Increasing your Social Return on Investment through Technology
Jerry Brito and David Kirby
Leveraging creativity and dedication can help a small group of people with a small budget produce big impact and big results, comparable to those of much bigger organizations. Well chosen technology can assist in this. The following article outlines some technologies used by America's Fuure Foundation.
Perhaps no concept in the last decade has aroused more interest and controversy among nonprofits and philanthropists as social return on investment (SROI).The concept is simple. SROI suggests applying cost benefit analysis to nonprofit management and the business of philanthropy.
This concept should be unobjectionable-particularly for those of us in the policy world. Can we apply the same cost-benefit analysis we demand of public policy makers, to ourselves and our missions? What impact, what results, at what cost? However, the answers to these questions are by no means simple-nor very often clear. It can be frustrating.
Nonetheless, the new logic of SROI demands that we, as nonprofit managers, become more nimble, more creative, more risk-taking, and do so with less-less money, less time, and less resources. And with philanthropy headed in this direction, those organizations well-positioned and with high SROI will be rewarded.
America's Future Foundation (AFF) has a strong SROI. We manage to get big results at little cost by making the most of the technology.
We must admit this is not by design, but by default. AFF celebrates its 10th Anniversary this year. Like many SPN members, in our first years as a start-up organization, we have been cost effective by necessity. You get the job done with the budget you have. Period. This constraint has clarified our thinking, engendered discipline, and promoted creativeness-particularly in technology.
Technology allows us to communicate. AFF's mission is to identify and develop tomorrow's libertarian and conservative leaders. Our theory of change is that young leaders learn best by doing. So not only do we target professionals in their 20s and 30s for our programs, we are run by professionals in their 20s and 30s. AFF is a virtual organization. We have only one full-time employee, an executive director, and just a handful of part-time staffers. Most of the work is done via remote offices, coffee shops, wi-fi networks, and Blackberries.
We communicate in cyberspace. Below, we describe what technology tools we use for internal and external communication. We highlight two tools for internal communication-Basecamp and Salesforce-and three tools for external communication-Moveable Type, Podcasting, and Survey Monkey. These tools have helped us achieve a strong social return on investment, big results with little or no cost.
Internal Communications
E-mail has played a major role in AFF, yet e-mail has drawbacks. Large e-mail conversations can be cumbersome. E-mail attachments become buried on hard drives. And, oh that pesky reply-all!
To solve some of these problems, the first way we better manage our internal communications is by using an "intranet." Customized intranet solutions can costs thousands of dollars. AFF's intranet costs $24 per month.
We bought an off-the-shelf product and adapted it to our use. Not only do economies of scale make these off-the-shelf alternatives cheaper, the fact that so many consumers depend on these products tends to make these solutions much more reliable.
We use a product called Basecamp. Basecamp is basically a password protected website that only you and your staff, board members, advisors, and volunteers have access to. On your Basecamp site, you can create "projects" and you can limit which people have access to which projects. Inside these projects, you can post and reply to messages, much like a blog. Basecamp also lets you upload documents and files with your messages.
The advantage over e-mail is that these messages are permanently available and searchable. You can always go back and see what discussions you've missed and make sure that no good idea goes uncaptured. More importantly, when messages are posted, everyone on the project can see the message and comment on one page. This fosters great virtual conversations that are orderly and easy to track.
For instance, our board has a project page. Our board members schedule meetings, discuss agendas, and provide feedback via the intranet. Our board secretary and treasurer upload board minutes, resolutions, bylaws, and financial statements, creating a virtual board reference manual. Our volunteers have a project page for our monthly Roundtable debates. They debate via the intranet how to frame a topic, suggest speakers, and assign tasks. AFF publishes a quarterly print magazine, Doublethink. Its editorial staff, writers, designers, and publisher have a project page. Our writers in New York upload their articles, so our editors in Washington, D.C. can revise, and so our designer in California can layout. You get the idea.
The second innovation for our internal communications is our contact database by Salesforce.com. How much time and money we spend agonizing over databases! And for good reason: a database can cost thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention the time spent implementing them.
Salesforce is free. That's right, free. While Salesforce costs commercial users thousands of dollars a month, the Salesforce Foundation offers it free to qualifying non-profits. This made our decision very easy.
As its name implies, Salesforce is really a customer relationship management application designed to manage sales. It is enterprise quality software that is in use in hundreds of corporate sales departments. This means it is not geared for nonprofit use out of the box. We invested time in customizing it to fit our needs. But conceptually, the sales process is really no different than the fundraising process. So it works.
