comparemela.com

Up next on booktv after words with guest host ken berger. This week former ceo of National Public radio ken sterns and his book with charity for all why charities are failing and a better way to give. In it mr. Stern explores what he calls the unaccountable world of u. S. Charities and how they are managed. This program is about an hour. Host hi and its a pleasure to meet you and i must say was a pleasure to read your book. Charity navigator really is something that i referred to with colleagues as the battle to the soul of the nonprofit. I commend you for taking it on and i think that of the numerous books i have read youve got some special insights there. In fact that is my first question for you. Over the past year, i want to give you a list of some of the books that have come out. Giving 2. 0, do more than give, the art of giving. Give smart. First i want to commend you for not having given the title this time but how would you differentiate this book from some of the others that i have just mentioned . Guest first of all thank you for having me on the show and let me first say i think i will steal the phrase battle for the soul from you. Its quite a good one. Im not entirely familiar with all the books you have mentioned. I think the fact that a lot of folks have been written about the charitable set to reflects the people realize it or not its enormously significant to her. 1. 1 million charities and 1. 5 chilean dollars in revenue and all the concerns about education for our young and help for old and young, Scientific Research and everything that goes into a great country. It doesnt surprise me a lot of people focus their time and energy on the charitable sector. Where i think my book differs from those that have come before is trying to understand how charities and need to be more effective and the market pressures and the things that need to change in order for us to have the charitable sector that we all want. Host great. I definitely think that your ability to articulate the problem and take the problem that we face in normandy and the serious nature is exceptional and that does differentiate from some of these other books. You know you start early enough in the book discussing the American Red Cross and i think doing a good job of dissecting some of the serious problems. You make the following statements. You say when even the highest revenue chair the which is by the way around 3 billion a year in the country is bound together by rubber band n. Tape it is a sign of her found misunderstanding of how to build effective charity. The question that i have for you as i read that is if the American Red Cross is not managing its performance well to ensure that its efficient its efficient and effective in getting good results, who is going to be able to achieve that and bring it to scale and what are your thoughts on that . Guest the problem with the red cross and theres a lot in that question i could go on but let me try to get to the red cross challenge which is how people, the challenge is not in the national cost. Its how people receive funds. I think of the red cross essentially as a job and enormous pressure and crisis to get lifesaving critical and lots of supplies from one place to the other and to marshal up people who are not professional and working fulltime. Its an enormous challenge. Think about the other institutions that have similar challenges that are really the best like fedex and mom are in the u. S. Military. They put billions of dollars into their infrastructure. The red cross puts if they are lucky singledigit millions because the funding comes a moment of crisis when the dilution of money half a billion dollars will come in all really to help the public and not the next big to them. In order for the red cross to understand the challenges around around [inaudible] host . You also think that in addition to those structural challenges there is also the question of leadership, because if you are 3 billiondollar operation and if you are passionately committed to being as effective and result oriented as possible in whatever ways that you can marshal resources would be our first priority, so as not also some responsibility for the organization . Absolutely. One of the stories to tell, in the book i tell about the American Red Cross starts with the story of her and dean healy who back in around 2001 was the ceo of the American Red Cross and she ran into the exact challenges we are talking about during 9 11. She ran into the problem that the American Red Cross could not respond in a timely fashion to the challenges of 9 11 and the pentagon bombing was within miles miles of the 24hour headquarters and 24hour Crisis Center and they still couldnt get there on time. She said we need to rebuild the infrastructure of the American Red Cross and she actually had an opportunity money poured in and a half a billion dollars help the victims of 9 11 and his awfulness 9 11 was wrote the red cross does in terms of assistance to the dems there is a lot of money left over and she said i cant help the victims of 9 11 anymore but i can help the next victim. It was a public flogging in the environment because the way people perceive their donations and what they wanted. As you know is often called the rescue. Its hard for me to imagine for her desire to do that, she lost her job. Of course thats a lesson to the future leadership of the red cross. Host you know i think we see a lot and Charity Navigator of charities that will do solicitations on their web sites and then when you follow the money you see something very different and i think one of the things that donors often get upset about is that they are being told this is going to occur but you have to redefine print to realize why its going to occur. I still maintain and i agree with you about the structural challenges that we face but i do think that the Organization Needs to have outspoken perspectives on how its a battle for the soul and its critically important for us for the survival of people to build the right systems. I hear what you are saying. You know if i was to identify the one thing that has the most concerning the book it was wondering from