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Dec 22 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 3) – Fixing the “pay” mentality

References:

Key Ideas from “Deferring Good Careers (Part 2)” Post (Dec 21, 2011):

  • Although we should keep highlighting, showcasing and offering them up as inspiration, we should at the same time move away from the prevailing culture of idolizing the very few individuals that start social enterprises and other do-good organizations and instead focus more holistically on how we can attract and retain top talent to push these organizations to the next level
  • Once we look underneath the human resource structure of such organizations, we realize how limited actually the pool of available positions is for top talented but not as proven people. We in fact discover what I referred to as the “middle layer” made up of functional jobs and other work-horse positions that are realistically the entry point for the majority of young people looking to do-good nowadays

In this Part 3, I want to think about one aspect of what it takes to attract the right talent to the available pool of positions by focusing specifically on compensation, which I would like to show to be a major obstacle for building more world-class, sustainable social enterprises and NGOs that want to scale their impact ever more.

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Dec 22 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 2) – Defining the available job pool

Key Ideas from “Deferring Good Careers (Part 1)” Post (Dec 20, 2011):

  • Philanthropy may be a subject of passion for those who already have made or sit on a good deal of money, but for the rest of us it should not be as relevant because (1) there are not enough of us with a lot of money and time to worry about where to put them to the best use and (2) philanthropy is not a full time job; it in fact detracts from the harder, more important idea we should think about, which is how we can incorporate a significant portion of our “do good” intentions into an attractive, life-long career instead of relegating it to mostly a by-thought or feel-good hobby in our spare time (or retirement)
  • The questions we left with were (1) how should a young person choose between making more money sooner and engaging in “doing good” later, vs. pursuing sooner an occupation that promotes his or her ideals of “doing good” and is meaningful, but potentially sacrificing building wealth in the long term? and (2) how much ought this “doing good” thing be valued both by employees and employers?

In this Part 2, I will now try to set up the conversation by first examining what the actual availability of positions is we are talking about. In Part 3, I will then attempt to qualify the career trade-off at stake and focus on the problem of compensation within this space for available positions.

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Dec 20 2011
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NGOs, Philanthropy

Philanthropic Laziness – Why nobody cares about evaluating nonprofits

Reference:

“Nonprofit Watchdogs: Do They Serve the Average Donor?” (Ram A. Cnaan and Kathleen Jones, Allison Dickin, and Michele Salomon) - published in Nonprofit Management & Leadership #21, 2011, summarized in Stanford Social Innovation Review Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2012

Key Ideas:

  • So-called nonprofit “watchdog” organizations like GuideStar, Network for Good, Charity Navigator, the Better Business Bureau and the American Institute of Philanthropy exist essentially to provide objective evaluations of nonprofit organizations so donors can make better informed giving decisions. They attempt to create more transparency and attention paid to actual performance and hope that donors will use their ratings of nonprofits to give to the “most deserving”, thus creating a more efficient philanthropic market

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