Giving Tuesday Founder Henry Timms Injects ‘New Power’ Into an Old Nonprofit

MARK ABRAMSON, FOR THE CHRONICLE

Henry Timms is on the phone. You may know him as the father of Giving Tuesday, the 24-hour global blitz that promotes charitable giving in the wake of Black Friday and Cyber Monday consumer excesses. Thanks to the success of this digitally driven campaign — $680 million raised online in the United States over six years — national media tap him as a spokesman for the nonprofit world. Foundation and corporate chieftains turn to him for advice. He is, in short, one of the most recognizable figures in American philanthropy, which is remarkable given that a decade or so ago he worked in his native Britain with two charities whose patron was the Prince of Wales.

Typically, a phone conversation with Timms — indeed, almost any conversation with him — is like throwing open a window on today’s stuffy realities and drinking in a breeze of tomorrow’s possibilities. In his forecasts of the future, good triumphs over evil because good is smart, good is strategic, and good deploys technology wisely.

Today, however, Timms heaves a sigh. His energy seems a half-stop shy of its usual full-throttle hum. A packed schedule is to blame. As executive director of the 92nd Street Y, the legendary New York community and cultural center, he is leading a $180 million capital campaign. Inconveniently, that drive launched publicly just after Timms and his team closed out Giving Tuesday.

“I remember thinking four months ago what a terrific idea that was,” he says with cheerful, if weary, sarcasm.

What Is New Power?

In an extensive interview, Henry Timms (left) and movement-builder Jeremy Heimans talk about their new book, New Power, and how nonprofits are supercharging their work.

Such is the double life of Henry Timms. One moment, he is pioneering a tech-driven movement based on “new power” — the subject of a book he’s co-authored with activist and movement-builder Jeremy Heimans, out this month. The next, he is tending to his $60 million nonprofit, an organization born when Ulysses S. Grant was president.

These two strands of work are tightly intertwined. Timms has made the Y a proving ground for his ideas — and a case study for venerable nonprofits. Sure, his book offers plenty for the nonprofit leader, but in the Y’s story, you’ll learn how Timms and his organization did what many dream about: reimagine a traditional, brick-and-mortar charity for the digital age.

The Mayor

The 92nd Street Y occupies the street front of an entire block on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Its 250,000-square-foot facility — two buildings, really — is a rabbit warren with a surprise at virtually every turn. A dozen or so elderly gentlemen hunch over chess boards. Mothers file into the library for a breast-feeding class. Two men square off across a net and play a paddle sport called pickleball. A tap-dance class is scheduled for the afternoon, Israeli folk-dance lessons a few hours later, and an appearance by legendary diplomat Henry Kissinger that evening.

Founded in 1874 as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the Y is an anchor for New York’s Jewish community. Though the 2014 appointment of Timms, an Episcopalian, as executive director caused a stir — “It’s a goy!” declared Crain’s New York Business — it was a nod to the organization’s emergence as a mecca for secular culture as well. Luminaries who’ve headlined events there include dancer Martha Graham, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, writers T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, and celebrities Bono and Bill Clinton.

Around noon one day a month after Giving Tuesday, the doors to its lobby swing open every few seconds to admit a stream of patrons of all ages, sizes, races, and ethnicities. A line of boys in soccer garb. Women pushing strollers. A man toting a cello.

Timms is the de facto mayor of this city within the city. He’s tall and fit, with undeniable charisma — the British accent helps — yet none of a politician’s slickness. At 41, he runs frequently and takes advantage of personal-training services offered free to employees. “I’m essentially patron number one of the 92nd Street Y,” he says.

Timms was born in the centuries-old city of Exeter in southwest England. He was one of two boys in the family; his mother was an artist, his father an archaeologist. “We grew up just surrounded by books and ideas and music and culture and family,” he says. “All the things that the Y cares about were essentially my childhood — obviously not as Jewish, but the core values resonated.”

After college, Timms ran sales for a publishing company. “I learned to make money,” he says with a laugh. “I could do it. I had a sales instinct. But I didn’t really enjoy it.” He quickly corrects himself: “Well, I did enjoy it. It was fun. But I did have a feeling like this isn’t what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.”

He next stepped into executive roles at two charities led by the Prince of Wales. From there, he helped arts-publishing magnate Louise Blouin launch her foundation. Blouin, he says, was an entrepreneurial tech advocate “who had amazing energy and was doing things all around the world.” Among other things, the organization started a $30 million museum and orchestrated an annual summit of world leaders in New York that coincided with United Nations week and focused on global affairs and culture.

A recruiter approached Timms about coming to the Y. The job included running some traditional programming, but he was also asked to create an innovation unit, tap technology, and identify new directions for the organization — to think big, in other words. Timms knew that groups often hired a tech-focused executive as a “digital beard” so they could claim they were entering the digital age. But board members appeared committed and promised free rein.

Timms arrived in 2008, and over the next few years, he and his team set out, in his words, “to create stuff.” And not just the now-typical online broadcasts of programs and events.

