An answer that has consumed my focus lately is one that doesn’t receive a lot of discussion. I hope that will soon change.

It is the fact that in this sector, everyone is an expert. Or at least that’s what we expect to be.

Most organizations that put themselves out there as “solving a problem” consider themselves experts at their work – or if they don’t, they are soon encouraged to do so. Environmental experts and human service experts and historic preservation experts and music experts.

Then there are the funders and consultants and nonprofit resource centers – all vying for who is the smartest person in the room.

And of course, while board members are not experts at the mission, they are frequently recruited for other expertise.

Experts experts everywhere.

What conditions does that assumption of expertise create in this sector? Here’s just a bit of what we’ve found.

1) An expert has the answers, and therefore takes that posture. The expert gives advice, prescribes solutions.

2) The recipient of that advice may or may not want the advice, even if they have asked for it. (Have you ever noticed how often you yourself ask for advice and then bristle when it is given? Have you ever noticed how often someone will ask YOU for advice, and when you give it, they will argue with you about why it wouldn’t work for them? Have you ever noticed how often you say or think, “Well if you didn’t want my advice, why did you ask for it?”)

3) Each of us has wisdom and experience and ideas of our own, that can be tapped to create possibilities.

4) None of us likes someone else telling us what to do. Yes, even if we have asked them for it. Just because we have confessed our weakness (hard to do) and asked for help (hard to do) doesn’t mean we will be happy about the answer!

5) This sector’s modus operandi – experts upon experts – has unwittingly created a situation of pervasive defensiveness. Walls go up. Questions go unasked. Learning and possibility stop.  Rather than “all of us working together,” we unwittingly create “us” and “them.”

The end result of this Culture of Experts is that it becomes hard to learn, easy to fail, impossible to achieve the results our communities deserve. Operating in a Culture of Experts actually makes us more vulnerable to being whipsawed by circumstances, as we sometimes have more of a stake in being right than making a difference.

Success in the Community Benefit arena doesn’t come from being the smartest and the fastest and the best. Yes, you may become the best funded organization, or the consultant with the most clients. But success in the Community Benefit world is about – well – Community Benefit! And none of us can do that on our own.

It is clear that this sector’s potential can only be reached if we link arms together to create the healthy, vibrant communities we all want. To accomplish that, many of the systems we rely upon in this sector will need to shift, from competitive systems that keep us apart to systems that encourage and nurture interconnectedness and interdependence.

And I am beginning to wonder if the assumption of expertise isn’t one of the pre-conditions to changing those systems.

After all, our assumptions and expectations guide our actions, and our actions guide our results. Without a change in assumptions, systems will not change. With so many systems (fundraising, governance, planning, etc.) continually failing to create the change we all know is possible, how many of those failures are at least in part the result of experts believing they know best for others?

Which leads me to the bigger questions:

What would it take for us to give up this notion that we funders and consultants and organizations are smarter than those with whom we are working to effect change?

What would it take for us to rejoice in learning together as equals?

What would it take for “leaders” and “experts” to be those who bring out the leadership and expertise in everyone else?

And how might we change the systems we use for doing our work, to reflect that shared wisdom, that shared learning, that shared leadership?

Today’s paper told me that in several days, there is a 5% chance of rain.  And I found myself throwing down the paper in total exasperation.  ”Really?” I said aloud to the dog. “A 5% chance it will rain?”

Translated to a more useful forecast, there is a 95% chance things will be sunny and clear. Yet as they do every day, the weather prognosticators focused their limited newspaper ink not on what was likely, but on what was unlikely.

What does that have to do with building a world where we naturally and reflexively treat all beings with kindness?  Everything.

Kindness is the norm. Kindness surrounds us everywhere and all the time.

UNkindness is the exception.  Despite what we see on the news, people are not overwhelmingly horrible to each other. If they were, life would be unlivable.  (And in fact, in those rare places where UNkindness is the norm, life is, in fact, unlivable.)

And yet we believe that exception is the norm.

That belief no doubt stems from our fears of how horrible that exception can be and often is.  But that doesn’t make it true.

