So let’s say you are interested in a global issue like world hunger. Perhaps you had a vacation in India and were dazzled by the beautiful sights, bright colors, delicious food, and welcoming people. But you were also deeply disturbed by the poverty and living conditions of some of the people there. You may have seen people that you thought were literally starving and did not know what to do about it. So you returned to your home in the United States and hoped to find a way to make a difference, through a donation or other means.

Like many people might, you sit at your computer, go to your favorite search engine, type the words World Hunger in the search box and click on Search Web. You will certainly get, at the top for the results page, a group of links to nonprofits or Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that have paid for that top placement because their mission is to fight world hunger. Below that you will find links to reports on world hunger, publications, and perhaps a blog posting about hunger issues. You may choose to do some research on sites that are more academically, historically, or religiously based. Or you may go directly to the web site of one of the aid agencies that fights hunger.

When you visit this NGO site, what do you find? Well, I just did that and clicked on the first site in the top box of my screen; I will not give you their name.  I came to an organization home page that shows their logo, a small box with some statistics, and a large photo that dominates the page of a small, dirty child with pleading eyes and an empty bowl. A video immediately starts playing about a young child and the miserable conditions she lives in. It does not show her gaining assistance from the organization or anyone else; indeed she seems to live with her helpless siblings in isolated misery. The only navigation buttons on the page are ones where I can send this video to a group of my friends, and where I can donate money, one for a one-time gift and one for a monthly gift. Surprisingly, there are no navigation buttons anywhere on the site to tell me about this organization, who works for them, what countries they work in, how they distribute food, what their strategy is, and what kind of results they have. They only have their address (a PO box) and phone number.

Photo by Susan Hardman (not taken from NGO site)

With this organization, there is nothing for me to do or learn. My only choice for engagement or interaction is to give money electronically; no chance for human interaction, for building solidarity with people who are starving, for learning about hunger issues or contributing anything but my money. I am an intelligent, curious, well-educated, resourceful, energetic, able-bodied person who wants to make a difference and in this instance I am reduced to a nobody (who can use his charge card). Worse than that, the child in the picture and those in the video are reduced to ciphers, shallow representations of victims, with no resources in their families, communities, environments, no inherent potentialities. They are solely objects of pity.

This may be a wonderful and effective organization. However, through my first and only interaction with it, I have learned that it is patronizing to me and its beneficiaries. It is not interested in anything but my money and will take that through a cold white electronic form. Since it is not willing to tell me anything up front about how well it uses the resources it collects, I would assume that I will get no report of how my contributions have made any difference after they have been given. There is nothing on the site to indicate they are connected to any other organizations, ones that sanction nonprofits or even ones that guarantee secure financial transactions on websites. I wish them well but go to another site.

The example above is real and not exaggerated in the lack of information available on their site. However, it is an extreme example that illustrates an outmoded way of engaging people to help with a mission. The newer way is to be transparent, informative, engaging, have options for people to create their own interactions, and in the end allow people to use the richness of their gifts (and not just their money) to assist with a problem. I believe that people are looking for meaning, connectedness, to be recognized and to be useful. They are also aware of how much we have to give to something we care about. Some organizations understand this and are using the knowledge effectively.

The Hunger Project is a great example. Their home page is full of information, but is not cluttered. It depicts people, in photos and stories, working toward their own self-reliance. They have clear buttons leading to sub-pages describing who they are, what they do, and where they work. When you click on their Get Involved link, you come to a page that gives you options for a whole list of ways to give financially as well as options for corporate sponsorship, volunteering, support their business partners, attending or hosting events, traveling with them to their work sites to help, and working with them as an employee, an intern or a pro bono technical supporter. In other words, you can choose to interact with their mission solely through the web, at their offices, just with other supporters, or in the countries they serve. They actually mean it when they say get involved.