our own experience, wondering if you had a chance to fact check some of the things that they had indicated to you. Case in point you are talking about organizations with the outside reputations and you had asked for information that claimed to be effective and datadriven but they were stonewalled by the organization. Actually i met with the harlem childrens zone enough than for information and i havent encountered that kind of stonewalling and im wondering did you reach out to harlem childrens zone or some of these other organizations to fact check this with what people were telling you and what their side of the story was . Guest i talk to a lot of people through the course of the book. You let let me give you the context of the story and one of the other ways that my book is different is its a story driven narrative. It tells larger truths to experiences as individual players as individual players and mature oral field and one of the stories i told was what i called creation story. Its an organization i admire here in new york city and at was founded i to refugees from the hedge fund industry. Two young guys who when they were added organization bridge spanned note. The name i forget at the moment. They were doing well and they wanted to make charitable contributions but they wanted a private skill set that they had learned during the time of the hedge fund in analyzing charities. Which led to these extraordinary and difficult things because they went to these charities to find the type of information they needed. Then they often didnt find it there and often they cant find it there and they have built upon that and said okay we are researchers and we will go to the charities ourselves. Often times the charities were unwilling to show the data. Their story that let them to a Great Organization get well so through their eyes and i told the story which i think speaks to the larger truth which is charities are often not transparent but when they are they dont dont know whether their success or they are successor not because they have invested the research and data to know that. Host let me take a different tack. You mentioned Market Mechanisms are missing for charities and then i quote you, funders, the true customers of charitable organizations are generally in different dimensions. I have a problem with that statement but my question to you is shouldnt beneficiaries or clients be the true customers of charities and not the funders . Guest absolutely, no question about it. If i suggested otherwise in the book, ultimately my experience is in my personal experience is donors often evaluate charities through their own experiences with those charities as opposed to is the question is are these charities serving the ultimate stakeholders well and looking at it through the eyes of the services they provide. I think challenges that often stakeholders feel voiceless because they are not the providers of the money and this is not personally a critique of the evil working for the charities. They are victims, they are subject to the same Market Mechanisms that anyone is and they listen to their donors and their source of revenue whether they are government donors are individual donors or foundation owners and donors. Host one of the movements to monitor the performance of charities is a Movement Towards what has been called constituent voice beneficiary feedback as a tool to measure results and to get that voice that is missing. I didnt hear anything about that in your book. What are your thoughts on beneficiary feedback as a tool to measure results . Guest i guess i would say that i am prensa play a proponent of evidencebased research of which the voice might have a part in it but the charities that i admire the most were those who used statistically significant approaches to try to understand whether regardless of the feedback or datadriven perspective doing well or not doing well. The more organizations i wrote about, the partnership, the village region africa are those that are heavily in data and less and some of the softer feedback groups. Host are you suggesting that in the fishery feedback is a softer feedback loop and not as valuable as other data . Guest i think its hard to say and gross generalizations. Which i think is one of the reasons its often challenging for charities to come up with the right tools but i do think theres a hierarchy of tools that i think that starts with quantitative data that looks at the effectiveness or not to establish standards of charity services. I think Everything Else is secondary to those types of measures to the sense thats possible. Host to change the subject again on you. There are number of things in the book and this is one of the things you mentioned or often than almost anything else, the observation that 99. 5 of Charity Applications are approved by the irs and you note and i quote more and more charities compete for a finite set of dollars unquote and you call at the spaghetti factory in one of the chapters of your book. One of my favorite lines in the book, you Mention Organization called the grand canyon sisters of perpetual indulgence and i would add that to the ghostbusters and the nudist colonies and on and on better incorporated as charities and the question of why couldnt this be done go are there not Market Mechanisms so if they want to do that do we need to form a charity to do those sorts of things . But i digress. The key question i have for you is from our work, we observe that there is a little known fact that the other end of the spectrum. When you look at the Nonprofit Sector as a whole, there is the 1 problem. The occupy wall Street Movement that said 43 of revenue goes to 1 of the population. In the charitable or 86 , twice as much of the revenues in the sector goes to 1 of the charities and in fact, i actually think that this notion that there are too Many Charities and we are forming to Many Charities in essence is a red herring because the reality is most of those teenyweeny Charities Get like 4 of the revenue goes to Something Like 60 of the charities and that is really not the main event. The main event which also talk about are these giants and that i think you also