Via Overcoming Bias:

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88 [1]. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved - the scope of the altruistic action - had little effect on willingness to pay.

Why?

People visualize “a single exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, unable to escape” [4]. This image, or prototype, calls forth some level of emotional arousal that is primarily responsible for willingness-to-pay - and the image is the same in all cases. As for scope, it gets tossed out the window - no human can visualize 2000 birds at once, let alone 200000. The usual finding is that exponential increases in scope create linear increases in willingness-to-pay - perhaps corresponding to the linear time for our eyes to glaze over the zeroes; this small amount of affect is added, not multiplied, with the prototype affect. This hypothesis is known as “valuation by prototype”.

An alternative hypothesis is “purchase of moral satisfaction”. People spend enough money to create a warm glow in themselves, a sense of having done their duty. The level of spending needed to purchase a warm glow depends on personality and financial situation, but it certainly has nothing to do with the number of birds.

Categories: Incentive Centered Design, Philanthropy
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The one thing each donor had in common? Recognition of KIPP’s past performance. Like it or not, this is what donors are after: an assurance that their donation will produce results. And school choice critics can bash KIPP until they’re blue in the face, but KIPP has produced results that are not merely outstanding and quantifiable, but predictable. These donors clearly believe that KIPP can expand and retain its same high standards. Could they be wrong? Sure. But it’s a calculated risk they’re willing to take.

Donors are funding the Knowledge is Power Program because they measure and deliver results.

via Joanne Jacobs

Categories: Education, Governance, Metrics, Philanthropy
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Via The Onion, Alternative Spring Break Devolves Into Real Spring Break:

“We owe a debt to these students for providing my family with a home, but I was expecting glass in the windows and a ground floor,” said Mavis Riggs, whose original house was completely destroyed. “Converting the new septic tank into a hot tub was inventive, but we really won’t get a lot of use out of it. Or the barbecue pit, which I think was meant to form part of the foundation.”

The article gets bonus points for the shout out to my Alma Mater in the second paragraph. An AnonymousSister reported back from her Alternative Spring Break in an AnonymousLatinAmericanCountry with a similar experience.

Why pay professional house builders to build houses when we can spend twice as much to do it ourselves, party while we’re at it, and feel good along the way?

Categories: Funny, Philanthropy
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Wow, talk about feeling good about helping rather than actually helping. Some data on Bono’s Red Campaign:

• Total spent on making Bono more famous = $100million.
• Total spent on drugs for Africans = $18million.

How self serving is it that celebrities would rather spend millions of dollars promoting how much they than make the large scale donations or encourage the structural reforms that can make an impact?

Categories: Marketing, Philanthropy
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From the Donor Power Blog:

You can’t go wrong if you think of your donors as your owners. They’ve invested in you, and demand some kind of return for their investment. Not money, but a better world. It’s something you need to deliver — and clearly let them know you’ve delivered.

I’d go one further - think of your donors as shareholders. They have lots of choices about where they can invest their donations, and they’ve chosen to invest it with you. That means you have to treat them like you would shareholders by delivering results, measuring them, and communicating information about your organization. At the same time, your service recipients are your customers, and you need to treat them as such by providing value for them, because that’s what your shareholders demand of you.

If you’re going to be responsive to your donors as shareholders, you need to run like a business, by determining what your objectives are, measuring performance and outcomes, and then communicating that information to your donors so they’re motivated to invest in you again.

Update: Duh! If I had read further in the post, I would have noticed he already advocated Donors as Shareholders. Donor Power Blog, you are so empowering!

Categories: Business and Economics, Marketing, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Googling around I found this Jewish Week article on why Jewish mega-philanthropists aren’t donating to Jewish causes:

Our annual research of mega-gifts — gifts above $1 million — turns up at least 50 people who could match or exceed Stanton’s generosity. Typically, these are wealthy Jewish business leaders who give only relatively modest gifts to Jewish causes.

It’s tempting to write these people off as uncommitted Jews, but it would be wrong.

If Jewish causes want to receive mega-gifts, they have to prove themselves worthy. They have to compete on equal ground with the secular hospitals, symphonies, museums and universities, all of which court and inspire Jewish donors.

