Next Stage - Social Impact Services

Social good strategy to amplify your impact

Thought Leadership

The Dangerous Allure of Win-Win Strategies – A Response

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My staff team at Next Stage are saints. No, truly. They put up with a lot, because when I get excited about something, I sort of can’t shut up about it. Such is my fascination with win-win strategies.

I’ve spent most of my working life trying to build strong philanthropic cultures inside nonprofit organizations with the goal of encouraging donations. For most, a philanthropic transaction is viewed as a “selfless act of charity.” I thought that way too until I started reading the work of Penelope Burke, the author of Donor-Centered Fundraising. She opened my eyes to the concept of “warm glow altruism” – the idea that a donor to a nonprofit gets something in return for making a contribution in the form of a positive feeling of accomplishment. A big ol’ dopamine hit. Her assertion is that a nonprofit can create a marketplace for these good feelings and can generate more donation revenue when it ratchets up the exchange. And with that, my love of win-win strategies was born.

Lately, Next Stage has turned its attention to “rewiring social good” between area companies and nonprofit organizations. Here we are exploring “win-win-win” strategies (aha! An extra win!) with the idea that our community benefits when nonprofits and private sector companies are able to work out an exchange that makes the partnership with each other an essential part of both business models. We have shorthanded it as “profit and purpose.” We believe so much in this direction that we are pivoting our firm to pursue new “win-win-win” frameworks. You can read more about it here.

With so much recent focus on “win-win-win” here at Next Stage, an article from the Winter 2021 edition of Stanford Social Innovations Review, a must-read publication, caught our eye.

The Dangerous Allure of Win-Win Strategies” (link), published by researchers with Andrew A. King and Kenneth P. Pucker, unpacks how many of the supposed breakthroughs in the past that were meant to change society ended up landing with a thud.

The points they make are extraordinarily well-researched (this is SSIR we’re talking about after all) and I was left to reflect on how we can learn from these failed initiatives of the past. Here are three 3 ways we can do better in future “win-win-win” efforts:

Avoid Inauthentic Expressions – If you’re engaging in social good purely for profit, it is not likely to have a great outcome. 

King and Pucker outline how the industry attempts to correct negative environmental impact through the creation of new mitigation industries have largely failed. Recycling efforts will never fully undo the harm done by plastics, for example, no matter how much profit there is in it.

It is a point well made. Efforts to create platforms for collaboration between corporations and nonprofits can only be successful if they begin with authenticity. Shining up corporate greed with social good does not work, and only exposes both sides to unneeded risk.

Seek Multi-Faceted Alignment – For many of the strategies outlined, the solutions being trumpeted were specific and narrow, often arising from the businesses themselves as a means to overcome a business challenge.

The examples given focus on big, sector-wide initiatives that were over-sold from the start.

We think solid strategies are formed when we seek to serve a broader set of needs. Social good has lived in the marketing side of the private sector for a long time, and it has largely been relegated to business-to-consumer companies where the customer is the target.

Our vision is for social good alignment to be multi-faceted, addressing many underlying business needs for companies and nonprofits both. It is also important that these win-win-win strategies be highly customized to these needs and rightsized with realistic outcomes.

Focus on Data & Measurement – Speaking of outcomes, the SSIR researchers were toughest on the lack of solid evidence that the concepts outlined actually did what they were sold as doing.

Some of this was attributable to overly-ambitious visioning, but a lot was just an inability to measure impact.

This is the biggest obstacle to overcome for local companies, who see investment in nonprofits as a “soft cost” where they have a hard time justifying the return on investment. I have heard the budget of corporate social responsibility called “a slush fund” for feel-good projects.

This must change if we want to encourage increased investment in social good, and Next Stage is leading the way to build strategies that start with data first.

All this to say, our enthusiasm for win-win-win strategies is not diminished but certainly better informed. What we are constructing is not built on relentless optimism – just the opposite. We see the challenge ahead of us with clear eyes and an open heart, and we know building proof is the key to unlocking amazing (though not limitless) potential.

Rewiring Social Good? What Are You Talking About?

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This month, Next Stage embarked on a new initiative – to “rewire social good, building a new bridge between the private sector and nonprofits that creates a win-win-win value proposition.”

Sorry, what?

It is a pretty bold declaration for us but one that requires a little context.

As strategists for social good, the team at Next Stage has been exploring the current conditions of the supportive community for nonprofits for nearly seven years. We’ve come to the conclusion that the future of nonprofits as the drivers of impact in our community is in peril. Big societal shifts are challenging the business models of these organizations. Trends toward digitization, generational approaches to philanthropy and changes to the tax code (to name just a few) are suggesting that a new path forward is needed. Badly.