mentioned that like in 40 years theres been virtually no change of the Largest Organizations. So dont you think the problem is not so much the proliferation of these teeny organizations that really are going to draw much revenue but isnt the bigger problem massive, massive charities that may be effective at marketing themselves but very poor at really showing results . Would you agree with me that that is the bigger problem . Guest i would agree and i think its part and parcel of the overarching problem. I think they are all part of the failure so we all know from in my Case Economics in college one of the great things about the forprofit free marketplace is this notion of people with great ideas when and people with outdated ideas that no longer work loose. You mentioned before that the top if you look at the fortune 500 from 40 years ago the ltvs, they are all gone replaced by apple and google. That is why the American Economy still works. The charitable side does not work because the same organizations are at the top which reflects how people given who they give it to them its often brand names and organizations which blocks away from and thats what theyre trying to get out and i totally agree that is the principle challenge we face. Host if i were to put it into sentences guest i will try. The current state of affairs is he or she who does the best marketing wins and the goal is the organizations that have the best results and helps the most people should win. Guest absolutely. Host lets take it from the other side and talk about Small Charities for a minute. Isnt there an implicit message because when you talk about the innovator they have to reach a certain scale and size typicalld and performance driven research base, does an organization have to be a certain size to have the capacity to do that . Wouldnt a smaller organization argued that this is an unreasonable requirement . What do you think of that argument . Guest that they should be able to show the effectiveness of their service before they start . They dont have the resources to build a Measurement System and they are doing something on the fly and for us to require this of them is unbelievable. Guest like you i would start top down. I would expect more from the Largest Organization and expect them to provide data and analysis in a transparent way that is not expected of a small organization. Any startup to grow and to prove their case should have time to do that. One idea that i think you know occasionally we should put higher barriers to entry into the system. The system is too big in terms of the numbers of organizations and there needs to be a time and place for these organizations to test ideas but ultimately maybe not in the first year of the second year but they have to show their value where their daughter should be supportive of them. Host another place in the book you note the irs and state oversight is very weak to begin with and all the evidence we see with government funding imploding if anything looking forward the likelihood is there will be even less oversight and enforcement from those agencies. I think you even note the irs, their mission is to get tax revenue and the nonprofits are not core to their mission and then you also note in your book that the Affordable Care act means far less money in the state coffers to care for the uninsured. And you note that attends to measure effectiveness in government usually squashed by politics or special interests. So these are all i think fantastic insights about the challenges, and then as a solution in your solution section you talk about the need to reinvent government. Unfortunately im old enough to remember the attempts by al gore in reinventing Government Back in the day, and it seems like all the evidence from government and all these challenges would argue that the chances for reinventing government anytime soon are slim to nil. Guest am i supposed to disagree with that . Host you recommended it. [laughter] guest sure. So lets put the framework around that in this conversation for our viewers which is as you know, the large as source of funding for the charitable sector by far is the federal government outstripping all other sources by far and all collective individual nations, a half a trillion a year. It is the largest largest sole funder but theres a larger bucket of money that comes from income when you look at the Nonprofit Sector as a whole but is certainly the largest. Guest earned income is not on a transactional aces as the decision to give money to an organization because it is effective in pursuing a public purpose. What i look at my recommend reinventing government to use al gores phrase, i say lets follow the money. Lets find charities are subject to Market Mechanisms and dollars. We should go to the people with the greatest dollars, the greatest outcome and there are some signs i think that the Obama Administration at least thinks that theyre thinking about that. I reference the executive order that came from the office of management and budget last year suggesting there be a higher standard of evidencebased work in terms of the federal grant making procedure. Obama has done the fund for social innovation which is another way of rethinking how government looks at the charitable sector. Another isnt entirely optimistic as you say that raises the focus on energy and thinking about whether it can be done. I will be the pie eyed optimist for once, our right . Midway through the book you chronicle some stories of what i referred to as the scoundrels scoundrels, the two were scoundrels of the sector and one of them you referred to is the association for firefighters and paramedics, selfenrichment, masquerading as a charity and you say a web site that is a marvel of Office Location obfuscation and heres what you them point out. It should be the case number one, whats missing. Amber when there is no financial information. Number two, no specific disclosures about how to donate dollars are spent and number three no information on the largess showered on ast commercial fundraising staff and board. So by juxtaposition and get to later on in the book on page 205 you say social investments should