In simplest terms, “new power” drives today’s movements, with social media and the internet enabling people who live thousands of miles apart to unite and build community around shared passions and ideals. Sometimes, like the Black Lives Matter and #NeverAgain movements, this happens almost overnight. Unlike, say, the 1960s civil-rights movement, which was carefully scripted and managed by its leaders, the result is a decentralized, grass-roots effort, with participants embracing the same idea but expressing it in their own way.

New power is the dominant currency of the digital age, wielded for both good and evil, Timms and Heimans argue in the book. Think ice-bucket challenge, where giving to fight Lou Gehrig’s disease became a contagious performance art on social media. And ISIS, which proffers online terror manuals but dictates little.

“The future will be a battle over mobilization,” Timms and Heimans write. Organizations that flourish will plant the seed of an idea and nurture it, but then step back.

For the Y, Timms’s first big new-power idea was the Social Good Summit, which he conceived as a free-ranging, social-media-driven event to run parallel with the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York every September. He approached Kathy Calvin, head of the United Nations Foundation, and proposed mobilizing thousands of average people to debate the same issues considered by the U.N. elite.

“We jumped at the chance,” Calvin says. “He’s such an effective salesman for an idea. If he had a little coffee shop, I’d buy in.”

This started in 2010 as a one-day event at 92nd Street, with Mashable as a social-media partner. Speakers included wonks (a malaria expert) as well as headline grabbers (actress Geena Davis and billionaire Ted Turner).

Writers for blogs and digital-media outlets hung out at the Y for the entire week, and a host of U.N. and development officials came in for interviews.

Today, that one event has bloomed into spinoffs in 100 countries, each designed as organizers see fit. Brazil puts on one that’s grown larger than the 92Y affair. The livestream from 92nd Street Y is translated into eight languages. Sponsors range from the Rockefeller Foundation to Target.

In 2012, Timms came up with Giving Tuesday. His team promoted the idea and built a website offering campaign tools — not top-down instructions. Over the years, nonprofits ran with the concept, as did individuals, groups, cities, and even countries, each adapting the idea to fit their cause and culture. The Brazilian city of Sorocaba mimicked a Giving Tuesday drive in Baltimore. Singapore made Giving Tuesday a weeklong affair. Islamic groups moved it to the Ramadan holiday.

Giving Tuesday, which raised $10 million its first year, brought in more than $300 million last year. It’s effectively the day now most associated with charitable giving; in 2015, the Smithsonian pointedly opened its first permanent exhibit on philanthropy on Giving Tuesday, with Timms taking the same stage as heavyweights such as Bill Gates and David Rockefeller Jr.

Steve MacLaughlin, vice president for data and analytics at Blackbaud, says Giving Tuesday has helped teach nonprofits that technology can spark growth at dizzying speed — if it’s used to plant an idea that supporters can make their own. “What Henry has shown is that you can get scale by releasing something into the wild and nurturing it.”

Radical Ideas

Timms’s ideas were radical for some at the Y. The organization’s mission is to promote civic ideals, community, and the personal development of individuals and families. For a century, it had done that well, albeit chiefly for New Yorkers. Now, Timms argues, the digital age requires that it take that work to the global citizenry. Nothing in the group’s mission statement, he contends, dictates that its work stop at the city limits.

Stuart Ellman, a venture capitalist and the Y board chair, notes that Timms saw the power of social media to expand the organization’s work when Facebook was only a few years old. “Henry understood how to utilize these new tools to reach a broader audience,” he says.

Some colleagues, however, were puzzled. What was the strategic value of a New York community center organizing a U.N. global-development forum? Or a campaign that encouraged charitable giving in Brazil?

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MARK ABRAMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The 92nd Street Y has gained global renown for digital ventures like Giving Tuesday, but the venerable Jewish charity is also a daily hive of physical activity, including boxing classes led by former world super-welterweight champ — and ordained rabbi — Yuri Foreman (left).

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MARK ABRAMSON, FOR THE CHRONICLE

The Harkness Dance Center at “92Y,” as the New York City nonprofit is known, offers ballet classes for kids from toddlers to teens as well as instruction in tap, modern, and jazz dance.

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MARK ABRAMSON, FOR THE CHRONICLE

The organization’s 250,000-square-foot Upper East Side headquarters includes schools for art and music as well as dance. It’s ceramics studio has 25 potters’ wheels and four kilns.

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MARK ABRAMSON, FOR THE CHRONICLE

92Y’s fitness facility, the May Center, hosts adult and youth swimming classes, lifeguard training, and other aquatics programs at an ozone-purified pool.

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MARK ABRAMSON, FOR THE CHRONICLE

Local youth hone their hoop fundamentals in 92Y’s basketball classes and leagues.

Timms also befuddled some when he insisted that Giving Tuesday would not carry the organization’s brand. A movement to inspire charitable giving, he argued, would take hold and grow only if others could make it their own. But how, colleagues wondered, would the Y derive revenue or benefit if no one knew the campaign was their work? The art director was initially horrified to see poorly designed spinoffs of his Giving Tuesday logo proliferate online.