Our deeply held belief that unkindness is the norm influences everything about the lives we lead, the work we do, the laws we pass.  Our assumptions guide our actions.

Studies may find that we are, at our core, empathic beings.  Given our deeply held beliefs that that is not true, we choose to ignore those studies, looking instead for signs that reinforce our belief that deep down we are all greedy, fear-driven, ego-centric beings who will, left to our own devices, act badly.

“We are what we think,” said the Buddha. “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we create the world.”

There is a 95% chance it will be sunny today. There is a better-than-even chance that you will find kindness all around you today.

What would it make possible – in our work, in our nations, in our politics, in our lives – if that is what we conditioned ourselves to expect?

First there was this week’s live Twitter Chat, where consultants from around the world grappled with the extent to which inspiring vs. prescribing to clients is most effective. In that context, the words Best Practice came up often.

Then I received an email from a reporter, with questions about Best Practice for governance. And then, not 24 hours ago, I scanned the latest copy of the Blue Avocado newsletter, only to find an admonishment that we reconsider what we mean by Best Practice.

For the record, the term Best Practice doesn’t make me crazy because it is overused or even because it is less than honest, as noted in Blue Avocado.

The term makes me crazy because much of what is declared to be Best Practice is actually to blame for why the Community Benefit Sector has not significantly and overwhelmingly changed our communities!

“Best Practice” Issue #1: The Answers Are Outside Us
One issue that became clear in the Twitter chat this week is an issue I raised in The Pollyanna Principles – that organizations have much to build upon, and that when we use systems that build upon a groups’ own wisdom, they are more likely to own and then act upon the results.

Best Practice throws all that out the window. Best Practice assumes the answers have been predefined from outside the group, and that failure to adopt what the rest of the world is doing will be perceived as less than professional.

Best Practice suggests the group isn’t smart enough to come up with its own answers. Best Practice leads to seeing others (especially consultants and academics) as having those answers.

Encouraging a group to rely on Best Practice, then, is reinforcing for the group that they are not as smart as those other experts. Rather than empowering a group, reliance on Best Practice takes their power away.

In a world where boards so often feel like fish out of water, deferring to EDs out of their own sense of inadequacy, encouraging a board to focus on externally imposed Best Practice simply reinforces that sense of inadequacy. Use of Best Practice therefore creates weaker, less confident leaders, who do not own the results of their work, because that work was generated outside them – by experts providing externally developed Best Practice.

“Best Practice” Issue #2: Who Says It’s Best? And What is Best About It?
Blue Avocado points out that what is commonly accepted as Best Practice is more often than not simply common practice – what everyone else is doing. (Can’t you just hear your mother asking, “If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you?”)

Board gurus often cite all the Best Practice sources - BoardSource, Standards for Excellence, even the articles at our own Community-Driven Institute Library.

But what makes those sources “best?” Best at what? If, as an example, board effectiveness is measured by board participation and enthusiasm, or by an accountability-for-the-means checklist – but not by the extent to which that board is aggressively pursuing the organization’s vision and mission in the community – is that really “best?” Or have we replaced our vision for what is possible with a set of minimum standards and simply chosen to call those “best?”

“Best Practice” Issue #3: When “Best” is Actually Bad
That leads to the hardest issue to face: What happens when what is touted as Best Practice is actually harmful?

Best Practice in Governance that rewards accountability for the money (means) with zero accountability for community-driven results (ends).

Best Practice in Board Recruitment, that provides a matrix of pro bono roles to be filled (attorney, accountant, PR person, etc.), when in fact, recruiting board members for the purpose of receiving pro bono help is actually a direct cause of micromanagement.

Best Practice in fundraising (and in providing funding as a grantor) that teaches organizations to become more competitive / to sell themselves as “better than their competition” – while simultaneously bemoaning that those groups have trouble working cooperatively with the very organizations they have been instructed to “differentiate themselves against” (i.e. make themselves appear to be better than).

