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Promise vs Hope
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In this crisis season, Kjerstin needs to focus her public message on promises she can credibly deliver.
This entry is from Curtis Chang, CEO of Consulting Within Reach (CWR). CWR has recently agreed to provide pro bono services to FORGE. As part of this experiment in radical transparency, Social Edge and Kjerstin have invited Curtis to regularly share about the experience in this context.
Grading Kjerstin's answers
You have to hand it to my client. I challenged her to make her case for why FORGE should matter to the collective nonprofit sector. And she responds by throwing down a regression analysis. She’s making me feel like I've time warped back 15 years ago, when I was grading essays from very bright college students.
So in that same classroom spirit, I’m going to grade her response from my perspective. I do so partially in jest. It is certainly not because I ultimately think of myself as her teacher or superior (any consultant who conceives of himself as either of those roles for his client is both arrogant and a poor consultant). In fact, the more I get to know her and her achievements, the more I am in awe.
But I’m going to grade her response because I want highlight this critical issue: how FORGE must communicate its indispensability, both during this crisis and in the near future. Kjerstin and I have already talked about these points over the phone and she essentially agrees with my perspective. So, I'm sharing this here as part of our ongoing commitment to let you in on our working relationship.
Overall, I’d give her effort a “reluctant “B.” “Reluctant,” because there is so much of her vision that is brilliant and deserves a sheer A+; but in the end I think she only half succeeds in what she needs to do.
The essence of FORGE is inspiring and paradigm shifting: to turn refugee camps from "warehouses of misery" into "incubators for social development." This is just the kind of bold thinking needed in Africa. It is the job of any consultant to respect and nurture that kind of boldness.
But it is also my job as a consultant to take that bold vision and – without quashing it – discipline and translate it into organizational effectiveness. And even though I haven’t gotten deep into my research on FORGE's sustainability plan, it is already quite obvious to me that more effective communication of its message will be critical.
There’s a lot of work that FORGE will need to do in terms of the mechanics of communication that I’ll discuss this in the future. But for now, I want to concentrate on the effectiveness of the message itself.
Promise vs Hope
I set up the "exam" as one in which she had to show why FORGE was deserving of a collective bailout. The two questions were:
- What damage to the collective are we averting with a collective bailout of FORGE?
- What collective good – even if it is in the future -- are we seeking by working for FORGE’s survival?
A simpler - and probably more elegant - way to frame my twin questions was that I was asking her to communicate what she could promise us right now and what we could hope for in the future.
I feel that Kjerstin’s piece was a good at hope, but weak on promise. And it didn't need to be that way.
Promise and hope are twin ingredients of any successful marketing. For instance, Nike offers the promise of a high performing shoe, and the hope of becoming a high performing athlete. The iPod offers the promise of an elegantly designed device, and the hope to become that cool, hip hopping, kaleidiscope colored dancing figure.
Promise is what you can deliver. Hope is what you can inspire.
As a social entrepreneuer, you need to communicate both. And sometimes, you need more of one than the other.
But to be persuasive, you need to distinguish between the two and reassure the audience that you haven’t confused the two. That’s why the classic Nike ads of Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon were so effective: they parodied the notion that you can “be like Mike” by wearing the shoe. In the process, they disarmed the customer’s suspicion that Nike was overselling its claims.
The ads kept the distinction between promise and hope – brilliantly, because it did so while still keeping hope out here in mid air (in the back of our minds, we felt even more that it must be so cool to be like Mike and be worshipped by hip figures like Spike Lee).
The central premise of Kjerstin’s case was that FORGE offers a way out of the structural factors causing civil war. This claim belongs in the hope category, not as a promise.
I won’t dissect her piece in detail, but I don’t believe she can make the case that she can deliver on ending civil war in Africa. Her regression analysis is nice, but is a very long way off from showing that. Anyone familiar with Africa knows that the true causes are incredibly complex: ranging from ethnic tensions to competition over scarce resources to decades of corrupt political culture to inadequate state structures and beyond. Most of the refugees in her programs aren’t returning to their homelands for a while, and when they finally do, it’s going to take decades to measure their impact on civil strife. The message "we end civil wars" (yes, simplified from what Kjerstin actually said, but that's what happens to messages when they go public) oversells by a very long shot.
What FORGE can promise
Even worse than the risk of overselling, talk about ending civil war distracts from the many wonderful promises that FORGE can credibly deliver. Right now.
Right now, the crisis of the Congolese refugee is making the news headlines. My wife heard about their case on NPR, was moved greatly, and wanted to know what she could do. She can’t very easily give to the UN agency running the camps (exactly who would I make that check out to?). Our sector doesn’t offer many other alternatives for people to engage with this crisis. But she could give to FORGE, knowing that it is not some bloated governmental bureaucracy but rather a lean and nimble organization.
A big problem about the refugee crisis is that it is largely inaccessible to the rest of the world. Any cause that gives people like my wife and me a way to touch that crisis has a good argument for indispensability.
Right now, the UN and other Western relief organizations treat refugees as objects of pity. The Westerners deliver food, shelter, and aid and the Africans receive them. The longer they remian merely recipients, the more disempowered and depressed they become. Most of these refugees will be there for 5-10 years. A culture of dependency will grow like a cancer on the culture. We need to reverse that slide immediately. FORGE is the only NGO (according to Kjerstin) who has a plan to do that and has a track record of execution.
In fact, FORGE got into this financial shortfall in the first place by becoming one of the few (only?) NGOs to actually employ the refugees themselves to come up with their own solutions. That empowerment approach to the refugee crisis, I believe, is indispensable to the sector and worth preserving.
There’s more that I can say – check out Forge’s web site for more specifics – but my point is that FORGE doesn't need to talk about some far off dream about ending civil war to make its case for why it qualifies for a sector wide bailout.
What potential investors are looking for
I’m emphasizing this promise versus hope distinction because Kjerstin needs to be very, very long on delivering specific promises and short on inspiring hope right now. If things break her way, she’s going to get air time before more and more audiences the next couple of months. Her real audience in all those cases will be potential investors. For potential investors evaluating FORGE these days, hope is heavily discounted. They want specifics. They want deliverables.
Indeed, the suspicion that Kjerstin has to combat among potential investors is that FORGE somehow got into this deficit by being unrealistic, dreamy eyed, recent college grads. The more she talks about lofty, seemingly unreachable hopes -- instead of the real concrete achievements happening in the field right now – the more I’m afraid she’s going to confirm that suspicion for this crucial audience.
Which would be tragic, because I believe she has so very much to talk about.
Fundraising focus on individuals
The promise vs. hope distinction just made my "sticky note" area (for fresh and important ideas to integrate). Interesting coincidence for me that I discovered FORGE in the last few weeks, working on ideas for program deepening and expansion for one of our international client-partners. For this partner, we are looking into the online giving market models. That aside, my quick strategic pass at her dilemna is: communicate the immediate promise of individuals being able to make a meaningful, specific, if even modest, contribution to the change (the old starfish on the beach story). The quick tactic? Intensive major and medium-sized individual donor campaign. A "ya'll come" solicitation letter to large donor list was just not enough, nor the right approach.