3a 2013 Mark Kramer Transcript
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Mark Kramer FSG Redefining the Role of Corporations on Society 2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT
Mark Kramer
Mark Kramer FSG Redefining the Role of Corporations in Society
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SUSAN HYATT: Let’s get started by introducing you to MARK KRAMER. Mark is the Co-Founder and managing director of FSG, and he’s the author of a ton of really influential publications, on shared value, corporate social responsibility, catalytic philanthropy, strategic evaluation, impact investing, and adaptive leadership. Mark oversees FSG’s consulting practice, and helps drive the vision and growth of the firm. He’s led consulting engagement across all of FSG’s impact areas, with particular emphasis on philanthropic strategy for private and community foundations, CSR, and evaluation and impact investing. He also leads the research on many of FSG’s publications, and publishes regularly in the Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and is the coauthor of the book, Do More Than Give. He is a frequent speaker around the world on topics of catalytic philanthropy, collective impact, all the things he’s going to share a little bit with us today on. Just to give you a little bit of his background, before co-founding FSG, he served for twelve years as president of Kramer Capital Management, which was a venture capital firm. Before that, he was an associate at the law firm of Ropes and Grey in Boston, and he was a law clerk to Judge Alvin Ruben in the fifth circuit US Court of Appeals, so he has a very broad background that he’s bringing to all his work. So let’s get started. Mark, you’ve got a ton of experience, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your path, and give us some more details about FSG as well, please.
M ARK KRAM ER: Sure, thank you Susan, for this opportunity, I’m delighted to have the chance to talk with you. You know I actually grew up with a small family foundation that I was involved with, as a trustee. I had the experience of year in and year out, making grants to different very hard working, well meaning organizations, but finding they kept coming back the next year. The issues that we were trying to address, the social issues we were trying to solve, didn’t seem to be getting better. So, over the years, I’ve increasingly tried to learn about and focus on how does philanthropy actually solve social problems, how does it achieve change? That lead me about ten or twelve years ago, to start FSG with my colleague Michael Porter from Harvard Business School, and to really take a hard look at what strategy means in the context of philanthropy. When we started, FSG stood for Foundation Strategy Group, but as we’ve grown, we’ve worked not just with foundations, but with corporations, with nonprofits, with government agencies, with school systems. So we shortened it just to the acronym FSG. Today, FSG is a firm of about a hundred consultants, with offices around the U.S., in Europe, and Asia. We work on seventy five to a hundred different consulting engagements a year. We also publish a lot of articles and research reports that are intended to build and advance the field. We’re actually a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit ourselves. All of us here are really focused on trying to understand how to achieve social impact and help the organizations we work with deliver more impact per dollar.
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT
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SUSAN HYATT: That’s great. I think it’s a topic that more people need to pay attention to, this whole notion of philanthropy solving social problems, and creating change. I know I first ran across some of your work because you had written an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on catalytic philanthropy. I used that article in some trainings I was doing with state service commissions that do grantmaking, to try to get them to think about their role in a different way. So would you mind sharing with folks, a little bit about what ‘catalytic philanthropy’ is and how you view that; how it is different from what we traditionally know.
get other people involved. They couldn’t do it themselves. They really needed to pay attention to what progress was being made, to measure the impact that they were having, and to create knowledge about the issue. That could not only make them more effective in their work, but also influence other people. So out of this work, we realized there is a theory of philanthropy here that says it’s not about funding individual organizations, it’s not even about funding a particular solution. It’s about assembling the different elements of a solution that enable the people involved, many, many people, to be able to come up with the solution for themselves.
M ARK KRAM ER: Sure. I’ll say the reason that we got to this approach and the content of that article was a project we did a few years ago for the Gates Foundation. They came to us and said they wanted to promote more effective philanthropy, but they weren’t sure exactly what effective philanthropy looked like. So they asked us to go out and interview dozens of donors, who were thought by experts to be highly effective in what they did. We interviewed men and women, young and old, technology wealth, inherited wealth, and real estate, all different ways and backgrounds people came from.
The reason we called it ‘catalytic philanthropy’ is because a catalyst is a term from chemistry - it’s an agent that helps bring about a chemical reaction, but is not itself part of the reaction. We thought that was a great image for a donor, who is trying to bring about social change but is not him or herself directly able to use their money to purchase that change.
Frankly, we didn’t think we’d find anything in common. But what we did find was that all of these highly effective donors went through a learning curve. They started off really thinking about giving away money, and which of the organizations they should be giving money to. But over time, they became engaged with a particular issue, that had real deep personal resonance for them, and they stopped thinking about how do I give away money, and started thinking about how do I solve a specific problem. That completely changed their approach to philanthropy, because they realized that giving money to nonprofit organizations was only one way of solving a social problem, and not the only tool available.
When we think of catalytic philanthropy, we really think of four practices. First, the donors take responsibility for achieving results. That means they need to have clear, measureable, and attainable goals, and take ownership of the issues. Second, they’re really mobilizing a campaign for change, not just giving money, but engaging others, working together to assemble the elements of a solution. Third, they use all available tools, not just charitable donations, but advocacy, fundraising, convening, and investing. If they own or operate companies and are able to use the resources of their companies to help address the problem; they bring all the tools at their disposal together. Fourth, they build actionable knowledge, not just academic research, but real knowledge about the issue that improves their own effectiveness and can influence the behavior of others. So those four dimensions are what we think of when we think of ‘catalytic philanthropy.’
