My favorite raving lunatic

Timothy Ferris has become my favorite lunatic. Tim is the author of the book The 4-Hour Workweek, which is a book about how to escape the 9 to 5 so that you can travel the world and become a national champion in Chinese kick boxing or learn to scuba dive in Hawaii. You might find it a little bit strange that someone who loves philanthropy so much that she stays up late at night and writes a blog about her field would enjoy a book about how to escape the work world. While I do sometimes dream about leaving my overflowing inbox behind so that I can go on safari in Kenya, I am much more interested in his tips for increasing your effectiveness by focusing on the essential. Tim talks about how your work expands to fill the amount of time that you have to complete it. I got to live this lesson recently when my son got the flu and I was out of the office for 3 days. When I returned I had a full inbox and a pile of work to do. Somehow 3 days worth of work was completed in an afternoon.

Focusing on the important lets you spend time doing the parts of your job that you love, ignoring the parts that are unnecessary (do you really need to get a CNN update every half an hour?), and having more time with the people and things that you care about outside of the work world. Viva la work-balance!

The Business of Doing Good

Rusty Stahl, director of my favorite organization for young people in philanthropy, EPIP, has recently written a response to Dahna Goldstein's essay, titled Foundations Should be More Like Public Companies, which she posted on Sean Stannard-Stockton's Tactical Philanthropy blog as part of his "One Post Challenge". Let me diverge for a moment and say how much I enjoy that the One Post Challenge in particular and philanthropy blogs in general have created such a rich conversation about how to make the work of philanthropy more effective. It wasn't so long ago when those conversations were few and far between because foundation's good intentions are seen as good enough. I'm glad to see that we are at a point as a society that we realize the stakes are too high to just settle for good intentions, it's time to expect results. Check out Rusty's response here.

Stop being such a bore

My biggest pet peeve is boring nonprofit and foundation staff. Terrible PowerPoint presentations from someone from the social sector make me want to scream out “you have the most powerful and emotionally wrenching material out there and all you could come up with is this dry, picture-less, graph-filled PowerPoint about your 10 year strategic plan?!” People make award winning movies about the work that we do everyday, Al Gore’s PowerPoint won him the Nobel Peace Prize, and you can’t keep your staff and board members awake for a ten minute presentation? You should be ashamed of yourself or at least be willing to admit that there is a problem. Luckily there is help out there when we get PowerPoint impaired and forget that the work that we do is about telling stories about the real people that we are helping. Here are some of my favorites:
Andy Goodman- A great communicator who has a fabulous and free monthly newsletter about how to get your messages across.
Cliff Atkinson- His book Beyond Bullet Points reminded me that Power Point is supposed to be a tool to get messages across, not a barrier to real communication.
Chip and Dan Heath- Made to Stick was one of my favorite books this year because it teaches you how to tell effective stories that create results.

Who would you add to this list of communication gurus that are helping us change the world one awake board room at a time?

How the web can transform philanthropy

I was just selected as runner-up for Tactical Philanthropy's one post challenge and despite my competitive nature I couldn't be happier to come in second. Did I suddenly have an awakening and discover that winning isn't everything? Of course not! My sudden comfort with second best is because the winner of the one post challenge was able to harness the power of viral marketing and received 683 comments for their blog posting compared to my 15 comments. The run away success of their post got me thinking about the power of web based networks to do good in our communities. So what nonprofits do you think do a good job harnessing the power of the internet to connect people to causes?

Does Philanthropy Cause Poverty?

I recently heard about a country that had severe nutrition issues. The United States told Malawi's government that seed and fertilizer subsidies would hurt the island's economy. To meet the nutritional needs of the residents, the US government began providing surplus food, as did many nonprofit organizations. This went on for many years. The malnutrition and severe poverty continued even with the food donations. A new political leader decided to ignore US advice and instituted the subsidies. His reasoning was that if subsidies were good enough for US farmers, they were good enough for his farmers. As a result, Malawi is now producing enough food for its residents' needs with enough left over for export.

My first thought after hearing about this story is that it sounds like a nonprofit urban legend but my next question was: Does philanthropy increase poverty by creating a disincentive for economic development? Are we unintentionally hurting the communities that we intend to help? What do you think?

Correction: Thanks to Nick for finding the original New York Times article this much repeated and adjusted story came from.