bringing purpose & creativity to work
TRANSCRIPT
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Leading a movement to bringpurpose and creativity to work.
Aaron Hurst, Founder, Taproot Foundation
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Bill Draper IIITranscript from his
remarks on Taproots
10th Anniversary.
1
First, I want to congratulate everyone in the room
who had anything to do with the development of
Taprootits extraordinary what youve done. Taproot
and DRK were born in the same year and we were
eager to nd someone like TaprootAaron is such
an example of sartorial splendor that I thought, we
really need to back this guy; he will do a lot of good
for us. When we conceived of our foundation, we
dreamed of helping to launch a panoply of stars, who
like Aaron Hurst, had a dream. We dreamed of lling
this sky with stars who together as they fullled their
vision would brighten up the lives of thousands less
fortunate than ourselves.
At the end of 10 years,
we look back with great
pride and satisfaction
at the results of the
work of the 40+ socialentrepreneurs we have
supported. They include
powerful organizations
that are changing the
landscape of the world
immigrant support
systems, help for wounded
veterans, healthcareareas where nonprot social
entrepreneurs are needed to ll that gaps that private
enterprise or the government have done their best to
ll but have left as gaps.
Among all of the wonderful organizations that we
have enthusiastically supported, I can think of none
more effective, more impactful, or more important
than the organization we are here tonight to
celebrate. Taproot has leveraged the work of many
of our social entrepreneurs and many thousands of
others. Its encouraged volunteers to come forward
from all walks of life. Who knows what impact its
encouragement and support has had or will have on
individuals they have supported and what positive
changes have occurred in the world because there
was a Taproot.
We at DRK are always looking for social
entrepreneurs who have vision, character, generosity
of spirit, persistence in following their dream, and
the managerial competence to successfully build
an organization to reach that dream. Aaron Hurst
after 10 years of hard work is the epitome of that
social entrepreneur. But he would be the rst to say
that he did not do this alone and that it was a team
effortand thats what were celebrating tonight.
And that has made the pro bono work of thousands
of volunteers more effective and more efcient. His
vision helped others see how the corporate world and
community of nonprots could help each other in a
synergistic way.
Taproot has much more work to do to promotethis wonderful pro bono activityand everyone
in this room can help even more than you already
have. Please volunteer your time, services, and your
companies support if none of that works, cash is
always accepted. On behalf of DRK, congratulations
to the entire Taproot team and to its network which
now stretches across the globe. 10 years old, and the
best is yet to come.
FOREWARD
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2
Covert
Operations
Caroline Barlerin crouched under her desk, speaking
softly. If her colleagues overheard her conversation,
shed be sunk.
Caroline was on the sales team for Landor Associates,
perhaps the most venerable branding agency in the
world. Walter Landor had by most accounts invented
modern branding 60 years earlier, and the agency
is still the go-to partner to make a product or brand
more compelling (and more protable). Landor made
Old Spice manlier, Citi more global, Kraft Macaroni &
Cheese happier, FedEx more innovative, and BP more
than just a petroleum company.
A brand is the most valuable xed asset of most
organizations. Interbrand, another branding agency,
does an annual valuation of the worlds 100 largest
brands. It values Coca Cola at $78 billion. Apple$77
billion. IBM$76 billion. Google$70 billion. This is
not the value of the company, just the brand. Could
Apple command the same prices without the Apple
name behind the products? Would Coca-Cola sell as
much soda without its 127-yr-old brand behind it?
Would you be just as likely to ship a critical package
with a no-name brand as with FedEx? A brand is more
than just a name and logo. A brand is a promiseit
sets an expectation with the customer.
The need for strong and recognizable brands has
grown over the last few decades at an increasingly
fast pace. We are bombarded by more and more
brands every day. More sources of information, more
products and services from all around the world. Even
the government understands the importance of brand.
When the United States Department of Homeland
Security was created in 2003, it looked to Landor
the company that revitalized the Smirnoff brandto
create their identity.
And now Caroline Barlerin of Landor was talking
brand shop, not to the CEO of some major company,
but to the executive director of the Florence
Crittenton Center, a social services organization
in San Francisco. The Center helps pregnant andparenting teens and young families thrive, and like
Coca Cola or IBM, they too felt the pressure of an
incredibly loud marketplace. As they competed for
attention from donors and the pregnant teens they
served, they needed a strong brand and clear, effective
messaging to reach the people who could ensure the
Centers continued success.
Like the Department of Homeland Security, to
achieve its mission, the Florence Crittenton Center
needed Landor-quality services. The difference? Asa small nonprot organization, the Center had no
way to pay the six-to-seven-gure fees of a Landor.
Caroline was deeply moved by the work of the
Florence Crittenton Center and wanted to help,
but she knew that Landor as a rm wouldnt touch
this agency, or be very happy to nd her spending
company time talking to them.
So she sat huddled under the desk, trying to gure
out which of her many friends at Landor would be
up for taking this on off the clock, ipping through
True happiness
involves the full use
of ones power andtalents.
John Gardner
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her mental Rolodex of talented Landor designers and
strategists to nd the ones she needed for some covert
pro bono. In the end, the Florence Crittenton Center
did get Landor-quality workbut management
never knew. The work was done by a small band of
professionals who cared about both their craft and
their community, people who were compelled to work
for more than prot.
Ask for help. If you
offer purpose and
direction, people
will give you the
world.
(And if they dont,
someone else will.)
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Donors Choose:
The 20%That Makesthe Dierence
Charles Best was a high school history teacher in the
Bronx. Despite his low salary, like his colleagues, he
found himself spending a lot of his own money on
copy paper and pencils. He would come up with all
these ideas for projects that would bring the subject
matter to life, but those ideas would never go beyond
the teachers lunchroom because he didnt have a
place where we could go to get the kind of micro-
funding that he needed to get his students a particular
book or take them on a eld trip or get the materials.
He had a simple ideaconnect the interest in society
to improve our schools with the specic teacher need.
He knew Americans were skeptical about just giving
to a school bureaucracy, but if they could buy $100 in
supplies on a teachers wish list well, that might just
work.
Charles saw that the rise of the web would makeit possible to create a national platform to ensure
every teacher had the supplies they needed for their
classroom. He envisioned a place where public school
teachers could post classroom project requests and
donors could choose projects to support and get really
rich feedback on their investments: photographs
and thank you letters and a cost report showing the
impact of their donation.
Ten years later, half of all the public schools in
America have at least one teacher who has posteda project request on DonorsChoose.org. Over $130
million has been donated on the platform to fund
classroom projects reaching 6 million predominantly
low-income students.
This scale is no accident. Charles didnt want to
create a nonprot that couldnt scale to meet his
vision. From day one, he partnered with companies
and business professionals to build, leveraging
relationships with corporate partners to augment
nancial support with pro bono help, from marketing
to technology to strategy. He developed a corporate-
oriented board and recruited companies like
JPMorgan Chase, American Express, and Yahoo! to be
true partners in building and marketing his new site.
To this day, Donors Choose relies on the business
community for far more than funding. Charles
estimates that as much as 20% of this operating
budget each year is met with a wide range of critical
pro bono services.
I didnt learn about Charles work until several years
after he got off the ground, but the story he shared
when we met immediately afrmed what I learned
when I left school, eager to make a difference.
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After graduation from the University of Michigan, I
moved to Chicago for an entry-level position at the
Chicago Foundation for Education, a decade-old
nonprot that made small grants to teachers to help
them buy supplies for their classroom. The grants,
up to $600, were available on a competitive basis to
local teachers with compelling needs to enrich their
classroom.