In just these 3 cases, adherence to Best Practice leads to and reinforces

• a lack of board accountability for end results in the community
• board micromanagement
• the assumption that organizations must treat the very people who care most about their mission as enemies

These practices move far beyond simply being “not best.” These Best Practices have caused dramatic harm – within individual organizations, within the Community Benefit Sector as a whole, and within the communities we all care about.

What To Do Instead?
If we humans are more likely to feel ownership of work we create ourselves, the answer becomes clear: Have groups establish their own “Best Practice.”

For simplicity’s sake, let’s use the board recruitment example. By scrapping the Best Practice board recruitment matrix, we can facilitate the group’s wisdom instead, asking such questions as:

• What are the qualities we want to be sure every board member has?
• What are the qualities it would be nice if some had, but not everyone needs to have?
• What are pro bono positions we wish the organization would attract? (Let’s be sure to recruit those separately as volunteers, rather than assuming we must add these folks to the board)
• What are the characteristics we never want to see on our board, ever ever ever?

From the lists of answers to these and other questions, each group will own its recruitment criteria and from there its recruitment process. And the same method of asking and encouraging the group’s own wisdom could then apply to all the other issues for which groups seek outside expertise.

As you seek to inspire and energize your board, your staff, your volunteers – even your donors – you may just find this lack of Best Practice to be the “best” practice of all!

What This Means for Consultants and Other “Experts”
As consultants, we are used to being asked for our expertise. Everything about the way we do our work changes, however, when instead of assuming the answer is outside the group, we assume the answer is in the room, and that our job as the consultant is to guide the group to find its own answer.

If we see our role as inspiring our clients’ own wisdom, then the consultant will ask instead of telling.  Instead of a magic bag of checklists and answers, the consultant will have a magic bag of probing questions.

Instead of enforcing external standards, the consultant will practice eliciting a group’s own standards.

The consultant will still have topic-specific knowledge to inject into the discussion where needed. But that topic-specific knowledge will be a perk, an incentive for the group to want to learn more, rather than the definitive word.

In the end, the approach you choose will come down to a question that is simultaneously simple and complex:  How much do you trust your own judgment and ability? And how much do you trust the judgment and ability of your clients?

If you are a consultant, join us at our new blog: Consultants as Catalysts for Community Change!

Photo credit: “Not What it Seems” by Hildy & Dimitri

And yet again, of its 33 chapters, one chapter is devoted to “Mission and Goals.” ONE CHAPTER!

The rest of the book is a chapter-by-chapter list of what we could all recite as the purported “Good Governance Checklist.”  Here’s just a smattering of topics that received entire chapters.

• Meetings
• Conflicts of Interest
• Term Limits
• Financial Records
• Board Size
• Expense Policies
• CEO Evaluation
• Donor Intent and Gift Acceptance

Is that really good governance? Or is it instead a 32 chapter list describing the mechanical functions of being a board?

Is there anything in that list about leading and guiding the organization towards the community’s highest aspirations for what is possible? And isn’t that what the spirit of engaged leadership is about at its essence?

When will governance experts start teaching that? When will they acknowledge that replacing high-level, engaged leadership with a risk management checklist has done nothing but create disengaged, micromanaging, dysfunctional, scared, bored boards?

The real power of governance is to govern for what is possible – governing to make a huge, visionary, significant difference in our communities.

We can govern by developing plans for making that significant community difference.

We can govern by spending time at the board table discussing the community conditions we intend to change.

We can govern by measuring to see whether our actions are indeed making a difference in our community.

And if we don’t know how to do that measurement, we can govern by exploring and discussing and discovering the answer.

Imagine board meetings where that is how your board governs. Imagine your board holding itself first and foremost accountable for what is possible for your community, and then doing their oversight work within that huge, powerful context.

It is time to hand back to boards the possibilities that drew them to the board in the first place. It is time to teach them how to govern for those possibilities – to hold themselves accountable for those possibilities.

Because those possibilities embody the highest potential for governance – to light the way to a better world.

To build a board around the issues that matter the most, let our Board Recruitment Manual be your guide!

Membership is by no means a new fad. It is one that is used by many high profile organizations – museums, Nonprofit Resource Centers, public broadcast stations. And it can indeed provide a fairly reliable stream of money.