They realized that to achieve the impact they wanted, they really needed to mount a campaign for change to
SUSAN HYATT: Thanks for giving us a bit of an overview about that. As you work with donors, and
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT help them understand these four practices, what are some of the harder places for people to get to? M ARK KRAM ER: Well, I think it’s actually a lot more work. For a donor, it’s not that hard to write a check, to be honest. You can be responsive, people are coming to you to ask for money, and you make a decision and then give them a check. This really involves rolling up your sleeves and getting engaged in helping to solve a problem. To be honest, it takes a lot more time and a lot more effort. I sometimes think it’s the difference between philanthropy as a spectator sport, where you’re writing checks, and actually being a participant in the game. It’s a lot more effort to be in the game, but it’s also a lot more rewarding. SUSAN HYATT: Absolutely, and that’s a great metaphor. I think we can all understand what you’re getting at there. So, if somebody had been doing their giving in the old traditional way, and they see what you’re talking about, about leveraging more impact by following these practices, what’s the first step that you’d recommend folks think about doing? M ARK KRAM ER: The first thing I would say is that you should abandon check writing and all other philanthropy. We really find that when people are thinking about their philanthropy, they really respond to three different motivations. The first one is that everybody is part of a number of different communities. It could be the school that your child goes to, it could be the college you graduated to, your religion, the city you’re a citizen of, and there’s an obligation as someone with resources to help support those communities. In that sense of communal obligation, you don’t need to be a catalytic philanthropist; you just need to write some checks. The second category is really responding to the people who have asked for the money, who are colleagues friends, family members, business associates. A certain amount of our philanthropy always goes to causes, not because we really care about the cause,
Mark Kramer
but because of the relationship to the person who’s asked for it. That’s legitimate philanthropy too and important. It’s only this third area, where you’re really trying to bring about change in the world that is where ‘catalytic philanthropy’ is relevant. So keep writing checks; don’t feel like you have to abandon everything you’re doing to become a catalytic philanthropist. But, think hard about the issue that most matters to you, the one you really would be willing to roll up your sleeves and play in the game to help address. Then, begin to talk to people that are knowledgeable about the issue: nonprofits, other funders, and academics. Begin to really focus on the issue and think about what you really bring to the table besides your money. Because, in all of these examples of highly effective philanthropy, what people personally bring turns out to be much more important than the money. SUSAN HYATT: That’s great, thank you. I like the whole idea that really we have a portfolio, of things that we do that are under the label philanthropy. It’s not you need to throw out everything and do this, but there are these three motivations. I like that, thank you. Let’s shift gears a little bit. You’ve written a lot of other things that are really thought provoking. There’s a piece about collective impact, which is one of the articles you are sharing with attendees, and one about creating shared value as well. Tell us a little about collective impact. M ARK KRAM ER: It really does kind of grow out of catalytic philanthropy and this idea of a campaign for change, and the notion that funders can’t just come in and write a check to solve a problem. What we realize as we stepped back and looked at the nonprofit sector, there are a million and a half nonprofit organizations in the United States. 90% of them have budgets under a million dollars and each one is doing
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT its own thing in its own way without communicating or coordinating with the others. Frankly, that’s just the nonprofits, but any significant social issue of scale is also deeply affected by government, and deeply affected by for-profit activities of businesses. All of those organizations are also very fragmented, each doing their own thing without coordination. When you step back and think about, how we solve a problem like the failures of our education system, or environmental pollution, or homelessness, or unemployment, no one would suggest that the way you do it is to have a million different small organizations each doing their own thing without any coordination. In fact, that suggests that there are a ton of resources that are being spent that are not really necessary because we’re trying all these different fragmented approaches. We realize that philanthropy operates on a model of ‘isolated impact,’ where you as a funder pick a particular organization that you think does a good job and you fund them to make their program bigger, and to try and scale it up. But no large scale problem is really going to be solved by any single organization. So if we step back and say let’s move away from isolated impact, how do we think about achieving collective impact? We realize that solving social problems really depends on the interaction of many, many different organizations. Even though we might talk about working towards the same goal, like improving education, if we asked, each funder in each organization exactly what they meant, we’d find that each person has a different vision of what improving education really means. We also find that each organization measures their progress and evaluates their outcomes in their own way: defining terms as they wish, and measuring things in isolation from each other. So we really can’t even learn across different organizations, because we can’t tell if one organization is doing something more effectively than another, because we don’t have comparable data. ! !
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Mark Kramer
So out of that comes the theory of ‘collective impact,’ that says what we really need is to bring organizations together, to create a common agenda, a shared vision for change, so that all of the organizations touching on an issue: nonprofit, for-profit, and government, are working toward the same end. We really need shared measurement systems, so that everybody involved is measuring results consistently, and tracking the same outcomes. We need mutually reinforcing activities. Not saying every person, every organization should be doing the same thing, they each have different strengths and weaknesses. They should be doing the things they do best, but in a way that is coordinated with others. We need continuous communication, so that these organizations stay aligned and coordinated with each other. Above all, we need a separate organization that can function as a backbone to this collective impact initiative, that holds it together. We somehow assume that if you just put people in a room, they’ll begin to collaborate. But the fact is, collaboration is a lot of work, and it takes an organization that is dedicated to making sure that collaboration is continued over time, that the data is collected, that the meetings are facilitated, in order to keep something like this going. I would have thought that this is an absolutely impossible vision, this idea of collective impact, but what really gave us the idea was an initiative in Cincinnati, Ohio called Strive, which has brought three hundred different organizations together to improve education in Cincinnati. They realized there’s no point in improving preschool programs, if the school itself isn’t any good. There’s no point with after school programs, if kids aren’t going on to college. There’s no point in going to college if they’re not going to stay in college and graduate and get a career. So Strive came up with this idea of a cradle to career initiative. They said some of the factors are in the schools, and some of the factors are outside in the community and in the homes, that are necessary for
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our kids to succeed. Let’s put on a single sheet of paper, a road map, it says what needs to happen from cradle to career for a child to succeed, and then let’s get all of the organizations that are involved in this together, so they can see where their own activities fit in on this larger picture.
M ARK KRAM ER: It really is. We’ve seen organizations make real progress on large scale change, that no single individual organization can make. And there’s an essential role for donors to really be able to help initiate and fund the development of collective impact initiatives.
Let’s break it up into working groups, so all the after school programs meet together every two weeks, talk about what they’re doing, develop a shared measurement system to be able to compare their progress, learn from each other, identify issues. It’s the same thing for the preschool programs, the same thing for teacher trainings, and so on and so forth.