Photo from The Hunger Project site

The Hunger Project web page also has information available in different formats (including video), has a report of their results, and shows Hunger Project as being recognized by 3 rating organizations.  In other words, this organization gives me self-determination; just as it gives it to the people it serves. It also recognizes my individual preferences and ability to give various types of gifts; just as the people it serves have ways to contribute. It assumes that I will do research to make sure my gifts are used effectively. It even has a program for me to do direct face-to-face work with the people that it serves. This is not only an organization I would want to engage with, it serves as a great example to other organizations.

A question always looming over donor relationships is: how ready is the organization for lots of really passionate people to engage and invest with them, not just donate? How can they balance their strategic plans and methods with the influence of their contributors, be they donors, volunteers, or beneficiaries? I call this openness to non-staff contributors, organizational permeability. Hosting these non-staff members takes staff or volunteer time, which can be draining to needed resources. If those people are forceful and have significant amounts of money to donate, they will also want to help determine the goals and strategies of the organization. And, if unguided, these passionate givers may create “mission drift”, where the priorities of the organization alter to accommodate a particularly influential or generous donor.

I believe that deflecting the passion of these people and walling them off from true engagement is a waste of potential assets. It can turn away both their financial resources and everything else they may have to contribute. The clear alternative to this is to seek their involvement and guide them to an understanding of the organization’s planning and strategies. This can be achieved by giving contributors well crafted choices of communication formats and levels of engagement, which will reveal and develop their interests and capacities. Meanwhile, balancing the benefits of permeability and contributor engagement against the dangers of contributor demands and mission drift will need to be perennially considered and calibrated by nonprofit organizations.

[Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with The Hunger Project in any way and have never visited their web site before. Therefore, I cannot vouch for any of their work – beyond their web strategy and implementation, which is excellent. Check them out for yourself!]

This is actually another post on the relationship of certain business models to generosity, but is not called The Business of Generosity (Part 5) because the series is getting too long and this post seeks the underlying ideas related to the quality of generosity.

I wrote in an earlier post about Kevin Kelly and his ideas about a new economy growing out of the basic free nature of internet products. Here, in a Wired article by Chris Anderson, is an even more direct article about how free is currently working as an e-business model. It is interesting to read, not only because he gives a wonderful example from the past (Gillette razor blades) but because he goes on to break down different business models in which free works. Why does it feel like free should be capitalized in this context, as if it is the name of a model (Free)? Anderson also applies the word abundance and refers to a gift economy, formerly terms associated with the cultural fringe of hippie communes and visionary socialists. Here is a short video presenting the context for this discussion:

These ideas, that our economy has a dominant and growing section based around things being given away, are very exciting. Imagine actually having a functional gift-economy based on an abundance model? This might mean that if we can give all people access (and that is a big if), that quite suddenly the have-nots will not be separated from the haves and we might have socio-economic equity at a level never possible before. However, I am also very concerned about the term generosity being applied to this. After all, at this point no matter how much is given away free, it is in the name of fueling the huge revenues of for-profit companies like Google and Yahoo. It cannot be called a model based on manipulation, however businesses have made corporate profits the goal of all this “free”-dom.

Here is a slideshow by Neil Perkins about marketing based on a free and generosity model. Part of it is clearly aimed at sales and new kind of aggressive marketing. And part of it is about growing meaning and happiness for everyone. Are we being old fashioned thinkers in seeing these two intents as mutually exclusive? Have a look:

My big concern is that generosity gets pulled into this new thinking, where marketing for financial profit also promotes altruistic values about improving life and spreading happiness. Perhaps we need a new word for generosity because by definition that quality is not self-interested. The word derives from the Latin generosus ‘noble, magnanimous’, and magnanimous derives from the Latin magnus ‘great’ + animus ‘soul’. If sales techniques are also promoting human values at the level of our souls, that will not only require new ways of thinking about what it means to be human, but will require new language to describe it. I hope I am not being jaded and rigid here, since unimaginable positive change may be within reach.

Back in July, I posted a story about the economist C.K. Prahalad and his idea that the poorest people in the world can be assisted by allowing them participate in our consumer systems, that is marketing products specifically for them to buy. That posting might have been called The Business of Generosity (Part 1) but it predated this series.

