[00:00:28] Speaker A: You are listening to right on radio on KFAI, 90.3 FM, Minneapolis St. Paul, and streaming live on the
[email protected] dot I'm Eric Bushnell. On tonight's program, Josh will be talking to Stephen E. Mayer to discuss his book, how to save the world. Evaluating your choices this book is for anyone who gets asked at least ten times a week to give money to a charitable organization, anything from your college or place of worship. Working to create solutions that might hold the world together, Mayer provides a guide to choosing a set of donations or investments that stand up to your own scrutiny so that you can feel your choices are meaningful and consistent with your values.
All of this and more. So stay tuned to write on radio.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Hello, everyone. This is Josh Weber. Today I'm joined in studio with Stephen E. Mayer, the lead strategist and consulting evaluator at Effective Communities Project, to discuss his book, how to save the world. Evaluating your choices.
This work offers guidelines and tips on how to consider a nonprofit's strengths and weaknesses and helps you prioritize requests so you can separate the wheat from the chaff. It gives an insight look at how nonprofits work their missions and intended beneficiaries, and are challenged to make progress on their mission, the bottom line of any nonprofit organization. Mayer is an experienced program evaluator, consultant and teacher working in the nonprofit and philanthropy industry. He has a PhD in industrial organizational psychology from U of M and taught nonprofit program development and evaluation in the nonprofit management program at Johns Hopkins University as an adjunct faculty member. Stephen, welcome to write on radio.
[00:02:31] Speaker C: Thank you very much, Josh. Glad to be here.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: So we were talking in the green room a bit about the origins of this book. What was the impetus for writing how to save the world?
[00:02:42] Speaker C: Well, the world needs saving, and it's in a pretty dark place.
As one of the people who used to do the drive time fundraising here, Willie Murphy used to sing, the world is a neighborhood and the neighborhood ain't doing so good. So that's a starting point, along with a career, really, a lifetime of working with nonprofits and foundations, helping them to discover the way forward, to greater effectiveness, to greater values, to their community, and hopefully to greater resources so they can do their job better.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: You mentioned in the first chapter the work of nonprofit organizations, the importance of mission statements for nonprofit organizations. Can you talk about why that's valuable?
[00:03:40] Speaker C: Well, it's a mission statement. Is the guide star, one might say, of the work of nonprofits. What distinguishes a nonprofit from a commercial organization is the mission statement. Well, actually, both have mission statements. But the mission of a four profit business is to make money to return a profit to their stakeholders. The mission of a nonprofit will state it in many different ways, whether they're in arts and culture or in food advocacy or social justice. But making progress on the mission, whatever it is, is the primary job of any nonprofit.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: You provide several criteria for examining nonprofits. Which criterion do you think is the most often overlooked by donors, and why is it crucial?
[00:04:35] Speaker C: Well, by donors here in this book, I am speaking to people like you, Josh, and people listening to this radio show who are donors. You've written a checks. You've certainly opened letters and opened emails asking for you to write checks. And as the lead ins suggested, we're all besieged with requests to donate, which so somebody thinks we are donors. Individuals are donors, and it's difficult for people to really sort through all the invitations they get to be helpful as donors. And the book tries to be a guide to people like you and your neighbors and friends to help sort through the merits and strengths of different nonprofit organizations.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: In discussing program strategies, you differentiate between nonprofits that benefit individuals, communities and social systems. I was wondering if you could talk about any examples that come to mind for you that integrate all three strategies. And perhaps I might be asking Davis question here, but do you think KFai is an example of an organ, of an entity that does integrate all three?
[00:05:55] Speaker C: Good question. And the answer is probably yes. Let me pull up KFai's mission statement. I was prepared for this.
It says, I also pulled up the mission statement for one of your competitors. We can.
We can look.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Maybe we can compare with faster.
[00:06:16] Speaker C: I'll start with the competitor, a commercial news organization, they say, named for a furry little animal that begins with.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Whose name may rhyme with rock.
[00:06:28] Speaker C: Snooze, not a ferret.