SUSAN HYATT: I strongly suggest that if you’re not familiar with this whole concept of collective impact, make sure you read the article that Mark has generously given that is posted on the website for you to download and read, because it really goes into more detail about this, because I think it’s the wave, we all need to be doing more of this. Absolutely. So thanks for sharing that. For those of you who really want to take it on this is a big effort, this could be a good time to call FSG to get some help.
This program has now been operating in nine school districts in the greater Cincinnati area for five or six years. They track about fifty different indicators of progress and issue an annual report card to the community about how they’re doing. It’s absolutely wonderful to see that in the last several years, first about 65% of the indicators were moving in the right direction, two years ago 75% were, last year 83% of them were. This is despite the recession and teacher lay-offs, and all of that. It’s just a much, much more effective way to work. Since we wrote that article and learned about Strive, we’ve been approached by about thirty or forty different organizations that are all using this collective impact approach, on issues as diverse as trying to fix the juvenile justice system in the state of New York, trying to reduce substance abuse in a small rural community, and trying to address global issues of malnutrition. It’s a really powerful framework and a powerful approach. SUSAN HYATT: Absolutely, it takes collaboration to a whole new level. Really the integration of all the different organizations and their comparative strengths and the piece of the whole continuum that they take on, interweaves them all together to really move the needle. That’s exciting, and it sounds tough.
M ARK KRAM ER: Absolutely. We’re working on about a dozen different collective impact initiatives that were helping launch. We can never be a backbone organization, we can’t be a long term presence, but we can help in the first six or twelve months, helping bring these things together. SUSAN HYATT: I can definitely see, especially when you’re bringing together a diverse group of organizations like you’re suggesting, that maybe know about each other but don’t often work together hand in hand in a concerted way. Using shared measurements and getting folks to take those first few steps is really critical because it can make or break the whole endeavor, I would think. M ARK KRAM ER: Absolutely. SUSAN HYATT: Let’s shift gears a little bit here and talk about some of the things you were bringing to light in your Harvard Business Review article on creating shared value. The subtitle is How to Reinvent Capitalism and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth. Tell us more about that. M ARK KRAM ER: That’s an article that Mike Porter and I published almost exactly a year ago, January of
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT last year, that has really caused quite a stir internationally. There really have been conferences now all over the world on creating shared value. It’s a different way of thinking about the role of business in society. What we realized is that social problems really represent business opportunities, and that the success of business really depends on the social and environmental conditions in the places in which it operates. So, the competitiveness of a company depends on the education and skills of the workforce, safe working conditions, sustainable use of natural resources, and a transparent business environment. At the same time, only companies can create the prosperity that funds government and civil society. Companies have the ability to create sustainable and scalable solutions to a lot of social problems in ways that governments and nonprofits cannot. Often, these become opportunities for businesses to make more money. I can give you just a couple examples. One of them is GE, which has launched a Healthy Imagination Program, they call it. It is an attempt to create new types of medical devices that can be used by lower income populations in rural areas around the world. The target is to create new devices that can be used by at least a hundred million people who don’t have access to these devices today. One example would be an ultrasound machine that is portable, battery operated, and transmits its results remotely through cell phone so that it can be interpreted or viewed at a clinic far away. This can make a tremendous difference on the rate of premature birth and neonatal deaths in the rural areas where it’s being used in India and Africa. It’s also a great new market for GE. A second example I’ll give you is Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, They operate in India and realized that most of their pharmaceutical products were being sold in the major cities, while most of the population actually lived out in rural villages. There wasn’t a distribution system to get the drugs out to these villages. But even more than that, there wasn’t
Mark Kramer
an awareness of the need for medicine, of health seeking behavior. They found villages where 80 or 90% of health care providers actually had no health care training whatsoever. They realized that to penetrate this market, they actually had to solve some social problems. So they hired three hundred health educators, not to sell their product, not salespeople, but to go out into villages and to teach people basic health seeking behaviors. They organized training camps for health care providers to give them health care training. They worked with fifty thousand clinics to create a supply chain that insured that when someone went to a clinic, the drug would be available. This took a tremendous effort on their part, but it also enabled them to reach a population of forty two million people. That turned out to be a profitable market for them, one that they could never have reached before. It’s a great example of shared value, because it’s an important new market for the company from which they’re making money and, at the same time, it’s really making a difference on the health outcomes of rural populations in India. SUSAN HYATT: Those are great examples. Now, in your article, you’re very clear that shared value is different from corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, and sustainability. So can you tell folks a little bit more about how you see the distinction there? M ARK KRAM ER: I think corporate social responsibility, and to some degree sustainability, is really about minimizing the risks and harms associated with the activities that a business performs. It’s looking through the value chain of activities and reducing the environmental footprint, ensuring that working conditions are safe. These are all very important activities for companies to do, but they’re not driving the strategy of the company or the profitability of the company.
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT Shared value is really an economic concept. It’s really about the processes, activities, and initiatives that help companies make more money by solving social problems. SUSAN HYATT: I know also in the article you talk about the blurring between what has traditionally been viewed as ‘for profit’ versus ‘not for profit’ boundaries. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I think we can hear that in the example, but let’s have you say some more about that. M ARK KRAM ER: I think that we (and our parents) grew up in a generation where you made your money and didn’t really think about the social impact. Where you made it and you gave it away to nonprofits. Nonprofits were the ones charged with solving social problems, or else government was. But I think what we’re seeing today, with the tremendous growth of social entrepreneurs who are finding new business models to solve social problems. And major global companies like GE and Novartis are moving into shared value initiatives that have a real impact on social problems. With governments basically hamstrung in their ability to play much of a role themselves, we see that companies can directly impact social issues in very, very positive ways. At the same time, we’re seeing nonprofits begin to change their roles, thinking about partnering with companies, not just to receive donations or volunteer hours, but to actually find initiatives where the company and the nonprofit can work together in a sustainable and profit making way. I think of one example of an insurance company, ICICI that worked with Muhammad Yunus and his nonprofit microfinance organization to develop micro insurance products that could be profitably sold to small hold farmers who earn less than a dollar a day. It’s a business venture, but it depends on the knowhow of the company, and also on the trust and relationships and understanding of the issues that the nonprofit brings.