The Chicago Foundation for Education had an
inspiring idea and it was working. There was just one
problem: it wasnt growing, and it could only meet a
small fraction of the teacher need. Their few hundred
grants per year werent going to achieve their vision
of a city of well-resourced teachers, and yet they had
no plans to grow.
I found it disheartening, more so when I heard the
same stories from colleagues at other nonprots withsimilar experiences. We were all so inspired by the
vision, but the reality in which our organizations
operated and expected to operate kept that vision
very far away indeed.
Walking home from work, I would look up at the
skyscrapers in every direction housing many of the
worlds leading companies and think: they didnt
settle for achieving 2% of their ambition. They had
the resources to turn vision into reality.
So why didnt our organizations have those resources?
It was a fundamental issue of social justice. Why
should the greatest IT, the greatest planning, the
greatest marketing, be available only to commercial
interests? Why should nonprot organizations, doing
the most important work in society, be forced to run
on crumbs? It was totally out of whack.
Most disturbing was the fact that the leadership of the
Chicago Foundation for Education, and most of the
nonprots I encountered, had developed a poverty
mentality. They had accepted a lack of resources
as the permanent reality, and stopped ghting. They
were caught in a starvation cycle.
Like Charles Best at Donors Choose, I decided that I
couldnt spend the rest of my career hungry. I swore I
would never again work for an organization that was
resigned to operate below their potential.
To change this reality and make professional
resources available to more nonprots, I needed to
know more about how business works, and how big
companies achieved their visions. At 22, however,
I didnt know a single business professional. My
parents didnt have a single friend in corporate
America. It was a 100% foreign universe to me.
It was time to break family tradition and venture into
foreign territory. I considered two paths forwardbusiness school, or business itself. Given my academic
history and school debt, the choice was easy. I went to
Silicon Valley for a 5-year apprenticeship in product
management.
1996:
Hitting Wallsand OpeningDoors
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2001:
Service AllianceGains an Ally
Several months after Caroline nished her covert pro
bono project, she found herself having an epically bad
day. She was frustrated with her manager. A client
was giving her a hard time. She had been doing this
for ve years. There had to be something better out
there.
So she went window-shopping on Craigslist. A
start-up called Service Alliance was looking for a
marketing director to help launch its effort to connect
business professionals to nonprots to meet their
marketing needsfor free.
She had never heard of Service Alliance, but a few
days later, we were having lunch.
When I met Caroline in May of 2001, I couldnt offer
any money or stock options. We didnt have a dollar
in the bank; we werent even a legal organization.What I offered was the chance to help make history
by ensuring all nonprots would have access to the
marketing services they needed. Id worked 5 years in
product management to learn how good businesses
got to great, how they used their resources, what
skills might be available for nonprotsnow Service
Alliance was the rst step to Taproot.
I asked Caroline if she could leverage her network to
help us develop a world-class brand and website in
time for launch in a few months. Much later Carolinetold me how crazy she thought my timeline was, and
my ambition, but she also found herself compelled.
It was a unique opportunity, and just the kind of
challenge she wasnt getting from her day job. So over
the next few months, Caroline brought together her
covert Landor team and a few of her other all-star
contacts to help me create a world-class brand and
website in time for our December 11th launch.
Caroline was one of several amazing professionals
who responded to my ads on Craigslist and got the
organization off the ground. In fact, most of the
launch team were not part of my existing network,
but new friends made through Craigslist who were
compelled by my vision and the need to do something
historic and meaningful.
Some of the most talented and passionate
professionals I had ever had the honor to meet
donated hundreds of hours of their time. None
of them were paid a penny. Over the next dozen
years, people continued to stand up and support
our mission. The most talented and passionate
professionals are always looking for a way to stretch
and make an impact.
This good fortune isnt isolated to Taproot. From
Donors Choose to Year Up, many of the top nonprots
in this country can trace back much of their success
to pro bono services from amazing professionals. Noris it isolated to the nonprot sector: conversations
with the entrepreneurs behind many visionary
commercial start-ups reveal that much of their early
success is tied to professionals who wanted to be
part of something exciting and compelling, even
without pay or the promise of future employment.
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Design Matters A world-classbrand is worth
the investment.The way your
ofce, website and
materials look
profoundly impacts
peoples condencein your work.
My grandfather, the son of a Jewish tanner in Salt
Lake City, worked his entire career as a public
servant for both nonprots and the government. In
these roles he worked with some of the wealthiest
and powerful people in the world. He had the ear of
presidents, CEOs, and Rockefellers, and he strove to
look the part. He wore suits hand-tailored in London,
ate in the most stylish restaurants in New York, and
stayed at the best hotels in every city he visited.
As a high school student, I questioned how a public
servant could justify wasting money on these frills.
But for him, these expenditures were the furthest
thing from frills. They were the ticket to engaging
with the rich and elite. He had to act like them so theywould invite him to their dinner tables.
This was the same thinking that I used in launching
the Taproot Foundation. When we launched,
many people assumed that I had made millions in
technology and invested them in this new venture.
The organization looked like a million bucks.
Technology hadnt made me rich, but like my
grandfather, those dotcoms had taught me about the
incredible importance of brand and design. If there
was one thing that all dotcoms did exceptionally
well, it was projecting their aspirations, not just
their current balance sheet. The Taproot Foundation
needed the same aspirational look and feel to attract
the resources, talent, and buzz to get off the ground,
even if we couldnt do it with $5.50.
We aspired to be a world-class brandthe kind of
brand our Landor team would put on their resumeswith pride. We had to communicate our bold vision
and professional culture, create a brand that would
give nonprots and professionals alike the condence
to share with us their most precious resource, their
time.
We did it. When we launched at the gorgeous Hang
Art Gallery in San Francisco with a crowd of over
100 professionals, we were immediately seen as a
player. We werent even a legal entity yet, but thanks
to the amazing work by Caroline and her team (AmySherman, Alton Wright, and Maria McGlaughlin), we
had a world-class brand to t the audacious goals of
this new organization.
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Dressed
or Success
In the audience at the launch was the development
director of Community Awareness and Treatment
Center (CATS), Terri Sideakis. She was in the class of
rst nonprot professionals to submit a request for a
Service Grant. She asked for the Taproot Foundation
to assemble a team to help create a new brochure for
their organization.
CATS had been a key part of the social services
infrastructure in San Francisco for years. They had
become best known for their CATS vans that helped
transport the homeless and in need to shelter and
treatment centers.
CATS faced many challenges, but one of the most
pressing was overcoming the lack of condence the
community had in their services. Despite the high
quality of their work, the perception on the street was
not remotely aligned with reality, and many of thecitizens of San Francisco stayed on the street rather
than take advantage of CATSs services. Terri wanted
something she could hand out to those in need that
would give then the condence to use their services.
We assembled a team of all-stars including one of
the Gaps best photographers and one of the best
copywriters we knew to create a powerful brochure.
A few months later, I got to see the brochure. It was
deep blue. The copy was sharp and powerful, and the
photographs were unlike anything I had ever seencreated by a nonprot. Striking.
Another few months passed before we heard back
from CATS. They had started distributing the
brochures at homeless encampments around the city.
One day, an older homeless man arrived at one of
the their treatments centers with the brochure in his
hand. He had been homeless for a long time and was
scared of shelters. While he was still skeptical, the
brochure had given him the condence to try.
At the end of the day, all the team had produced was a
simple piece of paper, but its impact was profound.
CATS also used the brochure to educate potential
donors about their work. In the past, Terri told me,
when she met with donors, she felt like she was
wearing jeans to the meeting. With the new brochure
in hand, she felt like she was wearing an Armani suit.
