Friday, August 15, 2014

One must travel, to learn (Mark Twain)

 "If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own", wrote Samuel Johnson in 1755.

As I have spent the past two weeks in India a thing that has struck me as I read my morning news has been the number of stories about local nonprofits

It has led me to think afresh about the importance of nonprofits (NGOs) and social enterprise in the space between what government and the for profit sector can do. It is in this space where change can happen, a difference can be made and humanity can be found. What would the world be like without all the various organisations in that space where you live?

There are said to be around 200,000 nonprofits in India more than one for every 600 of its 1.2 billion people. In India, as in much of the developing world, the ability of governments and the for profit sector to deal with the huge demands of extreme poverty and a fast growing population has limits. Here are some examples of how Indian nonprofits are stepping up to the challenges. 


Keshav Srushti in a bid to spread awareness on solar cooking, will be recruiting students from 500 schools across Mumbai to cook solar-powered dishes. This solar cooker is a rudimentary piece of plastic foam that can reach a maximum temperature of 120ÂșC and can save up to 10,000 units of electricity on a daily basis and is functional for a year.

Salaam Balak  is trialing solar powered school bags for the poor. This idea came to its designer when she was talking to her domestic help, “She told me about the problems her children faced while studying at night. There are frequent power outages in her slum". The backpacks look like regular schoolbags but turn into a lamp when their front pockets are unzipped.

GOONJ  responded to the problem that 68% of rural women cannot afford sanitary napkins. When women cannot afford sanitary pads they resort to using cloth pieces or nothing. This causes infections and can lead to cervical cancer. GOONJ decided to act on this issue and started a movement of making sanitary pads out of waste cloth for rural women.

Sewa Trust  provides free meals to city slum and street dwellers admitted to hospitals who are unable to afford their own. Many of the beneficiaries are migrant workers drawn to the cities from rural India by the opportunity of work and separated from family support during their time of need. Says one beneficiary, “I regularly come to this organisation and am offered free food by the members. I live on a footpath and do not have enough money to buy food for myself". 

Sangama, an NGO for sexual minorities, sex workers and people living HIV has been asked by the Kerala Government  to conduct a socio-economic and situational survey of transgenders in the state through an NGO with a view of formulating welfare measures for them.

To celebrate Indian National Day on 15 August, the Times of India ran a feature that highlighted several more NGOs and social enterprises:

Basic school skills
The focus of in-school programs has always been on children achieving basic skills. The depressing fact is that of children enrolled in class 1, about 40% drop out before class 8 and a total of 70% drop out before class 10, makes basic literacy and numeracy an urgent social goal. Akshara’s effort began in Bangalore when remedial programs were implemented with volunteers, trained to identify children with learning deficits and give them specialized inputs. 

Microcredit and crowdfunding
Rang De combines microcredit and crowd funding to help people achieve freedom from poverty. It acts as a bridge between people who want to help the under privileged and those who need money to invest in small businesses. People living in cities can choose from a huge database of borrowers on rang these websites invest as little as Rs.100 into their business.

Out on the streets
Started in 2010 by an anonymous group of volunteers Ugly Indians are out on the streets fixing pavements, fearing a garbage, removing unauthorised posters, painting walls and planting saplings all over India. The regional initiative in Mumbai has been to document all the filthy and rundown parks and playgrounds and lobby the city council to remedy these.

Femininity and Fearlessness
The Fearless Collective are artists, activists, photographers and filmmakers who use art to speak out against gender violence. It was formed in response to the Nirbhaya rape and murder. The collective aims to redefine fear, femininity and what it means to be fearless.

Pay from your heart
Seva Cafe is a pop-up restaurant run entirely by volunteers. At the end of the meal  diners don't get a bill, just a little note which says "Pay from your heart!".  A hundred percent of the restaurant profits is used to support social service projects.








Saturday, August 2, 2014

Is the Death of Corporate Philanthropy Exaggerated?

The end of corporate philanthropy was predicted in a post on the Forbes Leadership Forum. I reckon not and  the answer lies in stirring the alphabet soup.


Paul Klein, who heads business and civil sector consulting group Impakt, encourages any corporations who are giving away their hard-earned dollars to charity to stop.

Klein, admittedly, doesn’t go as far as Milton Friedman famously did, saying that the only responsibility of a business was to make a profit, or as Jamie Whyte implied even more stingingly in the Wall Street Journal, “Corporate philanthropy is theft.” However, Klein spares no punches when it comes to charities. He recommends they “can address the loss of 5% of their revenue by reducing costs, improving efficiency.” (Those who argue that charities should spend more on overheads will wince at that uppercut.) The five-percent figure quoted is the corporate contribution to nonprofit income.

The Giving USA statistics from which the number is drawn also show that corporations’ giving to charities declined during 2013. Yet there has been a steady flow of reports and articles pointing out that companies who do good in the world do well. A 2013 Cone Communications/Echo Global CSR Study says companies are “expected to be an active participant—if not a driving force—in solving the most pressing social and environmental issues.” Cause marketing—such as Toms’ “One for One,” (Product) Red, and Patagonia’s “Common Threads”—has been highly successful. Millennials, we are told, choose to join and stay with companies on the basis of their volunteer programs and social commitment.


However, it might just be a matter of semantics. Aren’t all the above types of doing good by companies forms of corporate philanthropy? Or are they corporate citizenship? Or corporate social responsibility? Impakt on their website extends this lexicon with yet another label: corporate shared value.

Might it be possible to take a contrary view that has corporate philanthropy is alive, well, and kicking—and adopting many different guises? I have always argued that the best thing for corporate fundraisers to do is to decode then rearrange the letters in the corporate alphabet soup. As well as CSR other acronyms in the soup are  CP (Corporate Philanthropy or Partnership), CSI (Corporate Social Investment), CSV (Corporate Shared Value) and more. The solution is to rearrange it as a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is the hard edged advertising and marketing related type of corporate partnership at the other softer gentler fuzzier community, social and political objectives.

Your job as a fundraiser is to understand what opportunities your organisation can offer and where it fits in the spectrum. Once you know that, you are a better position to identify whom or what department to target. If you have opportunities that are going to drive sales, or enhance corporations product brands then you're at the hard edged and and you need to be talking to sales and marketing executives. If your organisation offers opportunities for corporate volunteering, then you probably want to be investigating the company's human resources Department.  If your organisation has good government connections then you might offer opportunities for companies government or public affairs relationship building. If you are doing good in a particular community, especially one that is linked geographically to companies activities then you will probably be wanting to talk to corporate affairs.

Of course, one of the advantages your nonprofit may have is that you may 
have benefits at several different places on the spectrum to offer  a company. Take for example a health charity that stages a public event, such as a marathon, that offers branding and product placement opportunities for a business partner.  As well your nonprofit may have strong links  with government health or welfare departments. Such links offer opportunities for business partners to be seen supporting a government backed initiative and may offer networking opportunities to develop  relationships with officials. A major arts festival by which I was once employed offered both these opportunities.  We worked alongside brand and product managers to achieve outcomes at the hard end of the spectrum and with corporate affairs directors and the CEO's office to facilitate networks and contacts at the other more subtle end.

The secrets to developing successful corporate partnerships is to understand your corporate partner. If you can get inside the company's skin, that is see and hear through the corporate executive's eyes and ears then you have a good chance of pitching an opportunity.


Note: Some paragraphs of this blog were first published as a NonProfit Quarterly Newswire on 21 July 2014