In truth, we at Next Stage have known this for some time. We have been vocal advocates for new ways of doing things, but our mistake was in “preaching to the choir” – nonprofit leaders have been the primary audience for our messaging. Going forward, that is going to change.

We are repositioning our work, engaging in service delivery with private sector companies alongside the nonprofit organizations that have comprised our client base for years. We believe social good has a role to play inside companies throughout the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region. Bottom-line business needs like employee retention, team development, cause marketing, diversity and inclusion, wellness and workforce development are all areas where nonprofits can be vendors of impact. In fact, we think nonprofits are uniquely capable of being the authentic partners businesses need to stay relevant and competitive.

The key to making this work? A significant mindset shift. Companies see nonprofits as “charities with their hands out,” and nonprofits see companies as “sponsors supporting their cause.” What Next Stage aims to knit together is a new framework for this exchange – one that serves the interests of both sides and ultimately leads to community impact that supports the entire ecosystem. That is the win-win-win value proposition.

We began to explore this topic with our friends Blair Primis from OrthoCarolina and John Searby from the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation last week as a part of What’s Next? – our twice-monthly Friday roundtable. You can catch up with the episode on demand. It is the first of many such conversations as we dedicate What’s Next? to this topic over the next six months.

My colleague Janet Ervin and I have also recently launched a new community study tentatively called The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Social Good Report, our community’s first in-depth examination of the nexus between business needs, employee perceptions and nonprofit capacity. Janet and I aim to interview 50+ business leaders, survey 1,000+ next generation workforce members, and build a network of 20+ nonprofit leaders in an exploration of what is possible when we shift mindsets and build new marketplaces. We have working theories but we’re eager to test these new ideas in practice. We aim to publish our findings in March 2021.

Intrigued? Join us on this journey. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, participate in our What’s Next? digital roundtables, follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn), and let us know what you think about our new direction. We’re all ears.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Nonprofit Executive Compensation Study

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Next Stage is proud to unveil the 2020 edition of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Nonprofit Executive Compensation Study.

Click here to download your copy.

As covered in the Charlotte Ledger, Next Stage launched this project as a response to challenges repeatedly brought forward through its work facilitating strategic planning and executive searches for area organizations. Talent acquisition and retention is a priority across the nonprofit landscape. How to fairly compensate nonprofit staff leadership is a challenge that boards and executive directors wrestle with across organizations of every size, budget and mission focus.

In this report, readers will find research culled from the 990 forms of over 150 local nonprofits, insights gleaned from more than 40 participants in an in-depth survey, and commentary provided by 11 executives who agreed to one-on-one interviews. Criteria for inclusion in the study include being headquartered in Mecklenburg County and having revenue of more than $350,000. This research forms the basis of findings that are outlined throughout. Highlights include:

  • Dispelling the myth that nonprofit chief executives are driven primarily by passion over pay, the vast majority (92.7%) of organizations surveyed note that base compensation is important to their overall job satisfaction.
  • Other compensation, including benefits, are offered by just 60% of the organizations surveyed.
  • The Education and Environment & Animals sectors lag behind the Health and Human Services sectors.
  • The boards of nearly 30% of organizations surveyed lack a formal assessment process for the chief executive that is tied to annual compensation. And based on stakeholder feedback, those that do are relatively recently formed or are not well-designed.
  • Less than 40% of organizations surveyed offer a pay-for-performance or bonus structure to their chief executives.

This is the first edition of a study that Next Stage aims to produce every three years, allowing the firm to compare against benchmarks and illuminate how organizations are addressing executive compensation from today into the future.

What’s Next? on August 28
Join host Josh Jacobson on August 28 for What’s Next? – the firm’s twice-monthly digital roundtable – where he will share insights on the development of the compensation study, additional highlights from the research and recommendations for getting actionable on executive compensation. Josh will be joined by panelists Jim Bales, Chief Financial Officer for the Children & Family Services Center and Kevin Monaghan, Founder and Director of Charlotte-based Intuitive Compensation Group. They will add their perspectives on formal assessments of the chief executive and the design of pay-for-performance structures.

Register now and make sure to mark it on your calendar! And invite your board chair, executive committee or any board leader who might have interest in this topic. All are welcome.

About Next Stage
Next Stage is a strategy and strengthening firm based in Charlotte, NC and dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations, social cause start-ups and socially-conscious companies “get to the next level.”  Led by Managing Director Josh Jacobson, Next Stage partners with clients to design strategy and processes that create real community impact.

Talent acquisition is at the heart of the firm’s work. Next Stage conducts executive search, transition planning and onboarding, using a unique, consultant-style approach that positions talent acquisition in service to your organizational strategy. The firm develops a robust pool of traditional and non-traditional candidates to ensure your organization can thrive in its next leadership chapter.

To learn more about Next Stage’s services, visit the website at www.nextstage-consulting.com.