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2002:
Designing orScale
It takes the same
effort to hunt fox as
elephants.
By going with the Costco model, we could design
standardized solutions for 80% of nonprotsturning
overwhelming demand into something reasonable.
The next set of insights moved us from demand to
supply. Based on my experience over the previous
ve years, the list of standard needs of nonprots wascomposed of some basic solutions that companies had
been developing for years. Corporate America held
a large pool of talent with experience building these
solutions as well as pretty well established processes
for doing the work.
There was no way to use paid staff to deliver these
solutions. Even if we had the money, we couldnt
hire the volume needed to meet the demand. To
achieve scale and the desired 10% cost, we had to use
voluntary labor. 8 million business professionals inthe United States have the skills nonprots need
these professionals would become our team.
In recruiting them, however, wed nd professionals
who had never worked for an external client, much
less a nonprot. We couldnt just match them with
a nonprot and consider our work done. To reliably
produce professional quality work from this broad
workforce, we would need a very strong and tight
process to manage the services. The key to delivering
quality was the process management.
To meet our goals, we would apply a manufacturing
process to service delivery. Ford Motor Company
meets Deloitte: an assembly line process that leaves
little room for error. Each step of the way would
need to be dened and the roles clear. If you were a
marketing manager on the fth week of a brochure
project, you would have clear direction on what
needed to get done and how you need to work with
your other team members. Staff had to know what
every volunteer was supposed to be doing every
week so they could course correct quickly and
easily diagnose problems. The assembly line was the
only way to could control quality and also keep the
management and oversight costs down.
The constraint of developing a model that could
generate services with a cost of 10% of their value
brought us back to one of the pillars of Costcos
strategy: selling in bulk. At most grocery stores the
vast majority of items for sale are under $10, but at
Costco youll rarely nd something at that price.
Small transactions are expensive. The more someone
buys the lower the cost to the company and therefore
the lower the price they can offer to the customer.
Similarly, we couldnt provide $1,000 in services to
nonprots at a cost of $100. There are xed costs
associated with providing the very rst hour of
consulting services. For example, we needed to screen
nonprots and consultants, set up a team, and makethe matchfor every project, large or small. This is
expensive. Instead, we would provide large bundles
of services to nonprots. These projects would be
team-based, multi-month projects that could generate
north of $25,000 in value.
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This was the fundamental strategy that launched
Taproot: we would offer large standardized projects
that addressed common challenges for nonprots.
The projects would be delivered by teams of
volunteer business professionals and tightly managed
using standardized processes and established best
practices. It was the best way to provide quality at
scale.
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The Queen o
Pro Bono(The Rest oPro Bono?)
The Pro Bono Institute (PBI) was founded in 1996
as a program of Georgetown University, a resource
and advocate for the growing tradition of pro bono
service in the legal profession. Pro bono service had
been a part of the profession for decades, but it was
gaining steam and there was a desire by some leading
advocates support it as a eld with the associated
investments in research and knowledge sharing.
PBI was founded by Esther Lardent, who spent the
rst four years of her life in displaced persons camps
in Poland searching for family members who survived
the Holocaust. From an early age Esther was an
advocate for social justice; after graduating for the
University of Chicago law school three years before I
was born, she became a public interest lawyer.
We take for granted the role of pro bono in the legal
profession today. It is rare to nd a nonprot thatcant get access to pro bono legal services and movies
and TV shows are littered with references to pro bono
legal counsel. When Esther started PBI, this wasnt
the case.
Prior to 1996, Esther had seen a strong line between
those who practiced commercial law and public
interest law. They were two different worlds. Esther
had the vision to see that this was problematic for the
profession and for our society.
With PBI, she had a goal. She would break down the
walls and make pro bono service a core part of the
legal community across the nations thousands of law
rms. She would ensure that society had access to
the counsel it needed to ensure their basic rights and
needs regardless of their ability to pay.
When she started PBI, she began tracking the hours
the rms were doing pro bono. In 1996 they totaled 1.4
million. By 2007 the number had grown to 4.3 million.
Her strategy was brilliant and multi-faceted. She
created a law rm challenge to have rms publically
embrace a pro bono standard and then followed up
with a similar challenge for in house counsel. She
lobbied American Lawyer magazine to do an annual
ranking of the rms by the volume of their pro bono
service as well as the hours per attorney, creating a
competing and conrming market dynamic that
drove increased support within rms for pro bono.They needed it to attract the next generation of
lawyers.
There was also a concerted effort to make sure pro
bono service was part of the process of minting new
lawyers. In 1987, Tulane Law School became the rst
American law school to institute a comprehensive
pro bono program. By 1991, 13 more law schools had
launched pro bono programs; of these, six made pro
bono work a graduation requirement. Five years
later, the American Bar Association mandated that
accredited law schools should aspire to instill a pro
bono ethic, a guideline that was later codied in a
2005 standard stipulating that accredited institutions
shall offer substantial opportunities for student
participation in pro bono activities.
By 2007, out of a total of 200 accredited law schools
nationwide, 35 now have mandatory pro bono
graduation requirements; 110 have formal voluntary
programs; and 24 have independent in-house orcollaborative group projects.
According to a 2001 survey conducted by the
Association of American Law Schools, 95 percent
of law school deans agreed that it is an important
goal of law schools to instill in students a sense of
obligation to perform pro bono work during their
later careers.
Esther also helped develop a profession of pro bono
coordinators at rms and created a conference to help
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support them and their rm leadership to support
best practices. It set a foundation for the profession
that ensured a level of sustainability.
While many other institutions had played a critical
role in leading and executing the movement, Esther
earned the nick name the queen of pro bono for she
had truly been the voice and advocate for sweeping
change.
When I met Esther and learned both her personal
story and the story of the pro bono ethic the legal
profession, I had found my role model. She put a
name and strategy to the change that I envisioned in
society.
Taproots goal for 2020 is to accomplish for design,
management consulting, marketing, human resources
and technology what Esther and her colleagues did
for law. We will build the pro bono ethic into these
professions and create the infrastructure to ensure a
scalable and sustainable movement.
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2002:
Choosing theRight Category
Despite the high quality of our services, many of the
nonprots we approached didnt trust volunteers
to do mission-critical work. They had been burned
too many times by well-intentioned volunteers. You
get what you pay for, they shared over and over
again. They were encouraged by the structure we
proposed to manage the volunteers, but there was
a lot of resistance. One nonprot shared that if they
got another volunteer they would go out of business.Another described volunteers as the gift that keeps on
taking.
We had a major marketing problem. Nonprots didnt
trust our solution. It was hard to blame them, given
their stories of time wasted and promises broken
despite the best of intentions.
How could we earn the trust of nonprots and
broadcast reliability and stability?
We would position ourselves as a charitable
foundationnot a peer of nonprots, but a grant-
making organization. Foundations are well-resourced
and stable organizations with tremendous power in
the nonprot sector. They control the purse strings.
This simple idea turned out to be one of the most
important. It became core to our whole brand
platform and the design of our programs. We were a
foundation, but rather than giving grants we would
make grants of servicesService Grants. Unlikeconsulting rms who sell services to clients or
volunteer organizations who respond to in bound
nonprot requests, we would have a competitive
grant-making process to award services. These
nonprots would be grantees, not partners or clients.
This made working with us an achievement and
something worth promoting. It changed the whole
dynamic of the relationship.
Nonprots were accustomed to working with
foundations and understood the process. It was
familiar and comfortable. The work of applying
for a Service Grant also ensured the nonprot was
committed to the project and would put the necessary
resources against it on their end. They had to really
want it to spend the time completing an application
and doing an interview with our team.