KickStart is a company doing just that: marketing to the world’s poorest people, with products that will help them better live off of the land and provide them income. Their mission is to,

Get millions of people out of poverty quickly, cost-effectively and sustainably. And, in doing so, change the way the world fights poverty.

They are most famous for their Super MoneyMaker water pump that uses human power – pumped with the legs much like an exercise stair-climber to move water so small fields can be irrigated. They have sold over 100,000 MoneyMakers so far, creating over 70,000 enterprises, and moved 340,000 people out of poverty. The pump cost under $40 and they have developed a new pump that costs the consumer even less: $30. That seems both low cost (for us) and very expensive (for them) but increases farm income by 1000% on average. They have clearly found ways to set an affordable price point and market to their audience.

The company was formed by two men, Nick Moon and Martin Fisher, who were extremely well educated and encountered real poverty in the developing world. They decided to do something to change global poverty. The thing that I find so generous about this effort is their attitude that people living in persistent poverty have strengths, intelligence, and ambition that can be developed where they are and in their own cultural context. They are not saying, here take this grain and eat it (which can foster dependency), grow these new crops, or sell this product (which is more the way of the developed world). Their efforts are to give the people basic, high quality, well designed tools suited to their specific needs. Even without their impressive success numbers and continued engineering refinements, I think this honors the people they serve and engages them as true partners in making change. To me, working to understand people fully, beyond our preconceived notions, is truly generous.

From their website:

The Poor are Not Victims
To define people by their conditions rather than their qualities is dehumanizing. When you look past the poverty, you see abilities, resources, and desires. The poor are extremely hard-working and entrepreneurial–they must be just to survive. They don’t want or need to be rescued. They want an opportunity to create a better life for their families.

There is a whole movement of social entrepreneurship now where people are using a market-based approach to help make significant change in the world, sometimes addressing the most intractable or desperate problems. Instead of creating change through volunteering or political action, these are enterprises with social programs as a core part of their business plan. It is kind of like building a charitable program with the funding source built in. This is significantly different from a for-profit business like Toyota, whose business is to sell cars, partnering in a social cause effort (sometimes called cause marketing).

One of the most famous, and financially successful of these philanthropic entrepreneurs is Jonathan Greenblatt, who worked on the X Prize and helped found Ethos Water. He has gone on to publish Good Magazine, which combines entertainment with social change and makes charitable donations as part of its business plan. You can check him out in an interview on the wonderful National Public Radio program Speaking of Faith. Ethos Water has grown so big it is now competing with some of the big bottled water producers. A portion of the income from every bottle purchased goes toward humanitarian water programs around the world. The X Prize Foundation gives large cash prizes to teams that look to achieve things like sending a robot to the moon, producing a super-efficient car, and finding ways to use personal genetic information to prevent disease. Their method inspires people to put millions of their own dollars into the development of these products, which multiplies the benefits gained. Greenblatt says that he now is working with the X Prize Foundation on using the model to address persistent poverty.

Is this generosity or is this just smart business – appealing to the altruism of its customers so it can make them feel good about consuming and sell more products? When people are financially successful and things grow to a larger scale this basic question gets harder and harder to answer. After all they are marketing to us to fund programs for people who do not have what we have. The entrepreneurs get a viable business and compensation for their work, we pay for a product and get it – along with the knowledge we are helping a worthy effort, and the beneficiaries get something they need: a win-win-win situation. However, the opportunity for personal gain at the expense of others, or the original values of the enterprise, must be rife.

One company I find charming in its directness and ebullience is Tom’s Shoes, started by Blake Mycoskie. Tom’s produces simple espadrille type shoes that are commonly warn in Argentina (called alpargatas). These are available in all type of fabrics, colors and patterns. For every pair of shoes you buy, Tom’s gives a pair of shoes to a needy person or child. Those people get the same basic shoe you do. Since 2006, they have given away 85,000 shoes in Argentina and South Africa. Having shoes to wear can fight significant health problems from cuts and infections in the developing world, where people often have to walk long distances to get water and other supplies. Tom’s also engages high school and college kids in a program to distribute the shoes (called a Shoe Drop) and to travel around the country talking to their peers about issues of poverty and promoting social entrepreneurship, and of course Tom’s Shoes.  From their web site, the whole enterprise looks like it is fueled by joy, which is not surprising given the benefits they are distributing. And I love that the consumer uses the same product as the beneficiaries. That connection emphasizes that we all have the same basic needs and just how small the world is now.