The money-paragraph at the end:

Look at it this way: Today’s philanthropists think like investors, because that’s how they got wealthy. They want their money to achieve a return; they want results.

That means Jewish causes need to change the way they run their businesses.  Want to attract investment?  You need a clear definition of what you hope to accomplish, a strategy for accomplishing it, and clear metrics that demonstrate your progress.  Even more importantly, those metrics have to reflect your goals, not your activities.  Non-profits, especially in the Jewish community, need to treat their donors like corporations treat their shareholders, and start to demonstrate real, measurable results.

Categories: America, Community, Governance, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Rosner’s domain interviewed Jewish demography expert Dr. Ira Sheskin:

Where the lowering of the numbers will have an impact is on small Jewish communities. A Jewish community of 10,000 which now supports, say, 3 synagogues, a JCC, a kosher butcher, and several Jewish agencies and organizations, may very well lose some of this infrastructure if, say 20 years from now, the population is down to 5,000. So the impact of the lowering of the Jewish population will be at the local level more than at the national level.

Many resources in the Jewish community are being applied now by Jewish Federations and Foundations throughout the country to assure the Jewish future. Sheldon Adelson just started a foundation which will provide $200-$250 million per year in grants to Jewish communities. The challenge is to devise programs and services that will provide a quality of life within Jewish communities that will keep people wanting to be Jewish.

Dr. Sheskin also addresses intermarriage later on, though he tacks differently than i would. For those interested in Jewish demographics, most research studies are available for free online from the Jewish Databank. There, you can find the summary reports of most community and national studies, as well as the raw data for many of them, including the National Jewish Population Survey.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Polling
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The GapMinder foundation has a cool tool hosted by Google that lets you compare graphs of development variables against each other over time.  It defaults to Life Expectancy vs. Income per capita, but you can chart other variables as well.  You can see some very interesting movements when you play with the time slider.  Genocides show up as major dips in life expectancy - look at Cambodia in the 70s, Rwanda in the 90s.  To see the impact of AIDS, look at Zimbabwe or South Africa more recently.  A fun tool to play with, though it doesn’t have nearly as much data as some other visualization sties out there.

Categories: Business and Economics, Metrics, Philanthropy, Politics, Science, Technology
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BusinessWeek has an interview with Bruce Bickel of PNC Financial Services group about how to get kids started in philanthropy. An exerpt:

What happens with older kids?
At age 17 or 18, the teens become family foundation “interns.” They come to the board meetings, they listen, and they can participate. They have no authority, and they don’t vote. By the time they turn 19 or 21 or 30, they have sat through all of this, they understand their beliefs and values, they understand the hearts of their mom and dad and what they want to represent.

I had a long post with my take, but I realize that it might be flawed on its assumptions, so I’m still thinking about it. The interview comes from a much larger BusinessWeek section on philanthropy that I just discovered.

Categories: Business and Economics, Education, Philanthropy
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Kevin Bacon has leveraged his high network centrality into a charitable initiative, sixdegrees.org, which connects individuals to celebrities who advocate for a charity, or allows you to become a celebrity for a charity of your choice.  Somehow, it then networks people together, though I don’t really get how, and my guess is that the site cost more to put together than it’s raised so far.

Via Philantrhopy 2173.

Categories: Community, Information Markets, Matching Mechanisms, Philanthropy, Social Software, Technology, Users as Partners
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The cool kids in the Jewblogosphere , which I’m just starting to navigate into (thanks mom for the advance recon!), are debating whether social justice is central to Judaism. It starts here, they’re going all week, and Canonist has already chimed in a bit. They raise different points that I might take on later this week, but I’m going to tackle something else today.

The entire debate makes the same mistake that the Jewish community always does by confusing social justice with Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). Tikkun Olam is making the world a better place, very broadly defined. It influences everyday interactions like how you perform at work, how you treat your neighbors, what you do with your empty beer can, and whether or not it’s OK to cheat on your taxes, just to name a few.