However, before the study quoted in the WSJ gets your board all fired up to institute a membership program, there are words of caution you may want to heed.

Caution#1:
Membership dues are paid annually.

Result: While non-member donors are accustomed to giving throughout the year, members are used to being asked / giving once a year – period.

Caution #2:
Memberships tend to be inexpensive.

Result: Not only do funds from members only come in once a year, their giving levels barely graze the bottom wrung of a typical annual appeal.

Caution#3:
Almost by definition, membership is transactional.

Members provide financial support in exchange for a tangible set of benefits – free admission, a monthly arts calendar, discounts on classes, a Pavarotti DVD set.

Result: While members certainly feel supportive of the cause, members can also be heard saying, “I’m considering not renewing my membership this year. I rarely use it…” Their thoughts about their membership are not first and foremost as a donor who is supporting a cause, but as the user of a product or service. The transactional nature of the relationship is further reinforced by ongoing payment-due renewal notices, that are worded to focus on what members will no longer receive if they allow that membership to lapse.

Caution #4:
“Transactions” require more work for the organization than straight donations.

Result: In addition to standard fundraising costs, membership entails expenses for all the “stuff” the member receives.

Caution #5:
Net proceeds are all that count.

Result: Once you factor in the cost beyond the actual member perks – the staff time to secure and manage those items, as well as the ongoing “renewal” notices – might more money be raised if the staff were doing something other than ordering mugs or creating “member events?”

As we summarize the revenue side of the membership equation, we see the following:

Membership is once-a-year, low-dollar revenue from purchasers who, while supportive of the cause, expect to receive “stuff” in exchange for their donation. Membership is transactional rather than engaging, and those transactions require more staff time than other donation programs.

In addition to these financial cautions, there is one additional caution that relates not to revenues, but to the very mission of the organization.

Caution #6:
Membership is defined by exclusivity. Either one is a member or not.

Result: Effecting community change requires a culture of INclusivity. It requires as many hands on deck as possible. It requires that an organization provide service to anyone who needs it, regardless of (and often specifically in contrast to) their ability to pay for that service.

How does it impact a museum’s mission to “provide education and foster appreciation in the community” if they provide discounts only to those who can afford membership? Does the mission de facto become “to provide education and foster appreciation only among those who can afford it?”

The same question holds true for a Nonprofit Resource Center whose for-pay workshops are open to anyone, while free workshops are offered only as a perk for its members. Does that Nonprofit Resource Center’s mission de facto become “to serve our members,” rather than “to serve the community?”

The Answer
When we ask, “What are the pros and cons of a membership campaign?” we are considering one approach in a vacuum. And while the pros of that one approach may outweigh the cons, that still doesn’t make it the best choice among a whole realm of options.

So what’s the answer? The answer requires that we consider the range of options for raising money to support your cause, and choose your fundraising strategy by weighing each of those tactics not only against objective criteria, but against each other.

• How much might each approach raise?
• How much work will it take?
• Will those donors become real friends?
• Etc.

Add up and compare your answers and see which comes out on top.

Is it membership? I didn’t think so.

Are you making your decisions in a vacuum? This easy-to-use tool will help you make more effective decisions!

That story came to mind often last week, as we worked with consultants who were stepping decidedly outside their comfort zone.  Yes, sometimes it was uncomfortable, because sometimes that’s what it takes.

But that story alone cannot explain why some people always seem to succeed while others are always struggling.  For that, another story comes to mind.

It happened several years ago, when we were first considering how to teach Pollyanna Principled Consulting.  At that time, we surveyed consultants who might be likely candidates for the course.  We provided a bit of information and then asked those consultants whether or not the material would be of interest to them.

While many said it would indeed be of interest, one consultant – let’s call her Joanne – responded with the following:

“If you’re going to tell me that everything I have been doing for 20 years is wrong – that one of the reasons my clients are not creating more impact in their communities is me - then I don’t want to hear it.”

While Joanne was more direct than most, we heard her tone again when we announced our immersion course this year.  Interestingly, many of these comments came from folks who had not even read The Pollyanna Principles to know what we would be teaching!