One of the definitions of generosity is: freely giving more than is necessary or expected. It certainly seems like these companies are doing that. Is bears watching what freely means to them as they grow and prosper.

One of the trepidations I have about charitable giving is that writing a check to a charity can actually distance me from the people I am concerned about. So if I am concerned about teen pregnancy, writing a check can actually put a barrier between me and girls who get pregnant before age 18.

How could that be? Well it may involve factors having to do with my internal conceptions. I may use charitable donation as a way to emphasize that I am different from those too-young women saying, look how different I am – I am even empowered to offer my financial resources, while they are needy.

Another way that simply donating might maintain the difference between me and them is by making me feel that I have answered my concern, quenched my care, by contributing. Problem solved; no need for further action.  Also if I feel that I have done my part, I may never learn more about who those young mothers-to-be are and may continue to walk around with my opinions, my misconceptions (pun intended!) and my biases intact. These may include that pregnant teens are all poor or from bad neighborhoods.

If the nonprofit where I send my donation uses stories about teens that are the most desperate, in an effort to motivate my financial giving, it may do nothing to help re-educate me. If they do not include a program to engage me, not just volunteering for them but engaging me with that population in some way, I may remain at a distance. And if it sends me a hat with the name of the organization on it or a tote bag with its slogan, I may be even more sure that I have made a big difference, and less motivated to actually get involved.

What I am getting at here is that if you are concerned about a specific population or problem, really concerned, then it behooves you to get personally involved. In that case, your financial contribution is just one of the things you should give along with your curiosity, your skills, muscle, time, energy, voice, etc. or at least a few of these.

And in the end, I believe you need to risk creating a relationship with those people or that issue. In relationship, you will really find out about at least one of those teen mothers-to-be and will understand her gifts, strengths, and potential as well as what she needs for support. As the same time, she might find out about you and your vulnerabilities, wants, and cares as well as the gifts you have to give.

So how do you do that? If you have local concerns, it should be pretty easy to volunteer at a local charity and get engaged in a way that you can get real with some of their beneficiaries. This might be feeding the hungry in your town, or tutoring young men in a local prison.

If you are concerned about people who are far from where you live, in Africa or Central America for instance, you still have some opportunities to establish real in-person relationships. One of those is through your personal travel. There is an article today in the New York Times about travel efforts and companies that have philanthropic components. There are also international volunteer opportunities; so that you can use your vacation time to go somewhere and work to support people who need it (you can do that domestically as well!). For this option, you may want to start with the United Nations Volunteer program, World Volunteer Web.

Finally, and this is probably the most challenging, is a Pilgrimage of Reverse Mission because it,

does not include constructing buildings or providing specialized medical services in impoverished areas. A ‘pilgrimage of reverse mission’ is about building relationships…

This is a program of a Christian organization called the Ministry of Money. They seek, through these journeys to help the travelers they host to,

• express our gratitude,
• acknowledge our responsibility,
• become agents of systemic change and reconciliation, and
• be responsive to new forms of discipleship.

It is about being present with people who are the poorest of the poor to create meaningful relationships with them. Sounds challenging and risky? Yes it certainly looks like it. Even if you are not able to take that big step, find a way to establish a relationship with someone who belongs to a social group you are concerned about deeply. It will teach you so much more about them and about yourself. You will help just by your being truly present with them. And you will have a clearer idea of how much and what other ways you can give generously to them.