In contrast, social justice is still very narrow, and usually means leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist political leanings. Income redistribution is seen as social justice, but it doesn’t usually make the world a better place (see, Zimbabwe). If you count equal rights in the picture, you get another amorphous concept. Should we treat everyone equal, or make everyone equal? Because social justice is so narrowly defined, and because there’s real philosophical differences that usually emerge from the popular definitions, it’s really tough to make it a viable central theme for the Jewish community.

Making the world a better place, in contrast, is simple to understand and gives powerful meaning to peoples lives. Contrary to what you may think, nobody else in the marketplace of religions is selling it, and it has wide appeal.

Here’s an anecdote to illustrate the difference. An recent college graduate becomes an engineer and figures out how to make a manufacturing process 7% more efficient. He has just made the world a better place, because now you can make 7% more product for the same amount of money, but he probably hasn’t made society any more just (and he may have even made it less just). For his efforts, he is rightfully compensated by the company he works for, and he takes $5000 of that money and donates it to a charity which uses local labor, and therefore can build and stock an entire library for his contribution.

Another graduate strongly believes in social justice, and decides that education in the developing world is important to them. Because of this, they forsake the salary and benefits of a first job, and instead travel to the developing world to build a school. They want to get their hands dirty. Though they’ve never worked in construction, jointly with a group of 20 other recent graduates, they spend 8 months in Ethopia helping a Western project manager to construct a rudimentary building that a village can then use as a schoolhouse. Of course, they couldn’t get paid to do this - they’re making the world more just, so they borrow money from their parents to pay the organization supporting them about $4000 to cover food and lodging, as well as another $1000 for transportation to get to Ethiopia. Remember it took 20 kids to do this.

I don’t mean to criticize the graduate who spent time volunteering abroad (OK, I do). More than that, I mean to criticize the communal values that define Tikkun Olam in such a way that the volunteer is somehow seen as helping the world more than the engineer. Whether or not Tikkun Olam was central to ancient Judaism doesn’t matter, it’s certainly central to modern Judaism, and it’s what Judaism brings to the table better than any other religion (or non-religion) competing for people’s attentions.

Judaism offers a lot. It is a culture rooted in laws for every day life, a revolution at its time, that are based around values that are still relevant today. What Judaism offers that gives meaning to peoples lives is an end state not of another world, but of this one. I don’t mean to get too theological in this (maybe another day), but I see Judaism as a partnership with God to make the world a better place. Does campaigning for equal rights do this? Absolutely, but it’s not the only way. Does buying only fair trade coffee? I’d argue not so much. But that argument - about how we’re going to make the world a better place - is another example of the richness of Jewish culture. It’s just one for another post.

Categories: America, Jewishness, Marketing, Philanthropy, Strategy
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The Donor Power Blog has a list of the 3 best times to ask donors for money:

#1 3 to 6 weeks after they’ve given
Hands down, without question, this is the best time to ask a donor to give. The #1 predictor of likelihood to give is recency of the last gift. A lot of nonprofits operate on the opposite assumption — that recency predicts unwillingness to give again. If you’re avoiding contact with recent donors, you’re losing significant opportunities to bond with happy, involved donors

Categories: Business and Economics, Information Economics, Marketing, Philanthropy, Strategy
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I’ve recently been complaining around the Shabbat Dessert Table (where my conversations about Jewish life happen) about the lack of a coherent vision in modern Judaism that was attractive to my generation. So when I stumbled on In Search Of The Next Big Jewish Idea in Jewish week, I thought I was getting my answer, something I could reference instead of the massive blog posts I was planning to write. Instead, I found an article that may as well have been titled “What should we throw money at next?” Here’s my breakdown of some key passages:

In recent years the most compelling and successful Big Idea to strengthen Jewish life has been birthright israel, the project begun by several mega-philanthropists who believed that young Jews around the world deserve, and would benefit from, a free 10-day trip to Israel, connecting them to their history, to the land of Israel and the people of Israel.

If Birthright is supposed to be the most compelling and successful Big Idea in the Jewish community, they’re starting from a bad position. “Free vacations” isn’t a Big Idea, it’s a bribe, and a dubiously effective one based on a poorly thought out premise. We are not off to a good start.

