No organization wants to waste time reinventing wheels. But too many unwittingly do. Twelve years ago, the Arizona’s Children Association, a 99-year-old organization that promotes the welfare of children and their families, decided to buck this trend; it decided the best way to become more effective was to acquire other groups that had skills and knowledge the association lacked.
It put in place a merger plan to move the organization beyond providing residential treatment for children to providing preventative care. It added new services, then trained all its existing staff members in the approaches and methods. It adjusted their caseloads so they could spend more time with families and help kids learn, stay healthy, and develop strong relationships in their homes, all with the goal of catching behavioral issues early to prevent delinquency.
As a result, the organization grew ninefold over 10 years. Throughout the process, the association was acquiring staff members and programs, but, as important, it was acquiring and applying knowledge.
Arizona’s Children Association, unfortunately, is more the exception than the rule. The reasons so many nonprofits don’t learn enough from their own experience and others’—both from mistakes and successes—are plentiful, but they boil down to a few key issues.
Too few chief executives have outlined goals for organizational learning, not enough nonprofits give their employees compelling incentives to share knowledge, and many simply have not found good ways to exchange information about what works among staff members, volunteers, and others. As a result, a key opportunity to increase the effectiveness of nonprofits, and help them do a better job of achieving their missions, is lost every day.
Here’s a look at what we found in a survey of more than 100 nonprofit executives, and in-depth interviews with many of them, plus a look at how a number of nonprofits are overcoming the challenges they face:
The goals gap. Nonprofit leaders care about learning, but more than a third fail to define compelling learning goals.
Ninety-seven percent of nonprofit survey respondents—almost all vice presidents or top leaders of their organizations—agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “Our senior management team cares about organizational learning.”
But a third of those leaders report that their own senior managers have not defined clear and compelling goals about what the organization should learn and why. And nearly six in 10 said they don’t track statistics to show that the organization is learning.
Without clear goals and measures, it becomes harder to deploy resources effectively, measure progress, and influence behavior throughout the organization.
But when everybody is clear that the organization believes in learning about ideas that will improve its ability to carry out its mission, the resulting flow of knowledge can lead to big changes. Let’s look again at Arizona’s Children Association, which was crystal clear that its goal in merging was to learn ways to prevent adolescents from spinning out of control.
One of the association’s acquisitions was New Directions Institute for Infant Brain Development, which teaches the science of brain development and strategies to parents, child-care workers, and others to help children learn.
Jill Stamm, co-founder of New Directions, and the nonprofit’s staff members gave a series of workshops to the association’s employees to ensure that they understood the growing emphasis on working with youngsters while they are very small to avoid juvenile delinquency and other expensive social problems later.
Next the association began to incorporate what it had learned. Some caseworkers changed their agendas for visits to troubled families to include discussions of children’s brain development, providing New Directions “Brain Boxes,” which showed parents how toys for different ages could help develop a child’s brain.
Fred Chaffee, the chief executive of Arizona’s Children Association, reports that this sort of careful integration has allowed the association to more than double the number of clients served and significantly reduced costs per beneficiary.
It’s also allowed the organization to raise money for other merger efforts, because prevention can demonstrate payback in the cost and quality of a program.
The incentives gap. About half the nonprofits surveyed have failed to create incentives for staff members to capture and share knowledge.
Creating a culture that motivates each person in an organization to capture and share knowledge requires not only a clear and compelling goal but also a reward system.
Leaders report that they fail to clarify incentives for individuals, for teams, or for their organization as a whole. Four out of 10 nonprofit leaders said evaluations of staff members don’t touch on the process of capturing and sharing knowledge. In our interviews, we heard that measuring and encouraging learning behavior were the areas in which nonprofits struggled most.
Yet incentives at multiple levels often are exactly what it takes to transform a goal that is clearly important into a priority that rises above competing demands and gets the job done.
A straightforward incentive strategy builds organizational learning responsibilities directly into the job.
The Council on Foundations, a national nonprofit membership association whose members’ collective assets exceed $300-billion, has no dedicated staff members focusing on the process of collecting and sharing knowledge about grant making.
Instead, knowledge is becoming an explicit part of the job description of anybody who works directly with the grant makers who belong to the association—or about half the staff.
The council uses a customer-relationship management database not only to track interactions with members but also to measure and evaluate staff members on how well they capture and pass on learning to colleagues and collaborate across departments to pass on best practices.
Intrinsic rewards count, too. At Bridgespan, we have evolved from a highly personal system of sharing ideas and knowledge face-to-face to an approach 10 years later that depends heavily on technology.
For instance, we collect and categorize, case-by-case, the key lessons from each challenge we tackle with our clients on our intranet. Consultants can review precedents by field or type of challenge before they tackle similar work. And we augment our collection with related external resources.
While this shift can boost efficiencies, it has also encouraged more in-person interactions. This, together with acknowledging the ideas that our staff members share, has created strong intrinsic rewards.
For example, in our intranet-based “Ask the Expert” chat space for Bridgespan teams, a dedicated staff member picks up and connects questions to the right expert at the firm within hours. The expert will often connect live with the person seeking insight, but he or she also receives a virtual “shout out” for the contribution made to a project.
Likewise, we encourage brainstorming on solutions to problems for our clients by playing with ideas in an electronic “sandbox,” that we call “On Our Minds.”
To ensure that no one misses these conversations, every posting triggers automatic e-mail alerts to all staff members from coast to coast, so everyone knows what ideas are cropping up and can join in meaningful exchange. For the person posting the initial thought, it is both gratifying and informative to know others agreed it was a topic that was important to discuss.
The process gap. While more than 80 percent of nonprofits said they had processes in place to share knowledge, four out of 10 said their processes were not effective for encouraging learning.
Through what processes can nonprofits best capture knowledge, share it, and use it to increase their impact? That is a big question for many organizations.
The most important first step is to make these processes user-friendly.
Identify who needs the knowledge, where the best opportunities for learning lie, and what systems fit best with the way people already work.
For many groups, the number-one goal of organizational learning is to identify, codify, and distribute the approaches that everybody agrees work best in carrying out the mission, with the goal that everybody ends up using the best method to, say, train disadvantaged youths for jobs, tutor lagging students, or protect a given type of biodiversity.
But the Knowledge Is Power Program, a national charter-school network known as KIPP, goes about things differently.
“Knowledge sharing for KIPP is particularly powerful because we don’t have a master curriculum,” said Kimberly Oakes, who ensures that KIPP captures know-how across the organization and makes it easy for others to access and discuss. “We’re not going to tell you, ‘Here is what to do in third-grade math.’ But we know there are fantastic things happening across the board. We want to be able to extract that and bring it to the network without having to dictate what is good and what is quality.”
Last year, KIPP identified 15 of its most effective teachers, videotaped them, and made their content available online.
The online system, called KIPP Share, helps new teachers find useful classroom materials that KIPP’s experienced teachers have already created.
And it remedies a major gap in knowledge flows: When teachers moved to schools outside the KIPP network, their precious materials left with them.
Ensuring that knowledge flows throughout an organization, informing the quality of service to clients whose lives depend on it, takes hard work, to be sure.
The steps leaders must take are clear: They need to set learning goals that resonate because they advance the organization’s mission; they need to reinforce a culture that overtly rewards people who spend time collecting and sharing information; and they need to engage staff members in creating highly intuitive processes for making it all happen—keeping the learners themselves at the center.