To further the positioning as a foundation, we
attached a dollar value to each type of Service Grantwe provided to clearly show the value to nonprots.
For example, we might assign a value of $50,000 to a
Service Grant to design and build a new website. This
greatly increased the perceived value.
This also enabled our business professionals to be
philanthropists. They were each donating $8,000 in
services. It was more than being a volunteer. They
were now a major donor and a philanthropist.
Over time this positioning helped us in ways we didnt
anticipate. We got meetings with foundations easily
as they thought of us as a peer and less as a nonprot.
It also attracted talent to work on the team and our
board who aspired to work in philanthropy. There
was something aspirational about it that was a magnet
for talent.
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2002:
The FinalIngredient
The model that emerged was structured like
Costco, had the professional quality of a Deloitte,
was delivered on an assembly line like Ford Motor
Company, and was positioned as a charitable
foundation. There was one nal ingredient to pull
it all together: technology. This time the inspiration
was Amazon.com, the leader in ecommerce, at a killer
scale.
On Amazon.com the products were merchandized
online. You could learn all about a family of products
and even read consumer reviews before you
made your purchase. The rst taprootfoundation.
org launched with a catalog of ten services for
nonprotsService Grants merchandized just as
books or shoes might be. Each Service Grant had a
page on the site. It had an economic value assigned
to it. There was a description of the service and
key benets, as well as the ideal nonprot grantee
for the service. Also on the page was the scope of
work, deliverables, project plan, and list of business
professional roles that would be assigned.
The difference here was that instead of pressing the
buy now button, we had an apply now button.
At this point, fewer than 10% of foundations were
set up to take online applications, but by making
the experience like Amazon.com it was familiar and
comfortable for nonprot leaders.
We took another important lesson from ecommerce:
a guarantee. In the late 1990s many consumers were
still uncomfortable buying online. What if they didnt
like what arrived in the mail? The solution for the
smart ecommerce sites was simple. They guaranteed
your satisfaction with the product. If you didnt like it
you could return it for a refund or replacement. Most
even agreed to pay for the shipping to send it back.
We would guarantee our Service Grants. We couldnt
promise they would be done on time but we would
guarantee they would be completed and that you
would be satised or we would keep trying until you
were. If a nonprot got a Service Grant, they have
the commitment of their volunteer team, but also
the commitment of Taproot. Even if their team went
AWOL or didnt produce good work, we would x it.
They could apply knowing that we respected their
time and took responsibility for our work.
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16
Creating
A New Path
In starting Taproot, I studied corporate volunteer
programs to learn what worked and didnt.
Frustrating didnt begin to describe what I found.
Most corporate volunteer programs were fueling
sectorism, instead of killing it.
Business professionals told me over and over again
that nonprots need to act more like companies. They
said they wanted nonprots to be data driven andanalytical. But as I met with these volunteer managers
and heard story after story from nonprots, it became
clear that corporate philanthropy and volunteerism
were the entities that needed to act more like a
business.
So many corporate volunteer programs were
eld trips to see poor people and create photo
opportunities. They were not only not helping
nonprots, they were costing nonprots time and
money. Some of the companies were honest enough
about this and paid the nonprots for the ability to
keep 200 of their employees busy on a Saturday. The
bulk, however, felt nonprots should be thrilled to
have a busload of corporate employees show up so
the nonprot could entertain them and tell them they
made an impact.
I heard one nonprot in DC created a room at their
facility for corporate volunteers to paint. When a
company called and asked to send 30 people over thenext day, the nonprot would share that they had a
room that really needed to be painted blue. A month
later another company would call and they nonprot
would explain that the room needs to be green. It may
be an urban legend, but given the stories I heard, it is
likely close to true.
These experiences exacerbated the distrust between
the sectors. Business professionals walked away
from these bogus service opportunities feeling like
they wasted their time and blamed the nonprots
for being inefcient and not appreciating them. The
nonprots got great evidence to support their belief
that companies are arrogant and clueless about reality
on the ground.
As cost centers, volunteer programs are always
ghting to keep their budgets at companies. There
was no motivation to take a critical look at their
impact. No research was being done about theeffectiveness and I couldnt nd a company that
wanted that research done. They just wanted to data
to support more funding.
These programs had to be accountable for the damage
that many of them were creating in the community. It
was ruining the reputation of volunteerism and was
building even more disrespect between the sectors.
We would build our Service Grant program to show
that there is a better path possible built on respect
and mutual appreciation. We would intentionally
create space for professionals from both sectors to get
to know and admire each other for who they are and
what they share.
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17
When someone
gives you good
advice, take itthen
give it back.Let them know you
made the changes
and how it worked.
2002:
Our First$10,000
I have no idea how I got the meeting with Dick
Matgen at the Peninsula Community Foundation
(later renamed the Silicon Valley Community
Foundation) but I vividly remember the room and can
recall the speed at which my heart was racing. It was
my rst foundation meeting.
Dick wore many hats at the foundation, including
their investments in helping to build stronger andmore sustainable nonprots. Over the next ten
years I would meet dozens, if not hundreds, of
foundation program ofcers. Of all of them, Dick has
the strongest empathy for nonprot leaders. He was
deeply concerned about their organizations and felt a
personal sense of responsibility to help.
We had done a few projects for nonprots at this
point and started many more. Dick had the challenge
so many foundation executives face. He simply didnt
have enough resources to help all the nonprot he
wanted and needed to support. He was impressed
with what he saw from this young and passionate
professional but he also was very aware of how early
we were in our process.
He couldnt support Taproot. We didnt have enough
of the key pieces in places to justify the investment. At
my urging, he shared the list of changes we needed to
make. The list had roughly 10 items from formalizing
some key board practices to showing greaterindividual donor support.
The list was a gift. My focus when I return to my
bedroom ofce became his list of ten items. With
each I researched the best practices and then
implemented.
Two weeks later I emailed Dick back. We had done
everything on his list. Could we meet again? That
time I left his ofce with a request for a proposal that
eventual led to our rst granta modest but historic
$10,000.
Dick eventually joined our board and become its soul
and a good friend and mentor. He knew from day one
that when he gave me advice I would listen and act.
Even for busy people, it is always worth giving time to
people who make good use of it.
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18
2002:
Bill Draper III
Several years after my grandfather died, my
grandmother moved from their New York City 11th
oor apartment overlooking the United Nations to a
retirement home in Palo Alto overlooking Stanford.
She had packed several boxes of photos and as we
were unpacking them I came upon a signed photo
that caught my attention.
It was a photo of Bill Draper that he had signed with ashort note. To Joe Slater, whose loyalty and devotion
has made every task easier.
Was this the Bill Draper? The eyebrows certainly
looked familiar. It turned out that this Bill Draper had
been my grandfathers mentor in Germany after the
war as part of the Draper Commission. He was the
father of Bill Draper III, one of the pioneer venture
capitalists in Silicon Valley. He was doing deals in the
valley when much of the valley was still farm land.
During the dotcom era, Bill teamed up with Robin
Richards, a much younger but very successful
investor, to create Draper Richards International.
They made their share of Silicon Valley investments,
but their big win came from being the rst US venture
rm to invest in India.
The bet paid off- big time. They returned 16 times the
investment in only six years. They had made a ton of
money for their partners and for themselves.
While much of the gains were funneled into personal
interests and into new commercial investments, Bill
and Robin decided they also wanted to do something
for others who perhaps didnt have the opportunities
they had in their lives.
The only thing they knew, however, was venture
capital. The idea struck them that a startup nonprot
could do a lot of good if the right person leads it.
They could put their exceptional ability to identify
and coach entrepreneurs to help start remarkable
nonprots.