Studies show that these visits have a powerfully positive impact on most participants, strengthening their Jewish identity. (The biggest shame is that many additional thousands of young people have been wait-listed on birthright trips for lack of communal funds, with a number of federations failing to meet their own proposed budgets for these trips.)

I could go into an entire post - probably a journal article - about how these studies suck. They ask people who just got a free vacation an amorphous question about their Jewish identity and if it improved. Most importantly, though, Birthright participation is a major self-selection bias. If you want to do a good study, use the wait list as a control group, poll them both and compare the results, rather than compare participants to non-participants. But like I said, this is a topic for another post, and I’m getting off topic - where’s my Big Idea?

It was only fitting that CAJE held the symposium, since CAJE itself was a Next Big Idea when it was founded three decades ago by Jewish teachers as a counter-cultural, grassroots attempt to give support and attention to their work, underpaid and underappreciated.

Great! The big ideas are coming from CAJE, which the quality Jewish educators I know think of as crazy consultants who fly in from New York or LA to waste their time, and the crappy ones think of as the people who give them a paid day off. CAJE might have been a big idea at the time, but as far as big ideas go, I feel like it flopped pretty bad. Maybe things are different in New York, though. OK, let’s see what their panelists had to say:

Rabbi Elliot Dorf, rector of the University of Judaism, is concerned that Jews aren’t replacing themselves because they marry and start families late. How do we solve it?

His suggestion: encourage these young people to marry and have children while in graduate school, and for the community to create and subsidize affordable day care in Jewish institutions.

I don’t know if he’s clueless or just hasn’t thought this through, but Jews aren’t alone in marrying late, it’s a generational thing. Encouraging them to marry will drive more people away than it will attract - especially with the chaning nature of marriage as an institution. Affordable daycare is a great idea, but my intuition says that it will have a marginal impact on family size or start time.

My favorite, and the only one that makes sense to me is here:

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the president of the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, spoke of Steinhardt’s idea to articulate and disseminate a Common Judaism, a distillation of core Jewish values that speak to the widest possible audience of Jews today. Rabbi Greenberg added his own longstanding idea of creating a retreat center in the New York area.

The Common Judaism is important to me. It says “here is what Jews believe,” and creates a differentiating factor for Judaism in the marketplace of ideas that allows Judaism to compete for finite attention - which has a smaller budget than most Jews’ money-budgets. The retreat center is a stupid idea - there are enough opportunities for Jews to get sent into the woods to study, we don’t need another one.

Dr. Bethamie Horowitz, research director of the Mandel Foundation, asserted that “Jews don’t have to be cloistered” to live Jewish lives anymore, and that rather than ask “why be Jewish?” the question should be “why not be Jewish?”

That doesn’t even make sense to me. The answer to “why not be Jewish?” is because being Jewish is hard - it has added responsibilities and obligations. “Why be Jewish” is the question that identifies what you get for that extra effort. Her ideas sound like really stupid marketing spin to me.

Rabbi Jan Katzew, director of lifelong learning at the Union of Reform Judaism, said that “the single greatest problem” in his work is that “it costs too much to live a rich Jewish life.” He said that many leadership programs and quality day schools with high tuitions “enrich the rich and exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

I think Rabbi Katzew needs to redefine what it means to live a rich Jewish life. Cost is an issue if a) a rich Jewish life isn’t worth it or b) the costs are higher than the value of a rich Jewish life (can I teach Econ 101 at UJ?), or c) a rich Jewish life breaks the budget. A rich Jewish life shouldn’t have a dollar cost - not because schools and kosher food become free, but because you should be able to live a rich Jewish life without them. There is a nice opportunity for an Economics of Religion discussion here, but I’m not going to get into it.

Cyd Weissman, New York director of the Re-Imagine Project, called for “bringing down the walls” on a number of levels — between “learning and living,” between professionals and lay leaders, lay leaders and teachers, and to “create space” to foster a sense of “oneness.”

Quit smoking the doobie smackers. This is another one that doesn’t even make sense. Come up with something concrete, because the Jewish community doesn’t need more vague ideas. Everything I know about the Re-Imagine Project I just learned from their website, and it seems like a good idea, just not a Big Idea. It’s process improvement or strategic realignment for synagogues, but the synagogue is no longer the central Jewish communal institution.

