My Two Cents_14

Notice that my solution for beating CP has, to this point, said nothing about advocacy, nothing about government funding, nothing about stem cells, nothing about disability rights, nothing about assistive technology, nothing about neurorehabilitation. Inarguably, that’s where a lot of the action is. Organizations working in those areas have pivotal roles to play. 

What I care about is how effectively they're pursuing their respective missions. 

My solution has largely to do with how well they get things done with and through "outsiders." In my opinion, they need to get better at working with and through individuals, e.g. the parents and family members of the millions of children in the US with neurological disorders. They also need to get better at working with and through other organizations – other nonprofits, for example. That's a topic I hope to explore later on.

How best to do these things are management matters. Making the smartest possible uses of the world’s available brainpower should be our leaders’ top priority. Their job is not to advocate, research, educate, etc., but to orchestrate talent. They need to understand that. As do their board members and other stakeholders. 

*  *  *  *  *

Actually, it's unfair to put the onus just on them. We’re all responsible. I’ll start pointing the spotlight at us parents and considering what we may be able to do to move things along in the next set of posts.

My Two Cents_11

Bridgespan posits that deeper connections with constituents can equate to greater organizational (nonprofit) value and impact. Makes sense to me.

I especially like the way it spells out in a 2013 article some of the more promising forms of constituent engagement and how they differ in intensity. On the weaker-shallower end of things, when an organization conducts a satisfaction survey, for example, it receives timely and useful input but doesn't generally learn much about the respondents, who don't reveal much about themselves in the process. Engage those same respondents in a focus group, by comparison, and the organization is likely to gain a deeper understanding of their aspirations, challenges, and strengths -- and the respondents themselves are likely feel more connected to the organization.

Moving to the other end of the spectrum...

Stronger-deeper forms of engagement are tied to cases where constituents are co-creating, doing high-value mission-driven work, and /or controlling organizational resources, i.e., where they're taking some ownership.

Whenever constituents (feel free to substitute inside-outsiders, or, better yet, parents and family members) respond to an organization’s engagement efforts they're essentially doing work for that organization. They're giving it something of value -- often just for the asking -- that it would otherwise have to spend resources to acquire.

Key takeaways for organization leaders? 

Constituents can help advance your missions in a number of ways, many of which you probably haven't given much thought to. And -- the other side of the coin -- there are also a number of ways to draw people in who may be both willing and able to help you carry out your mission.

My Two Cents_10

PURE INSIDERS WANTED

It's time for our nonprofits to stop seeing the millions of us inside-outsiders as walking wallets and free labor (at worst) or as passive consumers (at best). Stop. And start thinking, instead, about converting us into evangelists for your various causes.

One of the more influential books on nonprofit management of the past few years is Forces for Good. (Crutchfield and Grant, 2012) In it, the authors lay out six practices the high-performing organizations they've studied use to magnify their impact in the world. My favorite of the six suggests that -- in order to help create "an ever-expanding circle of impact" -- nonprofits should strive to turn outsiders into insiders, i.e., co-creators of organizational value. 

CO-PRODUCERS. CO-DEVELOPERS.  

What's their recipe for turning outsiders into insiders? Among other things, you have to "go beyond traditional notions of volunteerism, transcend mundane tactics, and create opportunities for people to actively participate." 

CO-WORKERS. 

When I put it that way, do you see the parallels between outsourcing work and the authors' idea of turning outsiders into co-creators? Outsourcing is an opportunity for inside-outsiders to contribute, to make a difference. It's engagement by another name.

I want to move on to Bridgespan Group's conceptions of constituent engagement, next, to help tie some of these things together.

My Two Cents_07

So far I've suggested that beating CP will require us to manage our asses off, and that it’d do us a world of good to pay closer attention to some of the leading management thinkers and practitioners out there. I've also suggested that nonprofit-serving consultancies could fit that bill.

It's all been very general.

More specifically, what we should look for -- I believe -- are tips, tools, and techniques that will help us magnify our impact, get more bang for our buck, and become bigger up against our challenges. A few years ago, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article posed the question "How can we achieve 100x the results with just 2x the organization?" That's what I want to know. 

My search for answers has taken me again and again to consultants and their takes on: collaboration, constituent engagement, multi-stakeholder networks, "scaling up," and shared leadership. I've become fixated on productivity. I want to see us get a lot more work done through a lot more people. (with special emphasis on parents and family members of the 14-18 million kids in the U.S. with neurological disorders or conditions)

That's the direction I want to head next.

ROUND NINE: Where Are Our Dreamers?

I have a dream that someday we'll have a much bigger, much more focused, and much more effective community tackling the challenges we associate with childhood neurological and /or developmental disorders. And I have a strategy. One that has much to do with mobilizing parents and family members of the millions of kids with said disorders.

To execute the strategy? 

We’ll need to be more specific about who we are as a community and what our dreams are. We’ll need to be clearer about the work it'll take to get from here to there.

