How today’s “data is man’s best friend” attitude can lead you far astray

 While most of my posts are specific to volunteer management, this one reaches out more to fundraisers and IT folks. 


In business I can very easily justify spending $100,000 if it guaranteed (i.e. no risk) that  it  would reduce costs by $100,000 or boost sales enough that the profit from each sale would add up to be $100,000 a year for the next three years. (I get there is rarely a situation where there is no risk, but let’s work under that assumption to keep things simple for now.) By spending the $100,000 I would save/gain $300,000 over the three years and in the end, be $200,000 ahead!  .  It would still be an easy justification if the net effect on the bottom line was +$50,000 a year.  By spending the $100,000 I would save/gain $150,000 over the three years and, in the end, be $50,000 ahead!  One could even argue that if there truly was no risk, it would be justifiable to spend $100,000 once to create an extra $33,667 on the bottom line for three years. The business would then end up $1,000 ahead three years down the road.   It’s only $1,000 but that’s still $1,000 (remember that in this scenario there was no risk).

As a business owner, it would be easy to justify any of the above because I would be trading money in my pocket for more money in my pocket. That sounds simple and in business it is. I get the feeling though these days that the charitable sector sees this just like it would be seen in business. Although I am a big advocate of charities and nonprofits adopting appropriate strategies from the for-profit sector (and visa versa), this is one that I don’t see as appropriate.  While in the business case, I would be trading money in my pocket for more money in my pocket, in a charity’s case, it would be trading money in the donor’s pocket for both money in the charity’s pocket (the pocket that does the good stuff the donor wants to support) and also the pocket of the technology providers.

In some of the chatter I read and hear about donor databases connecting seemlessly to membership databases or volunteer databases and donor databases talking to each other etc. etc., I have seen too many examples lately where the mentality seems to be, “If we spent $X and we think it will generate donations anything greater than $X, it is worth pursuing”. I have various issues with this but there is only one I want to focus on today.

Picture for a moment that you have recently donated $1,000 to the ABC charity to help them _______ (insert your passionate thing here). If later you found out that it was a commissioned fundraiser who earned $990 parting you and your $1,000, you who likely not be very happy that only $10 went to (insert your passionate thing here). With just a slight change in the scenario, would you feel any better if there was no commissioned fundraiser but after the new data analysis technology that sought you out as a potential donor was paid for, the net result of your donation was that $990 went to the technology provider and staff time on the project and $10 went to (insert your passionate thing here)?

But it is still a positive return on investment for the charity. The data that was analyzed/shared/extrapolate etc.  suggested that you would give and you did.  In fact, it is the same ROI of the one   scenario above in the for-profit business examples. The 1% ROI was fine in the for-profit model but apparently not here.  Of course those are exaggerated numbers and everyone reading this likely already understands  the importance of infrastructure costs and how these need the support of donors. I get it too and that is not what I am at issue with here.

The big questions to leave you with are ….

•    When you are looking at a new expenditure for analyzing or sharing or extrapolating data for the sole purpose of raising more donations, what ROI is acceptable to your organization?
•    Perhaps more importantly, what would be acceptable to the donors making the new donations?
•    If the donors knew the portion of their donation that went into the analyzing / sharing / extrapolation of data that was spent getting them to consider donating, would they still have given?
•    Where do new infrastructure costs related solely to getting more donations cross the line?

Resources to calculate the ROI of volunteer engagement

For the past couple of years I have been working on a new model to measure the return on investment of engaging volunteers in a n organization. Because the emphasis of my model is to treat the expenditure of volunteer hours the same as the expenditure of cash I refer to it as the Scarce Resources Model. In economic terms, scarce does not mean hard to find but rather that there is a finite pool. Because there is a finite pool choices have to be made how each dollar is spent and choices have to be mad how each volunteer hour is "spent".  Better choices lead to a higher ROI which typically indicates a better allocation of resources toward an organizations mission.

The programming team at Volunteer² has put together a few free online calculators to help organizations measure their ROI. You can find them at www.volunteer2.com/ROI.

The model is young and certainly not perfect, but according to one participant of my conference workshops on the subject, "leaps and bounds better than what we have today". Not everyone is on board but the vast majority of conference participants agree.

I'll be writing more on the topic over the next year and I welcome your feedback.

Up-coming venues that include this presentation include:
July 17 Portland OR USA - Volunteer Portland (Session Sold Out)
August 9 - Chicago, IL USA - ICOVA Conference
September 11 - Ottawa ON Canada - Volunteer Ottawa 
September 18 - Columbus OH USA - 2012 Annual Ohio Conference on Service and Volunteerism
September 27 - Vancouver, BC Canada - Volunteer BC Conference
October 24 - Truro NS Canada - Recreation Nova Scotia Conference
October 26 - Topeka KS USA - 2012 Kansas Conference on Service & Volunteerism


Email me at tony@volunteer2.com with your location if you would like me to let you know when I'll be presenting at a venue near you, or if you would like me to try schedule a workshop in your community. (The workshop is free and if I'm traveling close enough, there's no travel costs to pay.)