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I think that in the future, maybe not our children, but our children’s children really won’t think about nonprofit and for profit as two different worlds. They’ll think about organizations that are finding ways to solve social problems, using whatever structure, or combination of structures, it takes to make an effective solution. SUSAN HYATT: That’s great. With the work I do with both nonprofits and businesses, I see the sometimes artificial line between them. Sometimes it’s very hard to get folks to collaborate in ways that synergize into something totally different. M ARK KRAM ER: It actually is, and I don’t want to minimize the fact that there are really different cultures in these two sectors - and they often don’t like each other very much. It is a real challenge to build effective partnerships, but I think that is the way of the future. You know, we’re seeing things like Social Enterprise Club at Harvard Business School. At FSG we’re finding lots of MBA’s from top schools, want to come work in the social sector and spend their time solving social problems, not business problems. That’s something we really didn’t see ten years ago. SUSAN HYATT: It seems like there’s a whole new crop of folks that are stepping up and taking on, a social entrepreneurial approach to how they’re designing whatever they’re doing. It seems like it’s a much tougher order to get a big company like a GE, or a Novartis, to really start taking this on. What do you see as the motivators? Who usually brings an idea to the table, because it’s a big effort, to get something like this started? M ARK KRAM ER: It is a big effort. I have to say that we’re seeing a number of leading company’s all over the world really beginning to focus in on the business opportunities. Whether it’s redesigning their products, or reinventing them to meet the needs of lower income populations or it’s taking a hard look at their value chain and finding ways to do things more
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT efficiently to save money, and environmental impact. Or whether it’s realizing they need to take a collective impact approach to fix a whole sector, in order to improve the context of their supply chain. We’re seeing companies increasingly thinking about this. There was a lot of talk about it at Davos just a couple weeks ago. I think it really needs to be led by the CEO. If the CEO doesn’t get it, I think it’s not going to happen in a company. Because it is taking a risk to do things differently and you need that endorsement from the top. But once the CEO has said, this is the direction we want to go, it really is up to the individual business unit managers to figure out what are the opportunities that they have in their own areas of responsibility, to improve the competitiveness of the company by beginning to focus in on social issues. That really has to happen at a very granular level, because you need something that is going to work for the business, that is going to be profitable, and that actually is going to make a difference on the issue.
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a hundred years; they planned to be around for hundreds more years. Their focus is not on the next quarter. I think of GE which under Geoffrey Imeld, has announced that they’re not going to announce quarterly earnings predictions any more. They’ll pay the penalty with their stock, but they think it’s the wrong way to run their company. I think it’s the leaders with long term vision, that are really moving most quickly to embrace this concept. SUSAN HYATT: That’s really interesting. It seems like, when you listen to the things in the news these days about expectations for job creation, and how to really move past some of the economic challenges that we’re experiencing right now, In some ways, it’s almost counterintuitive to be thinking really long term. People are so concerned with what is happening next quarter. But it sounds like you’re seeing a definite trend that people are planning ahead for the future.
SUSAN HYATT: Are you finding that it’s the newer generation of folks that are moving in to be unit business managers that are having an easier time with this sort of approach? Or, is it just a concept whose time has come; people understanding it, no matter when they started their career?
M ARK KRAM ER: Absolutely. There’s no question that we’ve been going through - and are still in - very difficult economic times; this is not a time for companies to put off acting. On the other hand, if you’re really about creating value, it’s not something that can be done in a ninety-day time horizon.
M ARK KRAM ER: I think it’s partly a concept whose time has come. I think that partly explains why there has been such uptake on it all over the world. But I also think that it takes leadership with a long term perspective.
SUSAN HYATT: As we start wrapping down our time, if you were talking to a group of nonprofit leaders, given the things you are seeing in terms of trends, and the things that you’re actually helping catalyze with donors and with businesses, what kind of guidance would you give them about mindset and how to direct their efforts?
This is not something that you undertake because it’s going to help your results next quarter meet the analysts’ expectations. I think it’s the CEOs who have a longer term vision for the companies that they’re trying to build that recognize the importance and opportunity of taking a shared value approach. I think of a company like Nestlé, which is a great practitioner of this in a number of areas. They have a thirty five year business plan. They’ve been around for
M ARK KRAM ER: I think that even stepping back and thinking about catalytic philanthropy and collective impact and shared value together, it’s really about focusing on a particular social problem that is relevant to who you are and what you do. Where you can bring more to the table than just writing a check.
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It’s about getting serious about achieving results, putting in place solutions that are going to be
scalable, that are going to be sustainable, and that really work; don’t just sound nice.
It’s about using all of the tools at your disposal. If you’re running a business, it’s trying to think about how can I make money by solving social problems. If you’re a philanthropist, it’s how can I use advocacy, or lobbying, or public relations, or research, or other tools to help achieve social impact?
That’s wonderful food for thought. Mark, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share your expertise with us today. I think everybody listening can’t help but be inspired and think about what are the future opportunities in terms of how to take on the social problems of our time in some absolutely new ways, in deeper ways, that can actually help move the needle. So, we don’t just keep moving around the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Thank you for giving us some great food for thought.
What can I do myself with my own network to bring people together, to focus in on this problem, and to begin to make progress together? I think that, in many ways, what it’s really about is picking the relevant issue and committing to achieving results, and doing it in a way that uses everything you’ve got to accomplish it. SUSAN HYATT: The other piece I hear you saying is no silos. There’s got to be a whole lot more engagement amongst people that bring different pieces of the puzzle together. To really work together in some new ways that perhaps they’re not used to from past experience.
M ARK KRAM ER: That’s terrific Susan, thank you very much for the opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed the chance to get to talk with you. SUSAN HYATT: Thank you. Those of you listening please make sure you check out the two articles Mark has graciously shared with you.
