geologic

The medium makes the matter matter

Lucy Bernholz

21 Nov 2008 • 2 min read

Two follow ups from earlier posts this week:

1) Yesterday I wrote this post on the Harvard Business Review article by Bradach, Tierney, and Stone, "Delivering on the Promise of Nonprofits," HBR, December 2008, pp 88 - 97. I've been deluged with emails saying that

the points about overhead are obvious and have been made by many,
people wishing they'd written the story,
people asking how to get copy of it (um, buy the magazine?),
people reinvigorating the debate about nonprofit overhead,
people reinvigorating the argument about rating nonprofits, and so on.

This is great - though I wish these folks would post these as comments so you could join the discussion. (hint, hint :))

Here's my point - the medium (the HBR) matters in delivering this message. Witness previous HBR articles on venture philanthropy and foundation value - this magazine has an impressive role in elevating topics within this sector. So whether or not you agree with the authors, think their point is well known and obvious, or spurious and wrong - MY Point is that the story is in the HBR and the HBR matters.

2) Earlier in the week I posted this:

Alliance for Social Investing Center For Effective Philanthropy ICMA measures, measurers, or intermediaries list geologic table evolutionary tree New Philanthropy Capital GiveWell Midot REDF Center for What Works

The Alliance is only one effort looking at this - it has no formal home or position, may or may not continue, and recognizes it is part of a broader landscape of efforts, which I tried to note in the post. My list in the post includes many of the others out there, and, of course because list making off the top of my head is dangerous, I forgot some - like Keystone, Great Nonprofits and a whole bunch of others (Many of which I had noted in this July post on how hard it is to even list all these groups - ah the irony!) Not all those listed above were at the meeting, not all those at the meeting were listed - MY Point in the post was that there are a LOT of these efforts and at the very least we need

list geologic table evolutionary tree

I was immediately encouraged that we need more than a list - we need to assess the assessors, rate the raters, compare the comparers. I could not agree more - I wrote about this same need in July. And one more thing, The Hewlett Foundation paper, which is set for launch on Monday, is making the rounds big time already. Though I did not post it on Tuesday I'll post it here: http://givingmarketplaces.org/. I hope I don't lose credibility for "leaking this" ahead of schedule.

So, I hope this post clarifies my earlier posts. It is November 21 and I will never meet my NaNoWriMo goal. Especially if I have to have re-write for clarity the few words I am getting written this month. But, I'm getting a lot of reading done and taking comfort in posts like this about bad writing.

Tags: philanthropy, hbr, metrics