 

The ‘Pandemic Effect’ on Social Good

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I’m fired up!

During the May 22 session of The New Normal, I had a chance to chat with three staff leaders of local nonprofit organizations about their major gift campaigns:

  • Jenni Gaisbauer outlined the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library Foundation‘s Common Spark campaign, which aims to raise substantial funding to open a “knowledge center for the future” on the site of today’s uptown branch.
  • John Searby discussed Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation‘s Vision 2025 capacity-building campaign which aims to engage across North Carolina and South Carolina, recing in to 26 counties of the Catawba river basin.
  • Banu Valladares walked through efforts by Charlotte Bilingual Preschool to raise funding to fuel the organization’s new strategic plan, which calls a dramatic increase in the number of children and families served over the next ten years.

Did you miss this awesome session? Stream it on-demand now.

Hearing them discuss such exciting visions for the future, it wasn’t hard to get excited about where our community is going. Up until a few months ago, the Charlotte region’s social good sector was cranking along at a pretty good clip. Buoyed by a strong economy, nonprofits were planting flags of ambition and setting out to generate the resources needed to make them a reality. And then, in what felt like only a few short weeks, it all came to a grinding halt.

Or did it? ‘Full-stop’ is certainly the perception at this time of economic (and societal) uncertainty. From the outside looking in, it appears that the health crisis repositioned our region’s narrative. Strategic efforts to advance our goals across everything from arts and culture to economic mobility seem to have been replaced by bail-the-boat activities meant to simply keep the community afloat.

And yet, because we work with nonprofit organizations for a living, we know that nothing just stops.

While our panelists last week acknolwedged that their major gift campaigns were modified by the realities of COVID-19, each spoke to a deep commitment to seeing their organization’s overarching visions realized. For most, that is likely going to mean changing the timeline, and for some, potentially the degree of ambition. But halting entirely? Not a chance.

The reason is simple – we need forward-looking inspiration. It is a resource on which a growing community like ours thrives. A natural disaster like COVID-19 demands a response, much like a hurricane to the Florida coastline or a tornado to the farmhouses of Kansas. It requires our community leaders to assess the damage done and determine a pathway forward. It justifies an outpouring of resources to combat its impact, as much an emotional reaction as a reasoned one.

But this response (we call it the ‘pandemic effect’ on social good) can also lead to the absence of inspiration that drives our community forward. It can result in a numbness to the damage done because it penetrates so completely our societal narrative. Inside each of us is an ache not just for things to ‘get back to normal,’ but for hopefulness and expectation. It is the human condition to seek inspiration; it fuels the sort of risk-taking that leads to all the best things in life. Love, marriage, career fulfillment, starting a family, launching a business – all require the sort of risk-taking that is fed by inspiration and hopefulness for a bright future.

That does not simply go away. It may become muted, but it is still alive in all of us. Smart nonprofit leaders know this, because it is ingrained into every grant application and request for support.

While everyone else is talking about getting back to normal, nonprofits need to be brave enough to talk about not accepting ‘normal,’ because the way things were before COVID-19 were not good enough. This requires risk-taking by social good organizations when conventional wisdom about ‘being out-of-step’ suggests otherwise.

Nonprofits are uniquely capable of inspiring others – it is a part of the social good DNA. Covering that up to attend to immediate needs makes sense when the crisis first strikes, but letting loose that inspiration at the appropriate time is the only way we can hope to move our community forward.

Back during the Great Recession, nonprofits sat on their ambition, not for months, but for years. Not this time. We’re a different Charlotte now – wiser for the road we’ve been on.

Like I said, I’m fired up. It is time to get back to building our city.

Budget Shortfalls & Bold Leadership: Follow-up from #NewNormalCLT

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Our online nonprofit roundtable that takes place each Friday at noon is called The New Normal. A promise we make is that it will only last 30 minutes, making it easily digestable as a “can’t miss” weekly activity. That also means we can’t always get to everything we plan to cover.

Luckily, we have our Monday morning wrap-up to capture everything we were unable to cover on Friday. Did you miss it? Check out the recording here.

Additional Panelist Questions

Chris, can you speak to scenario planning? Specifically, how various timelines or sets of conditions have factored in to the decisions you’ve made and will make moving forward?

Chris Jackson: I have found scenario planning to be helpful even in the best of times.  It helps our organization be prepared to adjust to various factors and be in a better position to ensure positive outcomes.  This type of planning has been even more important given the uncertainty created by the COVID-19 Pandemic. We have been running scenario analysis from the early stages of the pandemic affecting our region.  This has included, but not limited to various stay at home orders at the local, regional, state and national level, possible COVID related events effecting our facilities, and other factors affecting our team members and others we serve.

