Ailian Gan | >140

That $20 malaria book: how generosity trumped manipulation

I finally bought the book. I had been resisting it. All week, I had been seeing tweets and blog posts about End Malaria Day and the fundraising book that was being sold for $20. It’s a collection of motivational pieces, many of which were written by blogging personalities I follow. But I resisted it because the campaign just felt like just another ask for money. “Just click and for $20 you can save a life!” Also, frankly, it felt a little manipulative. I read these guys and am fans of theirs because I like their thoughts and writing. It felt a little manipulative to have all of them hit me up for a donation like that. 

I’m a terrible donor, I know. 

Tainted generosity
I mean, what of the fact that it’s for a great cause? It’s just $20. Save a life from malaria. How can I say no. But it still felt manipulative. I think Seth Godin has missed the mark on marketing this one. He wrote:

“You have realized what a screaming bargain it is to pay $20 for the peace of mind that comes with saving some one’s life.”

I get psychic benefits AND a book out of this? Isn’t that awesome? I don’t know. What could have been an act of pure generosity on my part is now compromised because I get something (aside from psychic benefit) out of it. Isn’t that win-win? I don’t know. Something about it doesn’t sit right with me. So I didn’t buy the book.

Doing what no one else can do 
Then I came across Kevin Kelly’s post on it. You know what he did differently? He gave his essay away. You can read it for free in its entirety. Let me tell you, his essay is wonderful. Kevin Kelly is not quite an inspirational writer but an inspiring one. And maybe that’s the secret. It is not a life hack but a piece of wisdom that’s worth aspiring to. 

He talks about the stages of discovering how to do good work. First you learn to do things well, then you take on more, then you learn to work smart, and then you learn to do work that you love doing and get paid for it. And that should be the end of the story, except for this:

“Work at its smartest means doing that work that no one else could do.”

It’s not just finding your true calling or whatever. There’s a deliberate process he describes. If you do something and you get really good at it and someone copies you, let it go. Move on, dig deeper. Keep probing for “the one that you have to do”.

Where you know you’re not a cog
This. This has been on my mind, because I’ve been talking to wannabe scholarship bondbreakers again. I make time for conversations that last hours when really I have no time. I do it because… this is work that few others can do and even fewer are willing to do. It is in the only work I do where I’m 100% sure I’m not just a cog. 

I have been thinking about how this applies to my professional life. Many jobs are designed so that you’re somewhat interchangeable. But how do you do the job so that it’s far more than a series of tasks. How do you do what only you can do, that the company needs, that no one thought to put in a job description. 

So I bought the book. I have no idea if the other essays will be as good. I hope my $20 will save a life. But mostly, my $20 is a gesture of thanks. Thanks for sharing, Kevin. He taught me something about work and something about generosity. He made me buy the book, and that was something none of the other bloggers could do. 

Matching your job to your leisure reading

“Every time I switch jobs, I learn to read a different section of the papers.”
-@chewinglum

That’s a one way to do it. I’ve done the exact opposite. I’ve matched my job to my leisure reading. 

Two years ago, I found myself reading a whole bunch of social impact books. Three Cups of Tea. The Blue Sweater. Half the Sky. Etc. Couldn’t get enough of it. I figured, if I’m going to spend all my time thinking about social impact issues, I might as well try to work in that field. I went after impact investing. 

A year and a half ago, I got hooked on TechCrunch and VC blogs and my Twitter stream of tech reads. When I wanted to procrastinate b school homework, I’d consume tons and tons of that stuff. It also made me really want to work for a startup.

When I started recruiting for startup jobs earlier this year, I could now do the same thing but feel productive. The funny thing is, I just felt like I was procrastinating all the time. Getting to procrastinate all the time is a great feeling. 

I once chatted with a classmate who really wanted to work in VC and told me she keeps up with the latest tech trends by reading TechCrunch. The problem with this is that she’s keeping up. Her competition for these jobs read, eat, breathe all things startup for fun. To the people who love this stuff, TechCrunch is less like the Wall Street Journal and more like People Magazine. In a field where there are people driven by love, it is very hard to trump love with brute force. 

Not all leisure reading habits can be turned into jobs. And success in any field requires some serious hard work and discipline at some point. But where you waste your time can be a pretty good indicator of where you should use your time. 

Doing work of social value

Building on a previous post about staying involved in social impact…

**

Over Sunday’s conversation, I was expressing - I guess the right word is - guilt over not taking up a save-the-world job post graduation. I’ve spent 2 years talking about social impact and telling everyone I care and that they, too, should care. But when it came down to it, I went with the other thing I spend all my time on - the internet. I am super excited about starting the job soon. And… I feel slightly guilty about it. 

