{"id":281,"date":"2009-07-14T18:36:11","date_gmt":"2009-07-14T22:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"\/news_blogs\/john\/?p=281"},"modified":"2024-12-24T08:48:10","modified_gmt":"2024-12-24T13:48:10","slug":"fully-funded-now-whats-our-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/john\/2009\/07\/14\/fully-funded-now-whats-our-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Fully funded, now what&#8217;s our mission?&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pps-series-post-details pps-series-post-details-variant-classic pps-series-post-details-38706\" data-series-id=\"127\"><div class=\"pps-series-meta-content\"><div class=\"pps-series-meta-text\">This entry is part 4 of 12 in the series <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/series\/harvard-business-school\/\">Harvard Business School<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today our cases in the strategic nonprofit leadership course at Harvard Business School&nbsp;included <a title=\"Prison Fellowship Site\" href=\"http:\/\/www.prisonfellowship.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Prison Fellowship <\/a>(featuring Frank Lofaro, now president of <a title=\"CLA Website\" href=\"http:\/\/christianleadershipalliance.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Christian Leadership Alliance<\/a>) and an interesting group of British financiers who created their own charity called <a title=\"ARK website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.arkonline.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Absolute Return for Kids (ARK).<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">An Amazing Fundraising Event!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">ARK holds a gala event each year to raise money for charity. In 2006, for example, they raised US$36 million in one night by auctioning off things like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>dinner with Gwyneth Paltrow,<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>guitar lessons with Chris Martin of Coldplay,<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>a game of tennis with Elton John,<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>a week on the world&#8217;s largest single-masted yacht for you and 11 friends,<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>a day of shopping with Elizabeth Hurley&#8230; you get the idea.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Unlike most charities that start with a <strong>mission<\/strong> and then go looking for funding, the financiers got their start in charity work&nbsp;by raising more money than they knew what to do with, and then&nbsp;had to decide what their mission should be! Isn&#8217;t that a nice way to get started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Grants or Investments?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They started off by giving grants to other charities, but felt they were not getting a big enough bang for the buck (or do&nbsp;Brits say <em>Not enough&nbsp;punch for the pound<\/em>?). So they stopped supporting other charities and became an operating charity themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, when you read the case you can&#8217;t help but think&nbsp;of this group of donors&nbsp;as a group of&nbsp;control freaks on steroids. The problem they encountered was that they couldn&#8217;t find any charities that fit their criteria for how they think charitable work should be done. Perhaps, you might wonder, their&nbsp;criteria were&nbsp;unreasonable. Well, you decide. They wanted to fund charities that are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>engaged in measurable activities<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>achieving&nbsp;real world results<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>creating value<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>efficient<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>sustainable<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>leveraging their resources, and<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>scalable or replicable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If they had come to you to talk about a grant, would you have met their criteria? It seems to me that ARK has a pretty good&nbsp;set of <strong>criteria<\/strong> that we could use to&nbsp;<strong>evaluate<\/strong> our <strong>charities<\/strong> and&nbsp;our <strong>programs<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lots of the nonprofit CEO&#8217;s started today&#8217;s discussion with a very negative view of the &#8216;business practices&#8217; these financiers were trying to impose on charities. Our group felt at first that they just didn&#8217;t understand how things work in the nonprofit sector. But as the discussion continued, I think everyone in the room came to appreciate the wisdom of their criteria. After all, wouldn&#8217;t you like to have programs where you know there are measurable real world results and that the program has the potential to become self-sustaining and could be copied all over the world? Wouldn&#8217;t you like it to be efficient and leverage your resources?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Maybe we shouldn&#8217;t be too quick to dismiss <em>business practices<\/em>. Maybe they just might be <em>best practices<\/em> for the nonprofit sector too<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pps-series-post-details pps-series-post-details-variant-classic pps-series-post-details-38706 pps-series-meta-excerpt\" data-series-id=\"127\"><div class=\"pps-series-meta-content\"><div class=\"pps-series-meta-text\">This entry is part 4 of 12 in the series <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/series\/harvard-business-school\/\">Harvard Business School<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><p>Maybe we shouldn&#8217;t be too quick to dismiss business practices in the nonprofit sector. Maybe they just might be best practices for our too. Here are some suggestions. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/john\/2009\/07\/14\/fully-funded-now-whats-our-mission\/\" class=\"linkbutton\">More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ts_fic_featured_image_caption":"An artist mannequin posed to seem puzzled while looking at a compass. Photo by <a href=\"\/photographer\/winjohn-50474\">John evans<\/a> from <a href=\"https:\/\/freeimages.com\/\">FreeImages<\/a>","footnotes":""},"categories":[553,623,556,224,663,554],"tags":[53,747,748,585,589],"series":[127],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-effective","category-healthy","category-skillful-execution","category-strategy","category-winning-strategy-healthy","category-thoughtful","tag-evaluation","tag-external-collaboration","tag-impact-assessment","tag-organizational-health-management","tag-organizational-self-awareness","series-harvard-business-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}