RE: the latter, some of my recent posts* have been on the snarky side in that I've called our nonprofit leaders on the carpet for doing a poor job of engaging us parents in their mission-specific work. That'll have to change, too --

Perhaps along these lines:

A few days ago, Cynthia at Reaching for the Stars sent me a wish list of about a dozen of her "human capital" needs, e.g., for a pro bono grant writer. (I pasted her entire list here.) My thoughts when I read it? Perfect. This is just what the doctor ordered. Openness from a leading CP organization about its "to do"s.

How come?

I'm sure a ton of our good ideas for improving outcomes as they relate to CP -- probably a majority -- never become official projects and never get acted upon. What a crime. Cynthia, though, has in a sense brought her would-be projects to life. She's given them forward motion and taken a positive step in the direction of getting them done.

Now, why couldn't the untapped and collective genius of our community-in-the-making help RFTS meet those needs? 

I believe it could. And then some. The same goes for meeting the brainpower needs of the hundreds (and hundreds?) of related organizations out there. In fact, I’d like for each of them to send me a dozen** of their "help wanteds" just like Cynthia did. I'd like to add them to this mind map and then invite our parents to have a look...

And consider pitching in. 

My bigger vision is to create an engine, of sorts, for turning our dreams for our kids into realities. My dreams. Cynthia’s. Yours.

As it stands, the map is a repository of requests-for-help /calls-to-action that some of our orgs have made public over the past eight (8) weeks. It's only sparsely populated and it's lacking in other ways. Do you see, though, how it or something like it could make it easier for us to more fully join in each other's dreams?

What if a million parents could browse through thousands of different "opportunities to help" and work an hour per month chipping and chopping away at them? Advancing our projects in ways large and small. How much farther ahead could we all be then?

*See Perturbed and Everything's Peachy. 

**Or more than a dozen. To inch my own dream closer to reality, I can think of more than a hundred things I'd like to do. I keep a detailed and running list. Many of the items on it could be broken down into small tasks. Hardly any of it would require a rocket scientist to complete...

ROUND THREE: What CP Parents Are For (Part D.2)

We left off talking about the possibility of breaking work -- even something like a writing assignment -- down into smaller bits and inviting other people to help chip away at it. This'd be an example of using collective intelligence: the pooling of small and incremental contributions into coherent, useful bodies of knowledge. Surely it's an execution approach CP-facing orgs could use to get more stuff done.

Ever hear of Amazon's Mechanical Turk? It enables, in the words of David Weinberger*, "vast numbers of people to work on small, distributed tasks" in exchange for small amounts of money. What kinds of tasks? Getting images labeled, finding duplications in yellow-pages listings, rating the relevancy of search engines' results...

We have tons of communicating to do. Could any of it be run through Mechanical Turk or something similar? What about researching? I think about UCP's close to 100 affiliates and all the data they must generate. Could it somehow be worked on in small increments and parsed?

I really don't know much about this "microwork" business, but it does seem to represent a relatively shallower form of worker engagement. Little or no training or expertise are required. The contributors probably aren't deeply commited or emotionally involved. Much of what they have, potentially, to offer never enters the equation.

It may actually be helpful to look at the use of collective intelligence in terms of how relatively engaged the worker is -- with "fully dis-engaged" at one end and "fully engaged" at the other of a spectrum -- and to ask: What are the next, more-engaged kinds of work (after microwork) on the continuum? More to the heart of our matter: What additional kinds of work could organizations pull from the collective of CP parents out there?

As The Bridgespan Group sees it, the next, slightly deeper form of engagement involves getting constituent -- think CP parent -- input. The more insights an organization has about its constituents or customers, the better it should be able to increase its impact. You accomplish something, in other words, when you're able to engage constituents in doing the work of telling you about themselves. (Who are you? What do you think?) Gathering demographic info. Taking surveys. Conducting focus groups. Employing human-centered design processes. Making real-time and comparative feedback systems available. These are all ways of seeking input, of eliciting constituent voice. 

How many of these approaches are any of our CP orgs taking? Not many, I'm willing to bet.  We could be doing a lot more. Outfits that may be able to help nonprofits in particular in their quests to elicit customer voice? Keystone Accountability. Great Nonprofits.

The quality and quantity of information an organization is able to draw out via surveys, focus groups, and the like depends on how it frames questions and otherwise manages its interactions with constituents. Those things set the limits as they relate to depth of engagement.

The next level of engagement is where the org actually gets its constituents thinking creatively, developing programs and solutions together with your organization. On the same page and fully partnering with you, in other words, in furthering your mission. This is the deepest level, really, because lots of fully engaged people give you: multiple perspectives; ongoing relationships; surprises /unexpected better ways of thinking and acting...

The Net makes this sort of co-creation possible. And it holds out this promise: The more smart people you can deeply engage, the bigger the dent you can make in whatever problem it is you're trying to solve. This is where collaborative communities coming together at forums, wikis, mindmaps, etc. come into play. And where we'll head next.

*author of Too Big To Know (2012)