focus solely on impact so these are the two, but i think when i read between the lines you are also saying and in another point youre saying its critical that an organizatorganizat ion have good fiscal management, good oversight by its board and a number of things that need to be in place. I think you know, you saw the materials that we have been working on that are premises that we agree that the results and effectiveness in measuring that is the most important thing. But, that there are at least two other critical tillers if you will or elements that need to be in place because if they are not in place you are not going to openly have alternatives. One of them is the question of the Financial Management and health of the organization because if its not financially healthy the results today will be gone tomorrow potentially and secondly this notion of oversight and governance. If you dont have a strong board that make sure that its results driven and it holds the staff to account and have ethical and strong policies and procedures and so forth that again you could run into scoundrels or some mismanagement. Dont you think its not just about solely about impact but also about putting these other systems in place to maintain impact . Guest actually there are two things that im most interested in. First of all i should say i was indebted for a lot of the research because they use a lot of research about those scoundrels. Its actually a problem and i dont want to blow out of proportion but one of the challenges, because there is no real regulation or oversight is fairly Fertile Ground for scoundrels. Its often hard to tell because to give an example the association of firefighters, 59,000 charities with veteran in the title. If the experts in the field can tell the difference between they are doing a better job than i am i think the challenge is finding but to me as sort of two things that i really care about that the donor should care about is effectiveness and transparency. And i think if you have those two things you will find the right data. No doubt i think i entirely agree with you that Great Organizations will have rigor around how they spend money and how to write oversight and that will help result in the effectiveness of the urbanization. To me a lot of the book was about trying to focus not that those are necessarily bad although i question some of the overhead ratios that are often the primary focus of peoples attention. Both are irrelevant but the Building Blocks for the greater issue around organizational effectiveness. You get the right think the other things will follow, the overhead in the administrative fees. I think those things that quickly. Host i am simply saying that you need to be maintaining all of those systems effectively to do it right and if you dont have those Building Blocks you are not going to be able to maintain it. Guest i dont disagree with that at all. A lot of my book was really trying to get peoples attention to the fact that the conversation is ultimately about effectiveness which i think we agree on and one of the reasons the Charity Navigator is launching Charity Navigator 2. 0 which is actually my book went to host i wish we would have had that knowledge before. Guest as do i but it gives us an opportunity to talk about Charity Navigator 3. 0 is the attempt to value effectiveness. My brother called me yesterday and said we give 25 veterans organizations. I said i have no idea and he said it should be easy. If its important you should put it in the work but also youll have to wait because down the road there are assets that are going to help my poor brother unwilling to put in a halfhour fork to understand the best environment for his donations. Host just as a sidebar on veterans organizations we see a striking example of the scoundrel clustering around veterans, police and firefighter organizations and there seems to be this knowledge that that is one of the places where the American Public it resonates with the American Public, the sacrifice and so the ability to manipulate the storytelling and the marketing to get those dollars by scoundrels is enormous. I think its great that you have highlighted organizations in that area. We all have the experience and we have been watching the phone rings at dinnertime and someone from the policemans, veterans firefighters fighting cancer where you see a lot of the scoundrels collect, an organization asking for money. No one just on the phone around dinnertime could possibly have a conversation. People want to help and there is an impulse to help with those really important issues and those important people in our lives but it impossible to make that judgment so i think scoundrels do the boiler room phone calling and actually do pretty well at it. Host more about donors. A great study i think the first of its kind in 15 years or so that you highlight in your book on studying donor behavior by consulting and he noted that the result of that study indicates that 90 of donors say that effectiveness in the organization is most important of them but then when you scroll down perhaps two or 3 actually do the work and follow up on that. But in defense of donors, i would give you the following argument. After four years of research on this whole subject, in a way, with a few exceptions and a couple of cola rarities, for the vast majority of nonprofits the average donor who has limited time and means to do a whole lot of research, there is no there there for the donor. In other words the amount of publicly available evidencebased research and most areas virtually nonexistent so i sometimes have a problem with this meeting of the donor if you will because that is what can be inferred. Guest i do think they are part of it. Host im not saying that there is no problem here and im not saying there isnt evidence that a certain number or a Certain Group of donors are going to remain impulse driven in their giving. Im not saying no to that but i also think that 90 figure is an indicator of hope that if there was more easily accessible, readily accessible resultsbased data publicly available that is the key and you dont have to use to stonewalling. If it was publicly