When we talk about sharing, we’re talking about TRANSPARENCY. This might be a word you’re more familiar with, and one that you’re hearing about a lot these days.

From just about every corner, we’re hearing that people want the organizations and companies around them to be more transparent. Even the Federal Government is getting in on the conversation about transparency. Donors, staff, volunteers, and funders want to know more about the organizations that they support, and by putting information out into the open, people feel that you’re not hiding behind “proprietary” information or obfuscating the truth in some way. In this day and age of information overload, people want to know more, and they feel better when they get the information that they’re looking for.

A “share-by-default” mindset is another way of saying “be more open and transparent.”

There are layers and steps to this. We don’t expect you to start sharing absolutely everything overnight. The first step is to think about how sharing can help you and your organization:

1. Think about your staff: are there documents that, if easier to find, share, and/or understand, would help them do their jobs more efficiently? How often are they searching for information that they can’t find, or having to ask their colleagues? You can empower your staff to work smarter by making more information available to them more easily.
   
   
2. Think about your donors and volunteers: they’re sharing their valuable resources with you – their money and time. What information can help you tell your story more effectively so that they become true ambassadors and advocates for your cause, not just transactional participants.
   
   
3. Think about funders and supporters of your organization: people increasingly want to know how you are stewarding their funds and resources, so what information can you share to demonstrate this? 
   
   
4. Layered on top of all of this is the question of how can you do all of this sharing more easily? We have the technology... There are many great tools out there at no or low-cost to your organization; it’s a matter of picking which ones are going to work for you.
   

Keep it simple and start small.

Maybe there are a couple of new documents that you can put up on your website that will help you better tell your story to your external supporters.

Maybe there’s a new tool you can use with your staff to share information more easily internally.

Try sharing, and, like green eggs and ham, you may find you like it...

By Anil Patel.

There is much hoopla these days over concepts such as the Creative Economy, Complexity Science and Integrative Thinking. So I was quite happy when a friend shared his copy of Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind.

The illustration below sums up what Martin distinguishes between conventional thinking and integrative thinking. The philanthropic sector could benefit from the 'salience, causality, architecture & resolution' concepts Martin offers. 

As a sector, we are really good at the Saliance part. And for that matter, the second step - causality. The ability to understand that if we provide a youth with the tools to complete highschool, go on to college and then get a job, it helps reduce the potential long-term costs if that youth gets into trouble and ends up in the social service cycle. 

But here is where things begin to breakdown. Because of the weird funding models in the sector (e.g. funders who won’t fund core costs), we are typically not able to spend enough time on the last two steps: architecture and resolution.

It is the lack of architecture support that is most worrisome. I’ve been to many conferences and workshops where sector leaders like to believe we are moving towards integrative thinking models.

However, just because we wish it, does not mean we are getting there as quickly as we need to. These workshops and conferences point to why it is important to collaborate, innovate and do things differently. But little is spend on the how: How are we going to do it? How can we build new incentive systems to achieve this? How to we build new resolution mechanisms once we learn from applying more integrative philanthropy into the current mix?

This bring us back to our current favourite question: How to get the Sharing Imperative as a governance question into the water supply? While we still have some prototyping and documentation to do, we think that help address the single biggest obstacle we’ve heard from charities and funders since rolling out Sharesies: “All this looks great, but it sounds like is a lot of work and would be complex to do!”

Martin provides a few examples in his book where two conflicting tensions are resolved through what he calls ‘creative resolution’. Isadore Sharpes Four Seasons model is one such example in the book.

Here is ours: In mid-2012, Framework will be establishing a Sharesies Academy. A Star Trek style learning environment for people who are interested in developing skills, tools and discipline to earn ‘Art of the Possible’ credentials. The same credentials Gene Roddenbery envisioned when he created StarFleet Academy.

This is clearly nerdy. Nerdy beyond all comprehension. However, our team believes that Sharesies can help philanthropy go to places we only dreamed of. To quote Roger Martin one final time explore “the world as it is, or as it might be”.

By Anil Patel
Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball is incredibly insightful analogue for people interested in ‘Impact Philanthropy’.

You don’t even have to enjoy the Baseball to appreciate the story arch that Lewis establishes. It is of David versus Goliath proportions (he uses this term a lot). David being the Okland A’s under the leadership of General Manager Billy Beane and Goliath being Major League Baseball, in particular the old boys club of big spending owners, tobacco-chewing scouts and know-it-all reporters.

All the pundits thought the A’s winning streak during the 1990s was sheer luck, not management design. As Lewis points out, Billie Beane in fact was applying a new approach to attracting the best players for the lowest cost to get on base (players who could control the strike zone), score runs and win games. The stat is called On-Base Percentage (OBP). Certainly sounds simple enough. But throughout the book it is clear how radical the approach is: The prevailing paradigm - 150 years in fact - is to spend the most money to hire the biggest sluggers and pitchers. Lewis explains:  

“Billie Beane, had set about looking for inefficiencies in the game. Looking for, in essence, new baseball knowledge. In what amounted to a systemic scientific investigation of their sport” [XIV]


Later in the book, Lewis interviews Ken Mariello a former investment banker who co-founded AVM Systems, a company that compiles a range of Baseball statistics. Mariello uncovered in baseball what he did in finance: “inefficiency caused by sloppy data” Ken Mariello (page 131)

What does this have to do with philanthropy? Well a lot. There is so much talk about efficiency of charities (e.g. cost revenue ratio) and mission success (e.g. impact metrics & reporting). And so much of it is noise.

Noise because Board governance question has not changed in decades; the same way baseball recruiting techniques had not changed. We currently assume that the way funders and nonprofits share information leads to optimal decision-making.

For instance, audited financial statements are still held up as one of the more important documents verifying organizational health & well-being. Or even information aggregators such as CharityIntelligence that claim will help identify the the good from the bad charities.

Just like Lewis set-out to dig into how the A’s transformed themselves, we have been searching out the same type of inquiry in philanthropy. Here is what we’ve come up with:

From a governance perspective, there might not be a single more important management competency then how well its organization shares: How well does it share internally with their staff and volunteers? How well with its external stakeholders? And is the organization getting better at sharing month after month; quarter after quarter; year after year?

And while there might not be an equation to plug numbers into, we do believe that it will be easy to establish a few guiding principles to measure against. And in the coming months we will be providing a framework for a sharing index: a simple and cost effective way for funders and grantees to better understand one anoth

Did you read the book? What did you think? Do you like our philanthropy analogue? Are you interested in helping establish a sharing index?