IN THE TRENCHES
By Alison Stein Wellner
This past holiday season, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, in Yarmouth Port, Mass., began its first-ever fund-raising campaign with a holiday gift guide. Designed for the hard-to-please animal lover, the guide offers donors a number of ways to make a difference, such as giving $25 to help clean one penguin affected by an oil spill, $50 to buy gas for a week of antipoaching patrols in Africa, or $100 to protect Canadian baby seals.
The gift guide turned out to be a success for the charity. “We exceeded our fund-raising goals by about 300 percent, and added a large number of new donors,” says Chris Cutter, communications manager of the charity. “We plan to do the gift guide again this year.”
The gift guide wasn’t an idea the group just stumbled across -- it grew out of brainstorming sessions that Mr. Cutter holds every month. Like many nonprofit organizations, the International Fund for Animal Welfare relies on its staff’s creativity to help make up for its fiscal limitations. “Nonprofits are forced into creative solutions because of tight funds and the weight of responsibility,” he says.
Whether they involve raising funds or developing a new method to recruit volunteers, the best ideas for managing nonprofit groups and furthering their missions often come from brainstorming sessions. Yet it’s not enough to just lock participants in a room together and wait for the mental juices to flow. Indeed, psychologists have found ways to make it easier to get to the best ideas.
“You shouldn’t do brainstorming by just throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks,” says Chris Stormann, former director of research and development at the Eureka! Ranch, in Cincinnati, a think tank dedicated to generating new ideas, and currently a partner at SparkPeople, a company also in Cincinnati that helps nonprofit organizations promote physical fitness. “There are scientific principles and practices from the established process of quality control that can apply to brainstorming sessions, too.”
Getting Ready
The first and most important step for any brainstorming exercise is to select a “good task,” says Paul B. Paulus, a psychologist and director of the Group Creativity Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, which studies brainstorming. Some problems are too detail-oriented and specific for brainstorming, he says. “Good tasks for brainstorming are ones where people have no limits and can come up with crazy ideas,” Mr. Paulus says. “Brainstorming is good for tasks where you want to cast widely.”
Next, let those who will be participating in the brainstorming session know about the task a day or two in advance, and encourage each individual to come prepared with a few ideas of his or her own. Mr. Paulus has discovered that group brainstorming is more effective when coupled with individual brainstorming sessions. This helps to alleviate participants’ anxiety, and it also ensures that they arrive at a group session ready to work.
At the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Mr. Cutter always warns his staff members about impending brainstorming tasks.
“I hold people accountable for bringing at least one mature idea to the brainstorming session,” he says. “If you don’t have at least one well-thought-out idea to bring to the table, you are out. It’s the price of admission.”
He says he has only shut people out of the sessions a couple of times, but he believes that this requirement increases the sessions’ productivity.
Generating Ideas
During the session, Mr. Paulus suggests, designate one person to act as leader, and another to write down ideas, or one individual to handle both functions. At the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the session facilitator also writes down ideas on a dry-erase board, says Anne Brooks Ranallo, the nonprofit group’s director of communication. Her foundation uses brainstorming sessions to generate ideas for new exhibits, such as a recent one on intergenerational housing designed for grandparents who are raising their grandchildren.
To prime the pump for ideas, Mr. Paulus advises, start by asking participants to share their own ideas. Encourage people to build on others’ contributions. When the flow of ideas starts to slow, don’t assume that the session is over, Mr. Paulus cautions. “If they stop, it doesn’t mean they’re done,” he says. “They’ve just a hit a space in their brain. You can’t believe all of the stuff that’s still in there.”
To get things started again, prepare the session leader with a few “prompts” to restart the flow of ideas -- a technique that has helped the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science, in New York, where a team of four people regularly brainstorms new fund-raising ideas with the help of “trigger words,” says Jeffrey J. Sussman, the organization’s vice president of marketing communications and public affairs.
“For example,” he says, “if we are trying to come up with a concept for a new philanthropic campaign, the trigger word may be ‘technology.’ Then, all ideas would need somehow to relate to that word, even though the word may actually not be connected to what we are currently discussing.” This, he says, helps to break participants out of their accustomed thought patterns, and can help shake out something novel.
“Trigger words” were also helpful when the organization developed its current print-ad campaign to encourage donations and planned giving, says Mr. Sussman. The brainstorming session, which included some of the charity’s donors, helped to create the theme of the ad campaign, which centered on such a pointed question as, “Will people think of you as someone who read the latest books, or as someone who provided future scientists with the texts they needed?”
Another effective technique is to engage in role playing. At Lebanon Valley College, in Pennsylvania, a brainstorming session on how to keep a $50-million annual campaign on track was juiced up by an exercise conceived by Anne Berry, the college’s vice president for advancement.
“I asked everyone to take off their work hats and pretend that we were a group of consultants -- highly paid, of course -- who’d been called in to review this campaign and make recommendations,” she recalls. “It was remarkably freeing, and I kept working the metaphor: ‘Tell me, you public-relations folks, what do you think the fund raisers ought to infer from this information?’ ‘Now, what do you think the alumni-relations staff should be doing to support this new initiative?’”
Leaders should also come to brainstorming sessions bearing additional information. Adding new data to the mix, says Mr. Paulus, can help participants generate new ideas. Bruce Kaufman, director of development for the Sports & Arts in Schools Foundation, in Queens, N.Y., says that he is always scanning his local papers, clipping articles that he brings to brainstorming events to help spark discussion. Such discussions have led to effective fund-raising ideas, such as collaborative events with other organizations like the United States Tennis Association and the New York Junior Tennis League.
If a group is really slow to get going, try a technique called “brainwriting,” Mr. Paulus suggests. One member of the group writes an idea, then another reads it, adds his or her own feedback and ideas, and passes it on to the next person. It’s a quiet activity, he says, but it gives participants more time to think about, and respond intelligently to, their colleagues’ ideas.
Wrapping It Up
Nothing can cut off the flow of creativity more quickly, say brainstorming veterans, than evaluating participants’ ideas in the middle of the session. The goal at this stage is to generate a quantity of ideas, not worry about their quality -- there will be time enough later to determine what is realistic and what isn’t.
A wacky notion can sometimes suggest a more practical alternative, says Mr. Sussman.
“I encourage people not to think about budget when coming up with ideas,” he says. “Obviously, we do need to worry about budget, but often a great, expensive idea can be converted into a somewhat less great, cost-effective idea.”
Even the most wildly creative session should end in about an hour, says Mr. Paulus, whose research has found that participants get fatigued when asked to work longer than that. It is also a good idea, he says, to schedule more than one session over the course of a few days, because brainstorming has residual effects -- it’s likely that the best ideas will occur to employees after the session is over. To make the most of this situation, he says, be sure to create a place where staff members can deposit the ideas they hatch up post-session. An effective session may yield results for an organization long after the conference room is empty.
For more ideas about how to keep brainstorming alive, check out Thinkertoys (A Handbook of Business Creativity), by Michael Michalko (Ten Speed Press, 1991, $19.95); A Whack on the Side of the Head, by Roger von Oech (Warner Business, 1998, $15.99); and a new book, Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small, by Barry J. Nalebuff and Ian Ayres (Harvard Business School Press, 2003, $27.50).
Discuss your organization’s methods for generating ideas in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.