available information a lot more people would use it and i think that is part of our challenge for donors. They are between a rock and a hard place and if i could get your reaction, one of the conclusions that he makes not mentioned in the book but their recommendation is a Rating System and the evidence donors regardless of income always will be looking for information that is free easily accessible and easily understandable and i think you also talk about relying upon expert information but even the experts need to get information. And its not there so what are your reactions to that . Its a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. I would say that if donors demanded it, charities would follow. That is the market mechanism that i think about. I think we have a case where it donors dont demand and therefore charities dont provide it and not the other way around, donors are frustrated. One of the things that you dont mention in the book that grabbed me was a report and a paragraph in the hope and charity report where they interviewed mark haynes sort of sticks with me. Mark kay encapsulated it when he said i dont do research because i know that charities are doing some good. Wright put my time in research is things like products. If i dont need to do the research for charities, think that actually captures the prevailing ethic among donors and part of my book really i would say all charities are not alike. We have got to give money to the best of a survived and the others dont. Host i think the reality out there might be a little bit more hopeful or new ones. We have 6 million visits at this point per year and as we have been pointing 3. 0 in our efforts to them for sizemore and result anything the amount of support in the amount of positive reactions from our users and donors to charities has been enormous. Anytime we have had conversations where we connect the dots what i call connect the dots for people and i say did you know the urbanization you are supporting has provided no evidence that is actually effective. And you realize that there are others that do. I think when you have those competitions and you walk them through it most people and most donors are certainly open and somewhat surprised. I think there may be implicit messages but its not intentional on the part of donors. Guest its often done through organizations and its about charity. That is the wave people given that is why i think two thirds of the people in the hope and charity, hope consulting survey did zero research so the question is, so there are some and 6 million is a great number. 110 million some days which will be households to donate. The challenge they think is how to get to 6 million. Everyone thinks about effectiveness and we are in the same page. That is when we need to have the conversation. We have a fairly long way to go to benefit the whole system. Host amen to that. You mentioned the 80 but another hopeful sign that was 15 some odd years the people they surveyed even if they are not currently doing research said there is an openness when they do the calculations we are talking about tens of billions of dollars that could be unleashed if there was more robust Data Available red accessible for donors. So what are your thoughts on that whole part of the research . Do you show share the optimism that we can unleash that focus . Guest i dont know if i actually read the whole consulting report and its particularly optimistic. They did say there were some money to be unleashed by better data and i dont doubt that at all. Remember we are talking about a 1. 5 trillion economy and i think they were talking about 40 or 50 billion. Im not here to spit on 40 or 50 billion, could didnt do an awful lot of good. Host that was in the context of the private contributions of 300 billion so there might be more money unleashed in some of those other sectors as well. Guest this is to my point which is great to put another 40 or 50 billion into it that would be great host 1. 5 trillion. Guest 1. 5 trillion or even just the 800 which are in the form of grants. We have that moving in that direction and a lot of good things would happen. Host where we are today is far, far away in another universe and it seems like some of your reviews in the book are early adopters and innovators that give us hope but unfortunately there are far and few between better like them at this stage so theres a lot more that needs to be done. Guest i actually think the charities i talked to in the last three for years and im sure you have talked to many more than i have, people were the innovators who wanted to make a contribution through the charitable are. I think its all about how to get the spotlight on them and get the resources to them whether proved approves their innovation or not. Win or lose get the chance to succeed in the same way that the steve jobs of the world succeeded on the forprofit site. Its very hard right now for and that is what the look is ultimately about and Charity Navigator 3. 0 as well. Host what about the other efforts to try to get the scale and reach effectiveness, efforts like social businesses and impact investing. What are your thoughts on out world . Guest i think there are are, i dont pretend to be an expert. I made some decisions on what i would focus on the book and what i wouldnt. There were innovations and ideas. The marriage between forprofit skill set and public host and the lcd three . Guest exactly and there are some new studies coming out from stanford in the coming months to see whether that would be effective or not. Everyone needs to prove their case. I think those things are interesting but they have spotlighted ways [inaudible] host i also have heard feet back that there is a worry that we have a dwindling pot within the charitable sector given the economy and what is generally going on and the competition for dollars in and one of the perhaps unintended consequences of social business and all of that is taking from that limited pie. I think the notion behind it is to free up new dollars, new stakeholders that want to give some kind of return in a different way. Isnt there also a danger that things could get even more difficult for