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Mark Kramer FSG Redefining the Role of Corporations on Society 2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT
Mark Kramer
Mark Kramer FSG Redefining the Role of Corporations in Society
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SUSAN HYATT: Let’s get started by introducing you to MARK KRAMER. Mark is the Co-Founder and managing director of FSG, and he’s the author of a ton of really influential publications, on shared value, corporate social responsibility, catalytic philanthropy, strategic evaluation, impact investing, and adaptive leadership. Mark oversees FSG’s consulting practice, and helps drive the vision and growth of the firm. He’s led consulting engagement across all of FSG’s impact areas, with particular emphasis on philanthropic strategy for private and community foundations, CSR, and evaluation and impact investing. He also leads the research on many of FSG’s publications, and publishes regularly in the Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and is the coauthor of the book, Do More Than Give. He is a frequent speaker around the world on topics of catalytic philanthropy, collective impact, all the things he’s going to share a little bit with us today on. Just to give you a little bit of his background, before co-founding FSG, he served for twelve years as president of Kramer Capital Management, which was a venture capital firm. Before that, he was an associate at the law firm of Ropes and Grey in Boston, and he was a law clerk to Judge Alvin Ruben in the fifth circuit US Court of Appeals, so he has a very broad background that he’s bringing to all his work. So let’s get started. Mark, you’ve got a ton of experience, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your path, and give us some more details about FSG as well, please.
M ARK KRAM ER: Sure, thank you Susan, for this opportunity, I’m delighted to have the chance to talk with you. You know I actually grew up with a small family foundation that I was involved with, as a trustee. I had the experience of year in and year out, making grants to different very hard working, well meaning organizations, but finding they kept coming back the next year. The issues that we were trying to address, the social issues we were trying to solve, didn’t seem to be getting better. So, over the years, I’ve increasingly tried to learn about and focus on how does philanthropy actually solve social problems, how does it achieve change? That lead me about ten or twelve years ago, to start FSG with my colleague Michael Porter from Harvard Business School, and to really take a hard look at what strategy means in the context of philanthropy. When we started, FSG stood for Foundation Strategy Group, but as we’ve grown, we’ve worked not just with foundations, but with corporations, with nonprofits, with government agencies, with school systems. So we shortened it just to the acronym FSG. Today, FSG is a firm of about a hundred consultants, with offices around the U.S., in Europe, and Asia. We work on seventy five to a hundred different consulting engagements a year. We also publish a lot of articles and research reports that are intended to build and advance the field. We’re actually a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit ourselves. All of us here are really focused on trying to understand how to achieve social impact and help the organizations we work with deliver more impact per dollar.
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SUSAN HYATT: That’s great. I think it’s a topic that more people need to pay attention to, this whole notion of philanthropy solving social problems, and creating change. I know I first ran across some of your work because you had written an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on catalytic philanthropy. I used that article in some trainings I was doing with state service commissions that do grantmaking, to try to get them to think about their role in a different way. So would you mind sharing with folks, a little bit about what ‘catalytic philanthropy’ is and how you view that; how it is different from what we traditionally know.
get other people involved. They couldn’t do it themselves. They really needed to pay attention to what progress was being made, to measure the impact that they were having, and to create knowledge about the issue. That could not only make them more effective in their work, but also influence other people. So out of this work, we realized there is a theory of philanthropy here that says it’s not about funding individual organizations, it’s not even about funding a particular solution. It’s about assembling the different elements of a solution that enable the people involved, many, many people, to be able to come up with the solution for themselves.
M ARK KRAM ER: Sure. I’ll say the reason that we got to this approach and the content of that article was a project we did a few years ago for the Gates Foundation. They came to us and said they wanted to promote more effective philanthropy, but they weren’t sure exactly what effective philanthropy looked like. So they asked us to go out and interview dozens of donors, who were thought by experts to be highly effective in what they did. We interviewed men and women, young and old, technology wealth, inherited wealth, and real estate, all different ways and backgrounds people came from.
The reason we called it ‘catalytic philanthropy’ is because a catalyst is a term from chemistry - it’s an agent that helps bring about a chemical reaction, but is not itself part of the reaction. We thought that was a great image for a donor, who is trying to bring about social change but is not him or herself directly able to use their money to purchase that change.
Frankly, we didn’t think we’d find anything in common. But what we did find was that all of these highly effective donors went through a learning curve. They started off really thinking about giving away money, and which of the organizations they should be giving money to. But over time, they became engaged with a particular issue, that had real deep personal resonance for them, and they stopped thinking about how do I give away money, and started thinking about how do I solve a specific problem. That completely changed their approach to philanthropy, because they realized that giving money to nonprofit organizations was only one way of solving a social problem, and not the only tool available.
When we think of catalytic philanthropy, we really think of four practices. First, the donors take responsibility for achieving results. That means they need to have clear, measureable, and attainable goals, and take ownership of the issues. Second, they’re really mobilizing a campaign for change, not just giving money, but engaging others, working together to assemble the elements of a solution. Third, they use all available tools, not just charitable donations, but advocacy, fundraising, convening, and investing. If they own or operate companies and are able to use the resources of their companies to help address the problem; they bring all the tools at their disposal together. Fourth, they build actionable knowledge, not just academic research, but real knowledge about the issue that improves their own effectiveness and can influence the behavior of others. So those four dimensions are what we think of when we think of ‘catalytic philanthropy.’
