Aria Finger’s track record of innovation at DoSomething.org started long before she took the helm of the youth volunteerism charity last October.
Ms. Finger, 33, got her start 11 years ago organizing campaigns to engage the nonprofit’s teenage and young-adult members. The one she’s most proud of is the group’s long-running Teens for Jeans drive, which last year collected 800,000 pairs of jeans for homeless young people.
An important part of creating the campaigns was securing corporate sponsors. And as DoSomething’s expertise at reaching young people grew, its business supporters started to ask for advice. Getting a request to spend a day talking to a company’s employees about social media wasn’t unusual, says Ms. Finger.
“Of course, we wanted to be generous and offer advice,” she says. “But a full day? No, we had day jobs.”
Recognizing a demand in the market, Ms. Finger wrote the business plan and recruited the first clients for TMI, a strategy agency run by DoSomething that offers consulting services to companies and nonprofits that want to reach young people. TMI’s clients include City Year, the Malala Fund, Microsoft, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
In the three years since its launch, the consulting company has generated $5.4 million in unrestricted revenue for DoSomething. And it fills a real need, Ms. Finger says: “Having corporate-social-responsibility campaigns fail is not good for anyone.”
Too often, she says, companies “slap a Twitter bird” on their social-good efforts and assume they will be successful with young people. When they’re not, businesses decide that teaming with nonprofits doesn’t work. “The lesson should be: You have to do purpose right.”
Unusual Path
Ms. Finger’s promotion to the top job at DoSomething after five years as chief operating officer was part of the group’s long-established succession plan. She took the reins from Nancy Lublin, who led the nonprofit for 12 years and left to become chief executive of Crisis Text Line, a charity Ms. Lublin founded in 2013 that provides counseling via text message.
A collection of profiles of leaders who stand out from the pack with an innovative approach to tackling major issues facing society. New articles are added monthly.
Ms. Lublin is an outspoken leader who has a wide following in the nonprofit world. But Ms. Finger says following in her footsteps hasn’t been difficult, largely because her predecessor gave her new challenges throughout her career and spent time raising Ms. Finger’s profile, both inside and outside the organization.
The new leader says she communicates with her old boss two or three times a week: “I now just feel like I have the best secret weapon.”
From a young age, Ms. Finger knew she wanted to make the world a better place. She cites the influence of her parents, who protested the Vietnam War and work in education. But she took an unusual path to the nonprofit world, majoring in economics at Washington University in St. Louis.
As fellow econ majors took jobs in consulting and finance, Ms. Finger decided to apply for nonprofit jobs: “I wanted to show my classmates that not-for-profits could be efficient, effective, that you could use market forces for good.”
Debt Forgiveness
Student debt is one of the barriers that keep young people from working and staying at charities. When she was DoSomething’s COO, Ms. Finger designed the nonprofit’s student-loan-forgiveness program. After employees have worked at the organization for five years, it will pay off up to $20,000 of their undergraduate student debt. By the end of this year, three employees will have taken part.
The program is a key part of the nonprofit’s push for diversity, says Ms. Finger, particularly in economic background — something that, unlike race or gender, is not obvious when you meet someone and is hard to determine in a survey.
“DoSomething is an organization that represents 5 million members across the U.S., and they’re incredibly economically diverse,” she says. “If we’re going to represent our members well, we better have people from all different socio-economic statuses.”
As chief executive, Ms. Finger has focused on increasing the organization’s social impact. In the last six months, members’ volunteer activity in their first 30 days with the group has doubled. One of the big reasons for the jump: DoSomething now steers new participants to easy-to-complete campaigns to get them hooked on volunteering.
“It’s important for young people to have that first validation, that first quick win,” says Ms. Finger. “Then we can take that volunteer and move them into a campaign that will take four or five weeks to organize.”
Happiness Survey
Making sure employees like where they work has always been a priority for DoSomething. Ms. Finger instituted a staff happiness survey that asks employees about a range of topics — organizational culture, how they feel about their manager, whether the group is meeting its diversity goals — and lets them provide feedback.
The nonprofit took several steps as a result of suggestions made by employees in the first survey. Leaders created an online resource with tips and advice to help new supervisors become better managers, and they started a program that allows interns to apply for housing and transportation stipends. DoSomething also changed its match for employees’ 403(b) retirement accounts from 1 percent of salary to a flat amount that is the same for everyone, regardless of how much they make.
Discussions of organizational culture often involves trendy perks like “scooters in the office and free lunch,” says Ms. Finger. “But I think it has a lot more to do with how you’re treated.”
This is the latest installment of a series, On the Rise, that profiles young people making a difference in the nonprofit world.