the charitable sector . Guest i guess so and again i disclaim certain expertise. I think a lot of what i write about in the book is leading the best ideas one and letting the worst ideas lose. One of the things ive noticed about the narrative is the charitable sector is this idea that its not okay that the best ideas lose and im a Firm Believer that some of the best ideas are in the forprofit sector, god bless them and let them win and the charitable sector even better. [inaudible] host i think there is a number of other efforts that are going on in addition to the story you told. There are a variety of other groups out there and efforts and im just interested to hear your thoughts on them if you are aware of them and if not i would urge you to check them out. One is an effort that has been undertaken by the intense independent sector in a variety of other players in the notion is to give every charity to answer five basic questions that relate to the question of their results and the independent sector has the force to try to set standards for the sector and Ethical Practices in governance and we have used some of that in our Rating System. These five questions begin to drive results driven thinking. What are your thoughts on that . Guest so, i write about give well and organizations not because they are organizations that are focused. A lot of people think about it in different ways. I use their story again is really examples of the right way to think about it and more people the more people that are thinking about them the better. And i think there are a lot of different ways to think about how the charitable sector as a whole can focus on this. One of the things i asked to write about and hasnt been much discussed is the independent sector came from people like John Rockefeller the third and i told the history of the charitable sector in part to the through the tension between john d. Rockefeller the third on one side and the congressman from texas on the other who was one of the great challengers of the opponents of the charitable role and one of rockefellers great hopes before he died two early in the car accident that there would be a Charity Commission that would become the source of these great ideas. There is one in england and we hope to see it come to fruition in the states that the idea of the charitable died with him. We should consider those institutional approaches to help put the spotlight on more effectiveness as well. Host when you mention the history you cover a very interesting explosion, the explosive growth that occurred especially you noted that in 1954 there were changes to the tax code and the ability to create nonprofits became like a spaghetti factory whereas before it was much more difficult to do. And actually some of the research that i did on this, prior to that change basically a judge and a state would have their own subjective measures to decide whether or not a charity would come to fruition. Its now an administrative procedure so that began the floodgates followed by the Great Society and you have the beginning of a train that you describe in the book is now growing faster than the forprofit sector and for the past decade or two. And even in the midst of the Great Recession and even in the midst of the reagan years when there were cuts it still keeps churning on and on and on and of course its now the largest Nonprofit Sector in the history of the world. The American Economy couldnt survive without it. So this is critical stuff. And its amazing that we are sitting here and the vast majority of charities cannot provide any Meaningful Evidence for results. The standard that you put in the book i think is sometimes referred to as the Gold Standard where you talk about randomized controls. I think the notion that charities are going to be able to achieve randomized controlled trials across the lord cost millions of dollars and tremendous research and also realities were a charity has to turn one person away and accept another another person. There are a variety of challenges to doing that. Do you see a way to get the results without requiring that standard for the charitys . Guest yeah i think first of all we start with charities themselves and having them articulate goals and deliverables and getting, asking them for the best statistical approaches to measurement. The random controlled trial which is somewhat controversial for the reasons you say actually can be done for a lot less than now can be done for a lot less than people tend to think. I would say the gold level charities, the 3 billiondollar red crosses we should he expecting gold level evidence of the sector and part of that is not just because we should say its the gold level but because a lot of the things the charities do are really hard stuff. We now its actually hard do we have had flatline educational systems in this country for 50 years. We know its hard to have Better Health outcomes. A lot of ideas sound good in a lot of ideas are inspiring that actually dont move the needle. Until we sort of take the hard hard and realize things that dont actually help we really need to investigate and put the best resources into testing whether its randomized controlled trials are not. I dont think we get to where we need to be so i start with the notion of whats raised the barrier. It may not be quite as high as Gold Standard but its pretty high. Host i think you go through describing the Nurse Family Partnership and in fact in that case to the credit of the leadership, when they were asked to take their model which they had proven through minimize controlled trials in other places, they were insistent to do more trials there to make sure that the model in that culture in that geography and that circumstance would fit so if anything, that to me with. 2 its not inexpensive to do it right because you have to do a lot of it and actually the other part is to do it right and in the case of Nurse Family Partnership it costs more. Now it costs more in the short term. The longterm benefits to society and economic benefit and so on and so forth as the standard argument that the fact is maybe part of the challenge here is a can be much more expensive