The End of the Barking Dog

So Ferocious!

What’s your opinion on the purpose of corporate philanthropy?

Is it an example of the powerful partnership that can be created between business and nonprofits?

Or is it simply about writing a check – and checking a box?

I mentioned in an earlier post on The Changebase that I recently attended the 2009 Net Impact Conference at Cornell University, and one of the panels I attended tackled this question.

The panel was called “The Evolution of Corporate Philanthropy: Achieving Greater Impact through Strategic Giving” – and moderator Mark Kramer, managing director at FSG Social Impact Advisors, immediately set the record straight regarding the changing role of corporate philanthropy over time.

His hypothesis is that in the last twenty years, the purpose of corporate philanthropy has evolved from mere existence (he actually used the word "irrelevance") to creating shared value for a company, its nonprofit partners, and its community.

To prove this point, Mark enlisted the help of an impressive corporate philanthropy panel:

• Anne Bronson, director of US Corporate Citizenship at Accenture
• Jason McBriarty, senior manager of Worldwide Community Affairs at Levi Strauss (and a Boston University MBA!)
• Hasting Stewart, vice president at Shell Oil Company Foundation.

Here’s what I learned:

Question: Do you still run into the issue of people doubting whether philanthropy is an important part of business?

Jason from Levi’s started out by noting that his company is privately-owned with a history of philanthropic community support (a factor that I believe is crucially important when it comes to the successful adoption/implementation of sustainability and CSR programs). He noted that the company’s new CEO understands that even in bad times philanthropy is a core component of Levi Strauss’ business.

Anne from Accenture said that, in this tough economy, shareholders don’t always want to see large checks going out the door. To respond to this, she and her team have focused more on donations of employee time through skills-based volunteering – which, given the experience of the Accenture workforce – is certainly a valuable gift.

Question: How can philanthropy be used to drive business goals?

I thought this was an especially important question – as I learned this summer as a corporate philanthropy intern, “doing the right thing” will only get you so far.

In the end, it’s about proving that the corporate philanthropy program is aligned with the business objectives.

Hasting said that philanthropy often reinforces the work that his company does by enabling Shell to have a presence in local communities. For example, every city or town that hosts a Shell refinery also has a community advisory panel (managed by the Shell Foundation and made up of local leaders and city advocates) that meets quarterly to engage in dialogue and share feedback or concerns. Thus philanthropy serves as an entry point for Shell to connect with its local communities.

Jason acknowledged that Levi Strauss engages in philanthropy because it’s the right thing to do, but it also looks critically at how philanthropy can have an impact on the business. One area of focus for Levi’s is its network of over 600 suppliers. Through its Foundation, Levi Strauss is training suppliers and their employees on issues relating to human rights and labor conditions in factories. In this way, corporate philanthropy is another lever that Levi’s can pull to ensure that its business is successful and sustainable.

Question: What kinds of attitude changes have you seen taking place in regards to public/private partnerships?

Anne noted that in the past relationships between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors had been strained, and even antagonistic. But, she believed that partnerships among business, nonprofits and governments were growing in popularity – and that when you focus on opportunities to partner with, rather than fight against, other organizations you ultimately create even more value and impact.

Jason highlighted the recent launch of a new partnership with Goodwill as an example of the power that can come through partnerships.

After evaluating their supply chain, Levi’s found that the greatest use of energy in the lifecycle of their 501 jean is consumer washing of the product at home. This made the company realize that it needed to do a better job of educating its consumers regarding how to care for their jeans as well as what to do with them once they were no longer wanted. And thus the Goodwill partnership – and a new Levi’s care tag on the inside of all 501 jeans – was borne.

Question: Given our economy, how has your company’s outlook on philanthropy changed?

In general, all of the panelists agreed that they’ve seen cuts to their budgets and staff. But, they also all agreed that they’re not seeing an abandonment of philanthropy just because times are tough.

As one panelist put it, “philanthropy is about being in it for the long haul” – and companies can’t just leave their communities because the economy is struggling.

All panelists did agree that, beyond measurement, monetizing the impact of philanthropy is a huge challenge. Levi’s, for instance, looks at measuring impact through the “buzz” that their cause marketing campaigns create, while Accenture uses storytelling to demonstrate the impact of their community investments.

