OPINION
Smarter Strategizing Could Help Grant Makers Go to Bat for Global Health
By JOSH RUXIN
TALK about Moneyball is every- where. It’s not just the buzz about the film as Oscar voting
gets under way but also how the movie’s
tale of statistical empiricism vanquishing decades of conventional wisdom can
apply to business and education. Now
it’s time to think about how it applies to
philanthropy.
The big insights of Moneyball—that
careful analysis of data, smart allocation of resources, and the pursuit of undervalued strategies can create a great
baseball team—have broad and important relevance for grant makers. Even
better than in the world of baseball, applying the ideas to the nonprofit world
leaves no losers but lots of winners, including schools, the poor, the environment, global health, and many other
areas of philanthropic endeavor.
Michael Lewis, the well-known financial writer, coined the term “
moneyball” when he wrote a book about
how the Oakland A’s, despite a payroll
of just $40-million in 2002, used statistics to figure out how to outplay the average major-league team, which had a
$70-million payroll. That was a monumental achievement at a time when the
New York Yankees paid players a total
of $125-million a year.
In the foundation world, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation often plays
the role of the Yankees. In the mid-
1990s, when Bill and Melinda Gates
Overwhelmed by the Gates
foundation’s resources,
many foundations stopped
working on global health
issues. They missed
the lesson of ‘Moneyball’:
There are many ways,
some counterintuitive,
to get big hits.
decided to undertake efforts to improve
health care in developing countries, everyone thought they could essentially
pay for everything that needed to be
done. Overwhelmed by the financial heft
that Gates brought, many foundations
concluded that global health no longer
belonged in their portfolios. What they
missed, of course, was what Moneyball
teaches us: There are many ways, some
counterintuitive, to get big hits solving
health and other social problems.
At a time when foundations must
spread their money further to care for
the 7 billion people now living on our
planet, it is more important than ever
to figure out how to do more with less.
Already social entrepreneurs are
showing us how to accomplish this goal.
By creating solar LED lights and clean
cookstoves, they are transforming efforts to fight poverty around the world.
But foundations are frequently not at
the forefront of those efforts. Through
the judicious application of Moneyball
techniques, they can once again become the leaders of large-scale social
change.
One place for some big wins would be
for more foundations to return to making grants for global health.
For a relatively small investment,
foundations could support treatment
for neglected tropical diseases such as
intestinal worms and make a huge dif-
ference not just in health but also in
the economic progress of people in poor
countries. Data back up the big effects
that these tiny investments could make,
but few foundations have shown any in-
terest in taking action.
LUCY BERNHOLZ
Deconstructing the 10 Nonprofit Buzzwords That Made the Most Noise in 2011
THE WORLD has been buzzing all year about the “Arab spring,” “Occupy” movements, and the
“European debt crisis.”
Similarly, people in philanthropy
have their own lingo to describe their
preoccupations of the past year, par-
ticularly as the government’s financial
challenges and growing competition for
scarce donations put ever more atten-
tion on nonprofits that produce results
and know how to get their messages out
to the public.
Here, then, are the 10 philanthropy
buzzwords that capture the essence of
2011 for nonprofits:
10.
The most important buzzword of the
year is the Twitter hashtag. Philanthro-
py finally got hip to Twitter this year
(as did so many people, thanks to the
uprisings across the world and Twitter-
enabled TV shows). One great example
of how this Twitter convention has be-
come part of the lexicon was the Case
Foundation’s end-of-year #GoodSpot-
ting campaign, born to be memorable
and social-media-friendly, hashtag and
all. Forget about folks fumbling to come
up with “bumper sticker” statements
or even sound bites. #Whatmatters-
nowisthehashtag.
9. Amplify
Without a doubt, 2011 was the year
of “amplifying” philanthropy. Is it a social-media thing? Have we given up on
leverage? Scale? The Foundation Center held a conference called Amplify
Your Impact; the Tides Foundation, a
network of donor-advised funds, says it
helps donors “simplify and amplify”; the
Women’s Funding Network advises donors “Don’t filter, amplify”; and the Philanthropy Workshop West promises to
help generous wealthy people “amplify
and magnify” their work.
8. Disruption
Disruption is the new black. Clayton
Christensen, a Harvard business professor, began the trend with his classic
management books that outline what
he labeled disruptive innovation. This
is the kind of thinking that launch-es whole new industries rather than
just “new and improved” products.
He’s gone on to write books on how
to “disrupt” the health-care system
and elementary and secondary educa-
tion. I contributed to the theme with a
report, “Disrupting Philanthropy: Tech-
nology and the Future of the Social Sec-
tor.”
Others have written on disrupting
homelessness, media, technology, and
manufacturing. Disruption may soon
replace innovation as the most overused
and approaching meaningless term in
philanthropy.
7. Shape-shifting
Shape-shifting is what happens
when an organization changes corpo-
rate form, usually shifting from non-
profit to for-profit. In the 1990s, we
saw health-care organizations and
student-loan providers make this
shift, spinning off philanthropic foun-
dations.
6. Evidence-based
practice
Evidence-based practice got its start
in medicine, then spread into domains
such as education and nursing. The idea
is to make sure good quality research,
not just tradition or conventional wisdom, backs up the basics of how professionals do their jobs. Now evidence-