“I have my MBA and I’m pretty sure I’m already doing what you do.  While I always appreciate getting new tips, I can’t imagine what you could teach for 5 days that I don’t already know how to do.”

And then there is William. William not only has an MBA, he has 34 years of corporate experience, many of those years as an in-house consultant.  Since retiring, William has consulted to all the big name Community Benefit Organizations in his community (Red Cross, United Way, etc.).  He has sat on their boards.  In every way imaginable, William is at the top of his game.

William is the last person we expected to be participating in our immersion course for Pollyanna Principled Consultants.  To be honest, I wouldn’t expect someone like William to even know our little Institute exists!

However William was one of the first to register for last week’s course.  And when I asked him why, his words were the exact opposite of Joanne’s.

“If what I’m doing is not creating the kinds of community change I want to see, then I need to know how to change that!”

Along with everyone else in the room, William was unlearning and relearning.  Those dedicated individuals did some of the hardest work I’d ever seen. In the end, each one of them was literally transformed into a catalyst for what is possible. It was a privilege to have a hand in guiding that change.

Years ago I knew a consultant who used to ask her clients, “If it winds up what needs to change is you, do you have the courage to change?”

And that brings us to Officer O’Bryan.  If you are hoping your consulting practice will soar to the next level of effectiveness, I would ask you to consider this:

Are you comfortable?

And whether it is through our class or through some other means, if it winds up what needs to change is you, do you have the courage to do so?

Ultimately it those two questions that will determine your success.

By how much they listen.
By how much they want to learn, no matter how much they already know.
By how much they ask questions instead of talking about themselves.
By how much it’s not about them, but about the change they can create in the world.

As part of this week’s immersion course in Pollyanna Principled Consulting, I was blessed to be able to speak with each of the attendees by phone, prior to our gathering together. I asked each of them the same question: “What difference do you want this week to make for you?”

Their answers will show you why some consultants always seem to be way ahead of the pack:

“I want to help organizations do what they really want to do for their communities.  I want to be able to guide them when they’re struggling for direction – when they don’t know what they don’t know about what is possible.”

“I want to be better at asking questions.”

“I want to understand how to bring along those individuals who have been at this for 20 years, who have so much vested in approaches that simply are not creating community change.”

“I want to be able to pull our whole community together, to think of themselves as a team with a common purpose – making our community more livable. I want to understand how to broaden who is involved in this work.”

“I want to be more effective at translating / reframing the principles into language boards and organizations will recognize and not be intimidated by (or feel is irrelevant: ‘Vision and values? We don’t need that!’).”

“I want the Pollyanna Principles to be second nature to the way I do my work.  I want to be conversant in them. I want to own the principles.”

It’s easy to teach “tools and techniques.”  That is why we see so many workshops with titles like, “Methods for X” or “Ten Ways to Y.”  How many of those trainings have you been to?  And how many have resulted in transformative change in your clients’ communities?

Untill we reconsider the assumptions, views, belief systems, personal values and expectations that undergird our work, we will continue to bemoan that “No matter what I do with clients, their communities are not seeing much difference.”

The folks with whom we are spending this week are not looking for tools and techniques.  They are instead seeking to transform how they think and be in their work – how they respond, how they reason things through, the questions they ask.

And that is the answer to why some consultants seem to always be ahead of the pack.

It is not because they know the methods or have the tricks.  It is not because they are better at marketing themselves.

It is because they are open to seeing their consulting practice as ever-evolving, as they seek to integrate their life and their work with their community and their world.  It is because they want their consulting practice to be a catalyst for social change.

And most of all, it is because they realize that change begins inside each of us as people first, before we even start talking with clients.

After just one day together, I am so energized by what I am learning from these amazing consultants. To know we have four more days where we are all teaching and all learning is a blessing.  And who could ask for more than that?!

To follow what happened throughout this week-long course, click here for the next installment.

Learn more about Pollyanna Principled / Community-Driven Consulting. Perhaps you will be in our next Immersion Class June 8-12!

And if you have not yet read the Pollyanna Principles, go now and get the book!