It’s not that I’ve stopped caring. I still care - a lot. I still spend my time figuring out how I can inhale more of the internet and how I can make a difference. The two intersect in many cases. Or maybe I am subconsciously paying attention to where they overlap, because I’m trying to find an answer to the guilt. 

The Guilt of Not Doing More
The guilt is that I cannot say that the job I will be doing, as thrilled as I am about it, has the same social impact as say, going to work for a non-profit that brings clean water to people in Africa. I feel bad that I just don’t feel that motivated to solve problems for the very bottom of the pyramid. I think these issues are highly important and I care, but I don’t find these issues half as interesting as… as how we can get better information retrieval on the internet. How can I claim to care, if I don’t act that way. 

My friend challenged me on this point. “Why do you think that everyone has to dedicate their lives to serving the poor? The world is not necessarily better off if everyone did that.” 

Hmm. 

Broadening the Umbrella of Social Impact
My friend’s remark gets at the other angle I’ve been trying to turn into a coherent argument. There are many ways to create social impact. It is not clear that the work that has the largest impact, that is the most socially valuable, necessarily involves directly helping the poor. The lack of profits does not equate to social impact. 

Saving the World vs. Changing the World
The field of technology presents incredible opportunities to change the world. Here, in Silicon Valley, the innovations are more often than not targeting the very top of the pyramid. Not just first world, middle to upper income users, but the early adopters, the alpha and beta testers whose tastes determine what makes it to the rest of the pyramid. 

The Top of the Pyramid
What we do at the top of the pyramid matters. Many of the great life changing products for the bottom of the pyramid were adapted from something at the top. The mobile phone wasn’t invented to help the bottom of the pyramid trade agricultural goods or send money. Facebook and Twitter were not created to help oppressed people launch revolutions. But these technologies have delivered incredible value. They have had, I would argue, at least as much social value as a social enterprise that brings water to ten thousand people. 

The Social Value of Building a Business
And it’s not just inventions. The act of building a great business around a technology is one the other powerful ways to deliver social value. A great business makes it possible to disseminate that technology to millions or even billions of people. A great business makes it possible to do so at scale, in an economically viable way. The fact that something valuable can be spread and enjoyed widely - surely that carries social value. 

The world is not better off if we all directly tried to serve the poor. 

The Social Value of Opera
Let’s talk about something that by my guilt-driven logic should be considered a total waste of resources: opera. I love that opera exists. It is a highly niche interest. It appeals to a tiny, tiny audience. It is ridiculously expensive to produce. It is economically unsustainable even at those high ticket prices. It relies on large donations to survive. And yet, when I’m at the Met Opera, I have that feeling. I want to be nowhere else in the world. I marvel that something so sublime can exist. Each performance represents some kind of pinnacle of human achievement. 

Opera has no value to the bottom of the pyramid. But I want to live in a world where opera exists. Along with art and poetry and people making solo treks to the North Pole and people trying to perfect a cup of drip coffee and people delivering happiness in shoeboxes.

Don’t you?

Our Social Obligation
Despite all that, I can’t shake the conviction that we shouldn’t lose sight of how we can help the poor, the oppressed, the less privileged. 

I think back to that passage from In the Plex about Google doing good. It’s not just that story. There are so many others of how they were well aware that their engineering and business decisions could make people’s lives better.

There is that part in the book about entering China, and in the end being defeated by stronger political forces and withdrawing. But even then, the business decision was made alongside the socio-political ones. In contrast to say, pharmaceutical companies that claim “it’s just business” and ignore their power to deliver life-saving drugs to developing countries, Google made a real effort to engage with the issues head on. Failed for various complex reasons, but tried. If you had the power to further free speech for a billion people, would you acknowledge it. What is your obligation. 

I think that’s the crux of it. There are many decisions we make with our work, our hobbies, our energies, our money, our attention that can make people’s lives better. Or not. There is often an implied choice. There is unobvious potential that sits there. That’s the edge I keep coming back to. How do you, wherever you stand in the world, make a social difference?

Staying Involved in Social Impact beyond Wharton

As we second years approach graduation, I’ve been thinking a lot about this question and wanted to pose it to all of you: how will you stay involved in social impact beyond Wharton? 

Almost none of us will be entering the social sector in our first jobs out of Wharton. A good number of us took up social impact related internships last summer - in education, with social enterprises, with non-profits, in social investing, etc. The reasons I’ve heard for not going into the sector full time range from financial constraints to limited opportunities available to lack of clarity on career path. My own excuse? I came really close to taking an opportunity in social VC, but fell in love with startups (as any good VC should) and really wanted to help build a company. That, and I decided that pushing the frontiers on technology is a wonderful way to change the world. 