to do it right than it would otherwise and maybe thats also part of the big carrier that we face with the foundation and the the government. If they want to do it on the cheap. Guess why think thats right so lets tell the story of the Nurse Family Partnership which id tell in some detail in the book. A lot of my book is really about trying to get trotter principles to the great characters of the charitable world. Some great in some and some awful and a lot of in between. A professor at the university of colorado at denver came up with the idea of the Nurse Family Partnership which is early pregnancy intervention by nurses to provide counseling to what we call atrisk mothers, provide a lifestyle childrearing counseling by nurses so that nurses people wouldnt be embarrassed as part of the life privation. A lot of good ideas in so much work and some which dont in that area. David have this idea, think he was a reach and graduate from college from Johns Hopkins i think and he went to graduate school. He tested for 20 years and he actually turned down offers. He did a seven year study in elmira and he said im going to test in memphis and it worked in memphis so im going to tested in colorado. He refused to scale the idea so what he eventually came to his and infuriated a lot of people along the way and a lot a lot of sort of knockoffs started during that time. In fact i would suggest that dont work but they did that for 20 years and built out of that has come an organization that he is convinced actually contributes to peoples lives. You are right, he didnt have the money or the patience and i know i wouldnt. Host its actually pretty unique. Guest you are right people like to do things faster and cheaper but we have to know that these are longterm solutions to really longterm difficult problems. Host the book, roughly 210 pages long, Something Like that. The first 175 pages of the book are doing overall but perhaps one exception and excellent job of characterizing the problem and then the remaining 40 some odd pages, there is a chapter that talks about a couple of marvelous hopeful signs like the partnership in the last 10 pages are roughly where you very concretely talk about solutions that you want to recommend. And so as we start moving toward the last few minutes that we have together, do you see a possibility for a second book that maybe teases out those 10 pages moran talks more about, because you have captured the crisis we are in and perhaps a book on working toward even more up out where we need to go and what we need to do . What you think about that as an idea of . Guest im not sure that my marriage was survive another book. It just came out today that they were doing the interview so its wonderfully premature to start thinking about a second book but i think the division of the book and the bigger question is heavy on pointing out the problems and its sort of starts the conversation about the solutions. And that reflects i think in order to really have a public conversation about the solutions we have to have people focused on the problem to understand that there is a problem. To understand that there is a charitable sector outfit and the numbers are used. It astonishes people the impact it has and the importance of it. The notion that people dont actually put time and effort into the donation process. I think its actually shocking to people, and until we get people focused i hope what comes out of it is the sense to the public that this is a tremendously important sector with tremendous potential but they shipped is moving in the wrong direction. That starts with donors understanding the construct in and we can have that conversation about a second book. Host we still have a few minutes. Continuing to talk about hopeful signs or other directions going forward, im mentioned chartering impact demand another underway is called perform well and this is a site where i think the urban institute is involved in child trends and social solutions. And thats they are compiling evidencebased outcome indicators by different areas. So that could be a way of perhaps an organization not to randomized controlled trials but to the others that ive done that and to use that. I think thats right. I think there is a complexity of the problem goes back to, i often talk about the lack of parallels between a forprofit and do not forprofit world. The forprofit world has a simple solution of either you make money or you dont. Its easy to know how youve done in the past but hard to forget how you will do in the future. Its not going to be a single set of numbers that defines the challenges and the answers for charities. That is why its hard and thats why it has taken four and half years to launch charity 3. 0. I think we can all recognize there is no onesizefitsall solution but the fact that people are starting to come up with solutions to meet is more important. [inaudible] host i think its a good contribution for sure. The other part of it is getting groups to set standards and there are some caused areas where that hasnt been done yet am part of the effort is to try to get consensus around standards for how we have measured the results in a certain type of charity and there is so much yet to be done in that. One of the simple dreams that i have this rather than trying to get the Charity Commission rather than trying to reinvent government another way we can approach a simple goal is to set a goal that perhaps 10 or 20 years from now every charity will not just have a financial audit of a certain size but will have a results audit and the incentive for that is funding and that you can benchmark yourself against others and it becomes a collective consensus on what the standard should be. The charity will pay for themselves just like they do the financial but the incentive is something simple to get to a segal. What do you think about Something Like that to where we try to get to the . Guest i know we are out of time and this is your last question so im actually going to try to leave it at a great point of consensus which is i think thats a remarkable goal, clear and direct

© 2025 Vimarsana

comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.