Flouting Taboo, Nonprofit Leaders Open Up About Failures

Brian Crawford

It was a story to make even the most resilient of nonprofit leaders want to slink out of sight. But with a microphone in hand, facing an audience of 125 colleagues, Meredith Emmett recounted how she lost her first executive-director job.

In 1989, Ms. Emmett found herself having to tell her board and staff about a budget deficit just before she left the office for a long-awaited week of vacation. Everyone was “furious” when she returned, she recalled, and despite her efforts to raise more money, she left the organization five months later.

Ms. Emmett is now a consultant with years of experience. But the lessons of that first failure have stayed with her for 27 years — the importance of taking care of oneself, asking for help, and thinking critically about systems that simply aren’t working. And after sharing the story with peers at a Durham, N.C., brewery, she invited another nonprofit leader to take the spotlight to tell another tale of defeat.

Bragging about failure is a popular pastime in Silicon Valley, but acknowledging it publicly is rare in the feel-good field of philanthropy. In recent years, organizations such as the World Bank, Unicef, and MobileActive, a nonprofit that promotes the use of mobile devices for social change, have tried to make failure less of a taboo topic for the charity and development communities by hosting events where people talk about times they didn’t accomplish their goals.

To that end, Ms. Emmett and a group of other nonprofit consultants and leaders in North Carolina’s Research Triangle gathered over beers in March to celebrate what they’ve learned through professional embarrassments. They dubbed the event FailFest.

The North Carolina Center for Nonprofits thought it was so valuable that it plans to hold its own FailFest at its conference in September.

“We feel very strongly that failures are oftentimes where we learn the most significant lessons,” says Trisha Lester, the center’s acting president. “To share them in a safe, supportive environment with peers was a great thing.”

Risking Failure

The idea for the Durham event came from a conference sponsored by the Triangle Community Foundation at which a speaker recommended that nonprofit leaders talk more openly about their failures, Ms. Emmett says.

“We can’t achieve the big goals or outcomes of our organizations unless we’re willing to risk failure,” she says.

But grant-maker culture is not especially accepting of failure, according to Ms. Lester.

“Funders don’t encourage it as much,” she says. “There’s money involved and you can’t take risks with money; there’s an unstated rule about that.”

Top charity executives are loath to talk to their boards about what’s working and what’s not, Ms. Emmett says.

“It’s embarrassing. We also think people will not look at us in the same way, that we’ll lose credibility,” she says. “They’re worried about the board not respecting them, or, in some cases, being fired.”

‘Sharp Lessons Learned’

So they decided to get the conversation started with a FailFest. In advance of the evening, the organizers recruited several people to speak. There were stories of “humility, pain, and sharp lessons learned,” says Mark Dessauer, vice president at consulting firm Spitfire Strategies.

One person talked about not warning board members against an idea she knew wouldn’t work. Another described a social-media campaign that fell flat. Ms. Lester of the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits explained how the group’s attempts to appeal to corporate sponsors had failed several times.

“It was not easy to admit,” she says.

Brian Crawford

Mr. Dessauer warned the crowd about the dangers of miscommunication, a lesson he learned while working at a national program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. During a visit to teach a black community in Mississippi about healthy eating, Mr. Dessauer raved about how much he loved the food he got through a community-supported agriculture program. He used the acronym “CSA” repeatedly as he spoke.

The presentation didn’t go over well with the community members, who gave him a “cold, cold reaction.” It was only later that he realized what CSA stood for in that part of the country: Confederate States of America.

“I recognized I was just throwing acronyms around,” Mr. Dessauer says. The lesson “failed miserably in the face of me not listening to the community.”

The Triangle Community Foundation joined in the confessionals, something the crowd appreciated, Ms. Emmett says.

“It really helped that we had foundation folks telling their stories of failure,” she says. “It leveled the playing field. It just made failure a little safer.”

Since the event, a few people have contacted Ms. Emmett to thank her for sharing her story and to seek advice on their own leadership challenges.

Says Ms. Lester, “One fantasizes about the day we could all be in the room, nonprofit and funder together, where we could talk about our failures in a way where we learn from them together.”