 So how can we stay involved in social impact? Many of us came to Wharton and joined WSI genuinely interested in learning how we can use our business skills to have some kind of positive impact. Hopefully in your time here, you’ve learned a little more about the social sector, how it operates, where the opportunities for intervention might be, and what the obstacles are. But if your experience has been anything like mine, there is a wide gulf between knowledge and action. You can know a ton about the sector and still have no idea where to start doing or giving. 

The thing is, it is not hard to help. Or at least look like you are helping. There are plenty of opportunities to write checks and plenty of ways you can volunteer your time. Many of us will work for companies that facilitate exactly that - volunteer one day a year of your time to clean up a park or re-paint a school or serve at a soup kitchen. The issue is that 1) that’s not terribly satisfying, 2) that’s not a particularly good use of your skills, and 3) your impact is questionable. (In the corporate case, I have long held that companies should take one day’s worth of employee salaries and donate that, instead of donating employees’ time.) You can do more and you should. 

So how do you stay involved effectively? Especially for those of us who want our professional lives to touch social impact more directly later in our careers, as social entrepreneurs or board members or philanthropists, what can you really do in the mean time? 

From discussions with friends, I have been collecting ideas. Here are some: 

1. Stay current on conversations in the sector. Not too hard when the sector is very active on blogs, social media, etc.
2. Strive to be an effective, deliberate donor, not a guilty one. Consider setting a giving budget every year, instead of giving only when people ask you for money. 
3. Invest the time to get to know one organization well. Help them in whatever way you can help - as a volunteer, fundraiser, board member, etc. 
4. If you’re in an 80+ hour week job, consider taking a few weeks off next year to do something like MBA Without Borders.
5. If you are in a corporate position, think creatively about how you could marshal your company’s resources to do good. 

Some starting points:

• http://www.taprootfoundation.org/
• http://catchafire.org/
• http://www.sv2.org/
• http://www.bridgestar.org/LearningCenters/BoardService/FindandJoin.aspx
• http://mbaswithoutborders.org/

I’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts / ideas / plans for staying involved in social impact post-graduation. Please share. 

Beyond carving out a couple hours a week to care, I think the real challenge is to think hard about what the world needs and what we can give to it. Nick Kristof is one of thousands of journalists. But where most journalists are satisfied to just report, Kristof has used his talents, his passion, and his platform as a journalist to shed light on issues, countries, people who don’t have a voice. Most of us will never be journalists, but by virtue of the platforms that we hold and will hold as we climb in our careers, there is more that can be done than we realize. No one needs to give you a job to change the world. From wherever you stand, you just need to do it. 

Thanks so much as always for reading. 

[I wrote this originally for our Wharton Social Impact mailing list. Cross posting here. Many thanks to the handful of friends who have indulged me in these conversations. Special thanks to @kathliu for the original chat over good food that sparked all this.]

Should non-profits put themselves out of business

I’ve thinking about non-profits that should go out of business. It started with Nancy Lublin’s post about why charities should have an expiration date. Then I came across Scott Case’s talk on how non-profits should design their missions to put themselves out of business. He says their missions should be:

1) Measurable - You need to know whether you’re getting closer to your goal or further away or if you’ve reached it.

2) Achievable - It must be something doable, however ambitious it is.

3) Time limited in some way - Goals need deadlines.

I see the merit of this approach. If your goal was to end polio, do it, then get out of the way. We should encourage accountability in the social sector by pushing people to think about the shut down condition. Imagine what the world would look like if your work is done and you’re no longer needed. Now work backwards and figure out what it would take to make that happen.

But as I tried to define what the shut down condition would be for various organizations (non-profits and social businesses), I couldn’t quite make it work. Moreover, for-profit companies would never think that way. For instance, no pharmaceutical company thinks, we’re going to sell drugs to all the people with a certain disease, and when we’ve eradicated it, we’ll stop. No, if you’ve got a good process going, you figure out how you can tackle other diseases. Stay relevant, get bigger, take on more. 

Then I tried to think about whether the non-profit or social enterprise’s goal should actually be the opposite of shutting down - become ubiquitous. If you’re an organization that aims to deliver an additive good (think books, knowledge) to as many people in need as possible, shouldn’t you aim to be as big as possible? 

Then I put on my social investor hat. Should we only invest in organizations that are additive? Or is it worth investing in organizations that eliminate as well? Should every organization that is additive aim to become financially sustainable (and operate as a for-profit) so it can scale and be as large as possible? Can you ever make a double- or triple-bottom-line investment in an organization that eliminates? Or is that type of organization necessarily not financially self-sustaining because it means throwing resources at a problem until it goes away? 