This is Part 2 of this post. If you have not read Part 1, you will find that here.

Reverse Engineering the Future We DO Want
There is something that DOES work to solve the large, systemic problems our organizations and our communities face today. And that is to aim our efforts out beyond “zero” – out beyond just solving our problems – and to instead solve those problems as one among many steps towards creating something positive.

What works is to aim at the positive, affirming future we want to create, and then reverse engineer that future.

Rather than tethering our efforts to what we do NOT like about today, reverse engineering begins by tethering our plans to the future we DO want. The process then consciously considers the cause-and-effect steps that will work backwards to create the path to that future.

This is not about predicting possible scenarios or aiming at pie-in-the-sky fantasies. It is instead about asking the most realistic of questions: “What has to happen (cause) for X to be the result (effect)? And what has to happen before that can happen? And what before that?”

Along the way, we will link arms with anyone who wants the same thing we want – some who share our organization’s mission, and some who are seemingly far outside its scope. We will consider all the different cause-and-effect steps we can think of. And when something unforeseen intervenes, we will continue to keep walking in the direction of our dream.

There are so many benefits to vision-based planning, the most obvious being that those plans actually work!  However the part that always brings me the greatest joy as a facilitator is that unlike problem-solving plans, vision-based planning starts at the point where everyone agrees.

That is just the opposite of problem-solving plans!  Because those plans begin with today, they start with everything we bring to the table right then – our fears, our baggage, our turf issues, our political postures and positions, our sense of scarcity. With all those personal hurdles to get past before we can even consider finding points of agreement, is it any wonder that planning sessions can become contentious?

However, when we begin the discussion at the future we want to create, we are beginning at the point where we all agree.  We all want vibrant, healthy, resilient, compassionate places to live. Anyone imagining such a future does so with a smile.

From that place of agreement, as we step backwards through all the cause-and-effect preconditions to that future, we continue to agree.  By the time we arrive at a point of disagreement, our expectation is that we will find a win-win path to our common goal.

As I noted in the video, we reverse engineer everything we do in our lives, from getting to the airport on time, to figuring out what time we have to leave the office to get our kids to soccer.

It is time, then, that we in the Community Benefit Sector stop seeking to narrowly fix our organizations and our world. It is time we stop seeking to end poverty and disease (and organizational dysfunction).

It is time we start aiming at creating an equitable, peaceful world.

Once we do that, we will find a thousand inter-related ways to end suffering along the way.

(Part 3 concludes this series with examples of what this approach looks like in action – complete with a video! You can find that here.)

Reverse engineering the future is simple and comprehensive. Learn more in The Pollyanna Principles.

The War on Drugs. The War on Poverty. The War on Illegal Immigration.

Fixing a dysfunctional board. Team-building to boost employee morale.

What do all these things have in common?

If you answered, “None of them have solved the problem,” you would be right.  Decades of fighting drugs, poverty, illegal immigration; decades of trying to fix “the problem with boards,” or any other organizational problem – if these problems had been solved, we wouldn’t still be hearing about new efforts to fix them!

Yes, an individual user has gotten off drugs. An individual organization has become financially solid. An individual single mom has raised herself and her family out of poverty.  But overall, the problems these initiatives have sought to solve are all still with us, leading the most jaded among us to just give up.

“Boards will never change.”
“The poor will always be among us.”
“Employees anymore just don’t care.”

Problem-Solving Doesn’t Solve Problems
There are many reasons problem-solving does not solve large systemic problems.

For one thing, what we call “problem-solving” is really symptom-solving.  Drug use is not the end problem but a symptom of something larger.  The same is true of illegal immigration, of employee morale.

Yet we continue to problem-solve narrowly, sometimes myopically.  We take problems out of the larger context that created them, addressing them in a vacuum that ignores all the interdependent and interconnected issues that create and maintain that problem.

Sometimes we create these narrow “solutions” because they are all we can wrap our minds around.  Or because the rest is outside our mission.  Or because there is no funding or political will to do more than that.