A year after I launched Taproot, Bill and Robin
launched the Draper Richards Foundation and hired
a family friend of Bills, Jenny Stein, to run it. They
were at the very beginning of a new eld of venture
philanthropy and the rst major US fund for early
stage start-up nonprots.
Bill Draper knew what it took to create a protable
enterprise. The best organizations learn efciency
and effectiveness. They learn that sales, or
fundraising, is very important and that marketing is
critical to supporting it. They need strong nancial
management, human resources, and technology. They
need exceptional leadership and to build equally
terric teams. In Bills experience, there was little
difference between the needs of a strong company
and a strong nonprot. The motivations were
different, but the ingredients remained the same. His
investments in nonprots would share the traits of his
best commercial investments.
Shortly after funding their rst two ventures,
Upwardly Global and Room to Read, Mike
Zimmerman, a friend of Robins, introduced me to
the Draper Richards Foundation. Bill and Jenny
understood the concept right away. Nonprots
needed access to functional talent and the economicsof the sector made it nearly impossible. They saw that
it was elegant and breakthrough. It was the disruptive
innovation needed to bring business talent to the
social sector.
The process to actually go from the rst meeting to
funding took over six months. I later joked that it is
easier to survive a senate conrmation than to get
funding for their foundation. They called over a dozen
leaders in the eld, grilled me multiple times, visited
me at my home, talked with our board members and
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19
had me revise our business plan until it was ready.
The Taproot board ended up being the variable
that push the deal over the top. Bill fell in love with
Caroline Barlerin, who he still gushes about. She was
wonderful. Jenny was equally impressed with her
and other members of the board like Dick Matgen.
That I had built a strong board so early demonstrated
to them that I could attract talent and was in this towin it.
Their support would enable us to get our rst ofce
and for me to stop running Taproot off my credit
card. $100,000 a year for three years plus the boost of
knowing the godfather of Silicon Valley was behind
us.
The Draper Richards Foundation would go on to
fund many of the most successful nonprots of the
following ten years, from Taproot to Kiva to World
Vision to Room to Read. Bill and Robin kept their
golden touch.
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20
2003:
Dr. James
Captain Kirk had Dr. Spock. I had Dr. James, aka
James Shepard, Jr.
In his senior year at Georgetown, James worked
fulltime at the Princeton Review and stayed there for
the two years following college, running their mid-
Atlantic franchise. He grew it from seven staff to over
100 and expanded it to 15 locations.
The Princeton Review used graduate and college
students as teachers to help aspiring students prepare
for standardized tests that would determine their
academic futures. Working with part-time teachers
with little-to-no teaching experience and high
turnover requires the Princeton Review to provide
substantial scaffolding to ensure a high-quality
product. James had to learn how to bring teachers
on board quickly, get them up to speed, and monitor
their progress. This required a rigorous process and
tight management.
James then tried his hand
at management consulting,
got an MBA, and in the
late 1990s, joined several
dotcoms in Silicon Valley.
When I met him through
my girlfriend at the time,
Aimee Randolph, he was
the CMO of Headlight.com, and Aimees boss.
We reconnected in 2003
shortly after Taproot
received funding from the
Draper Richards Foundation. James and I were both
part of a Jewish leadership program and he shared
that he was interested in moving into the nonprot
sector and working in education. We had many long
talks about the need for Taproot services within
education nonprots and he eventually agreed to
volunteer to do a study on the topic.
James was the rst person I had met who really
understood what I was trying to build at a strategic
and design level. He put words to my intuition and
saw that what we were trying to do was productize
professional services. It made complete sense to him,
as he had seen it done before, but he knew that it was
an unusual approach and that most people didnt
understand it. Through his research on education
nonprots he also knew there was a tremendousneed.
I had found the partner I needed to really make this
new organization work. Jamess experience at the
Princeton Review, combined with his consulting
background and start-up background, made him
one in a million. He understood the processes
and risks in using part-time and transient labor to
deliver professional services. He appreciated the
structure and design of consulting rms and had the
courage and audacity to work at a start-up. He could
operationalize the vision.
James took a salary that must have been 25% of his
last paycheck and joined the team despite the fact
that I didnt know where the money would come
from to pay him. I just knew that he was the partner I
needed and together we would nd a way.
We had a blast working together. I would be up all
night coming up with a new approach or framework
for how to get to the next stage and would shareit with him in the morning. He would get it right
away and usually point to some business school
or McKinsey study that stated the same thing and
allowed me to expand on the thinking. We could
totally geek out on strategy and the immediately put it
into action.
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21
Blueprints
One key to operationalizing the Service Grant
concept, as in productizing any professional services
project, was to design it to t into a single standard
process. That process needed to work regardless
of the project type. You had to be able to use the
same process to design a website as to do a branding
project.
Despite the different nomenclature from rm torm and industry to industry, all projects have the
same process DNA. They kick off, conduct discovery,
deliver ndings and recommendations, execute,
iterate, and then transition to the client to take over.
We found a great ally in the design of the program
in the Project Management Institute. PMI is an
association of thousands of licensed project managers
who had developed common best practices for
managing complex projects. They understood the
art and science of project management and were
intrigued by the added complexity of managing a
team of volunteers.
Another key was in the design of the materials and
infrastructure to support the process. Without clear
guidelines on the standard process, best-practice
documents for each project type, and example project
plans and deliverables from similar projects, a team
could quickly get lost, no matter how carefully wed
trained them.
James rst task, then, was to determine the right
documentation and process management to really
support our Service Grants. He set up a war room
and went to work, quickly developing a prototype of
a 70+ page guide that we could customize for each
project type. Each blueprint, as we called them,
included the best practices for that project type,
garnered from the leaders in the eld (such as Landor
for branding), as well as the tips and tricks from PMI.
The documents anticipated the 100 reasons a project
would go south and headed them off at the pass
through proactive communication and processes.
It was not only what many would call the best
volunteer management resource ever created, it was a
profound innovation in process design. We found that
it was not only highly effective in our program but
beyondour business professionals were taking our
documents back to their corporate ofces and usingthem to manage their projects for their company.
James had created a work of art, something a
coworker called drop-dead gorgeous. The
blueprints were our purple cow, in Seth Godin
speak. They became our secret sauce.
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22
Overcoming
Sector Barriers
Sometime in our rst few years I met with a program
ofcer who was highly skeptical about the viability
of the Service Grant program. She told the story of
how one pro bono program had sent a rst year MBA
student into a school district to help develop a new
organization design for the district. It was a huge
failure. The student was way out of her depth and she
pissed off just about everyone at the district ofce.
For many people in the nonprot sector, this was their
experience with business professionals who donated
them time to help x nonprots. Rather than
strengthen nonprots and build bridges between the
sectors, pro bono work was doing the opposite.
The suggestion many made was that we train our
business consultants on the nonprot sector before
they do a project. But the potential models and
curriculum always fell short. The nonprot sector
is way too diverse to create a standard training, and
until a volunteer was on site with the client, they
werent going to retain the information anyway.
Our solution was simple: dont have professionals
doing projects they couldnt be hired to do, and
make sure the projects we offered required little
understanding of the nonprot sector. That MBA
should never have been asked to redesign a school
district, as she didnt have the skills or the knowledge
of the eld.
Another problem was the arrogance dynamic in
projectslike that MBA, many consultants brought in
to help a nonprot offered the wrong solutions, at the
wrong times, and seemed tone-deaf to the nonprots
real needs and resources.
This problem turned out to not be a sector issue at all,
but a consulting issue. Business professionals doing
volunteer work for nonprots really want to help
and they want to hear that they are helping, from the
very rst meeting. So they were quick to give advice
in their rst meeting, even though they had little-to-
no knowledge or appreciation of the organization
and setting. Their insecurity and well intentions were
perceived as arrogant.