Yeah, rhymes with rock. So they say we empower a diverse range of creators to imagine and develop culturally significant content. I think that means fake news. While building an organization that thrives on creative ideas, operational expertise and strategic thinking. We've long been a leader in news, sports and entertainment programming, achieving strong revenue growth and profitability in a complex industry environment over the past several years. Blah, blah. So again, this is about for profit profitability, returning profit by doing something that makes profit. Whereas KFAI says as its mission, KFAI is a volunteer based community radio station that exists to broadcast information, arts and entertainment programming for an audience of diverse racial, social and economic backgrounds. By providing a voice for people ignored or misrepresented by mainstream media, KFAI increases understanding between peoples and communities while fostering the values of democracy and social justice. And KFAI lives this out in its 24 hours day by being a different radio station every hour, as the tagline says, because they're speaking to different demographics and four different demographics, and everybody on air is intending through their own voice to increase understanding between peoples and communities and fostering the values of democracy and social justice. That is the mission. And the criterion for judging whether an organization is doing a good job is whether the organization is advancing, continually advancing this particular, their own particular mission and trying to get better at it all the time and trying to become a stronger organization so that it can do its mission better.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: What do you see as then, the biggest challenge for small nonprofit organizations in achieving their missions, and what are some options for overcoming it?
[00:08:47] Speaker C: The biggest challenge, I think, is perhaps the the reluctance of institutional funders, foundations to try to understand a nonprofit in its own terms. In a nonprofit's own terms, nonprofits have their own values, their own cultures, their own histories, their own voices.
Yet foundations, while they ask for applications, they count the number of characters that go under the electronic digital application form and do not invite serious dialogue or an attempt to understand what that nonprofit is all about. That is a significant barrier.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: You highlight the role of individuals in supporting nonprofit work. What advice would you give to someone looking to maximize their impact when choosing which organization organizations to support?
[00:09:49] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I think the whole idea of changing the world, as grandiose a title as it is, has actually some chance of coming to pass if individuals decide to pay attention.
In the same way I've been suggesting that institutions pay attention.
Pay attention with respect. Pay attention to what others, the so called others, are saying to you so that you can understand them better. So when a request for support comes to you as an individual donor by email, start with, let's say, don't start by saying no immediately. Don't start by talking, tossing it into the delete pile. I'm guilty of this, too. Sometimes, you know, mood happens.
But when I bring my best self forward with an intent to understand their work, their mission, because they put as much work into formulating their mission and recruiting people and recruiting a board and recruiting resources, people in the nonprofit sector are very intentional and devotional, one could even say, in making their mission come true. And so I think it behooves us as individual donors in their audience to pay attention.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: Let's talk about this further, then. Can you elaborate, then on the difficulties nonprofits face when constructing a theory of action and suggested ways they can better articulate this to potential supporters.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: Theory of action. I can't believe you brought that up.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: You brought it up.
[00:11:46] Speaker C: I did. I brought it up so I could. So I could knock it down.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: I learned by reading you, theory of.
[00:11:53] Speaker C: Action is one of those contrivances that, I mean, they may have been invented with some intention. The intent. The intention there is that funders want to understand what a nonprofit is doing. I think they would like to understand it, but. So they've created this exercise called logic models and theory of action, where they make the nonprofit list all the inputs and all the outcomes and all the this and that's part of nonprofit management jargon. Nonprofits hate the exercise, I think, because it's asking them to explain the logic of their actions. Now, how would you like that, Josh? If someone were to ask you to explain the logic of your actions, would that be an opportunity you would look forward to?
[00:12:48] Speaker B: That sounds like an exhausting endeavor. Yeah.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: Yeah.
So instead, what I suggest is that that nonprofit boards and staff, instead of a theory of action, instead hold that mission statement on the blackboard or whatever is used now, and smart board do a kind of an exercise where they brainstorm all the things they've done in the last week or six months or year to make each of those different parts of the mission come true. All the things that KFAI has done to increase understanding between peoples and communities. All the things KFAI has done to foster the values of democracy and social justice. Those would be a good presentation for individual donors to read in an invitation. Good thing to put on the website. A good thing to put on the funders applications, even if it does take a number of characters.
