Interview: Why Nonprofits Need ‘New Power’ When Good Battles Evil

Photo by Michael Creagh

“The future will be a battle over mobilization,” Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms write in the opening pages of their new book, New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World — and How to Make It Work for You. Those who can mobilize people behind a cause or idea will win, they say. Those who can’t ... well, “the dustbin of history” is the phrase that comes to mind.

Heimans and Timms aren’t alarmists, but they worry that the forces of evil — ISIS among them — are deploying advanced “new power” with increasing skill. Many charities and other agents for good, meanwhile, have yet to show up for the fight.

The mission of their book: rally the good guys, explain new power, and provide models for how it works. In its pages, you’ll find analyses of Black Lives Matter, the ice-bucket challenge, and other cause-related movements that have sprung up unexpectedly and raced across the globe on the wings of social media.

Heimans and Timms first explained “new power” in a much-touted 2014 Harvard Business Review article. In simplest form, their argument is that technology has made it possible to quickly and easily amass people — to solve a problem, to advocate for change, to bankroll a charity. But such power can be earned, they say, only by giving up some control and allowing followers to put their own stamp on things — much like internet meme-makers riff off signature moments in culture or politics.

A native of Australia, Heimans came to new-power thinking as a boy, when he used his family’s fax machine to lobby politicians. In 2004, when George Bush and Dick Cheney were running for re-election, he dropped out of Oxford to organize mothers of U.S. soldiers to dog Cheney with war protests as the vice president campaigned. This was long before the first crowdfunding platform, but one night he and his friends built a website to raise money for travel costs. “We woke up in the morning, and we’d raised a quarter of a million dollars,” he says.

Today, Heimans runs the consulting firm Purpose, which helps nonprofits, foundations, and businesses build cause-related campaigns. Clients include the American Civil Liberties Union and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

Doubleday

Timms is the architect of many social-media-driven efforts out of the 92nd Street Y, where he is executive director. Most famously, he came up with the idea for Giving Tuesday, the charity blitz that follows Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The two talked with the Chronicle about their book and the importance of new power for nonprofits. Next week, we’ll post an article on Timms’s work bringing “new power” to the 144-year-old 92nd Street Y.

Why did you turn the Harvard Business Review piece into a book?

Heimans: Some of the people who most get new power are also some of the worst actors. The challenge we set for ourselves was to translate these ideas and give them a frame that is useful for everyday people across the nonprofit, public, and private sectors and across geographies.

Timms: There were a group of nurses in the United Kingdom who had read the piece and got very excited. They started using our frame and our thinking in some of their work, developing it, making it their own. They invited us to an event in London with maybe 200 people. There were policemen. There were surgeons. There were frontline health workers. All of whom were engaging around new power to make them more effective in how they dealt with patients and communities.

That was why we got into this business: to make the right people more powerful. There’s never been a time when we need those on the side of the angels to be more empowered. Ironically, those people are becoming less powerful. In some ways, they’re getting trampled by hordes of unreasonable folk.

Heimans: Our goal was never to write a sort of Snapchat for Dummies. Our goal was to point to the intellectual underpinnings, the mind-set that you need when you approach everything.

The book touches lightly on your own work but details a number of case studies, including ISIS, President Obama’s campaign, Black Lives Matter, and even Podemos, the new political party in Spain.

Timms: There’s a world out there of people doing this much better than Jeremy and I. We reached out to that community of people to figure out what made them tick. Like Podemos — neither of us has done any direct work with them, but we connected with them through some people at New York University whom I’ve worked with.

Heimans: We had some really good conversations with Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, in particular, trying to unearth what the lens behind their leadership approach was.

Often these movements get reduced to unsophisticated “either” and “ors.” People will say the movement is all that matters, or they will say, “It’s achieved nothing; where are the policy wins?”

That misses a really important point. The Black Lives Matter movement played the role of increasing salience, increasing awareness, mobilizing people, giving people energy, amplifying demands. There will be other actors in the ecosystem who are going to be more steeped in old power who are going to push things through courts and who are going to develop the more intricate political strategies to get something through a state legislature.

Why do we need new power?

Timms: If you’re an old-power institution that doesn’t have a capacity to mobilize in a meaningful way, how are you going to get the outcomes you want? It’s almost indefensible at this point not to have some kind of new-power effort, even if you don’t use that language.

The dangerous thing in our sector right now is you’re seeing lots of old-power actors. People are doing new-power things that are quite shallow and quite peripheral and quite intermittent. They’ll do a one-month initiative — “everyone participate” — and then it will be back to 1994.

You have to be very careful and very serious about how you embrace this stuff. And this isn’t simply hiring someone who once worked at BuzzFeed. That isn’t the solution. The solution is about a set of identity questions you’re going to pose to your institution.

I’m always thinking: “Is your institution changing as quick as the world is?” The answer’s always “no,” but you’ve got to try.

In the nonprofit world, foundations seem to epitomize old power.