The article ends on a question from an audience member:

A woman in my small discussion group said she and her husband raised their children with Jewish rituals, Hebrew school and synagogue attendance but that the children, now in their 20s, were not at all interested anymore.

“What can we do to bring them back?” she asked.

The problem is that ritual, Hebrew school, and synagogue attendance all need to provide value, or else they’re just a chore. If she had taught her children Jewish values in such a way that they served as some sort of guiding principle in their lives, or demonstrated the worth of being Jewish (and with the synagogues, rituals, and Hebrew Schools I’ve seen, it’s tough), it’s much less likely they would have left, and it would probably be much easier to bring them back.

This turned into a pretty long screed, but there were so few good ideas in that article, and my frustrations with the organized Jewish community are continuing to grow. The last thing the Jewish community needs right now is something else for a philanthropist to throw money away on, even though the philanthropists are lining up to do so. It’s time some serious thought was put into gathering the right data and coming up with real non-programmatic solutions to the problems faced by the community. This means reassessing human resources policies, allocations, governance structures, communal institutions, and coming up with a real strategy for providing Jewish meaning in the 21st century.

(this was too long for me to proofread, so if you catch anything, let me know)

I found the article through the canonist blog, and I’m not sure where I found that.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Nobelists Gary Becker and Richard Posner take a look at Charitable foundations:

The main case for giving tax breaks to individuals who set up foundations, and for exempting from most taxes the incomes that foundations earn, is to encourage decentralized private support of universities, health care, and many other activities, as opposed to relying only on centralized government support of these activities. Universities and other recipients in turn have to compete against each other for funds from the many foundations. I believe that such competition and decentralization of support encourages a more efficient use of resources by recipients, and makes it easier to finance unpopular art, music, or other activities that have difficulty getting support when governments are the dominant source of support. (Becker)

From another perspective:

I agree with Becker that the great strength of charitable foundations, and the principal justification for the tax exemption (though a secondary one is to offset the free-rider problem in charitable giving–if you give to my favorite charity, I benefit, and so the more you give the less I will be inclined to give), are that they bring about a decentralization of charitable giving, breaking what would otherwise be a governmental monopoly and thus reducing the play of politics in charity. In addition, however, to the extent that charitable giving substitutes for government spending, such giving (minus the tax benefits to the giver) represents a form of voluntary taxation, like state lotteries. Given the enormous skewness of incomes in today’s United States, it is good to encourage voluntary taxation of the wealthy. But I would not place much weight on competition by universities and other recipients of charitable giving for foundation grants, since the recipients will compete whatever the source; universities compete for government grants just as they do for private grants. (Posner)

In their full posts, there is more depth, as well as some noteworthy disagreements. My favorite observation comes from Posner’s next line, “a perpetual charitable foundation, however, is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody.”

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Governance, Law, Philanthropy, Politics
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For my friends who plan to marry a rich man to spoil them (and I have far more than you’d imagine), Forbes offers a Special Report on How to Land a Rich Man:

Of course, finding that big-time breadwinner is not as easy as it sounds. It’s all about knowing how and where to search. Enter the gurus with their sage advice.

“You’ll need to upgrade where you go,” advises Sayles.

“Hang out where the wealthy do,” echoes Johnson. That means drinking at their bars (think five-star hotels), dining at their restaurants (super high-end, of course) and playing their sports (golf, anyone?).

Another sure bet for Anna Nicole Smith-wannabes: charity events. Johnson says there’s no need to donate the big bucks. Just sign up as a volunteer–you’ll get a sneak peek at the guest list, an invite to the party and a free pass to mingle with the moneyed.

After that last paragraph, dare I categorize this under “philanthropy?” If seeking rich men gets attractive women to volunteer more, I am 100% in favor of it. After all, when they solicit they raise a full standard deviation more money, and I’m not convinced that anyone else at that party is there for fully selfless reasons.

Categories: Careers, Community, Dating, Matching Mechanisms, Philanthropy
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