For Timms, the unorthodoxy was critical. In the marketplace of donors and foundations, the Y had to distinguish itself as an innovator. Established nonprofits, he believes, celebrate their past yet neglect to demonstrate their relevance for the future. “Apple would never do that,” he says of the tech giant. “They’re not going to say, ‘Congratulations, let’s spend a year celebrating the 20th anniversary of the iPod.’ They’re going to create what’s next.”

Over time, doubters found reassurance when Timms’s ideas raised the organization’s profile and paid off in tangible ways. The Gates Foundation has put more than $3 million toward Giving Tuesday since 2014. The John Templeton Foundation gave the organization more than $1.8 million to support the first three years of 7 Days of Genius, an annual exploration of people, ideas, and innovations changing the world. Other new power-driven programs launched since Giving Tuesday have also won favor with grant makers.

Eric Lange, one of the organization’s senior leaders, says he was initially skeptical about Giving Tuesday. But one morning, he arrived at work to find a half-dozen television news trucks outside. NBC’s Brian Williams was inside interviewing Timms. “I said, ‘OK, I’m in. I get it now.’”

‘What Are We Doing?’

Timms was hired at 92nd Street Y by Sol Adler, a revered figure who was executive director for 25 years. But Adler was fired in 2013 following revelations that he had an affair with his assistant, whose son-in-law, the Y’s head of facilities, was being investigated by the organization for taking kickbacks. Adler later committed suicide.

Timms led the organization through the scandal’s aftermath as it searched for a new leader. Several prominent outsiders emerged as candidates.

“I wasn’t a favorite,” says Timms, who was only 37 at the time and had never led a big organization. The board, however, came to see its internal candidate as the logical choice.

“At the end of the day, a bunch of people just said, ‘What are we doing? We’ve got a guy in place who clearly gets it, who is obviously one of the smartest people you’re ever going to meet,’ " says Lange, who was part of the board’s search committee.

When Timms’s appointment was made official in April 2014, the organization also announced his first hire: Peter Rubinstein, the longtime senior rabbi of a big New York synagogue, to lead the extensive Jewish-life program.

92nd Street Y

Timms describes Rubinstein, 75, as a key “shape shifter” — an influential old-power figure whose embrace of new power persuades others to jump in. The rabbi had broadcast synagogue services to those who couldn’t attend — first by phone, later through livestream — but worried that these worshippers participated alone and passively. “I was nursed in old power but was teetering on the edge of new power,” he says.

In an early Rubinstein effort, the Y established Facebook groups that came together to watch and discuss livestreaming broadcasts of high-holiday services. One of Rubinstein’s biggest triumphs has been a Jewish New Year’s blessing written and pushed out digitally to inspire local celebrations. Last year, music was written to accompany the blessing, and dance groups all over the world choreographed performances to it.

Timms says Rubinstein “is doing the most groundbreaking work of reimagining models of anybody in the institution” — just one of many Y staff, he adds, putting new power to work in traditional programming.

Hype Over Impact?

Timms’s theories aren’t universally embraced. Some charities deride Giving Tuesday as a gimmick. Critics contend Giving Tuesday has concentrated donations on one day but done little to increase charity altogether.

“I can’t think of a less useful piece of information” than Giving Tuesday’s annual tally of donations, says Tim Ogden, managing director of the Financial Access Initiative at New York University. “We don’t care about how much money was given on Giving Tuesday; we care about how much money was given [over all]. And that number is not changing.”

What’s more, Ogden, who’s a board member of the charity evaluator GiveWell, argues that Giving Tuesday doesn’t foster giving based on a group’s effectiveness. It rewards those savvy at building social-media networks.

At 92nd Street Y, a number of staff have left; some plainly said new power was not for them. Still, surveys of employee satisfaction suggest morale is high, with staff embracing opportunities to innovate.

In an employee survey conducted by an outside firm, nearly 70 percent of staff say their new ideas are welcomed — up from 38 percent when Timms first took over. More than three-quarter see the organization as an innovator.

Financially, after years in which annual deficits reached $5 million, the organization is running a surplus of nearly $2 million. Program revenue is strong, and new power-style programs are attracting money from foundations and donors — including longstanding supporters from the Jewish community. Says Rubinstein: “You say to them, ‘You want to be part of a revolution? You want to be part of the next step in Jewish life?’ They want to be there.”

Before its public launch, the Y’s $180 million capital campaign raised $102 million in about two-and-a-half years. Securing big gifts involves a decidedly “old power” courtship of monied elite. But every organization must balance old and new power and blend the two, Timms says. He estimates that 35 percent of the Y’s work today is tinged with new power. The board, once hesitant about ideas like Giving Tuesday, now expects them.

Timms imagines a day when the innovation unit he was hired to create will shut down; the entire organization will essentially become a laboratory for new ideas. Giving Tuesday itself might run on its own momentum, without any push from the organization.

What then for the Y? “You create something else,” he says.