The Impact Evangelist

André Chung for The Chronicle

Mario Morino would soon turn 70. For a blue-collar kid from Cleveland, he had done very well for himself. He had made a fortune in the software industry and given a lot of it away — about $40 million, he estimates. He had helped pioneer venture philanthropy, an approach to charitable giving modeled on venture capital. He had written a book called Leap of Reason, urging nonprofits “to create more meaningful, measurable good.”

Morino was unsatisfied. He took time off after publishing his book, and he was restless.

“I felt guilty,” he recalls. “I’d been out of the action for two years.” He could have joined another board or two, but he wanted more. So he set out to build a movement to improve the performance of America’s charities.

“There are too many nonprofits,” Morino says, “that are just not doing enough to ensure they’re making a positive difference.”

This was 2013.

Beginning with a handful of collaborators, Morino gradually persuaded dozens of leaders of nonprofits and foundations to form an organization known, inelegantly, as the Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community.

Five years later, the by-invitation-only group, which operates mostly by email and phone, has about 160 members. (Among the best-known are Jeff Bradach of Bridgespan, James Canales of the Barr Foundation, Dan Cardinali of Independent Sector, Kathy Reich of the Ford Foundation, Nancy Roob of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and Bill Shore of Share Our Strength.)

Together they have produced thousands of words, recorded many hours of videos, and built an extensive set of tools, all designed to help themselves and their peers build, evaluate, and sustain what they call high-performance organizations.

How’s it going? Morino feels good about the ambassadors, the connections they have built, and the products they have produced.

“We’ve got great people,” he says. “They care immensely. It is a real community.” But the community’s ideas and practices have taken longer than he would have liked to spread beyond its members. “We’re growing a nucleus of people who see a common horizon,” he says. “Now it’s time to go into campaign mode.”

Resolve, Resources, and Tools

“Not many nonprofits manage to outcomes, and among those that do, few do it well.” So said McKinsey & Co. consultants Lynn Taliento, Jonathan Law, and Laura Callanan in their introduction to Leap of Reason.

It’s not that the leaders of charities don’t care enough or aren’t smart. What seems to be missing, they say, is a lack of resolve to take on the hard work that change requires, insufficient resources to invest in management capacity, and the absence of tools to do so effectively.

The Leap community is designed to attack on all three fronts. True to their name, the ambassadors are expected to evangelize for better, outcomes-focused management. They argue, too, that donors should support their grantees’ learning and improvement. And they have collectively developed content to spread the word and tools to drive high performance.

They went on to build a framework called the Performance Imperative, aka the PI, which includes seven principles touching on the role of leadership and boards and the need for external evaluation. The PI is based not on research but on the collective experience of leaders of the community; it took more than a year to develop.

Since then, the group has built a tool called the Performance Imperative Organizational Self-Assessment, which helps charities measure their progress, and a PI for small nonprofits. It’s also developing PIs for health-care organizations and faith-based groups.

Lowell Weiss, a former Gates Foundation executive who is one of Morino’s close collaborators, says: “The pursuit of high performance is expensive. It is difficult. It is painstaking.” But, he says, the work of the Leap community is slowly spreading from trusted peer to trusted peer, as envisioned. “This message has legs,” he says. “It has resonated pretty widely.”

Up From Poverty

For Morino, this is the third and final act of a stellar career. He grew up poor but says he never felt deprived because of the support of family, teachers, coaches, and his church. His mother, he says, cleaned offices and homes to keep the family afloat and “made sure my brother, sister, and I — and oftentimes our friends and cousins — were well fed, clothed, and loved.” From those early experiences grew a lifelong desire to help underprivileged kids.

Morino earned a degree at Case Western Reserve University and learned about technology during a stint in the U.S. Navy. His first start-up failed, but his second grew into Legent Corporation, which was sold for $1.7 billion in 1995 — at the time, the biggest deal ever in the software industry.

By then, Morino was onto act two. He had retired from Legent in 1992 and spent a couple of years talking with hundreds of philanthropists and leaders of charities. In 2000, he joined with technology executives Raul Fernandez and Mark Warner (now a U.S. senator from Virginia) to start Venture Philanthropy Partners, which invests in organizations that help vulnerable children and youths in the Washington, D.C., region.

Unlike most donors, VPP makes long-term commitments of money and engages deeply with its grantees: It takes a seat on their boards, helps them recruit staff, and advises them on strategy and finances. In exchange, charities are expected to demonstrate their impact. The idea was controversial — some donors didn’t want to take a hands-on approach, and some nonprofits resisted it — but others, including some traditional foundations, embraced the model. In the last 17 years, VPP has raised and deployed nearly $110 million to 18 Washington-area nonprofits; Morino was its chief executive for seven years and still sits on its board.

Morino’s belief that donors and nonprofits should become true partners, while recognizing the power imbalance between the two, shaped Leap of Reason. It’s core to the Leap community, too. Morino says grant makers and charities need to be more honest with one another, and they need to expect more from each other. “Funders should expect high performance for greater results, but they must help their grantee leaders build and strengthen their organizations to meet those expectations,” he says.

