7 Paths Blog

Originally published 11/1/07.

I e-mailed 6 questions to the co-authors of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. Co-author Heather McLeod Grant agreed to answer the questions during a flight on their book tour. She answered each question including the one I thought she was most likely to dodge about the foundation funding—How much in total did the 12 sponsors contribute to fund the study?

Foss: Were the six practices present in each organization from the beginning or did they evolve over time?

Grant: It was a real mix among our sample. In a few of the organizations, many of these practices were there from the outset. For example, City Year’s original vision encompassed the notion of both advocacy (for national service legislation) and service (running direct programs on the ground via the youth corps.) They also decided early on to engage the private sector in their cause; and they quickly developed ways to inspire evangelists by engaging members of the general public in Serve-a-thons, and serving as a model for President Bill Clinton who became their most powerful ally and ambassador. City Year was also co-founded by friends Michael Brown and Alan Khezei and had a model of “shared leadership” at the start. So City Year emerged pretty fully formed, and embodied many of these practices early on. However, for many of the organizations we studied, they gradually came around to more of these practices over time. Often, in their quest for greater impact, they added in various practices to create more leverage to their model. The good news is that any organization seeking to increase its impact can emulate these best practices—they don’t have to have them all at the beginning.

Foss: The smallest budget among your sample is $13 million. Which, if any, of the six practices will smaller budget nonprofits have difficulty adopting, and why?

Grant: Yes – we deliberately selected organizations that had reached a level of national or international scale of impact from the outset. We wanted to know what it took to scale impact or go from “zero to great” in a relatively short period of time. This meant that the nonprofits we included tend to be larger than average, even if they only have one “site” such as the Exploratorium. They’ve reached a “minimum efficient scale” if you will. We realize that this excluded many highly effective smaller groups that are not interested in wider scale. However, we believe that organizations working at the local, state or regional level can apply these practices in their local context—e.g. partnering with community business, advocating on local policy issues, etc.—to increase their impact. It’s a hypothesis awaiting further testing, but we’d welcome stories of local groups using these practices. Based on early feedback, I do think that some practices might be more challenging for a small group to apply – particularly investing in capacity (we don’t really count this as a practice but it’s in the last chapter on sustaining impact.) Early on, smaller groups may not have the budget to pay their people well, or invest in infrastructure – but if they are successful over time, they will attract more resources. As they attract more resources and increase their impact, they will need to invest in their people and infrastructure to sustain this impact over time.

Foss: When you and your advisors looked at the data, was there one of the six practices that was debated more than the others before you included it in the list? If so, which one and what convinced you and your advisors to include it?

Grant: The most debated practice was actually not a practice at all, but the final chapter on “Sustaining Impact” that I referenced above. We debated whether it should be a seventh practice, but ultimately decided it wasn’t a practice because the patterns weren’t as strong across all the organizations. Additionally, within each “pattern” there was greater variation: for example, all the organizations find ways to sustain their fundraising, but their sources are very different, and how they do that fundraising varies greatly. We decided to include this chapter anyway because we felt we’d uncovered some important findings here even if it only held true for half of the organizations. For example, all the organizations have invested in their capacity to sustain impact to some extent, but only half of them have run major “growth campaigns.” Still, we felt this was an interesting finding worth sharing with the field, as it points to new, creative ways of raising funds to invest in infrastructure. None of the three things in this final chapter by themselves lead to breakthrough impact—so they are not really points of leverage as many of the other practices are. However, they are absolutely critical to sustaining impact over time. That’s why we call these things (people, funding, capacity) “necessary but not sufficient.”

Foss: Was there a practice that almost made the list but in the end did not? If so, what was that practice and why didn’t it make the list?

Grant: To constitute a practice 10 out of the 12 organizations had to embody it to some degree. It took us awhile to get the “buckets” or categories right. At one point we had a practice we were calling “pragmatic idealism” to capture these nonprofits’ willingness to work within capitalism and with business; and their general bipartisanship. However, the more we teased this theme out, we realized it was actually two practices: one around advocating and serving; the other around engaging markets and the private sector in social change. Similarly, we had several themes emerging around learning and innovation, which were eventually collapsed into the chapter on Adaptation. So it wasn’t always as neat as it appears in the book—like all research, it took constant iterating and testing against the data to get the practices and themes right. We mention the “myths of nonprofit management” upfront – these are really the things that we expected to find—i.e. well-known brands, high marketing spend—that we DIDN’T find; only a few of these organizations were exemplary in these areas.

Foss: How much in total did the 12 sponsors contribute to fund the study?

Grant: The total cost of this project over four years—and the amount of funding we raised—was $750,000. That funding went to cover research costs (such as the survey administration and paid research interns), our time (we both paid ourselves a percentage of our normal salary for work on this project even though it was a full-time job much of the time), and travel incurred doing case study site visits. This just shows the real cost of rigorous and time-consuming research—academics are familiar with having to write grants to fund intensive research. On the other hand, if this book leads to greater impact in just a few organizations, or in how foundations invest their money, then we believe it will have a very high return on investment for the foundations that supported this research.

How has your study of the six practices shaped the work in your own organizations?

Grant: This is a question we are just beginning to grapple with. I know Leslie’s organization, Ashoka, is asking itself how it can use these practices to inform its own work, not just the work of its social entrepreneurs for whom this was written. We just did a presentation to their entire staff last week and many interesting questions came up. As for me, I know it will help inform the work of the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford, since it dovetails so nicely with their belief in having all three sectors work together to solve social problems. Additionally, I definitely plan to use it in my consulting practice to help nonprofits and foundations increase their impact.