We have to change the game so that funders are more required to listen to what nonprofits actually do.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: You mentioned the need for nonprofits to build capacity in some various areas. What is the most common areas where nonprofits underinvest, do you think?
[00:14:21] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Well, capacities, you know, the key ones have to do with administration, you know, staff and board. They have to do with fundraising and communications. They have to do with putting sensible programs together that deliver the goods for the people that they intend to deliver the goods for.
But the least attended to is community interconnection, actually between or among different nonprofit organizations that have every reason to be allied in their work. But the dominant fundraising model has nonprofits be competitive with other nonprofits, and this competition is not healthy.
So many organizations here in town focus on, let's say, food issues, hunger issues, yet they operate kind of in vacuums. I think what they need is instead to have people on staff who reach out to their allies and try to make things happen together. They would love to, of course, but they don't have the staff. It takes money, obviously, to have a staff person so that KFAI could relate to even NPR or Minpost or established and non established news and storytelling sources. But that kind of staff person takes money. Commercial organizations have that. People in commercial organizations are paid to go to meetings, to create partnerships, to create alliances. But people in scruffy little nonprofits are not paid to do that kind of thing. And so they work 60 hours, weeks, lots of overtime. They don't get paid for because they carry the passion of the mission.
But if funders, institutional funders, were serious about nonprofits becoming a constructive force for good in this community so that together they can help save the world, they would encourage this kind of networking and alliance building and coalition building.
There are lots of coalitions that have come to be formed in all walks of nonprofit life. They need money to work with more people. Build up the networking strength. Build up the coalition strength of nonprofits.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: What strategies do you think then, can nonprofits do to better educate their donors about the complexities and challenges they face in achieving their missions?
[00:17:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I think they have to be more forthcoming in describing what they really are doing to advance their mission.
They have to communicate this with assertiveness and pride and even tell their audiences what are the obstacles to their growth. Obstacles of all different kinds. Every organization knows what its own set of obstacles are. I think theyre afraid of speaking out about what they are for fear of looking weak.
I think instead, if they had some good talk plan about what they would do to overcome their limitations, to become stronger, they could invite support for getting stronger.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Let me ask you a follow up question you're going to hate me for, Steve, then. How can nonprofits balance their roles in direct service and advocacy without overstretching the resources they have available?
[00:18:28] Speaker C: I'm going to hate you for that question. I'm sorry.
I might even ask you to repeat it because it's such a big one. Go ahead.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: How can nonprofits, do you think, balance their roles in direct service and advocacy without overstretching their resources?
[00:18:43] Speaker C: Well, that's where a chief partnership officer would be a good addition, someone to help the organization think beyond the immediacy of direct service.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: What's the role of this person? Say the name again.
[00:18:56] Speaker C: I called it a chief partnership officer. Officer.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Chief partnership officer.
[00:19:00] Speaker C: Not chief marketing or chief communications or chief, but chief partnership. CPO. CPO, you could say, because the idea is to strengthen the interconnections and find common cause, find ways to work together, get funding to work together, to advance a common purpose.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Okay, so you're proposing reversing the traditional priorities in nonprofit work. What resistance have you seen to these ideas, and how would you propose addressing them?
[00:19:39] Speaker C: Well, you know, historically, the first work of nonprofits have been charities. Wherever direct service is provided in the areas of food and clothing and shelter and safety, the items are at the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Yeah, that's right. And this is where faith based charities have emerged. The earliest charities were addressing those kind, and the earliest charities were faith based. And all the major faith traditions mandate that their culture, our cultures, make sure that our people are not hungry or without homes or shelter or security. So that deserves support. There's no doubt the more recent kind of efforts have to do with making. Promoting system change through advocacy, such that these systems are better able to take care of hunger and homelessness and security, so that it's not just the churches that are responsible for making those things happen, but that our public systems are more likely to be helpful. Now, nonprofits can't. They're not in charge of those systems, but they are the skunk works, you might say, of experimentation, where new solutions get designed and tried out with support and improved upon, and hopefully gone to scale a little bit more. Although scale, I think, requires public support, and it's just taxpayer support, and that's probably a subject we shouldn't get into, isn't that right? That's one of those areas where it's like almost swear words, right?