Timms: Foundational philanthropy at its worst is the worst kind of old power. They literally have all the power. As a grantee, you say everything you can to keep them happy. They’ll keep you waiting for months and not give you any feedback. You never know why.

Heimans: We do a lot of work with big philanthropies at Purpose. And a lot of the conversation is helping them understand the intrinsic power of mobilizing people, of getting people to participate.

There are a couple of challenges. One is an old-power mind-set that is: “I’ll only do what I can measure.” But the work of mobilizing people is often more complicated. Sure, there are things you can measure — the number of people who show up to an event or a protest or who sign a petition. But that’s not actually a measure of what’s changing. The subtle thing is making people feel more powerful and over a period of time giving those people that sense of agency and power. That’s a much more subtle thing.

The second challenge is that philanthropy sometimes struggles with the idea of empowering the people that they serve. Philanthropies are comfortable funding the NAACP, but are they comfortable funding a Black Lives Matter? Also: You can fund a mobilization group, but can you add new-power elements to the grant-making structure?

Timms: The big MacArthur experiment, the 100&Change contest, was interesting. So MacArthur’s clearly trying to think differently about participation of grantees. And it’s trying to get away from this kind of Byzantine process where no one quite knows what’s going to happen.

Even Bill Gates, who essentially has this terrific store of power. He’s pretty powerful. He can call anybody in the world. He has huge amounts of money. He has resources. For all that, he recognizes that if he isn’t able to mobilize people around the key causes he cares about, that won’t go far enough.

Philanthropy is where I think there’s the biggest opportunity. You see these big foundations who have this huge capacity, this huge store of old power. They are desperately needed in our national and global dialogue right now. And if they can develop the new power to go along beside that old power, they’ll be incredibly powerful.

Heimans: As a thought experiment, you can consider something like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Even though the Facebook wealth that makes for the CZI endowment is all based on people’s participatory energies, CZI was announced as: “We’re going to get some experts to really make decisions.” Henry and I were both a little struck by that.

Timms: “We won’t accept any proposals. It’s a closed process.”

Heimans: You understand the impulse, which is: We don’t want to be deluged. But that’s a great example of where some new-power thinking could really come in handy. There’s also a resource — the 2 billion people who are part of Facebook — that could be used in some participatory way to help at least some aspect of their philanthropy. There’s a blended-power strategy there that could be very potent. The Ford Foundation doesn’t have a crowd. But CZI potentially has a crowd.

You preach a balance of new power and old power. Talk about that balance.

Timms: I hope your readers understand from this that they have to reject the false binaries — the idea that you can either have stability in old power or chaos in new power. That isn’t the trade. What you’re trying to chart is a path that makes you relevant, and you’ll pull on both sides of the equation when you need to.

The challenge for your readers is: Are you as good at new power as you are at old? And the answer is almost always “no.” And we need particularly people in the social space. We need those people to be able to mobilize because you only need to see how successful the anti-vaxxers are or the climate deniers are or the white supremacists are or the racists are, how good they are at mobilization. To recognize that those august institutions who have represented these issues for a long time, if they don’t work out how to mobilize, they’re going to lose battles that we need them to win. So like I think there’s an urgency around this work that I think people need to recognize. I don’t sense enough urgency in the field on this topic right now.

Heimans: Nonprofits often are dependent on the energy of ordinary people in order to do their work. So that’s the thing that we have going for us as a sector. It’s not like mobilizing and engaging people is a new thing.

So I do think there are lots of reasons for optimism. I think a lot of these NGOs in the last 10 years have gotten a lot smarter. We worked with the ACLU on their digital transformation in terms of online campaigning. And that really helped them; they were able to kind of catch the rain when the Trump moment happened. Because a lot of that work and that cultural change had happened.

What type of people typically embrace new power?

Timms: Those who do it really well are usually very successful people who have to be prepared to completely reimagine their worlds. And that’s really tough, because the reason you become very successful is typically you have a suite of old-power skills that you’ve mastered over the years. You’ve gotten very good at them. Then suddenly, you have to redo all that stuff.

There are people who are capable of doing that, and I think that kind of vigor is really interesting.

I think the second key thing would be a willingness to resist a cynical instinct. There’s a lot of things we see with “New Power.”

When we talk to groups of people — academics or scientists or journalists — there will always be two responses. Some people are like: “Thank God, I’ve been thinking this for years. How do I do this tomorrow?” The other extreme in the room are people who just don’t like it. It’s not who they are, and they deep down know that they aren’t going to be able to change. They don’t want to change their identity.

And so the people who do this really well are prepared to shift their professional identities. And the people who don’t do it well reduce this to a conversation about digital and aren’t prepared to investigate their own professional identities.

Here’s the carrot for your readers: You look five years out — and this is a prediction, not a fact — and it’s hard to think that any of the people leading our sector aren’t going to be people who haven’t reimagined their professional identity so that they’re good at this stuff.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.