They realized that to achieve the impact they wanted, they really needed to mount a campaign for change to
SUSAN HYATT: Thanks for giving us a bit of an overview about that. As you work with donors, and
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT help them understand these four practices, what are some of the harder places for people to get to? M ARK KRAM ER: Well, I think it’s actually a lot more work. For a donor, it’s not that hard to write a check, to be honest. You can be responsive, people are coming to you to ask for money, and you make a decision and then give them a check. This really involves rolling up your sleeves and getting engaged in helping to solve a problem. To be honest, it takes a lot more time and a lot more effort. I sometimes think it’s the difference between philanthropy as a spectator sport, where you’re writing checks, and actually being a participant in the game. It’s a lot more effort to be in the game, but it’s also a lot more rewarding. SUSAN HYATT: Absolutely, and that’s a great metaphor. I think we can all understand what you’re getting at there. So, if somebody had been doing their giving in the old traditional way, and they see what you’re talking about, about leveraging more impact by following these practices, what’s the first step that you’d recommend folks think about doing? M ARK KRAM ER: The first thing I would say is that you should abandon check writing and all other philanthropy. We really find that when people are thinking about their philanthropy, they really respond to three different motivations. The first one is that everybody is part of a number of different communities. It could be the school that your child goes to, it could be the college you graduated to, your religion, the city you’re a citizen of, and there’s an obligation as someone with resources to help support those communities. In that sense of communal obligation, you don’t need to be a catalytic philanthropist; you just need to write some checks. The second category is really responding to the people who have asked for the money, who are colleagues friends, family members, business associates. A certain amount of our philanthropy always goes to causes, not because we really care about the cause,
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but because of the relationship to the person who’s asked for it. That’s legitimate philanthropy too and important. It’s only this third area, where you’re really trying to bring about change in the world that is where ‘catalytic philanthropy’ is relevant. So keep writing checks; don’t feel like you have to abandon everything you’re doing to become a catalytic philanthropist. But, think hard about the issue that most matters to you, the one you really would be willing to roll up your sleeves and play in the game to help address. Then, begin to talk to people that are knowledgeable about the issue: nonprofits, other funders, and academics. Begin to really focus on the issue and think about what you really bring to the table besides your money. Because, in all of these examples of highly effective philanthropy, what people personally bring turns out to be much more important than the money. SUSAN HYATT: That’s great, thank you. I like the whole idea that really we have a portfolio, of things that we do that are under the label philanthropy. It’s not you need to throw out everything and do this, but there are these three motivations. I like that, thank you. Let’s shift gears a little bit. You’ve written a lot of other things that are really thought provoking. There’s a piece about collective impact, which is one of the articles you are sharing with attendees, and one about creating shared value as well. Tell us a little about collective impact. M ARK KRAM ER: It really does kind of grow out of catalytic philanthropy and this idea of a campaign for change, and the notion that funders can’t just come in and write a check to solve a problem. What we realize as we stepped back and looked at the nonprofit sector, there are a million and a half nonprofit organizations in the United States. 90% of them have budgets under a million dollars and each one is doing
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT its own thing in its own way without communicating or coordinating with the others. Frankly, that’s just the nonprofits, but any significant social issue of scale is also deeply affected by government, and deeply affected by for-profit activities of businesses. All of those organizations are also very fragmented, each doing their own thing without coordination. When you step back and think about, how we solve a problem like the failures of our education system, or environmental pollution, or homelessness, or unemployment, no one would suggest that the way you do it is to have a million different small organizations each doing their own thing without any coordination. In fact, that suggests that there are a ton of resources that are being spent that are not really necessary because we’re trying all these different fragmented approaches. We realize that philanthropy operates on a model of ‘isolated impact,’ where you as a funder pick a particular organization that you think does a good job and you fund them to make their program bigger, and to try and scale it up. But no large scale problem is really going to be solved by any single organization. So if we step back and say let’s move away from isolated impact, how do we think about achieving collective impact? We realize that solving social problems really depends on the interaction of many, many different organizations. Even though we might talk about working towards the same goal, like improving education, if we asked, each funder in each organization exactly what they meant, we’d find that each person has a different vision of what improving education really means. We also find that each organization measures their progress and evaluates their outcomes in their own way: defining terms as they wish, and measuring things in isolation from each other. So we really can’t even learn across different organizations, because we can’t tell if one organization is doing something more effectively than another, because we don’t have comparable data. ! !
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So out of that comes the theory of ‘collective impact,’ that says what we really need is to bring organizations together, to create a common agenda, a shared vision for change, so that all of the organizations touching on an issue: nonprofit, for-profit, and government, are working toward the same end. We really need shared measurement systems, so that everybody involved is measuring results consistently, and tracking the same outcomes. We need mutually reinforcing activities. Not saying every person, every organization should be doing the same thing, they each have different strengths and weaknesses. They should be doing the things they do best, but in a way that is coordinated with others. We need continuous communication, so that these organizations stay aligned and coordinated with each other. Above all, we need a separate organization that can function as a backbone to this collective impact initiative, that holds it together. We somehow assume that if you just put people in a room, they’ll begin to collaborate. But the fact is, collaboration is a lot of work, and it takes an organization that is dedicated to making sure that collaboration is continued over time, that the data is collected, that the meetings are facilitated, in order to keep something like this going. I would have thought that this is an absolutely impossible vision, this idea of collective impact, but what really gave us the idea was an initiative in Cincinnati, Ohio called Strive, which has brought three hundred different organizations together to improve education in Cincinnati. They realized there’s no point in improving preschool programs, if the school itself isn’t any good. There’s no point with after school programs, if kids aren’t going on to college. There’s no point in going to college if they’re not going to stay in college and graduate and get a career. So Strive came up with this idea of a cradle to career initiative. They said some of the factors are in the schools, and some of the factors are outside in the community and in the homes, that are necessary for
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our kids to succeed. Let’s put on a single sheet of paper, a road map, it says what needs to happen from cradle to career for a child to succeed, and then let’s get all of the organizations that are involved in this together, so they can see where their own activities fit in on this larger picture.
M ARK KRAM ER: It really is. We’ve seen organizations make real progress on large scale change, that no single individual organization can make. And there’s an essential role for donors to really be able to help initiate and fund the development of collective impact initiatives.
Let’s break it up into working groups, so all the after school programs meet together every two weeks, talk about what they’re doing, develop a shared measurement system to be able to compare their progress, learn from each other, identify issues. It’s the same thing for the preschool programs, the same thing for teacher trainings, and so on and so forth.