Perhaps the most powerful moment of the session came when one panelist asked why corporate philanthropy was being forced to prove financial returns to the business when other functions (like marketing) have always had dubious connections to ROI?

In the end, he said, we need to stop being “the barking dog” - that is, forcing a conversation about why philanthropy matters - and instead showcase the assets that philanthropy has to offer to the business.

I couldn’t agree more!

A Tale of Two (Green?) Cities

We’ve all heard the saying, “You are what you eat.”

When it comes to green living, could we stretch that and say, “You are where you live?”

That is to say, is where you live a determinant of how you live?

Plenty of research and evidence exists to confirm that yes, the city you live in has a big impact on your lifestyle, health, and happiness.

And intuitively, this makes sense: the city or town you live in will play a big role in how well you can access nature and the outdoors, locally-produced food, public transportation, and recycling programs. All of these ideas, to me, make up a green, or more sustainable city - but if you're curious about other initiatives that make a city green, this is a good start.

With the rise in interest and action around "living green," I've noticed an uptick in people who care about the relationship between location and lifestyle. In fact, it seems like every week a new ranking of the greenest U.S. cities is published - just doing a search for “green city rankings” yielded a few of the following lists:

• Environmental Leader
• Popular Science
• SustainLane

So clearly lots of people are thinking about this idea. Additionally, two recent examples do a good job illustrating this connection between location and lifestyle.

The first one comes from a conversation I had with Dave Pedersen, a new Twitter friend of mine who works as supply chain director at Resources Global Professionals (follow Dave on Twitter). It turns out that in addition to his day job, Dave is a member of the Hermosa Beach Green Task Force. Hermosa Beach is a pretty small town in Southern California, with about 19,000 residents. With its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and the abundance of outdoor sports opportunities like surfing, Hermosa Beach is a perfect example of a town where location really does dictate lifestyle.

Recently, the Hermosa Beach City Council realized that something needed to be done about how climate change was affecting its local community. That “something” was creating a Green Task Force to advise City Council members on steps the city needs to take in order to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The Task Force has four main areas of focus:

• Waste reduction, re-use and recycling
• Sustainable private and public transportation
• Water use reduction and storm water management
• Green building including energy and related matters.

According to Dave, the big mandate given to the Task Force from the City Council is first to develop a plan to reduce emissions through the introduction of initiatives like better commuting options, additional biking/walking paths, and improved community recycling and waste reduction programs.

While this is obviously a crucial first step, Dave told me that an underlying, yet equally important goal is to engage Hermosa Beach residents in these efforts by reducing apathy and driving home that climate change is something that affects everyone (once again, the omnipresent “stakeholder engagement” issue rears its little head!).

So how are they doing this? It turns out that Hermosa Beach has signed on to something called the Cool Cities Initiative, a program created by the Sierra Club to help cities to reduce their carbon footprint through specific, achievable milestones. Probably my favorite feature of this site is that you can actually check out Hermosa Beach’s progress on these milestones – and your own city too!

Hermosa Beach is a pretty inspiring example of how a city can proactively engage its residents in its sustainability efforts. And I’m sure that there are plenty of other cities across the U.S. that are involved in similarly innovative and action-oriented programs.

Yet I have to wonder what’s going on in cities throughout the U.S. that perhaps aren’t as forward-thinking?

What role are city councils in “middle America” playing to help shape the way their residents live sustainably? A recent example comes from a trip I took to visit family in a small town about 40 miles outside of Houston, TX.

I haven’t spent much time in Texas, but even after only a weekend it was clear that strip malls, freeways, fast food, and urban sprawl dominated the scene. Even simply casual observers could have spotted the differences between this Texas suburb and a place like Hermosa Beach.

To make sure that I wasn't making any unfair judgments, I asked my relatives about how their town encouraged certain green behaviors like recycling and water conservation. Unfortunately it doesn’t sound like the local city government is doing much of anything to incent or motivate its residents to participate in these types of green behaviors.

Interestingly, on my way to the airport at the end of the weekend, the normally traffic-packed freeways were empty. I wondered aloud where everyone was, and my family said “Church”. This got me thinking: when it comes to green cities, maybe the local city government isn't the only institution that should be encouraging and incenting these behavior changes.