This is a common challenge in consulting, especially
with rookie consultants. The solution wasnt better
training, but a better process to give the businessprofessionals the permission to learn before they
advise. As Steven Covey famously said, our teams
needed to seek to understand and then to be
understood.
We made this understanding a core part of the
design of the blueprints. The team engaged in a
deep discovery process at the start of the project,
then shared their ndings so the nonprot could
conrm that the team understood the situation.
Only then would they move into a phase of making
recommendations and giving advice.
It became rare to have one of our grantees complain
about the lack of sector knowledge or arrogance
in one of our teams. They felt respected by having
the teams spend so much time listening. It created
authentic and trusted relationships and was critical
to the business professionals giving helpful and
informed advice.
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23
2003:
DefningAssumptions
Parallel to developing our blueprints, Dr. James took
on writing our rst true strategic plan. His draft
was 61 pages, which I cut down to 6, but in it was
something very powerful that continues to core to
how I think about new programs and ventures.
James had worked with John Doer and some of the
best VCs in the valley during his tenure in dotcoms
and had an appreciation for which questions neededto be explored and answered at each stage in the
development of a start-up.
We were going from an R&D stage to taking the
program to market and there were certain key
assumptions, or risks, that we needed to clearly
articulate as a team. Success in this stage was about
being deliberate about testing our key assumptions
and seeing if we could move forward to start to scale
the concept.
We called out the specic assumptions and the status
of validating them in that initial strategic plan. If we
found that any of the assumptions were wrong we
would need to adjust course or even pack our bags. It
created a discipline around our work and where we
put our energy.
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24
Assumption Description Status in 2004
R&D We can professional quality services be delivered
using volunteers for team staff & management.
Proven Yes
Product We can create a system for delivering quality servicesat our target cost point.
Proven Yes
Demand There is nonprot demand for the services
we offer.
Proven Yes, mostly
Volunteer Supply There is a supply of appropriate volunteers. Proven Yes, mostly
Small-batch
manufacturing
We can deliver small numbers of professional-quality
projects in one city.
Proven Yes
Funding Funding available. Proven Yes, mostly
Single-City, Single
Functional-Area Scaled
Manufacturing
We can deliver large numbers of similar professional-
quality projects in one city.
Current Focus of Effort
Sustainable Revenue We can build a sustainable revenue generating
process.
Current Focus of Effort
Multi-City, MultipleFunctional-Area Scaled
Manufacturing
We can manage large numbers of differentprofessional-quality projects nationally. Outstanding
Competition We can build sustainable advantage
and compete successfully against
competitors.
Outstanding
Key Take Away: At every stage in the development of an organization, name your assumptions and regu-
lar check to make sure you are on track.
Here are the assumptions as they appeared in our 2004 plan
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25
2003:
CorporateSirens
Tie yourself to
the mission mast
to steer clear ofdistractions.
Shortly before we closed the funding from the Draper
Richards Foundation, we were in talks with CNET.
They were one of the hottest companies in the Bay
Area at the time and had a beautiful new building
South of Market.
As a media company, they had a ton of the right talent
for our projects. They could help us quickly staff
our projects and help more nonprots faster. They
offered us ofce space in their building if we would
focus our efforts on their employee population.
Working out of my home ofce at the time, my
immediate reaction washell yes. But after sleeping
on it, challenges started to emerge. We didnt have a
funding model yet but CNET was only offering space
(in a recession with plenty of empty buildings intown), and their needs would make it hard to attract
additional funding. They would be legitimizing
but their degree of ownership would make it hard
for me to raise the funds to pay myself and create a
sustainable organization.
The board wrestled with the decision but we decided
to pass. It was hard to do given that we didnt have
any other options but it wasnt the right partnership.
Then, in the year after the Draper funding, we had
another exciting opportunity. Cisco was trying to
make the jump from traditional volunteering to
leverage the skills and talents of their employees to
help the community. We met with them and they
immediately saw the potential.
The problem was that they saw too much potential.
After several conversations, they drafted a document
outlining their needs. The model had to be able to
scale to hundreds of projects within 12 monthsandthey needed to be global. Cisco has ofces all around
the world and the solution had to work just as well in
Ireland and India as San Francisco.
They gave us a long lecture about how this is how
companies work. They need scale, they need a global
footprint, it has to be supported with enterprise
quality technology and it has to happen quickly. They
felt they could do it on their own but it would be
easier if we could help them. They also said that we
should be willing to do it for next to free as working
with Cisco would open so many doors to future
revenue. It was an organization maker.
There was no way in hell we could do it but we didnt
run right away. They had found my Achilles heel.
They had questioned our ability to be world class and
play with a company. They had framed it as a test of
our value and potential.
We returned to our strategic plan and the
assumptions we were trying to prove. There wasno assumption about being global. There was no
assumption about providing enterprise software to
companies or even an assumption about companies
for that matter. Working with Cisco would take us off
course.
We walked. 12 months later they didnt have the
platform they described mandated by their executive
team. They tried and rolled out various programs but
none of them achieved what they had asked us to do
in 12 months.
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If you want to
be national or
global, make thecommitment early
and build it into
your DNA so you
dont set deep roots
in only one place.
26
The Second City
Many nonprots have ambitions or visions to become
national and go beyond just serving their place of
origin. It is their goal but they rst want to make
sure they have their recipe perfected. There is a lot
of merit to this thinking, but as one mentor pointed
out, it has three aws when applied in the nonprot
sector.
The longer you operate in a single location, themore connected your staff and board become to
your identity as a local provider. Rather than seeing
success as becoming national, you begin to worry that
scaling will jeopardize your local efforts. Your culture
or DNA becomes local and your relationships become
local.
The idea of perfecting your model sounds smart when
you think about manufacturing but with programs
that are human-based it is an illusion. Programs are
never perfected and there are always two more things
you want to nail down. It can become an innite loop.
Finally, there is defacto no serious start-up funding
for nonprots. At $100,000 a year, Draper Richards
offered the largest grant available at the time for start-
up nonprots. This could get you off the ground and
enable some piloting but to build infrastructure you
needed more money.
With our model, that was designed aroundphilanthropy, the growth curve in a given city
could only accelerate at a certain trajectory. This
was a healthy growth curve but didnt support any
investments in infrastructure. The only way to
accelerate this curve was to start opening more ofces
so that the infrastructure costs could be allocated
across multiple ofces.
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Sometimesgrandmas are more
important than PPT
in making strategic
decisions.
27
2004:
New York
New York City had the greatest potential to be our
second city. It had way more companies, foundations,
business professionals and nonprots. We knew that
all the key ingredients were there and also that if
someone else entered that market before us it would
both be hard to get in and also hard to be the national
leader if we were out of the biggest market.
But that wasnt the main reason we opened NewYork City second. We could have stayed in the same
state and opened Los Angeles or gone back to the
city where I rst worked in the sector, Chicago.
We opened New York City second because of my
grandmother. My grandfather had recently died and I
wanted to spend time with her and she had a couch I
could sleep on.
Spending time with my grandmother was one of the
best parts and fondest memories of our early days in
New York. Every night I would come home and walk
her through all the meetings from the day. She would
reect on my grandfathers parallel experience scaling
the Aspen Institute and her experience as his right
hand.
The last conversation I had with her before she died
was about our time together in New York. It was the
highlight of our relationship.
