. One of the fundamental tenets of the Game-Changer Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategy and Evaluation is rooted in an old Taoist saying, For every yes there is a no.Continue reading “More about the Game-Changer Approach to Poverty Reduction”
Mandatory Winter Tires and Poverty
Yes, perhaps an odd title for a posting, but bear with me. I was on my way back home from meeting downtown with Alberta Government colleagues who also work in the poverty reduction arena and I heard this call-in show about winter tires and more to the point about whether or not winter tires should be mandatory.
They are in Quebec now but even in some provinces without a mandatory requirement more than 80% of drivers have winter tires. Not so in Alberta where the percentage is just over 50%. Not sure about other low percentage provinces, but here is what went through my mind.Continue reading “Mandatory Winter Tires and Poverty”
Simplicity and Complexity
The top drawing suggests there is complexity to the journey from A to B. That journey requires numerous loop backs before moving forward and takes the traveler up and down and back and forth along the way until the destination is reached. Who knows the reasons why the journey was somewhat unpredictable or if there were side trips that were either necessary or just taken out of curiosity.
I have taken journeys like that one and some were enjoyable. (I was once drove half way from Edmonton to Vancouver taking dirt roads through farmland and forests and loved it.) But sometimes the complexity represented in a diagram like the one above is caused by necessary diversions, distractions, or even arguments about which way is the best way to go. In other words, sometimes complexity is a good thing. It factors in different view points and it allows us to see more scenery along the way, perhaps learn more as well.
But sometimes getting from A to B can be quite simple and straightforward. Could be we need to get there as soon as possible. Could be the straight path is the safest path to take or more economical. Maybe there is some correlation between having a sense of urgency and getting to where we want to be as completely and as quickly as possible.
The reasons abound if we really think about it – for both scenarios.
Complexity and simplicity are not at odds are they? They just offer us a different perspective, offer options that perhaps the other doesn’t.
Maybe there are simple solutions to complex problems.
There appears to be a common perception among some thought leaders that complex problems require complex solutions. I am not arguing against that perspective except to ask, if it is always true? In my early life as a consultant to non-profit organizations I was involved in developing software, databases primarily, that were purposed to help organizations collect, analyze, and report on their work. Without exception the work these organizations were doing was addressing complex problems like exclusion, poverty, mental illness, and so on.
I remember one time when we were coding the database, we discovered that the entire database did not work. Not just parts of it but all of it. I tried every which way to identify why this was happening. An earlier version worked fine, but now after adding copious amounts of code, nada.
Code is complex in and of itself but even more so when code must work with other code. In other words, a good coder has to understand how to use the development language but also needs to understand how that language interacts with itself across patterns or clusters of code.
After literally days of trying to figure out what was wrong, I finally identified the problem. I had forgotten a period in one line of code and that small mistake stopped everything. The solution was laborious to locate but it was a simple one. Add the period and voila, all was as we intended.
Maybe there is a lesson here for us in terms of our design of programs and services or collaborative ventures. Maybe our policies or systems that exist to solve complex challenges do not always need to be scrapped or undergo a major rethink. Maybe sometimes, within what we currently have before us, there is a small, simple change that will in turn change everything.
What do you think?
Watch out for the solution bias
Solutions are exciting, especially those you are a part of creating, but even if the ideas behind them were not your own, implementing a new solution is an intellectual turn-on. Sometimes there is even an ego-boost one experiences when part of something on the “cutting edge.”
I wonder though if at least some of the time solution-makers are so pumped about the potential of their new journey, they can overlook pitfalls, obstacles and unintended consequences. I call this, solution-bias.
There’s a kind of bandwagon effect that can get in our way if we are not careful. Jim Collins, the Good to Great, author, talks about “getting the right people on the bus.” His intent was to point out the importance of having the right group of people engaged together to achieve a common aim, but what if the bus is headed in the wrong direction? Or, even if its direction is correct, what if it is winding around obstacles or even running them down that actually require a stop along the way to understand the journey better, if not the destination itself?Continue reading “Watch out for the solution bias”
About Crowd Funding
Posting #2 in a series on Resource Development
See # 1, Five Elements of Strategic Resource Development
First, a definition from the Oxford Dictionary: Crowdfunding (a form of crowdsourcing) is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, today often performed via Internet-mediated registries, but the concept can also be executed through mail-order subscriptions, benefit events, and other methods. i
Wikipedia adds this: Crowdfunding is a form of alternative finance, which has emerged outside of the traditional financial system. ii
This latter definition is sometimes called “Equity Crowd Funding” and investors receive equity in the business or venture they are contributing to. This posting is not about this type of Crowd Funding. Rather I am writing about the most common type of Crowd Funding today which allows anyone to donate their money to anything that gets posted on an Internet-based Crowd Funding website. Recipients of funding can be individuals in need, informal groups, performance artists, individual schools, clubs, inventors, product developers, techno- projects, as well as conventional charities and businesses.
