Top 10 Things I've Learned About Transparency

 
As readers of my blog know, FORGE successfully emerged from the financial crunch that had us all preparing for the worst. We are far from done worrying about what will happen to us in 2009, but the immediate threat of closing down in February is at least conquered. In the end, about 40% of the donations that helped us close that gap came from donors who had learned of FORGE through the "transparency" buzz surrounding my blog. The rest came from the generosity of our existing donor base who reached deeper into their pockets to help us in a time of need.

Because of this short-term 'success' at closing our funding gap, I've had several people and organizations approach me to ask how they might be able to replicate the transparency strategy. And yet, FORGE’s transparency does not mean that any nonprofit can go out, be transparent, and expect to have services thrown at them. Transparency is not a magic bullet. That’s not to say, however, that transparency isn’t a helpful value to adopt - both for the organization and for the sector at large.

Over the next two weeks, I'm going to share with you the Top 10 Thoughts on Transparency that have coalesced for me in the past 3 months. Here goes with the first one:

Lesson 1: Transparency is a Value, not a Strategy
  
The first thing I've told people who've asked me how they can apply transparency to benefits their own ventures is that you can’t just ‘choose’ transparency as a response strategy to a certain situation - people will see right through that. In order to be trusted and to have your message resonate, you need to build and maintain a track record of openness & honesty in all different situations.

In order for people to respond on a visceral basis to an organization's "transparency", they must be able to trust the messenger. In order for them to trust the messenger, the messenger must have a track record of being transparent and authentic in cases where it was less urgent or potentially adventageous to be so. Therefore, an organization cannot just turn to 'transparency' as a strategy to help them get out of a crisis - they must first show that it is a value throughout the organization.

The public's inherent distrust of strategies came up repeatedly during the past few months as FORGE generated attention for its "radical transparency". Many people who were not familiar with our background expressed the concern that FORGE coming out publicly in response to a crisis situation did not represent true transparency. In order to be able to respond to that legitimate fear, it's been really important to be able to show the ways in which transparency has been a value that we've demonstrated throughout our history. We may not have had a crisis like this before, and our transparency may not have generated this kind of attention before, but we’ve always been straightforward about both our successes and our failures. For example, we post each project's Monthly Progress Report in full on our website without removing the parts about the project's problems, issues, or concerns. In my own blog, I've talked about issues we've faced and difficult decisions we've had to make. And when people ask questions or express concerns, we are there to answer them frankly and publicly.

While we never actually called it transparency until recently (it is a bit of a buzzword), the value of being open and honest about our successes, failures, mistakes and lessons is one that has shaped every aspect of FORGE and its evolution. Five years in, it ended up helping us get out of a crisis in a wholly unexpected way. And yet, I hold that transparency is not a tactic that can be turned to when times get tough. Because in the end, people are rightly suspicious of being taken advantage of. They must trust you to invest in you. And trust can only be built through consistent action over time.

- Kjerstin Erickson
www.FORGEnow.org