SUSAN HYATT: I strongly suggest that if you’re not familiar with this whole concept of collective impact, make sure you read the article that Mark has generously given that is posted on the website for you to download and read, because it really goes into more detail about this, because I think it’s the wave, we all need to be doing more of this. Absolutely. So thanks for sharing that. For those of you who really want to take it on this is a big effort, this could be a good time to call FSG to get some help.
This program has now been operating in nine school districts in the greater Cincinnati area for five or six years. They track about fifty different indicators of progress and issue an annual report card to the community about how they’re doing. It’s absolutely wonderful to see that in the last several years, first about 65% of the indicators were moving in the right direction, two years ago 75% were, last year 83% of them were. This is despite the recession and teacher lay-offs, and all of that. It’s just a much, much more effective way to work. Since we wrote that article and learned about Strive, we’ve been approached by about thirty or forty different organizations that are all using this collective impact approach, on issues as diverse as trying to fix the juvenile justice system in the state of New York, trying to reduce substance abuse in a small rural community, and trying to address global issues of malnutrition. It’s a really powerful framework and a powerful approach. SUSAN HYATT: Absolutely, it takes collaboration to a whole new level. Really the integration of all the different organizations and their comparative strengths and the piece of the whole continuum that they take on, interweaves them all together to really move the needle. That’s exciting, and it sounds tough.
M ARK KRAM ER: Absolutely. We’re working on about a dozen different collective impact initiatives that were helping launch. We can never be a backbone organization, we can’t be a long term presence, but we can help in the first six or twelve months, helping bring these things together. SUSAN HYATT: I can definitely see, especially when you’re bringing together a diverse group of organizations like you’re suggesting, that maybe know about each other but don’t often work together hand in hand in a concerted way. Using shared measurements and getting folks to take those first few steps is really critical because it can make or break the whole endeavor, I would think. M ARK KRAM ER: Absolutely. SUSAN HYATT: Let’s shift gears a little bit here and talk about some of the things you were bringing to light in your Harvard Business Review article on creating shared value. The subtitle is How to Reinvent Capitalism and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth. Tell us more about that. M ARK KRAM ER: That’s an article that Mike Porter and I published almost exactly a year ago, January of
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT last year, that has really caused quite a stir internationally. There really have been conferences now all over the world on creating shared value. It’s a different way of thinking about the role of business in society. What we realized is that social problems really represent business opportunities, and that the success of business really depends on the social and environmental conditions in the places in which it operates. So, the competitiveness of a company depends on the education and skills of the workforce, safe working conditions, sustainable use of natural resources, and a transparent business environment. At the same time, only companies can create the prosperity that funds government and civil society. Companies have the ability to create sustainable and scalable solutions to a lot of social problems in ways that governments and nonprofits cannot. Often, these become opportunities for businesses to make more money. I can give you just a couple examples. One of them is GE, which has launched a Healthy Imagination Program, they call it. It is an attempt to create new types of medical devices that can be used by lower income populations in rural areas around the world. The target is to create new devices that can be used by at least a hundred million people who don’t have access to these devices today. One example would be an ultrasound machine that is portable, battery operated, and transmits its results remotely through cell phone so that it can be interpreted or viewed at a clinic far away. This can make a tremendous difference on the rate of premature birth and neonatal deaths in the rural areas where it’s being used in India and Africa. It’s also a great new market for GE. A second example I’ll give you is Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, They operate in India and realized that most of their pharmaceutical products were being sold in the major cities, while most of the population actually lived out in rural villages. There wasn’t a distribution system to get the drugs out to these villages. But even more than that, there wasn’t
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an awareness of the need for medicine, of health seeking behavior. They found villages where 80 or 90% of health care providers actually had no health care training whatsoever. They realized that to penetrate this market, they actually had to solve some social problems. So they hired three hundred health educators, not to sell their product, not salespeople, but to go out into villages and to teach people basic health seeking behaviors. They organized training camps for health care providers to give them health care training. They worked with fifty thousand clinics to create a supply chain that insured that when someone went to a clinic, the drug would be available. This took a tremendous effort on their part, but it also enabled them to reach a population of forty two million people. That turned out to be a profitable market for them, one that they could never have reached before. It’s a great example of shared value, because it’s an important new market for the company from which they’re making money and, at the same time, it’s really making a difference on the health outcomes of rural populations in India. SUSAN HYATT: Those are great examples. Now, in your article, you’re very clear that shared value is different from corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, and sustainability. So can you tell folks a little bit more about how you see the distinction there? M ARK KRAM ER: I think corporate social responsibility, and to some degree sustainability, is really about minimizing the risks and harms associated with the activities that a business performs. It’s looking through the value chain of activities and reducing the environmental footprint, ensuring that working conditions are safe. These are all very important activities for companies to do, but they’re not driving the strategy of the company or the profitability of the company.
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT Shared value is really an economic concept. It’s really about the processes, activities, and initiatives that help companies make more money by solving social problems. SUSAN HYATT: I know also in the article you talk about the blurring between what has traditionally been viewed as ‘for profit’ versus ‘not for profit’ boundaries. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I think we can hear that in the example, but let’s have you say some more about that. M ARK KRAM ER: I think that we (and our parents) grew up in a generation where you made your money and didn’t really think about the social impact. Where you made it and you gave it away to nonprofits. Nonprofits were the ones charged with solving social problems, or else government was. But I think what we’re seeing today, with the tremendous growth of social entrepreneurs who are finding new business models to solve social problems. And major global companies like GE and Novartis are moving into shared value initiatives that have a real impact on social problems. With governments basically hamstrung in their ability to play much of a role themselves, we see that companies can directly impact social issues in very, very positive ways. At the same time, we’re seeing nonprofits begin to change their roles, thinking about partnering with companies, not just to receive donations or volunteer hours, but to actually find initiatives where the company and the nonprofit can work together in a sustainable and profit making way. I think of one example of an insurance company, ICICI that worked with Muhammad Yunus and his nonprofit microfinance organization to develop micro insurance products that could be profitably sold to small hold farmers who earn less than a dollar a day. It’s a business venture, but it depends on the knowhow of the company, and also on the trust and relationships and understanding of the issues that the nonprofit brings.