Is your organization ready for the mobile internet boom?

If your organization is similar to most, over the past ten years, it launched a website and started using email. Recently it might have launched a blog, a Facebook presence, started using Twitter or somehow begun using various forms of social media. So what’s next? The indications are pretty clear that a mobile strategy is the way of the future. Mobile devices are taking over and will soon replace the desktop computer as a leader in devices connected to the internet.

Apple claims it sold 300,000 iPads in the United Sates on its first day of sale and announced that it sold its one millionth iPad on Friday, April 30, just 28 days after the device’s release.

The total number of mobile internet users is expected to reach 134 million by 2013.According to the research firm, eMerketer, the USA can expect the number of mobile internet users to reach close to 45% of the population by 2013.

And looking at the global picture, IDC's Worldwide Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast, tells us that the from a base number of 450 million mobile internet users worldwide in 2009, that number is expected to double by the end of 2013.

So what does this mean to your organization? For one thing, it means that your efforts in social marketing will grow to have more exposure. The typically short bursts of information in social media are well suited for the quick updates one can so easily get on a mobile device while riding the train or standing in a grocery store line.

According to Merkle (a customer relationship marketing agency), “consumers with an Internet-enabled phone are one-third more likely to be active on top social networks. This natural affinity of mobile and social networking, both in demographics and ease of use, speaks to the importance of both within an integrated digital strategy”.

It also means you could benefit from focusing on current news bites and information that is particularly useful to your readers in the present, today rather than three weeks from now. From Mark Donovan of comScore's "Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of their lives. This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information." This does not need to be an overly difficult shift in what you are already doing. Simply keep in mind that your message might be read in an environment where the reader will only have a few moments to internalize your message. News writers have always included the most important information first so that if people only read a portion of the article they would still get the key message. Think of that way but at hyper-speed.

The growth in adoption of mobile access to the internet will affect more than how you communicate general news.

Think of how a mobile internet device can help you fill shifts when the originally scheduled volunteer has had to cancel. Here is a possible scenario. You are out for lunch or anywhere out of your office and a volunteer cancels a shift for tomorrow morning. Through your mobile access to the internet you to learn of the cancellation and from wherever you are you access your volunteer management software and broadcast an email and text message to those volunteers that are qualified to fill the shift. From wherever your volunteers happen to be at that moment, they receive your message and the first one able to fill the shift responds directly into your scheduling software. Other volunteers who would be willing to fill the shift see that it has already been filled. All of this can happen without any of the participants sitting at their desks.

Years ago organizations had to rely on the post office and telephone to communicate. The post office was slow but it delivered eventually and the phone, although great when you reached the right person without having to leave a message, led to a lot of back and forth calls. An internet presence and desk to desk email dramatically decreased the timelines required for organizational communications. Now we are well into an era where we can make another leap in improving the lines of communications which will have a direct impact on reaching organizational goals.

The mobile internet is upon us. How will you make it work in your organization?

Why your organization’s mission and core objectives are crucial to your volunteer program

Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, describes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. If you don’t have an affection for stats, the three points below might seem a little dry but Covey has an entertaining, although somewhat frightening, metaphor for it all further below. Some of the poll's findings were as follows:

• Only 37% said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why
• Only 20% was enthusiastic about their department's and their organization's goal
• Only 20% said they had a clear "line of sight" between their tasks and their team's and organization's goals.

Here is Covey’s way of describing it."If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do.” I wonder what results a poll of volunteers would yield.

As we grow to see volunteers as people who work for the benefit of an organization but do not get paid for it, we can look to the management practices of leaders of people who work for the benefit of an organization and do get paid for it. Although there certainly are differences, there are also many similarities. One area in which there are similarities relates to the importance of embracing your organization’s mission and core objectives.

Hopefully, your mission statement describes what the organization does at the core level. Objectives (or goals) also answer the question of what the organization does but they are smaller than a mission. Although, an objective might represent an important achievement, it is not the final achievement. There can be a number of objectives and goals to be achieved in order to achieve a mission, but there is usually only one mission. Your volunteer program can have its own objectives but they should always contribute to the organization mission.

You can’t always be over your volunteers’ shoulders when they need to make a decision about what to do or what not to do. If they are knowledgeable about the organization’s mission and core objectives however, the chance of them making the best decision increases. If you educate them on the mission and empower them to make some decisions about their work, they will become higher level volunteers, happier volunteers and tend to make the decisions that contribute to achieving the organization’s mission rather than detracting from it.

