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_09B

I define outside-outsiders as organizations or individuals who may be willing and able to take on outsourced work from organizations in the CP arena, but who don't have any prior commitment or connection to it.

Here are three types of outside-outsiders (whose members, incidentally, will "do their thing" for either little or no pay):

• Pro bono professionals. Think legal, marketing, HR, etc. pros who donate their services to social change organizations. Example: Taproot Foundation acts as an intermediary between nonprofits and pro bono workers. 

• Freelancers. Two subcategories here: virtual assistants (organizations post tasks or projects and VAs complete them to spec; example: see MobileWorks) and gig /small service workers (workers proffer specific services that organizations buy; example: see Fiverr) 

• Students /academics. To come.

Are you utilizing this talent pool? If not, are you really maximizing the effectiveness of your organization in pursuing its mission?

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Inside-outsiders, by contrast, are would-be workers (service providers) who have a personal stake in how well or poorly our kids fare. While they don't currently work in or for our organizations, they may be familiar with them. They're part of the neuro disorders community.

Here I'm thinking almost exclusively of parents and family members of kids with CP or other neurological disorders or conditions.

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These two talent pools differ in significant ways. For now, I just want to touch on a few of the potential advantages to outsourcing to inside-outsiders, i.e., parents.

• For one, you get their passion. And, with it, trust-based relationships. Do these things lend themselves to creative problem solving? I'd say so. To innovation? Perhaps. 

• You also get their huge numbers. There are 14-18 million kids in the US with neurological disorders. Consider this: The average association executive probably works about 2000 hours in a year. If we could enlist a-half-of-a-percent of the parents of those kids to work just two hours per month (doing outsourced work, in service to our nonprofits) we could add over a million man-labor hours a year to help us in our fight. Who wouldn't want to try to put that to productive use? I sure would.

One other thing you get when you outsource to inside-outsiders is the increased likelihood that they will be transformed in the process...into pure insiders.

My Two Cents_09A

You as an organizational leader are going to want to delegate lower-value work to colleagues who can do it -- not necessarily as well as you, but -- well enough. Competently. The idea is to free yourself up to work on the largest, most pressing issues in your area of responsibility.

The goal of delegating is to maximize your effectiveness.

But our organizations are relatively small. There aren't large pools of potential delegatees. What, then, is the point? How much can "practicing safe delegating" really enhance an organization's overall impact?

Well, London School of Economics' Professor Julian Birkenshaw would have us understand that delegating is one of two ways to offload work. The other is outsourcing. (delegating to outsiders) I happen to believe that outsourcing -- or something like it -- may hold a key to amplifying our whole community's impact. I think it's well worth exploring. 

I'll lay out why in the next four or five posts. 

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When I think of outsiders who may be able to do work on behalf of organizations in the CP sphere, two things jump to mind. One: I think of a vast landscape made up of a larger number of individuals and a smaller number of organizations. Two: If this were fifteen (15) years ago, most of the know-how and know-what associated with said landscape would have been next-to-impossible to access. Today’s communication technologies, however -- our new digital infrastructure -- make all that knowledge "there for the taking." 

The Net opens up a whole new world of possibilities for delegating to outsiders. Those of us in the neurological disorders community aren't even scratching the surface in terms of taking advantage of it. 

I see the outsider landscape as consisting of outside-outsiders and inside-outsiders. Those are only my distinctions, my constructions. But I think they're useful. And I'll characterize them in the next post.