Like Basecamp, Salesforce is a completely online application. There is nothing to install, no supporting hardware or mainframes, and your staff can always access the system from anywhere on the web. Unlike early efforts at web-based databases, Salesforce is very fast. You won't wait six seconds every time you push "save." It behaves much like Gmail.
Salesforce performs the basics well. It tracks our members and donors giving and activity history. But Salesforce also integrates with our website so that whenever a new member joins online or subscribes to our magazine, the contact information they enter on our site automatically gets added to the database. It also reminds our members to renew their memberships. We use PayPal to receive online credit card gifts, which is a snap to set up.
Even better, there is also a community of Salesforce nonprofit users that exchange tips and pre-made tweaks for the applications online. In D.C., we're part of a local Salesforce user group that includes large nonprofits like United Way. These meetings can be an invaluable resource. With so many Salesforce users, you can leverage the experience of other nonprofits and commercial organizations with more resources and expertise.
External Communications
AFF's website is our face to the world. It not only keeps our audience informed about our activities, but it serves as a rich resource for our members and the public at large. On our site we publish a weekly online magazine, an electronic version of our print magazine, we host two opinion bloggers, and a team blog for our staff. We also publish a calendar of events and a job board, as well as archives of all our past events including photos and audio of those events.
When a website offers this much information, a simple web page creation tool is not enough; you need a content management system (CMS). Professional CMS applications-the likes of which The Washington Post online or General Motors use-can cost thousands of dollars. So again we take a free off-the-shelf application and, with a bit of imagination, stretch it to meet our needs.
For our website we use Movable Type, the popular blogging tool. Movable Type is really nothing more than a basic CMS that helps you easily publish items that have a title, a byline, a body, and a short excerpt. While these items are meant to be blog posts, there's no reason why they can't be calendar items, job openings, magazine articles, archived events, or anything else. The key here is to invest a little bit of money in a web-savvy consultant that can help you customize the application to your needs.
The second tool we use for external communications is podcasting. Podcasting has gotten a lot of press lately. It's basically an audio file that you can listen to on your computer or download to an iPod or similar device. The technology is emerging. It still feels a bit uncertain-much like blogs did three years ago. But the value of podcasting is it will give you a potential audience of millions of listeners for your message at a very low marginal cost.
Podcasting is not difficult at all and there are many primers online that will get you started. All it requires is a small investment in microphones and some other equipment. We bought our equipment online for a total of $350. We record the program in an office conference room on Sunday because the building management turns off the air-conditioning to save money. It's almost like a sound studio!
AFF decided to harness this technology to produce and podcast a monthly political talk show called AFF Radio. Again, the limit for this tool is your imagination. Maybe you include a short "podcast" audio clip on your press releases? Maybe you podcast an audio file along with your Annual Report to donors?
Finally, lets return for a moment to social return on investment: How do you know you're making an impact on your intended audience? Ask them! If the intended audience for your policy reports is state representatives and staff, ask them if they read them and how they have used them. If they're young people, ask them if and how you've changed their lives.
When we want to take the pulse of AFF's membership, we employ a tool called Survey Monkey. It's cheap and it's online. For only $19.95 for one month's use, Survey Monkey lets us create a detailed survey that we can send to our membership. They answer online. We ask about our mission, image, impact, and outcomes. These surveys produce data sets that can be cross-tabulated to help inform decision-making.
A word of caution: Surveying can be tricky. Poor wording, bad question design, and low sample size can skew results. We wouldn't let this stop you from experimenting. Just exercise sensible caution in the results. Try to solve these problems as best as you can. For instance, we held a drawing for an iPod for survey respondents to increase the sample size among our test population. We mimic the wording and question design from Gallup and other major polls that have an army of sociologists at their disposal.
Conclusion
The lesson AFF has learned in its 10 years is that less is more. By leveraging creativity and dedication, there's no reason why a small group of people with a small budget can't produce big impact and big results, comparable to those of much bigger organizations. While big budgets can breed complacency, resource constraints force good ideas to the surface.
And this impact translates into a high social return for your philanthropic investors. The distributed nature of the internet allows people to communicate and collaborate effectively without being in the same place-and cheaply. Sure, you could buy top-of-the-line systems to effortlessly meet all your communications needs. But when that's not an option, a little effort and imagination goes a long way.
David Kirby is executive director of America's Future Foundation (AFF), and recently graduated from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he studied nonprofit management. Jerry Brito is technology director for AFF and a legal fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.