Beyond Good Intentions
Global Social Benefit Incubator
Global Social Benefit Incubator 2008
Exercise 1: Target Market Statement
GSBI 2008
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How we got into this crunch
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And the 4 main lessons we've learned along the way....
In my last post, I talked about the financial hardship that FORGE is currently going through and the emotional strain that comes with determining how to best move forward. The first question that everyone has been asking is "why?" - why are we struggling to meet our baseline budget of $400,000, when there are trillions of dollars out there in the world. Sparing you the obvious answers, I'll use this post to elucidate the 4 main lessons about things we've done wrong and things that have worked against us:
1) We changed our impact model, and with it lost an income stream.
The Story: As I've blogged about before, this past year FORGE changed its model from one that used college student volunteers, to one that puts the control of designing and implementing projects directly in the hands of the refugees themselves. We made this decision based on its potential to exponentially increase our impact, and the results have been better than we hoped for. Unfortunately, along with the positive change in outcomes, we lost a huge amount of guaranteed revenue every year. Our American volunteers were each required to raise a minimum of $5,000, and through them we would raise at least half of our funds every year.
The Lesson: We made the decision to change our model consciously, thinking that we had built the structure we needed to survive the transition toward increased impact. Unfortunately, I think we were judging ourselves by the wrong criteria: we thought that the thing that would allow us to bridge the gap was the four years of results that we had built. As it turns out, while results are very important, we should have been asking ourselves whether we had built enough relationships and connections with potential funders. We've learned that results and a track-record aren't enough, and that any organization that is considering taking the risk of a substantially-increased fundraising burden should ask themselves first and foremost if whether they have the relationships to jump the gap.
2) Hard to categorize
The Story: A big part of the problem that we encountered this past year was that we were much more confident with our ability to fundraise through grants than turned out to be realistic. The problem wasn't so much being turned down for grants as it was being able to find grants whose criteria and RFPs we fit. Of course, finding international grants is hard in the first place, but the major roadblock that we ran up against was that FORGE's mission and programming just didn't seem to fit any of the predetermined categories set by grantmakers. The problem is simple: because FORGE put the control designing the projects in the hands of the community itself, it's almost impossible to categorize exactly "what" we do. When RFPs out there are calling for health projects, or water projects, or post-primary education projects, we can say "we do that, when the community prioritizes it", but we can't simply say "we do THAT." It's made finding grants that we qualify for extremely difficult...
The Lesson: As collaborative and community-driven approaches to project planning and conflict recovery are still quite new and yet growing in regard and academic support, my hope is that over time the philanthropic community will catch on and funding will move toward a more open model. So my belief is that this problem will eventually become a strength. In the meantime, though, any organization which is similarly difficult to categorize should do a lot of investigation before making grants a large part of their funding strategy.
3) Driving traffic to our website
The Story: This year, we built what I (yes, with obvious bias) believe is one of the most real and informative sites on the internet: www.FORGEnow.org. The website was designed to introduce people from across the world to the sites, sounds, tragedies, and hopes of an African refugee camp, and allow them to give directly the projects that most speak to their passions. Through photos, videos, blogs, and monthly unedited progress reports direct from-the-ground, the site is built for international donor transparency beyond any site we know of. We are vastly proud of the way it has turned out, but have been disappointed in how little traffic we've been able to drive to the site. While we knew that we couldn't count on an "if you build it, they will come" mentality, I think we underestimated just how much it takes to get people to come! Therefore, we just haven't had the kind of site exposure we need to raise the funds we're looking for.
The Lesson: If you are going to depend on a web-based fundraising strategy, you better have the manpower to promote it! As it is, we have only 3 full-time staff in our US office, and we are responsible for a lot more than just fundraising. We probably need 4 full-time marketing people to meet our goal of fully funding all of our projects in the next 4 months. Building a website, no matter how over-the-top awesome, will not be enough.
4) It's the economy (no... I won't call you stupid).
The Story: We sent out our annual mailing to past donors at what turned out to be a historically bad time - right in the middle of the meltdown. On average, people have been giving about 25% of what they've given in the past! Yeah...that's really bad. Partly, it's bad timing on our part. Partly, you can't blame people for being scared right now.
The Lesson: If you can hold off on a general campaign, do it! If you can't, be prepared for a very concerning response. We haven't cracked how to respond to the economy right now, and unfortunately it's come at a time that we are least prepared to deal with it. Ideally, we'd have a few people ready to back us financially should things go really wrong macro-economically. It's too bad that the worst effects of the economic fallout are going to be felt by the people around the world who are the least prepared to deal with it...
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Okay, so I've put it all out there. The above areas encapsulate the big failures and problems we've run into, although there are surely a lot more things I could add. I hope that this proves helpful to some people out there. In the next post, I'm going to write about what really concerns me: what we're doing to move out of this financial crunch and into long-term sustainability and impact growth.
'til then,
- Kjerstin
www.FORGEnow.org
Thank you
Kjerstin,
I want to express my sincere admiration for your work. Two years ago I was doing research about "The Zambian Initiative" which shattered the paradigm of looking at refugees as promoters of development and not otherwise. The camps I studied were Meheba and Mayukwayukwa. You can imagine how excited I got when I found out about your work.
I thank you for sharing your experiences with us, I'm sure they will provide wisdom. Have you tried promoting your website through viral sources or with social media? In either case, I want to help as much as I could, whether it is with expertise or otherwise. In the meantime, would you be offended if I wrote a post about Forge and your work in my blog? I'm sure that spreading the word can be beneficial to your organization.
Don't you even think about getting discouraged. These rough times are nothing but a way to prove the world what a great leader you are. Please, let me know if I can help. Below is my URL.
Exito!
Gonzalo http://thehumanlevel.blogspot.com