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I think that in the future, maybe not our children, but our children’s children really won’t think about nonprofit and for profit as two different worlds. They’ll think about organizations that are finding ways to solve social problems, using whatever structure, or combination of structures, it takes to make an effective solution. SUSAN HYATT: That’s great. With the work I do with both nonprofits and businesses, I see the sometimes artificial line between them. Sometimes it’s very hard to get folks to collaborate in ways that synergize into something totally different. M ARK KRAM ER: It actually is, and I don’t want to minimize the fact that there are really different cultures in these two sectors - and they often don’t like each other very much. It is a real challenge to build effective partnerships, but I think that is the way of the future. You know, we’re seeing things like Social Enterprise Club at Harvard Business School. At FSG we’re finding lots of MBA’s from top schools, want to come work in the social sector and spend their time solving social problems, not business problems. That’s something we really didn’t see ten years ago. SUSAN HYATT: It seems like there’s a whole new crop of folks that are stepping up and taking on, a social entrepreneurial approach to how they’re designing whatever they’re doing. It seems like it’s a much tougher order to get a big company like a GE, or a Novartis, to really start taking this on. What do you see as the motivators? Who usually brings an idea to the table, because it’s a big effort, to get something like this started? M ARK KRAM ER: It is a big effort. I have to say that we’re seeing a number of leading company’s all over the world really beginning to focus in on the business opportunities. Whether it’s redesigning their products, or reinventing them to meet the needs of lower income populations or it’s taking a hard look at their value chain and finding ways to do things more
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2013 STRATEGY for GOOD SUMMIT efficiently to save money, and environmental impact. Or whether it’s realizing they need to take a collective impact approach to fix a whole sector, in order to improve the context of their supply chain. We’re seeing companies increasingly thinking about this. There was a lot of talk about it at Davos just a couple weeks ago. I think it really needs to be led by the CEO. If the CEO doesn’t get it, I think it’s not going to happen in a company. Because it is taking a risk to do things differently and you need that endorsement from the top. But once the CEO has said, this is the direction we want to go, it really is up to the individual business unit managers to figure out what are the opportunities that they have in their own areas of responsibility, to improve the competitiveness of the company by beginning to focus in on social issues. That really has to happen at a very granular level, because you need something that is going to work for the business, that is going to be profitable, and that actually is going to make a difference on the issue.
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a hundred years; they planned to be around for hundreds more years. Their focus is not on the next quarter. I think of GE which under Geoffrey Imeld, has announced that they’re not going to announce quarterly earnings predictions any more. They’ll pay the penalty with their stock, but they think it’s the wrong way to run their company. I think it’s the leaders with long term vision, that are really moving most quickly to embrace this concept. SUSAN HYATT: That’s really interesting. It seems like, when you listen to the things in the news these days about expectations for job creation, and how to really move past some of the economic challenges that we’re experiencing right now, In some ways, it’s almost counterintuitive to be thinking really long term. People are so concerned with what is happening next quarter. But it sounds like you’re seeing a definite trend that people are planning ahead for the future.
SUSAN HYATT: Are you finding that it’s the newer generation of folks that are moving in to be unit business managers that are having an easier time with this sort of approach? Or, is it just a concept whose time has come; people understanding it, no matter when they started their career?
M ARK KRAM ER: Absolutely. There’s no question that we’ve been going through - and are still in - very difficult economic times; this is not a time for companies to put off acting. On the other hand, if you’re really about creating value, it’s not something that can be done in a ninety-day time horizon.
M ARK KRAM ER: I think it’s partly a concept whose time has come. I think that partly explains why there has been such uptake on it all over the world. But I also think that it takes leadership with a long term perspective.
SUSAN HYATT: As we start wrapping down our time, if you were talking to a group of nonprofit leaders, given the things you are seeing in terms of trends, and the things that you’re actually helping catalyze with donors and with businesses, what kind of guidance would you give them about mindset and how to direct their efforts?
This is not something that you undertake because it’s going to help your results next quarter meet the analysts’ expectations. I think it’s the CEOs who have a longer term vision for the companies that they’re trying to build that recognize the importance and opportunity of taking a shared value approach. I think of a company like Nestlé, which is a great practitioner of this in a number of areas. They have a thirty five year business plan. They’ve been around for
M ARK KRAM ER: I think that even stepping back and thinking about catalytic philanthropy and collective impact and shared value together, it’s really about focusing on a particular social problem that is relevant to who you are and what you do. Where you can bring more to the table than just writing a check.
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It’s about getting serious about achieving results, putting in place solutions that are going to be
scalable, that are going to be sustainable, and that really work; don’t just sound nice.
It’s about using all of the tools at your disposal. If you’re running a business, it’s trying to think about how can I make money by solving social problems. If you’re a philanthropist, it’s how can I use advocacy, or lobbying, or public relations, or research, or other tools to help achieve social impact?
That’s wonderful food for thought. Mark, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share your expertise with us today. I think everybody listening can’t help but be inspired and think about what are the future opportunities in terms of how to take on the social problems of our time in some absolutely new ways, in deeper ways, that can actually help move the needle. So, we don’t just keep moving around the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Thank you for giving us some great food for thought.
What can I do myself with my own network to bring people together, to focus in on this problem, and to begin to make progress together? I think that, in many ways, what it’s really about is picking the relevant issue and committing to achieving results, and doing it in a way that uses everything you’ve got to accomplish it. SUSAN HYATT: The other piece I hear you saying is no silos. There’s got to be a whole lot more engagement amongst people that bring different pieces of the puzzle together. To really work together in some new ways that perhaps they’re not used to from past experience.
M ARK KRAM ER: That’s terrific Susan, thank you very much for the opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed the chance to get to talk with you. SUSAN HYATT: Thank you. Those of you listening please make sure you check out the two articles Mark has graciously shared with you.
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