Month: April 2014

I spent too much time and effort at my now defunct company worrying about people stealing my ideas. By the time I was wrapping up Idealistics, I thought about open sourcing the code I paid Github a monthly fee to keep private, all to realize it would have taken a ton of effort to get anyone to care that I was giving my software away for free.

If I had Idealistics to do again, I would have spent my energy spreading my ideas rather than paying to keep them secret.

I think there is a lot of value in being open regardless of the industry one is in, but there certainly is value in openness in the social sector. We’re supposed to be in the business of solving social problems after all.

Given the value of openess, and general rallying cry around nonprofit transparency, I can’t help but wonder why I’ve been coming across so many nonprofits intent on lawyering up to “protect” their intellectual property.

I’ve been doing a lot of contracting work recently. Really interesting stuff, and a bunch of insights that could probably help out a whole slew of social interventions. And I can’t tell you about any of it. I’m contractually obligated not to.

The social sector exists in this weird space between the public and private sector. We run private entities intended for public benefit. In the process we develop proprietary solutions to public problems.

That last sentence makes my head hurt.

We need to make a decision as to what we are, and what we stand for. You can’t have proprietary collective impact. The patent system is designed to allow companies to lock in competitive advantages to singularly reap the benefits of their investments over a period of time. Our investments are supposed to be public. So why the hell are startup social enterprises seeking patents on technological solutions to connect low-income families to social programs? Who benefits from those patents? Certainly not the public. Definitely not the poor.

I’m grateful to be working on an exciting range of contracts. While I’m under contract not to say anything about that work, going forward I’ll certainly be more open about my own ideas, even if I intend to monetize them.

If my ideas are any good, and can actually create real social value, be my guest and help yourself to my ideas.

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting recently, which has resulted in a several months long hiatus from writing on this site. Happily, my greater volume of consulting engagements has given me more opportunities to give people bad (and hopefully some good) advise, which means more content for Full Contact Philanthropy.

Recently I have been reflecting on some particularly bad advise I gave to one of my customers. Over the summer I was hired by a large provider of housing and homeless services to improve the operational speed at which chronically homeless clients were being placed into housing. The project went well, and by the end of the project the executive team was seeing the value data can bring to their organization on an ongoing basis

The executive director asked me to draft a memo outlining what the organization should look for in an internal analytics hire. Ideally, the executive said, the hire would be able to work both on social outcomes data as well as helping the development team improve its use of donor data. I advised the executive against hiring one person to oversee all of the organization’s data needs, as I felt there was value in having specific domain experience (such as a background in homeless services or fundraising) before jumping into an issue specific data set.

I was wrong.

By telling the executive he should hire two different analysts, I scared him off of bringing in more data talent entirely, as I took what already looked like a budget sheet stretch (one new hire with a non-trivial skill set) to something completely out of reach.

Furthermore, while domain experience is important, the organization already had sufficient internal domain expertise. The development folks know development really well. And the program team is top notch. What they didn’t have was internal capacity in sifting through the volumes of data the organization collected each day.

Instead of trying to argue for hiring analysts who intimately know the organization’s core mission, instead I should have advised a management structure where the development and program teams make data requests to a data team, allowing development and program staff to identify the right questions, and letting the data team (or individual to start) focus on answering those questions with the data available.

As I’ve thought about this issue further, and gotten a closer look at the data needs of both the program and development sides of nonprofits, the more I am convinced that having a Chief Data Officer (someone whose sole responsibility is focusing on the data needs of the entire organization) makes a lot of sense.

The idea of a Chief Data Officer has been growing in popularity in the for-profit world. There are some nonprofits that have had success employing chief data officers as well. However, the idea of the Chief Data Officer has not permeated throughout the social sector. Instead, the nonprofits that have employed heads of data have more obviously quantifiable interventions, generally nonprofits that focus on measuring online engagement like DoSomething.

However, there is an exciting, and much broader opportunity, for various types of organizations to bring in Chief Data Officers. Indeed, regardless of what your organization does, every organization (business, nonprofit, foundation, whatever) traffics in some sort of information. Given the importance of data, not just now but historically as well, a Chief Data Officer is as logical, and essential, a hire as good director of programs, development, and Chief Financial Officer.

I’ve complained before that the rhetoric around data in the social sector is too hallow, and thinking too shallow. Part of the block in moving from concept to action in realizing the value of data is that organizations have not invested sufficiently in figuring out how data works in their managerial structures.

Mario Morino rightly encouraged the sector to think more intelligently about how to manage to outcomes. Managing to outcomes is not just about outcomes reporting software, but investing in people and process. I couldn’t be more excited about the fact that my work is giving me the opportunity to help organizations think more seriously about how to build data cultures. It’s a theme I’m passionate about and plan to expand on more in subsequent posts.