Southwest Airlines is by many definitions, a successful airline. While others have struggled to the point of bankruptcy, Southwest has been profitable for the past three decades. Herb Kelleher, the longest-serving CEO of Southwest, once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-cost airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.“Here’s an example,” he said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entree on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?” The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’”

The core objective of being THE low-fare airline is very simply stated but it is powerful enough that it has guided the actions of Southwest’s employees for more than thirty years. Do your volunteers have such a statement that can guide them?

Although not as obvious as the things a manager does that contribute to the organization’s mission, good managers also pay close attention to avoid engaging in activities that do nothing to contribute to the organization’s mission. And there is good reason for this. Everything that gets done that does not contribute directly to the organizations’ mission or indirectly through core objectives is like a silent thief, stealing resources from the organization. Consider the following comments from volunteer sector consultant Martin Cowling in his article, Messing It Up: How Organisations Sabotage Their Volunteer Programs.

“For example, each year I conduct an annual survey of volunteer organisations, randomly selected from across Australia. I phone the agency and tell them I am interested in becoming a volunteer and then await (and record) their response. Consistently I find that less than one third of all organisations actually respond to my offers of assistance. Before a volunteer has even reached their door, it is effectively slammed shut!”

Now I imagine that those responsible for the management of volunteers in each of those organizations from the 2/3’s that did not respond are very busy people. I suspect that their day is filled with many tasks. The important question to address is whether or not each of those tasks are contributing in some way to the mission of the organization. If not, then the time and the other resources consumed in the pursuit of non-mission driven activities has stolen the time and other resources required to deal with a potential new volunteer in a timely fashion.

There are many ways in which a manager can feel busy without the effort contributing to the organization’s mission in a meaningful way. One that I have come to recognize as all too common is that of reporting. In some cases it is self-inflicted and in many cases it is imposed by bosses or funders. The next time you go to produce a report, ask yourself why you are generating that report. If ‘nice to know’ is any part of your answer then it is likely not making any real contribution to your organization’s mission. If you are required to produce a report, ask yourself how it addresses the mission or any of the core objectives. If you can’t come up with an answer ask whoever is requesting the report to explain it to you. If he or she can’t, send them a copy of this article.

I speak passionately about this because I have seen first-hand the difference it can make. A few years ago I looked at a series of reports for the Volunteer2 business on a weekly basis. One of the reports included how many people visited our website. We used this data in a meaningful way each time we updated the website but watching these numbers grow with each weekly report was an enjoyable experience for me. I looked forward to doing it, typically just after lunch on Fridays. I forget which book woke me up to the frivolity of this but it did not take much for the author to help me identify this as activity that did not foster any growth in the number of volunteers, volunteer management efficiencies, or professional management practices (our core objectives) nor contribute to overhead or profit. My routine of producing those reports ended that week. Now I put that time to use on tasks that make a contribution to our mission.

I have also seen first-hand how the complete adoption of mission and objectives and can help fulfill the vision of the organization. My mother lived her final days in Ian Anderson House, a hospice in a community that neighbored our own. As much as losing a loved one is difficult, it was what I would describe as a good death experience. Those that have experienced hospice care for someone close to them know what I mean. All of this motivated me to get a hospice established in my city of Burlington and as the founding chair, I had some of the greatest experiences of my life.

The mission of the hospice is a follows. “The hospice provides individuals who are dying and their families with high quality palliative care in a home-like setting meeting their physical, emotional and spiritual needs and making the last days of their lives together peaceful, comfortable and meaningful.”

Prior to hiring a staff and converting to a policy oriented board, the board was quite operational in nature and made many decisions as we sculpted what would eventually become the Carpenter Hospice. One core objective of the hospice board was that the hospice be as homelike as possible and from it many of the decisions that we made became easier. We simply asked ourselves, “Would we do it in our own homes?” When we considered adopting a practice that other hospices had of naming the bedrooms after significant donors, we did not. In each of our own homes the rooms are referred to with the name of the person whose room it belongs to; Paul’s room, Ingrid’s room etc. So that is what we did in the hospice. We also publicized our core objectives and when a decorator came forward with an idea of getting a number of decorators to volunteer their time to decorate each of the ten bedroom differently, we happily went forward with the idea since we decorate the bedrooms in our own home differently. Of course we had to make decisions to accept certain things that could pass this test such as doors wide enough to roll a bed through. In cases such that though, it was simply one core objective having a priority over another. Embracing our mission and our core objectives guided us as to what we should and should not do.

Should you have volunteer appreciation nights, fire volunteers, get criminal background checks, generate racial demographic reports on your volunteers, chat about personal things with your volunteers etc.? I don’t know. But if you run each of these questions through the filter of your organization’s mission and core objectives you should find yourself much closer to the answer.