Donors to such initiatives do not, as a general rule, get anything in return. Some may get a charitable receipt, but equity is not particularly part of the arrangement. Actually for many, if not most, of the asks being made on sites like Kickstarter or Go Fund Me, there is no equity to be had. Witness two of the appeals below from Go Fund Me, Canada’s largest Crowd Funding website.
The first one is about saving a single mother and her four children from losing their place and becoming homeless as of September 3, 2016. I am writing this on September 4th, perhaps too soon to see if the money raised stopped her eviction. I sure hope so. The other one is about Pebbles, a dog with liver problems and other illnesses who needs interventions that Darlene cannot afford.
I am not saying these are not causes to donate to. I use these two examples only to highlight that Crowd Funding is changing the how fundraising is done, about why it is needed, and who does it. There are the more standard types of appeals on these sites from charities and relief funds. For them Crowd Funding may very well be but one more way to generate support.
Unlike Go Fund Me, Kickstarter does provide some accountability on its site by reporting on fundraising results in a variety of ways, although neither site offers any accountability reports or information on impact, other than showcasing “success stories.”
Kickstarter tells us the following about its funding activity iii:
- Since its inception in 2006, Kickstarter as generated pledges of $2.58 billion and successfully funded 111,500 projects.
- Kickstarter is an “all or nothing” venture. If you do not raise all of the goal, you get zero. Unsuccessful initiatives were greater than successful; there are 200,000 of them reported by Kickstarter.
- Most successful fundraising appeals were small ones, just shy of 75% of them. Just over 14 raised between $10,000 and $19,999. The dollar range categories are much wider than the smaller ones. Those raising $20,000 to $99,999 make up about 13.2% of the total successes. Less than 3% generate funds in the $100,000 and up category. If you are wondering if anyone has raised $1 million or more, the answer is yes. Of the 111,500 projects, 189 of them hit the million dollar mark (.0017%).
- Those appeals that have the highest success rate are by category: Dance, Theatre, Comics, Music, and Art. Of the 15 categories listed, Food is in the bottom five. There is no category listed for Social Service, Human Services, Community Work, and so on.
In the United States there is another site that caught my attention: DonorsChoose.org, which exists solely to raise money from citizens for class room projects in schools around the country. Most of these requests appear to come from teachers looking for money to support something in their classroom that the public school system doesn’t fund. Most requests seem to be in the hundreds of dollars. Of three I dug into, the highest request was for $296.75 to support teaching 15 kids about cosmetic surgery. Other requests seem to be about getting money for things that one could argue should be paid for by the school system. I will stay silent on that topic, at least for this posting.
Whether or not Crowd Funding is a good thing for the market place has no right answer. It depends on how it impacts the community and community systems. In other words, its value is contextual. For the mother and children saved from eviction, the impact is substantive for her family. But as a business – Kick Starter is a business – its implications include diluting overall giving patterns of donors which may – and perhaps are – hurting other more traditional appeals from organizations who are trying to help thousands of single mothers and their children. Perhaps more importantly, sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe are redefining what help and impact look like; they speak to those who are disillusioned with formal charities or with banks and so on.
For your organization or group, the questions you likely face if you are thinking of including Crowd Funding in your fundraising program include the follow:
- Will raising money this way impact other revenue sources, whether support from your donors or from more traditional funders, who might see success as Crowd Funding as an indication of your lack of need for their support?
- Given that, by far, the majority of projects that meet their fundraising goal receive $10,000 or less in funding, will entering this market place suit your needs and will the effort and the exposure be worth it, especially if you are not successful? Remember, at Kickstarter and other similar sites, it’s all or nothing.
- Ten thousand dollars is a good amount of money and for some small groups it is big money. The key will be putting an ask out there for something that is compelling and likely to motivate a large number of small gifts that more likely or not speak to each donor’s emotions. While I could find no evidence to support this next point, my sense is that these types of appeals must be of a kind that generate impulse giving.
I will leave it to you to form your own judgements on Crowd Funding and to decide if and when it has a role to play in your resource development activities. My intent here is to provide information that may be of help.
Stay tuned for the next blog posting, About Social Impact Bonds.
i Retrieved from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/crowdfunding, September 4, 2016
ii Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding#cite_note-1, September 4, 2016
iii See https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats?ref=about_subnav
Mark Holmgren 