Meeting with foundations, corporations andnonprots in New York was so refreshing. We had
proven the model in the Bay Area and they didnt have
the same skepticism as we faced pitching the program
before there was evidence of success. Unlike the
Bay Area, there also wasnt the sense of innovation
fatigue. Funders in the Bay Area get pitched new
ideas every week and the headlines in the paper are
always about technology and innovation. In New York
City the foundation community was excited about
our entrance and saw the real value in what we had
created.
Our biggest champion was Matt Klein, the head of
the Blue Ridge Foundation. We met in his ofce in
Brooklyn and within 30 minutes he gave me a verbal
offer of funding and incubator space. He was the rst
entrepreneurial funder I had ever met. Other funders
understand entrepreneurs, but Matt was one and
acted like one. He didnt need PPTs or budgets. He
just had the instinct.
Matt introduced us around town and within nine
months we had funding lined up from many of the top
foundations in the city from the United Way to Booth
Ferris. They were all modest grants but they were
all we needed to be able to hire someone to lead the
ofce and a desk for them to sit at.
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If you are
introducing a new
category, dontexpect customers
to come to you; nd
out where they are
and go to them.
28
Sell the End,
not the Means
How do you sell a product to someone who isnt
looking for it? Harder yet, how do you do it in a way
that costs next to nothing an in large volume?
Few business professionals today are looking to
engage in pro bono services. Far fewer were seeking
these types of opportunities back in 2003. While they
wanted to have more impact and purpose in their
careers, and be more connected to the community,they didnt know pro bono was the solution.
When we spoke to potential candidates for the
program, most had a bad association with the very
concept of volunteering. They pictured old ladies in
Keds planting owers. Those that had volunteered
in the past found it an utter waste of time and
talent. They were not looking to volunteer, so trying
to recruit people through traditional volunteer
channels like volunteer centers and websites like
volunteermatch.org was bearing very little fruit.
Another challenge was that we needed very specic
roles. Most of the volunteer-oriented sites were too
heterogeneous and could not reliably create pipelines
for roles like graphic designers and web developers.
Again, we decide to approach it from a different angle.
What was the prole of the person we wanted to
attract? They were professionals in a given eld. They
werent satised with the current state of their job orcareer and were looking for something else.
Where did graphic designers or web developers going
when they were looking for change in their career?
They went looking for a new joband by 2003 most
of them were looking on one or more of about a dozen
job websites from Craigslist to CareerBuilder to Dice.
com to Monster.com. These sites could target specic
professionals in certain geographies who all met our
target prole. Most importantly, they reached
thousands of professionals per day and could generate
real volume.
That was the insight, but getting these sites to help
us was another story. There was no way we could pay
the hundreds of dollars they asked to advertise a role
and they were concerned about having unpaid jobs
listed as it might frustrate job seekers.
One by one I made the rounds and gave each site mypitch. Our nation was in trouble and the nonprot
sector was our best bet, but nonprots needed the
talent to help them rise to the challenge. Taproot was
working to make this happen but they (insert job
board) were the only way we could do it. They had
the attention of the business professionals and had to
decide if they would use that power for good.
If they didnt do it we would fail, the nonprots would
fail, and our society would be in deeper water. I asked
them to let us post for volunteer positions on their job
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29
boards and to donate the inventory, tens of thousands
of dollars worth per year.
These sites protested that it would open a ood
gate of requests from nonprots for free listings;
they told us it would ruin their job board. But most
were able to see this as a unique opportunity. Other
nonprots might want free job postings here or there,
but we were the only one who had this strategicability to partner. We were the only one with a large,
ongoing need for something only they could provide,
something that would enable their customers to
maximize their careers and impact.
In just a few years we signed up every major job site
and had hundreds of thousands of dollars in donated
job board inventory each year to drive business
professionals to nd purpose.
And come they did. Over 61,000 people have applied
to do pro bono with Taproot; as of May 2013 we
have more than 5,000 active or on hold pro bono
consultants.
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Surround yourself
with great people
and let them ndways to create
value and energy.
The best ideas
rarely come from
management
30
Like me, Lindsay Firestone speaks a mile per minute.
Like me, she did her undergraduate studies in
sociology and organizational behavior. This focus
was a product of her natural interests but also her
experience as a summer intern at the Red Cross
headquarters in Washington. It was the perfect
opportunity to understand how a large nonprot
was able to run a world class program and operate
efciently and effectively. It would be a master class
in organization design and leadership. It ended up
being just that but not for the reasons she expected.
The Red Cross needed help. It had world class
programs and yet was also missing the most basic
systems and infrastructure support because there was
little funding that was allowed by donors to be spent
on overhead. Lindsay was shocked. If a nonprot
of this size and stature was hampered by these
fundamental obstacles, how could other organizationsexpect to have it any better. It turned her thinking
2004:
LindsayFirestone
upside down. She returned to Yale that fall with a
renewed passion to understand how to build a healthy
and strong nonprot organization so that she could
one day help ensure our
social sector was able to
realize its potential. She
had been out of Yale for
a few years when she
approached James aboutjoining our team. To her,
Taproot was exactly what
the doctor ordered. We
were scaling a model to
bring talent and services
to nonprots that they
couldnt afford. She wanted to be part of it. James
met with her while I was on my honeymoon. When
I returned he shared that he had found a profoundly
passionate young star that he wanted to hire but we
didnt have the right role for her. We did have one
opening, as a volunteer recruitment associate, but it
wasnt quite right. After I met with Lindsay, I gave
James my blessing to hire her for the role anyway:
dont let this one get away. While it wasnt intentional,
over the next few years Lindsay got what many
management grooming programs at big companies
received, a rotation through all the departments in the
organization. She was our young star, and when we
needed something done and done well, Lindsay got
moved into a role to work on it.
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31
2004:
Matt OGrady
Key to opening a second market was to hire someone
else to run the Bay Area so I could be on the road and
know that our work in the Bay Area could continue to
grow with quality. That person was Matt OGrady
one of our early culture carriers who thought Taproot
was an innovative experiment in engaging people in
service in a much more powerful way than had ever
been done before. He had worked for decades in the
nonprot sector and was a thought leader in bothnonprot management and volunteerism.
Taproot was breaking a lot of the rules and turning
conventional wisdom about volunteering on its head.
Based on what he was hearing, the early indicators
were that it was successful and really powerful. He
wasnt looking for a job but when he saw that we were
looking for someone to run the Bay Area ofce, he
through his hat into the ring.
Where James was an ideal
partner to operationalize
and develop our programs,
Matt OGrady was the one
guy in Bay Area that could
be our ambassador to the
nonprot establishment.
He was one of the old
guard and had seen it
all and knew all the key
players in the nonprotand philanthropic
community. His endorsement and ability to put what
we were doing into language that would translate into
the eld that would control our success.
Several years later as part of a 360 review for Matt
I interviewed a foundation executive about her
experience working with Matt as our Bay Area
Executive Director. She was very complimentary
but when I asked if she had any challenges working
with him she shared that Matt at times was too
excited about Taproot and his enthusiasm could be
overwhelming.
Matt is an effusive guy to begin with, but Matt
become the best possible advocate for our
new program. He truly understood why it was
revolutionary and was able to get others to share his
excitement.
For Matt, our rst heresy was that we focused rst
on nonprots and then on volunteers. Instead of
going out and recruiting volunteers and then nding
nonprots that might need them, we had started with
the nonprot demand and then sought to nd the
volunteers to meet their needs.
This runs counter to just about every volunteer
program. The collective wisdom was that volunteers
and valuable and if they want to contribute their time
and talents you should support them and nd a way.
There was a lot of truth in this but Matt had seen the
result of this thinking in the past. It fundamentally
cost more than it was worth and set up the wrong
dynamic between the volunteer and the nonprot
in need. Being volunteer-centric actually limited the
impact you could make and Taproot had ipped the
model around to address this issue.