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Possibly.
[00:21:45] Speaker C: So the role of nonprofits and the role of individual donors is to promote solutions that could go to scale to fix the kinds of problems that our public systems are facing.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: In chapter four, you mentioned that evaluation is often more political than scientific. Could you elaborate further on this point?
[00:22:08] Speaker C: I thought that's what I've been talking about.
Yeah. Yes.
Evaluation gets promoted as a science, as a social science, and social scientists are hired to do evaluation.
You know, there's people in foundation staffs who've all had some courses in social science, and they would say that social science is the way to go. And so they demand that a nonprofit provide proof that you are increasing the democratic capital or the social justice, the level of social justice in this city. Well, you can't provide proof of that. And the demands for proof are silly. It can't be done. There's no laboratory work that can be done instead. We can be empirical, however, which is the root of all science, and that is to begin to notice the sorts of changes that our nonprofit programming can do.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: All right, then. Well, then let me ask you, then, a follow up question. In what ways can nonprofits effectively use qualitative data to complement this? Quantitative measures of the progress, then, yeah.
[00:23:35] Speaker C: Quantitative is sort of overranked, I think, overvalued.
There are ways one can think about, you know, categories one can think about, you know, send people out with a job of noticing how many signs of democratic or compassionate, let's say, or behavior that exhibits dignity or responsibility towards others.
What does that look like, and how do we describe that description? Storytelling, writing, informed journalistic writing, and inquiry about the kinds of immediate outcomes that could be expected from exposure to KfAI programming.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Well, I'm kind of curious, then. So has there been social scientists that you encounter or try to quantify some value metric like dignity or empathy or anything like that? Then what do you say to those people?
[00:24:38] Speaker C: I discourage them.
If quantified means creating some sort of scale, like an IQ scale.
No, let's not do that. If quantified means, how many instances of this kind of behavior do we see? Or how many examples of that kind of behavior have a set of behaviors that you're wanting to see more of? And, you know, you send people out to look for those. It's about observation, observing the kinds of changes that you're hoping to see in the very, very short run and counting those off and trying to make more of those happen through better programming.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Very close to the end of our time here, Steve, I got one, I think room for one more question here. All right, so how can individual donors, like our listeners, develop strategies or developing a strategic plan that maximizes their impact?
[00:25:45] Speaker C: Where did you learn these words?
Strategic planning for maximizing impact. Okay, I can go there. I do go there. In classes that I teach and webinars I do for nonprofits and foundations.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: I looked up, I did my research, and found this. Organizational industrial psychology speaking a jargon he understands, maybe. So this is what I did. I'm wrong. I'm sorry.
[00:26:12] Speaker C: Well, I think it's important for people to better understand where their values lie and what they'd like to see more of.
Every time you open an envelope with a solicitation and you're inclined to say no, to stop and ask yourself, why am I saying no? Why does this not ring my bell?
Conversely, something will ring your bell and ask yourself, what is it about this that I like? What about their mission. Do I like? Okay, let's go further. Let's look at their website, let's look at their activities to see if they align well with the mission and think critically about that. And then a third big question is, do they have the horsepower to make this mission happen, to make progress on their mission? Horsepower, meaning the staffing, the organizational base, the technical know how, the whole infrastructure, that stuff. And it gets you thinking about the inner workings of a nonprofit. And my book actually goes into some detail about that.
It sort of gives a guide to the sort of plan that a person like you could, without using excessive jargon this time.
A person like you could put together to inform yourself on the possibilities and in a way that sheds a light for a path forward for you to increase your own impact and usefulness in the nonprofit world.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: This has been my time talking to Stephen Mayer about his book how to save the world, available now wherever books are sold and on Amazon. Stephen, I guess thanks for coming on the program.
[00:28:18] Speaker C: Well, Josh, I've heard so much about you, and I'm glad finally to be.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Here and now this.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: You have been listening to write on radio on KFAI, 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and streaming live
[email protected]. dot I'm Eric, and we would like to thank Stephen E. Mayer and all of our listeners. Without your support, KFAI would not be possible.
