The World is a Mess
There’s an incredible video making its way around the internet called “The Girl Effect,” and it starts with this statement: The World is a Mess. I’ve watched this short clip a bunch of times, and it never fails to give me chills. Check it out here:
Pretty powerful, isn’t it?
As the video closes, a sentence comes up on the screen: “Invest in a girl and she will do the rest”. This got me thinking: who out there is really investing in girls?
The good news is that a lot of organizations are. The Girl Effect is, in fact, a collaborative effort between the Nike Foundation, the Novo Foundation, and a handful of other international organizations. Beyond just this project, there are many other well-known NGOs also working to promote education and economic empowerment for women and girls around the world, including Room to Read and Heifer International (both of which have terrific girls’ education and gender equity projects). Of those with a U.S. focus, two of my favorites are Girls on the Run and Girls Inc (more along the lines of girl empowerment and confidence building). In the end, it seems that a whole host of domestic and international organizations understand the value of putting girls first.
But this good news is, in my opinion, also the bad news. A quick search on Guidestar for nonprofits with the word “girl” in their title produced a list of 20,177 results. Ok, so I recognize that this isn’t the most scientific of all surveys, but it raises a crucial question: At what point are there just too many nonprofits out there doing the same thing? Yes, in theory lots of organizations should mean more resources, more innovation, more impact–but does it? Or does this huge contingent of girls’ organizations (or any kind of cause for that matter) simply dilute everyone’s collective efforts? The nonprofit community seems divided on this one. While some folks clearly think that this redundancy concern is a non-issue, the topic of nonprofit mergers is increasingly on the front burner. Interestingly, a February 2009 Bridgespan Report stated that mergers should not just be a tool for nonprofits in tough times:
…nonprofit mergers often come about through default—due to financial distress or leadership vacuums. At the same time, relatively few nonprofits are using M&A strategically, as a way to strengthen organizations’ effectiveness, spread best practices, expand reach, and to do all of this more cost-effectively. Yet the potential for M&A to create real value in the nonprofit sector exists, particularly if more philanthropists take on the mantle of matchmaker and help nonprofits explore and evaluate M&A opportunities.
To me, the idea of nonprofit mergers seems obvious: given the increasingly competitive fight for fundraising dollars, it makes sense that we’d be entering our own form of nonprofit natural selection, truly a “survival of the fittest.” But therein lies the rub, as they say: how can organizations–already strapped for financial and staff resources–ensure that they have the skills and strategy in place to guarantee that these mergers are not doomed to fail from the outset? Looking back five years or ten years from now, what will we say made the difference between mergers that worked and those that didn’t?
And here’s where you come in: what do you think about the issue of “too many” nonprofits? Are mergers the way to go? Do you have other examples of two organizations becoming one–and it being a success? I’d love to hear what you think.
Other Related Resources:
- Made to Stick: an interesting play-by-play as to why and how The Girl Effect video works
- The Girl Effect 10 Steps: A downloadable poster of the top 10 issues affecting girls and their futures
- Philantopic–How Many Nonprofits is Too Many?: review of a 2008 Boston Foundation study on the health of the nonprofit sector in Massachusetts
I believe the issue of “too many nonprofits” is an extremely important topic that does not get enough attention. Clearly, the sheer number of nonprofits existing today is proof that there are a lot of people out there who want to make this world a better place. Undoubtedly those in the nonprofit industry are making the world better, but could they achieve even greater change if they pooled their resources?
This summer I am going to be working in Boston on a financial literacy initiative for a large publishing company, so I decided to do some research on the number of Boston financial literacy nonprofit organizations. After a quick search, I came up with a list of nonprofits three pages long! I am curious to learn more about the business strategy for each of these organizations. Are these companies so differentiated that they each fill a unique niche in the market? Or are they really just duplicating each other’s efforts and, in essence, wasting money on overhead that could otherwise be invested in programs and services?
I’ve worked in education as a teacher, fundraiser, and manager for the past 10 years. For the past six years, I’ve worked with public schools in New York City. If there was one golden rule that I learned while working with schools in New York City, it was that every school and every neighborhood is different. Our country is truly a Melting Pot, and a result, I believe large top, down approaches sometimes fail because they fail to address the diverse needs of communities. Perhaps this is an argument in favor of many nonprofits addressing the same cause.
On the other hand, there are nonprofits out there, such as Teach for America, that have successfully scaled their initiatives. Though many of us lament large big box corporations such as Walmart and Best Buy, which occupy shopping malls in every community across the country, one cannot deny that their scale is a significant competitive advantage. I often wonder what it would take to have a handful of market leaders in the social sector. One or two organizations could lead the way in every community addressing the “girl effect”; one or two could champion financial literacy etc.
I once worked for nonprofit that raised $135 million in five years thanks to the leadership of a powerful board. More consolidation in the social sector would allow for greater depth of talent and resources on nonprofit boards. This would lead to increased sustainability and, ultimately, a level of financial resources that would allow organizations to hire the best talent, to invest in innovation, and to capture the attention of American consumer by marketing the virtues of their mission.
One of the greatest challenges competing against this ideal vision is this: how do we know if an idea or organization has potential to be a world changer unless we fund them? I read the biography on Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp. TFA’s success was a long-shot. It took a number of very agonizing years before Teach for America reached the tipping point to become a model in the social sector. Entrepreneurial ventures in the private sector flame-out regularly and disappear, however, in the social sector many nonprofits hang-on even though their model has not been able to scale. It is tough to give up on a cause that helps others.
I believe that it is important to promote more discussion on this topic of “too many nonprofits”. In an ideal world, nonprofit ventures would be given a chance to succeed, but if they were unable, they would either fold or get bought out. In the private sector, small start-ups often feed industry growth by providing incubators for talent and ideas. Some of the ventures boom but many get bought out and, subsequently, feed larger companies with their innovative ideas and talent. I have never heard much conversation about this taking place in the nonprofit sector, and I am sure there are many reasons why this would be challenging, but I do think that the idea deserves more consideration and debate.