He was also blown away by the idea of nonprots
applying for services in a competitive grant-makingprocess. We werent trying to serve all comers but
instead setting as high bar and making it something
special to get access to our services. This was not
the way volunteer programs were supposed to work.
You were, within limits, supposed to help everyone
you could and nd a way to make it work. To
treat services as the same value as cash and lift the
philanthropic model to do so was unheard of and ran
counter to so much of what he had seen.
Finally, he would tell foundations and nonprots
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32
about how we had productized our services and
developed blueprints for each project type. He would
bring the blueprints to meetings and show them off
like pictures of his kids. He spoke of wishing he had
been able to use these previously in his career and
saw them as a work of art.
Despite all his excitement about our innovations, he
was still skeptical when he took the job but felt it was
worth taking the risk given the potential. What nallywon him over was seeing the work our volunteer
teams were producing.
The nonprot grantee that he most often sited was
the Point Reyes National Seashore Association. We
had awarded them both a branding and website
Service Grants and he saw how it transformed how
they positioned the organization in the community.
But he also saw the transformational power these
projects were having on the nonprot staff and
leadership. The process was helping them reconnect
with their vision, bond as a team and become more
focused and energized about their work. It was
making them each stronger professionals and the
organization as well.
Unlike many of the industry veterans I had seen
destroy the commercial start-ups a few years early,
Matt didnt join the team to change us or teach us
how to run an organization properly. He truly loved
the model, appreciated the team and wanted to help
be part of making the vision a reality.
Key Take AwayDont hire people who want to x
you but instead are motivated to help you do what
you are already doing better.
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33
The Smell o
Success
Have you ever noticed the distinct smell of certain
stores? Most people dont consciously but research
shows that they do subconsciously.
It is such an important variable in retail that at one
point in the 1990s a technology company received
signicant funding to create scent speakers. The
idea was that if you went to Macys.com that website
would have the scent speaker produce a specic scentthat they wanted to add to your online shopping
experience.
It was riddled with problems, not the least of which
was that bouncing around on multiple sites would
produce a horrible cloud of different smells leaving
the room smelling less like a perfume counter and
more like a mens locker room.
Research by Eric Spangenberg reported in the Journal
of Retailing found that people respond best to singlesimple smells. In a home dcor store, the plain scent
of citrus well outperformed a mixed scent including
basil and green tea. People spent more when there
was only one scent. In fact, all of our senses respond
best to simplicity, not just our nose.
In 1897, Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss endowed
28 scholarships at UC Berkeley. His descendants,
the Haas family, have become the standard-barrier
for family philanthropy in the Bay Area. The
family divided their fortune and created a series of
independent foundations to focus on their diverse
interests. The largest is the Evelyn & Walter Haas,
Jr. Fund, which has assets of around $600 million.
The other Haas funds include the Walter & Elise
Haas Fund, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund,
the Miriam & Peter Haas Fund, and the Columbia
Foundation. While there is some overlap in their
funding, they largely fund different areas of need in
the Bay Area from social justice to the environment to
the arts.
Many local nonprots counted a Haas foundation as a
benefactor. It is rare for a nonprot to receive funding
from more than one given the diversity of interests,
however. Under the leadership of Matt OGrady, the
Bay Area executive director, we relieved support from
nearly all of them.
The funding was for what is called capacity
building in the nonprot sector. The term refers toinvestments made in strengthening and sustaining
nonprots vs. supporting programs. It covers costs
like marketing, human resources, strategic planning
and technology. These are areas of investment that
have historically been painfully underfunded.
Donors want to sponsor scholarships, feed kids or
provide another bed at a shelter. Very few donors
want their money going to implement new human
resources software. This is not only true to casual
donors but also many of the top foundations. Howoften do you see an end of the year charitable
solicitation in your in box asking for support for their
capacity building needs?
Only one of the Haas family funds proactively
provides funds to nonprots to help build their
capacity. Despite this reality, Matt offered a solution
that made it too hard to not invest in capacity build
through Taproot - a simple and compelling solution
to a challenge they see every day. For every dollar you
donate to Taproot, we could generate $8-10 in critical
services for nonprots in your portfolio. As one
funder put it, we turbo-charge a foundations funds.
Foundations who had never funded capacity building
suddenly became our partners. Not only were we
likely the only nonprot funded by nearly ever Haas
family fund, within a few years we were working with
nearly all the top philanthropic organizations in the
Bay Area. Our pitch was perfectly simple.
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Create a strong, simple hook. Complexity
kills partnerships and sales. Create a
simple hook. We raised funds from morefoundations than any other nonprot in
our eld because we have a simple hook.
34
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2006:
Returning toChicago
In 1996, I left Chicago with a vision to learn how to
help nonprots realize their visions and potential.
Nearly ten years later, with the New City ofce open
and new leadership in place, it was time to return to
Chicago.
Chicago has arguably the most civically-minded
corporate community in the world. Over the last ten
years however, nearly all the big Chicago corporateheadquarters were gone. Some had gone bust. Others
merged and moved. Many jobs remained and the
employees remained commitment to the community
but the power and leadership had been greatly
degraded.
Unlike the Bay Area and New York City, there was
next to no appetite for innovation and despite my
short tenure in the sector a decade earlier we were
seen as an outsider and the welcome mats were not
rolled out for Taproot.
But there were a few key champions that enabled us
to establish a beachhead. The Wrigley Foundation
provided our rst support and slowly a few other
foundations started to see the value of our work and
follow suit.
A few years after we opened the ofce I was scanning
the list of nonprots we supported and saw the
Chicago Foundation for Education appear on the list.
I had come full circle. We were now helping to bring
business support to the nonprot that drove me to
start the Taproot Foundation.
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36
2007:
Pro Bono Air
As we scaled the Service Grant program it as a
constant battle to ensure we had the right resources
in place to deliver on our plan and maximize our
impact. To deliver a Service Grant we needed to have
a ready nonprot, sponsorship to fund it and a team
of diverse business professionals. Without any one
of those resources in place, the project couldnt go
forward.
In his work as a management consultant prior to
business school, James had worked in the airline
industry. For a company like United Airlines, success
was about optimizing their revenue per seat.
In designing their model, airlines had to decide which
routes to y and with what frequency. They also had
to pick the right plane to handle the expected number
of passengers. Finally, they had to determine the
right mix of rst class, business class and economy
class seats on each plane. Getting this equationwrong would cost them money and often leave their
customers frustrated and looking for a new carrier.
This was the same challenge we faced as we scaled
and James brilliantly went to work applying the
Excel magic he had learned in the airline industry
to manage our operations. We needed a predictive
model that could enable us to forecast likely supply
well in advance.
We learned that you need to reach out to ten
nonprots to get three to apply for a Service Grant
to ultimately lead to one ready grantee. We learned
that 50% of volunteer applicants never make it
past orientation. We learned that on a team of ve
volunteers, an average of one of them drop out during
the course of the project. We learned that many
projects would be on hold because we couldnt ll one
role of the ve on the team.
These hot roles were worth a lot more than other
roles that were in abundant supply and never held up
completing the stafng of a team. They were our rst
class and business seats. They needed more attention
and service.
These were all inputs that went into the design of
the management and reporting systems. Our stafng
database was congured to suggest the best role of a
given trained volunteer based how to maximize thenumber of projects that could be launched. We knew
which projects to promote to nonprots to encourage
applications for projects we could staff more easily.
We built volunteer recruitment goals based on the
projected need in 3-6 months.
Pro Bono Air was ready to take