Certainly the City Council in Hermosa Beach is the driving force there, but for other small towns in the U.S., perhaps there are other players who could drive change in their communities. Imagine if your local church, a huge stakeholder in many American towns, started to educate your community on the how’s and why’s of living a green life?

Knowing what we know about the realities of climate change, our overarching goal should be to create radical, sustainable change. It seems to me that this can only come when a collection of organizations – city councils, nonprofits, businesses, and religious institutions – come together to bring the green message to the masses. So maybe it's city councils in one town, churches in another town, and NGO's in another.

At the end of the day, does it matter where the message comes from - as long as it's heard?

What has been your experience in your city or town - are your local community organizations talking about climate change and living green? Whose message has been most influential in getting you to think and act sustainably? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

So You Want to Be a CSR Director?

This past weekend over 2,400 MBA students, CSR professionals and social entrepreneurs congregated on the campus of Cornell University for the 2009 Net Impact Conference.

For those of you not “in the know,” Net Impact is an international network of people looking to use their business skills to create global social change.

I’ve been a member of Net Impact for a few years now, and I have to say that attending their annual conference is a must (if you’re not a member, I highly encourage you to join).

When I attended last year as a first year MBA, I remember feeling overwhelmed by all of the new ideas, terminology and opinions swirling around in the air. This time though, as a second year student, I felt much more grounded and less inundated, which made it possible to simply enjoy the opportunity to learn, connect with colleagues and friends, and share ideas around CSR and sustainability.

Perhaps because it’s the topic most on my brain these days, but a lot of the panels I attended were somehow related to careers in CSR. I went to a couple of especially terrific sessions that I just know the readers of The Changebase will enjoy, so I thought I’d share what I learned over the course of a couple of blog posts.

This post centers around one panel I attended called “Developing CSR Competencies”. Moderated by Chris Pinney, director of research and policy at Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, this session highlighted recent research that BCCCC had just completed with the Hay Group, a global management consulting firm.

The research they did focused on the specific individual competencies that CSR directors need to have in order to be successful in their jobs. To add value to the report’s findings, the panel included three current CSR directors who were interviewed for the study:

• Dan Bross, Senior Director of Global Corporate Citizenship, Microsoft Corporation
• Valerie Smith, VP of Corporate Responsibility, Citigroup
• Dave Stangis, VP of Corporate Social Responsibility, Campbell Soup Company (follow Dave on Twitter here).

Chris opened up the panel by introducing a few important points which are worth repeating here:

• Each company does CSR differently – so the job functions of a CSR director will vary.
• Most CSR teams are incredibly small – for instance, the group at Campbell Soup is only 1 ½ people!
• Not surprisingly, therefore, these jobs are incredibly hard to come by – especially for folks who aren’t already internal employees at the company.

After this, he went on to outline the research findings. In general, 8 key competencies emerged as the "keys to success" for any CSR director.

Personal Maturity (aka: Humility): this basically comes down to your ability to achieve success through empowering others to be part of the process – and then letting them take the credit. All three panelists agreed letting other people shine (and thus staying out of the spotlight yourself) is an acceptable trade-off for seeing your program reach its milestones.

Optimistic Passion: this competency relates to your ability to get out of bed everyday feeling motivated about your work. It’s about being patient, resilient, and dedicated to making change. Perhaps the best part of the panel was when Dave from Campbell Soup strongly opposed this phrase ‘optimistic passion’ (two words that he did not believe described himself or his work). Yet the more he explained why he opposed the phrase, the more passionate he seemed!

Next up was Peripheral Vision and Systems Perspective: two traits that refer to your ability to understand how your work in CSR relates to various business units within your company as well as to society as a whole. Once you understand this, the next step is being able to translate these ideas to other stakeholders. Essentially, it’s how well you can see the forest through the trees – and then tell others about what that forest looks like.

After that was Visionary Thinking: a skill that forces you to look beyond that pile of “to-do’s” on your desk and think instead about how you can bring innovation and fresh ideas to your work.

Two other competencies that I particularly enjoyed were Collaborative Networking and Strategic Influencing: these attributes relate to how well you engage others in your work, ask for help when you need it, and get buy-in from key decision-makers. Dan from Microsoft brought up a particularly interesting point about the role of trust in strategic influence – without instilling in your colleagues the feeling that they can trust you, you’ll never be able to persuade them to help you.