Finding ‘Their Tribe’

To be sure, none of this is entirely new. Consultants like Bridgespan and McKinsey, networks like Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and nonprofits like MDRC and GiveWell have preached about impact. Even the federal government, beginning in the Obama years and continuing under President Trump, has steered hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations that run programs that can show evidence of their effectiveness; this effort supported such nonprofits as Youth Villages and the Nurse-Family Partnership. Youth Villages uses counselors to help troubled youths in their homes instead of moving them to foster care or detention centers, while Nurse-Family Partnership sends specially trained nurses to visit first-time moms; both have been extensively vetted.

This, though, is the first time that a community of nonprofit leaders has come together who are pushing the idea of high performance to their peers, colleagues, and grantees and developing best practices. The ambassadors, all of whom have full-time jobs elsewhere, say they give their time and energy to Leap because they believe it is working.

When the ambassadors met face-to-face for the first time several years ago, “everyone left feeling they had found their tribe,” says Debra Natenshon, a consultant who formerly ran a nonprofit called the Center for What Works, which looks for ways to measure results.

“The whole culture is beginning to change. Very slowly. Very grudgingly,” says Michael Bailin, former president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and a consultant to Leap.

Morino would like the community to be able to thrive on its own, but for now he remains the reluctant hub. He provides about $1.5 million a year, which supports a staff of about 10 full-time and part-time people. Most are based in Cleveland, where he lives; depending on the time of year, he’s likely to show up for work in Cavaliers, Indians, or even Browns gear.

He also draws upon a loyal network of friends and supporters in business, the nonprofit world, and academe.

“He sees abilities in people they don’t even know they have,” says Cheryl Collins, who has worked closely with him since 1992. Bill Meehan, a Stanford professor and co-author of Engine of Impact, a book about nonprofit effectiveness, is not part of the Leap community but says: “I adore Mario Morino. He’s a doer. He cares, and he cares about the right things.”

Micro-Bonuses and Feedback

It’s a safe bet that hundreds of organizations have been influenced by Leap of Reason. (Morino gave the book away; it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.) Scores of nonprofits now regularly use some or all of the Performance Imperative. Some have published their stories.

One example: Wings for Kids, which runs after-school programs in Georgia and the Carolinas to help low-income children develop social and emotional skills.

Scott Henderson

Wings has worked especially hard to follow a Performance Imperative pillar that calls for “disciplined, people-focused management” by adopting rigorous employee evaluations, coaching, and recognition. Top performers are rewarded through a program called Bonusly, which enables workers to give and get so-called micro-bonuses, such as gift cards, for going the extra mile.

By contrast, laggards get concrete feedback about their flaws, and they are expected to improve or else, according to Bridget Durkan Laird, the group’s chief executive.

“We try really hard not to keep people around who aren’t going to do good for the kids,” she says.

To better understand its impact, the organization has also commissioned an external evaluation led by scholars at the University of Virginia. The randomized, controlled trial will compare the progress of children who participate in the Wings program with those who do not; it is partly funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Grants for Performance

Leap is also shining a spotlight on grant makers that invest in charities’ performance. Leap ambassador Brad Dudding, chief operating officer of Center for Employment Opportunities, which helps people with criminal convictions find jobs, says: “Right now there’s a big push in Leap to hammer away at funders and get them on the bus.”

Guided by Leap ambassador and consultant David Hunter, Impetus-PEF, a foundation in Britain, helps all of its grantees develop performance-management systems and is putting one in place for itself.

At the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, the philanthropic arm of hedge-fund manager David Einhorn and his wife, Cheryl, executive director Jennifer Hoos Rothberg uses the Performance Imperative to track the progress of grantees.

“Lots say it’s helpful. Some say it’s onerous,” says Hoos Rothberg. “But once they set a baseline for where they are, it’s a very nice tool for them to hold themselves accountable.” She’s also talking with other donors.

St. Louis has become another hub of Leap-driven activity, led by Julie Russell, senior vice president for planning and evaluation at the United Way of Greater St. Louis.

A former social worker with Catholic Family Services, Russell says it’s important that the drive for performance is being led by nonprofits and not being imposed from the outside. She has led 10 workshops for about 200 nonprofits in the Performance Imperative, as well as for nonprofit boards. “Agencies love it,” she says. “They’re really hungry for this information.”

The Performance Imperative isn’t for everyone, its advocates concede. While Natenshon and consultant Karen Walker developed a version for charities with budgets of as little as $100,000, some small nonprofits may decide that the effort to measure outcomes is beyond their capability. The Performance Imperative was designed for charities that provide direct services — Morino’s focus for decades — and so it does not fit advocacy groups or arts organizations quite as well. But its focus on mission, strong leadership, and engaged boards should work for all.

True Test Is to Come

Looking ahead, Morino has set specific targets for the Leap community. By the end of 2020, he’d like to see it grow to include 300 actively engaged members. He’d like the Performance Imperative to be fully adopted by at least three foundations, 12 consultants, 25 nonprofits, a metropolitan region or two, and a couple of colleges and universities. He has promised to personally fund the work for the next several years.

Beyond that, all bets are off. The true test of the endeavor will come when it is no longer held together by Morino’s passion, network, and money. The community will have to find another wealthy individual or foundation to step in, no easy feat because, as Morino notes, donors don’t readily fund efforts created and developed by others. Besides, he sighs, “at the end of the day, there’s nothing sexy about management.” But there’s also nothing more important.