I’ve been going back and forth on all this, and so far I’ve come to a few conclusions:

- Many missions can be defined in both the positive and negative sense. Your goal can be to end disease, or your goal can be to provide good healthcare to as many people as possible. End illiteracy, or provide education. Two sides to the same coin. 

- The “non-profits should go out of business!” tagline is useful for getting attention (it got mine), but what organizations really need to do is become better at setting goals. You can set a great long term mission that is lofty and all but impossible to achieve. But on a more realistic time frame, such as every quarter or year, you should have targets that are measurable and achievable. Hold yourself to that deadline. Report them to your donors/investors. 

- Non-profits should not be forced to shut down when they reach their goal. They should be shut down when they’re ineffective. 

This is a thought-in-process topic, wanted to share this for a start. 

In lieu of thank you gifts, donate

Over winter break, in exchange for housing we made donations. We stayed at two apartments. At the first apartment, when the topic of rent came up, our host and friend suggested that instead of paying rent, we make a donation to a non-profit he wanted to support. He told us about a friend who works with a non-profit operating a network of schools in Honduras. We thought it was a great idea and were happy to make the donation. 

Donation as thank you gift
We liked this in-lieu-of-gifts approach so much that we decided to give the same “gift” to our friends at the second apartment. We knew they weren’t into “things” so we didn’t want to buy something they didn’t need. But we knew that they supported various causes. So we said, we’d like to make a donation on your behalf to a charity of your choosing. This turned out to be a gift they couldn’t refuse. It was a way they could feel great about accepting a gift.

Why people give to certain causes
I think a lot about how to make effective donations, so I used this gifting exercise to better inform my own giving. What motivates people to give to what they give? Should I borrow from some of these approaches? 

One friend picked a cause because he personally knew the person running the non-profit. So it was about supporting a friend as much as it was about supporting a cause.

The other friend chose a cause she was made aware of through her travels. She chose an organization that used satellite radio to deliver news in a country ruled by a military regime. With the internet blocked and other forms of media censored, satellite radio is one of the only ways people could get unfiltered information.

Technology as a cause
What do you call this satellite radio cause? It was such an interesting mix of human rights and freedom of speech and media and technology. I really liked that it had a technological component. It made me think, oh, this is like giving people Twitter! Ok, that’s a terrible analogy, but I got really excited about it. 

In (social) venture capital, we invest in the development of technologies that improve the lives of the poor. For some reason, it has never crossed my mind that on individual level, I can also direct my giving towards life-improving technologies. Individual, small scale philanthropy doesn’t just have to be about subsidizing the delivery of goods and services. (When you donate to clean water, education, healthcare, food, that is basically what you’re doing.) It is possible to make personal investments in technology that has impact. For a start, Omidyar’s portfolio includes an investment area called Media, Markets and Transparency, which includes Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS, both of which take individual donations. I am going to look out for more of these opportunities. 

So next time you have a friend who doesn’t need anything, consider giving the gift of a donation on their behalf. 

(See also: Charity Water on donating your birthday; Nick Kristof on gift rats for Father’s Day.)

Why we should be willing to fund non-profit overhead

I’d like to propose that we should be willing to donate to a category that usually gets sidelined: non-profit overhead. Overhead includes employee salaries, infrastructure, fundraising. The pioneers of the metrics movement have convinced us that we should ask, “What % of the amount donated actually makes it to the victims?” and that the higher the % of overhead, the more poorly run the nonprofit. This approach of wanting every last cent to go to the end recipient is misguided. Totally misguided. 

Sophisticated donors should be willing to pay for quality overhead. If we’re willing to pay top dollar for great management in our private sector companies, why are we so reluctant to pay our non-profit managers well too? Donating to programs, to end recipients, means that your end recipient gets a meal, books, clothes, clean water. Paying for talent can be a great way to stretch the impact of your donor dollars. Paying to get an amazing non-profit manager can mean the non-profit now has someone who can make program money go that much further and deliver that much more impact to that many more people. It’s encouraging to hear that Charity Navigator is finally trying to measure effectiveness instead of overhead.

To push the point even further, I think we should be willing to fund fundraising. Or rather, invest in fundraising. Dan Pallotta, one of the boldest thinkers in the non-profit space, compares fundraising spending in a non-profit to SG&A spending in a for-profit company. For-profit companies approach SG&A spending as an expense that helps them to scale their business and bring in more revenue. Why can’t non-profits think of fundraising spending the same way - as an expense that will help them get more donations to solve social problems at scale? 

Obviously there must be some balance between overhead and program dollars, and obviously we should only pay for efficient, effective overhead. But too often, donors are repulsed that their money goes to paying for any overhead. We need to change that mindset. 

[I posted this to a Wharton Social Impact mailing list. It’s a follow-up to Nick Kristof and Impulsive, Ineffective Giving.]