Finally, and perhaps most important, you need to be a Change Driver: with such small teams and such big jobs, you must be the one leading the charge and taking initiative to get results.

I found all of these traits to be incredibly interesting – and truthfully a little daunting.

To be a really good CSR director, it turns out you have to be a bit of a superhero!

But the more I heard the panelists speak about their experiences, the more excited I felt about the opportunity to one day join their ranks.

At the end of the session there was still one final question that I felt needed to be answered:

With all of this emphasis on individual competencies, I wondered what it was about the panelists' specific organizations that perhaps nurtured their ability to be successful in their jobs?

Was it simply a case of just having these competencies and jumping in with both feet? Or did their company's culture, values or even governance structure have something to do with their success?

Interestingly, the panelists seemed to agree that in fact it’s the individual’s ability to bring these skills to the table that sets them apart. While some organizations may have value systems or missions that make it easier to succeed, the panelists believed that true success in these positions is based on your ability to think big yet stay grounded, to include various stakeholders in a collaborative process, and to strategically enlist the help of champions to promote and evangelize your cause.

Overall it was an incredibly valuable afternoon and I learned a lot. Thank you Chris, Dan, Valerie and Dave for sharing your insights with us!

Stay tuned to future posts on The Changebase to hear more about what I learned at Net Impact 2009…

In the meantime, ask yourself: what are you doing right now to develop each of these competencies yourself?

Creating Change from Within

I've often spoken on The Changebase about social entrepreneurs who've chosen to radically reinvent how business creates social change in our communities and around the world. Organizations like Kiva (microfinance), Carrotmob (conscious consumerism), and Frontline SMS (information access through technology) have literally re-drawn the lines when it comes to creating sustainable, empowered and effective change through grass-roots social entrepreneurship.

While the importance of these examples can't be overstated, if we only focus on social entrepreneurs we actually miss an entire population of changemakers who want to have an impact but can’t quit their day jobs.

What can these people do to create change in their communities and their environment, without reinventing the wheel?

Enter social intrapreneurship – a new movement centered around creating progress internally at existing organizations.

Ok, so this is an interesting concept, you might say. But what does this look like in practice?

From what I hear, it’s all about baby steps - that is, starting small and growing big. Maybe it’s just me but it seems everywhere I turn I hear stories of employees who mobilized themselves and insisted on small initial changes like improved recycling at their corporate office, company incentives for using public transportation, or time off to volunteer in the community. And from there the social intrapreneurship momentum just grew. 

Another example: I recently had the chance to speak with someone in global citizenship at eBay, and I asked her what she thought made the company’s green efforts so successful. While she agreed with me that senior leadership buy-in is important, she pointed first to eBay’s employees as the single biggest driving force in creating change in the company.

It just so happens that much of their CSR efforts actually got started by a group of forty employees who came together to talk about little ways they could “green” the company – and from there it just snowballed. Now, more than 2000 employees in 23 countries are part of eBay’s Green Team – talk about a perfect example of real-life social intrapreneurship!

As a growing wave of MBA students (myself included) begins to dip their toes into the job hunt water, I find eBay’s story of creating change from within particularly inspiring. I know I want to work in CSR and sustainability, but I also know that these jobs are often really hard to find. If eBay's social intrapreneurship story tells us anything, it's that making change isn’t just about your job title or even your job function. No matter where any of us lands after graduation, we can each be changemakers in our organizations. And all it takes are some baby steps.

And that goes for all of you non-MBA students too!

It turns out that this isn't the first time I've extolled the virtues of social intrapreneurship. In fact, I was recently interviewed by my school, Boston University School of Management, as part of a promotional video meant to show prospective applicants how MBAs use their degrees to create change. Since I talk about social intrapreneurship in the clip, I thought I'd include it.

First up is BU Finance professor Yrjo Koskinan, then my classmate Susie Keane, and then me (I’m roughly two minutes and thirty seconds into the video).

Enjoy my 15 minutes of fame! 

And going forward, ask yourself: how can I be a social intrapreneur and create change from within my own organization, school, or community?