At this point, Marilyn Mock is well known for her generosity. For those who missed this news item in the election frenzy, I will recount it briefly here. Ms. Mock went to a real estate auction in Dallas in late October to help her son buy his first home. During the bidding on another property, she saw a woman crying in the audience, unusual at a real estate auction, and asked her what had happened. It turns out that Tracy Orr had lost her house to foreclosure and had come to the auction because the home was central to her life; she needed to see it go and get some closure on it. Ms. Mock decided to bid on the house so that Ms. Orr could live in it again. The two sat together as she did and purchased the house for just under $30,000. When the bidding was over, the distraught Orr had disappeared. Ms. Mock found her in the hallway, and so did a local news team. Since then she has been on Good Morning America and has been approached by bookers from the Oprah, Ellen, and Dr. Phil shows.

Marilyn Mock: "People need to help each other and that's all there is to it."

What interests me about this is how Ms. Mock acted and then reacted to all of the attention. I am sorry I cannot put the video right in this posting, but you can click on the link to see her in the video. Tracy Orr is upset and moved in the video. Ms. Mock is smiling and hugs Orr warmly. She will hold the mortgage and Orr will pay her; she has jumped into a relationship with this complete stranger. What is interesting to me is that, from all appearances she acts as if she has done nothing unusual, nothing out of character from the fabric of her life. After the hug Marilyn Mock and her son turned away and walked down the hallway as if changing someone’s life was just a normal errand, while they were out.

If you are in business, your primary aims are to produce and promote your products and to make money. Here two commentators add to that the idea of also being generous. The first is Masimba Biriwasha, a freelance writer and children’s book author from Zimbabwe and living in Thailand. He writes on Oh My News International, a training center for young journalists and on-line publishing opportunity based out of South Korea.

In How to Be a Generous Entrepreneur, Mr. Biriwasha gives tips about being generous in business such as ensuring that the business is financially stable before giving donations and considering the non-financial benefits that a corporation can provide to support charitable efforts. He also writes about including generosity as part of the business plan and is careful to caution against being charitable solely for the purpose of marketing and good public relations.  This balance between being charitable for its own sake, or the sake of the recipients, and for the sake of income for the company is interesting. Although Biriwasha  writes,

As part of this vision it must be clear to the entrepreneur that generosity is not some sort of a media stunt aimed at boosting the fortunes of the business. Generosity must be practiced in its own right and not as a hidden agenda.

he also writes,

In essence, generosity can open up new opportunities for the endeavors of the business person. At the same time, generosity has a boomerang effect which can help to propel the fortunes of a business.

Biriwasha’s last section is called Start Inside and in it he speaks to aligning the entrepreneur’s personal life with his corporate actions:

This is perhaps the important tip on developing a reputation as a generous entrepreneur because everything that a business does reflects the character and content of his or her life. When a paradox exists between an entrepreneur’s generosity and their private life, it can spell doom. The entrepreneur must always make a conscious effort to ensure that they are generous with employees and family. As the old adage goes, if it doesn’t begin in the home, it will not go far. Generosity must begin within the entrepreneur’s own organization.

Although Brirwasha is a young man and may have limited experience operating within a large company, he is reaching to grapple with issues that should be on the minds of everyone in corporate leadership. These are about the relationship between the corporation and the community it is part of and whether it should act altruistically or strictly in its own interests, even when being charitable.

Kevin Kelly helped co-found Wired Magazine about a decade ago and is now busy with 9 blogs on the web. One of them is The Technium, which is part of a book in progress about “the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” In a posting called Better Than Free, he writes about the internet as a giant copy machine, where information, images and sound is available in unlimited amounts. He states:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Then Kelly gives 8 qualities of things that cannot be copied, and thus become valuable in a networked economy. They include immediacy, personalization, and findability. It is worth reading the whole article if you want to click on the link, because Kelly is making a case that our old economy will not work as it had because so many people have access to what they need, for free. He writes,

These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse.

Who would have thought that advanced technology and the internet would bring us to a place where things that drive business income, that are financially valuable, “must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured”, like generosity? It will be interesting to see how this evolves beyond observation of current web phenomena and theory into a viable business model built around generosity.