And sometimes those narrow solutions spring from well-intentioned “Eureka” moments by folks who truly believe they have found the answer.  (The latest poverty-fighting example being micro-lending.)

By definition, problem-solving is reactive. As we move forward in those reactive plans, new circumstances arise for which we did not plan.  We then react to those circumstances, often entirely scrapping the old plans to fit this new information.

It should therefore be no surprise that the law of unintended consequences seems to negate virtually every problem-solving step we take. As we try to predict what might happen, things change before our eyes. When we throw up our arms and decide to just do something – because doing “something”has to be better than doing nothing – that “something” fails to hit the mark.

And the cycle of “things will never change” and “we’ll never be able to do enough” continues.

The Problem with Problem-Solving
The real problem for those of us doing Community Benefit work, though, is that we aim at problem-solving as if it were the holy grail.  The ultimate, almost whispered Pollyanna-ish goal is to dare to dream of ending poverty, ending disease, ending misery and suffering.

And while those dreams are admirable, they are zero-sum dreams.

Grade school math tells us that eliminating a negative does not achieve something positive.  -1+1 does not equal a positive number; it equals zero.

Ending poverty. Ending hunger. Ending homelessness.
Ending drug use. Ending illegal immigration.
Ending board apathy. Getting boards to stop micromanaging. Finally meeting our budget.

When we are problem-solving, the best result we are aiming for is zero.

BUT wait, there’s more!

Because we assume we will never reach our ultimate goal (ending poverty), we create incremental plans, hoping to “increase our ability to meet the demand for food boxes by 50% over the next year.”

The result, then, is that problem-solving is a reactive, incremental approach that at best aims at zero as its final goal, and more often aims below zero as its best possible outcome.

So – now that we know what doesn’t work, what will work?  Find out in Part 2!

]]> http://hildygottlieb.com/2009/04/13/why-problem-solving-doesn%e2%80%99t-solve-problems/feed/ 12 http://hildygottlieb.com/2009/02/10/joan-is-going-nowhere/ http://hildygottlieb.com/2009/02/10/joan-is-going-nowhere/#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:16:30 +0000 Hildy http://hildygottlieb.com/?p=231

The following note came from one of the readers here at Creating the Future. The subject line was “Feel like I’m going nowhere with fundraising.” I thought I’d share it here, as I know Joan is not alone!

Dear Hildy:
I’m hoping to get advice. I read your blog all the time, and I’m with you on the philosophy of fixing the system as opposed to addressing the symptoms.

I work in fundraising, and I feel like we’re not only merely addressing the symptoms, but we’re actually exploiting the symptoms.

My director is very much of the “donor-centric” philosophy, but that philosophy rubs me the wrong way at my core. To me, my organization exists to address the needs of the population we serve, not the needs of donors. But my director tells me over and over again that the needs of that population cannot be addressed without making the donors feel good about themselves.

I see where she’s coming from, but I feel like we miss the big picture, the opportunity to solve core problems, when our primary focus is on making the donors feel good about giving.

I’m told that, no matter the donor’s motivation (guilt, sympathy, vanity, etc.), as long as they’re giving, the cause has benefited.

This is where I’m stuck. Perhaps that’s true, but I feel like we neglect the big picture, the real solutions when we fundraise to the donors’ fears and egos. I feel like our community suffers when we fragment it by each individual’s personal motivation to give rather than unifying it to address the whole picture, and to perhaps finally solve those greater problems.

I’m reluctant to say it, and so many fundraisers and fundraising blogs try to sell me on otherwise, but I feel like the way we (and most other non-profits) fundraise might be counterproductive to actually creating solutions.

So what can I do? How can I advocate for real, big-picture change when our fundraising is entrenched so deeply in its individualized, donor-centric philosophy?

Sincerely,
Joan

What do you all think? Does the focus on donors actually contradict the ability to focus on the community? Which should be the context of the discussion – donor-centric within a community focus, or community-focus within the donor relationship? Which should guide our work? Do we really have to choose? (Comment button is at the top of this post.)

2/17/09 Note: Check Hildy’s response to Joan here: 6 Steps for Connecting Donors to What Is Possible.