High Risk, High Reward

I’ve mentioned in previous posts on The Changebase that, in many ways, my MBA experience has made me feel a bit like a fish out of water. With my non-profit background and change-the-world goals, it’s not surprising that I have had some serious growing pains associated with learning new ways of thinking about and solving business problems.

Funny enough, my favorite learning experiences in school have been when I could relate what I was learning about business with what I knew to be true from my work in the social sector.

Here’s a good, albeit slightly roundabout, example: over the last couple of months a number of my classes have delved into the topic of venture capital – both from an investor and entrepreneur perspective. Now, as someone who practically grew up on Sand Hill Road, the venture capital culture of Silicon Valley is one that I am very familiar with. Still, beyond a very superficial understanding of what VCs do, I didn’t know much about the field before this semester.

Forgive me if this is incredibly naïve of me to say, but it turns out that venture capital is all about making money. I mean, REALLY BIG MONEY.

And how do these VCs make this money? They take risks. Nowhere is the saying “high risk, high reward” more applicable than in VC country.

I've also learned in class that the relationship venture capitalists have with entrepreneurs is an interesting, and some would say, delicate one. On the one hand, the two parties presumably should partner together to execute a winning business strategy and deliver an innovative product or service to the market.

On the other hand, as new majority-stake owners (which is what VCs become when they fund an entrepreneur’s company), the VC has little interest in anything beyond a successful exit strategy that will make him or her millions (if not billions, if you’re lucky enough to invest in the next Google or eBay).

All of this really hit home for me recently when I participated in a venture capital simulation for my entrepreneurial management class.

Picture this: me and my classmate, sitting in a small, windowless room with a “real” venture capitalist trying to negotiate a fake $30M term sheet for a new start-up we’d just created. Let me repeat: the money was fake but everything else was real: real VC, real term sheet, and a very tough, very real negotiation. In fact, at each stage of the negotiation he forced us to fight tooth and nail for any concessions we wanted him to make. Why was he so tough on us?  

Because – just as I’ve learned in class – there was money to be made in the deal and he wanted to make sure that, in the end, his slice of the pie was as big as possible. Remember, high risks and high rewards.

Ok, so you’re probably asking yourself – what’s the point? Why are we talking about venture capital on The Changebase?

Here’s the deal: it's perhaps a silly analogy but just like bees, cross-pollination between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors is happening everywhere. As businesses become more concerned with social responsibility and corporate citizenship, nonprofits are also warming up to the idea of creating revenue-generating models to ensure sustainability of their programs and operations. The social is becoming the financial, so to speak. And nowhere is this cross-pollination more obvious than in the area of Venture Philanthropy (seriously, even the name is a hybrid!).

More and more funders today are providing “VC-themed grantmaking” to social entrepreneurs looking for capital. Organizations like Echoing Green serve as “angels” to social enterprise leaders; Ashoka and Skoll Foundation provide early-stage funds to change-oriented start-ups; and New Profit assists more mature nonprofits and social ventures as they grow to scale. Each one has taken its cues from the venture capital world while tweaking its strategies and funding models to meet the needs of the social enterprise sector.

When I first heard about it, I thought this whole concept of venture philanthropy was pretty cool – and I still do. After all, it’s a no-brainer that social entrepreneurs need the same access to funding, support, and guidance that regular entrepreneurs have, and these organizations provide those services.

But if I go back to what I’ve learned in class about venture capital, that’s when I start getting confused. If venture capital is about taking risks and making money, doesn’t it seem a little backwards to look to that industry for cues on how to fund a sector whose primary goal has never been just financial?

Moreover, when I think about my experience at the negotiating table, I wonder: how do these social enterprise funders treat their entrepreneurs? Is it an adversarial relationship, like I experienced in the simulation? Or a more collaborative partnership?

Interestingly, the organizations that fund social enterprise start-ups may not be buying equity like VCs, but they certainly are taking risks. In fact, one might argue that they’re taking even more risks than traditional venture capitalists, given that they’re investing in people and organizations with truly revolutionary, world-changing ideas.

Maybe for these funders it’s more about “high risk, high social reward”?

What do you think about the world of venture capital being applied to social enterprise? Does the same language apply? And do organizations like Echoing Green actually take on more risk when they bet on entrepreneurs whose ideas can have an impact on people, and not just on the balance sheet?

I don’t have the answer, so I’d love to know what you think.