This planning has helped us understand when we might need to make different decisions based on changing external factors and provided us with clarity about the impact these decisions would have on our team, program participants, customers, and the financial stability of the organization.  It has also helped us communicate our actions with transparency.  Both what we know for sure and what is not clear yet.

Michelle, on the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra Facebook page, there was a post that started “There’s nothing quite like the feeling you get when you experience the beauty of live music with your friends and loved ones.” And while I agree, #CSOatHome is such a bold and innovative platform. Do you think this pandemic will accelerate the rate at which arts organizations embrace the digital medium?

Michelle Hamilton: The ban on mass gatherings has surely catapulted performing arts groups like the CSO forward in our use of technology. As Basil and Chris mentioned on the panel, many of us are now doing things to innovate that we may have had on the shelf waiting for the “right time” in the future.  Much of what the CSO is doing today to engage audiences, both publicly through our website and social platforms and privately with donors and subscribers, will remain part of our toolkit after the crisis abates.

What will never change is the thrill of live performance.  For years we’ve been able to stream orchestras from around the world, yet people continue to come to concert halls to hear their local orchestras perform.  Live performances engage the senses in a way a recorded or streamed performance never will.  I spoke with a donor today who said the concert is the centerpiece but the complete experience, the people she is with and the energy in the concert hall on a night at the Symphony, can never be replaced by a recorded or streamed experience.  I see most of our concerts more than once, even three days in a row, and I come away with three completely different, and remarkable, experiences.  I so look forward to the day when it’s again safe to gather for the exhilarating experience of a live performance of the full orchestra.

Basil, hands-on, service-based leadership training is how the brothers of Pi Kappa Phi learn and channel servant leadership. How will learnings from this pandemic potentially change how you think about the mix of those experiences into the future?

Basil Lyberg: As college students return to school this fall, they will be returning to a campus community that will be forced to change. Football games, lecture classrooms and residence life will all look different. As a result, we will have to change as well to serve our mission until threat of COVID-19 is greatly reduced and we have a vaccine in hand. For The Ability Experience, this will mean finding ways to foster relationships between students and people with disabilities when they may not be able to walk down the street for an event. Innovations like inclusive gaming will be critical in providing opportunities that can’t be impacted by the reach of this virus.

We also are going to have to do more work to educate students on how to be servant leaders and work to encourage their heart. Just last week we had a Zoom call with our chapter philanthropy chairs. It felt more like an AFP Charlotte luncheon with topics on how fundraise in a crisis and breaking down preconceived notions that students have about fundraising and service. Students want to give back and sometimes just need the tools and encouragement to go for it. There has been no time in their lives that servant leadership has been more critical or needed to meet the needs of our communities.

Bonus Content: How to Write a Compelling ‘State of the Organization’ Update

This week we add a new feature to #TheNewNormal – bonus content! We were so impressed by Chris Jackson’s first-person statement on LinkedIn entitled Leadership in the Era of Coronavirus that we dedicated a whole post to it. Specifically, we believe nonprofit Executive Directors and CEOs should consider being more vulnerable and reflective in their communication to the public during the current public health crisis.

In this post, we outline six steps to writing (or recording) a compelling statement about the state of your nonprofit. We also urge you to make it public. Why is that important? Click above to learn more.

Announcing: Crisis Planning Services

Are you on Zoom a lot these days? We are too. Our area nonprofits are struggling to determine a pathway forward during COVID-19 and Next Stage is rising to the call.

This month, we are formalizing a service line we have already deployed for multiple organizations. Read more here about how we can help your nonprofit navigate near-term challenges and emerge on the other side of this in a better position to meet your mission.

You’ve got this.

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It’s been quite the week, hasn’t it? 

We appreciate everyone who joined us this afternoon for The New Normal. The conversation was honest, meaningful and exactly what we needed to hear. If you missed it or want to share with friends, you can access the recording here or join the conversation on Twitter using #NewNormalCLT.

Many of us are dealing with heavy questions without clear answers, but it is clear to us that our community’s organizations couldn’t be in better hands. We’d just like to pause a minute to say – 

You’ve got this. 

In the last week, you all have done superhuman things at superhuman speed. As Don, Banu and Shannon referenced in the call, nonprofits across our community are changing service models and getting our community’s most vulnerable residents what they need to make it through the crisis. You’re learning how to work and serve virtually. You’re making sure your staff have the resources they need. You’re rearranging events and sending out appeals. 

These projects aren’t easy. In normal times, we would build 6-12 month project plans, hire technology experts and fine tune every change – but these aren’t normal times. And you’re doing it all while learning to homeschool and taking care of your own families and friends and neighbors. 

Thank you for working hard on behalf of our community and neighbors. There is a lot to figure out, but we’re full of confidence that the organizations that serve our city will continue to thrive and serve people well. 

We can’t wait to talk to you again next week.