David La Piana

I wholeheartedly support Barbara Kibbe’s recent suggestion to make the next GEO meeting in two years more interactive. I want to emphasize this: let’s make it radically more interactive.

I have been to dozens of conferences, including every GEO meeting since 1998. GEO is great because of the people, some of my favorite people in the field seem to attend. Still, and this is no knock on GEO, it is the sad state of conferences these days that, just as in the 1970′s, and probably back to the Pleistocene, they alternate between plenary sessions and panels, and “interactive” means a 10 minute Q&A at the end. We can do better.

Next time let’s do GEO as a three day Open Space session. We could invite people to consider some big topic in philanthropy, to just come at noon the first day and make it happen. There will be no conference planning committee. There will be no proposals for workshops. There will be no agenda. There will be no celebrity plenary speaker at lunch. There will be no break out rooms. We just need one room large enough to hold all of us with lots of space to move around. We need a bank of laptops we can all use to capture our “proceedings.” And we also need a flexible caterer who can provide food throughout the day so there are no meal breaks per se. People will be having too much fun to break for meals all at once.

Open Space begins with people self-organizing an agenda. Now, that sounds hard to do on the fly with a group of several hundred people, and it does take a different type of pre-planning, as well as a cracker jack support team on site, but in the end it always works. I have never facilitated, or participated in, a failed Open Space meeting. In my experience, Open Space meetings have been by far the most meaningful.  Given the right structure and support on site, people make it work.

The GEO crowd is a great, smart, creative group of people. Let’s give them the conference they deserve – a conference they make for themselves.

Writing from the biennial gathering of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Conference in Pittsburgh, I have to say there is a really upbeat attitude among the participants, mostly foundation staff and trustees. I ascribe this optimism to the Dow hitting 11,000, a height fondly remembered but not seen for a long time. As the market picks up, foundation assets rebuild from their 28% decline and things get much more positive in the foundation community. Which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong.

But on the other hand most nonprofits rely on sources other than foundations for the bulk of their support. Giving from individuals is still being pressed by high unemployment and uncertainty, some of which may also ease as the market rises. And the largest source of revenue for nonprofits is state and local government programs, and here we see no light at the end of the tunnel, only a precipice as the states try to balance their 2010-2011budgets.

So, as the foundation community regains some of its capacity to help nonprofits, let us not forget that the public sector funding in many cases is much more critical, day in day out, to the survival of most nonprofits, and it will not be rebounding any time soon.

As I waded through nearly a foot of water at the curb while exiting a cab at SFO, rain pouring down my collar, all I could think is “What possessed me to book a 4PM Sunday flight to Pittsburgh?” But I knew the answer. It was for a good cause, of course, the biennial meeting of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, where my colleague Heather Gowdy and I will be leading a session on our latest research initiative NonprofitNext.

GEO’s conference is my favorite gathering because it is a group of people who understand the importance of building strong, sound organizations, not just funding exciting new programs. Still, going out in this curiously wild April storm seemed a bit crazy. So I was all the more surprised when I was joined at the gate by roughly a dozen Bay Area foundation folks, all waiting for the same flight.

GEO is an important part of the nonprofit sector. I must be one of a very small number of people who have attended every one of its meetings, going back, if memory serves, to 1998. The first gathering of a few dozen people in Monterey has mushroomed into an international conference with several hundred foundation leaders and capacity builders.

Despite the dramatic loss of funding for organizational effectiveness issues over the past decade GEO has grown. It publishes important resources, including our Due Diligence Tool, and in addition to the biennial gathering, convenes smaller specialized meetings on many topics. GEO enriches the sector, even if getting to the conference requires traveling through rain, sleet, or snow, it’s always worth it.

Following up my recent Merging Wisely article in Stanford Social Innovation Review, I will be discussing the practical issues involved in merging nonprofit organizations at the next SSIR Live! webinar. From Nonprofit Partnerships to Mergers: How to Restructure for Success will take place Tuesday, April 6, 2010, from 11:00am – Noon PT. I plan to leave plenty of time for questions, so bring yours and join us. Register today!

Without a doubt our nation, and the nonprofit sector that serves it, have both gone through a very tough time over the past couple of years. The crisis brought a barely averted financial collapse, from which Wall Street has recovered quite nicely. Profits are way up, and our biggest bankers seem to have learned – well, nothing actually. The head of Goldman Sachs described the whole near-catastrophe as practically an act of God that mere mortals could neither have foreseen nor prevented.  Regardless, Wall Street is back in the money, big time.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of us. Unemployment is stuck at record levels, which means, among other things, that nonprofit human service providers are stretched to the limit in many parts of the country, with less revenue and many more demands on their services. The nonprofit economy has continued to languish while the financial markets have begun to recover.  Where nonprofits are concerned, unfortunately, there is little hope for a rapid turnaround.

The largest source of income for many nonprofits is state and local government. The recession, while technically over, is still in full swing in most state legislatures. Higher unemployment means both lower tax revenues coming in and more benefits paid out. In places like California, where “dysfunctional” doesn’t begin to describe our pre-recession political system, each budget brings even more draconian cuts.

What can organized philanthropy do about all of this? Foundation funding has in the past been a highly strategic part of the sector’s sustainability.  It needs to play that role again today. Foundations are loathe to “play God,” deciding which nonprofits will live and which will die, but the time has come to place some bets.

As the sector continues to witness the financial collapse of not just marginal performers but important nonprofits, funders can ask “Which groups are too important for us to lose?”  Foundations should identify their top picks, the organizations their communities and fields cannot live without, and invest in strengthening those groups. This does not necessarily mean picking up the tab for government funding cutbacks, but helping these essential groups to rethink their business model, restructure their management and service delivery, and perhaps even join forces with others to withstand the storm.

A few foundations have launched initiatives to help key grantees rethink their models. It is time for the foundation community at large to jump in.

A January 25, 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention.  Entitled “Strategic Plans Lose Favor, Slump Showed Bosses Value of Flexibility, Quick Decisions” by Joann S. Lublin and Dana Mattioli, the article describes several big companies’ efforts to find a better way, in the current economic uncertainty, to plan for the future.

Walt Shill, head of the North American practice for Accenture, is quite blunt: “Strategy, as we knew it, is dead. Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future.” Corporate planners are increasingly revising their forecasts monthly, but this too is the wrong solution in my opinion. It consists of continually moving the goal posts. When you first miss your numbers, recast them. Next month, repeat.

It is great to see corporate America, and consulting giants like Accenture, beginning to see the problems with long-term static planning approaches to strategy. We identified similar problems in the nonprofit sector years ago and prescribed a better approach to strategy, our Real-Time Strategic Planning methodology, which was described in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution in 2008. Sometimes our sector leads the way! In this work we describe an ongoing strategy process designed to anticipate and respond to challenges and opportunities as they emerge.