Interview with Carol Erickson

Carol Erickson is an expert in philanthropy and international development, specializing in organizational capacity building, evaluation, fund raising and development, project management, and building leadership that empowers people and creates learning organizations.

What is your personal background working with international development and NGOs?  

I’ve dedicated my professional career to international development, philanthropy, and nonprofit organizations, working to alleviate poverty in low-income communities in the US and throughout the world.  As a Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I directed efforts to provide public access to computers and the internet in public libraries that serve low-income communities throughout Canada, Chile, and Mexico.  While Executive Director at Rural Education and Development (READ) Global, I expanded access to education, small businesses, and microfinance in rural communities of Nepal, India, and Bhutan.

In the early part of my career, I spent over 10 years administering Fulbright programs and assisting PhD candidates and post-doctoral researchers with access to library and archival material throughout the former Soviet Union. As a Senior Program Officer with the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), I helped to establish one of the first American nonprofit offices based in Moscow. I also was the Director of International Relations of the American Library Association, where I worked to establish a number of programs to improve information access to immigrant communities in the United States, including formal partnerships with the Guadalajara International Book Fair and Zimbabwe International Book Fair.

My specializations include organizational capacity building, evaluation, fund raising and development, project management, public speaking, building impactful partnerships, and leadership that empowers people and creates learning organizations. 

What do you consider the most common organizational problem for NGOs today?

My experience is that the most common problem is organizational capacity – having the right combination of talent, not only in terms of expertise to implement the NGO’s mission, but also the right combination of people to support other areas that make the organization function such as marketing and communication, fundraising, evaluation, knowledge of information technology, etc.  Many NGOs just don’t have the capacity to hire full time staff for these positions, and often don’t think to bring on short-term support or consultants to help them build these areas so that they can get ahead and be more successful in the long run.

What advice would you have for a charitable organization attempting to raise funds in today’s economic climate? How have things changed?  

Three words would summarize my recommendation to any charitable organization competing for funds in this tough economic climate:  Mission, Marketing, Evaluation. 

NGOs need to be razor focused on their mission and have staff and board members who, first and foremost, connect with the mission of the organization. It is all too common to find boards that are composed of only friends of the founder or executive director. Those types of board members tend to care more about supporting personality instead of caring about the health and future of the NGO. Boards need to be diversified to include members with connections to a variety of institutions to help the NGO thrive and prosper, and every single board member – in action and passion -- has to singularly be committed to seeing that NGO succeed. Board members need to be passionate about the cause, the mission, so that they will become lifetime spokespersons for the NGO.

Secondly, the NGO has to dedicate funding to communications and marketing. A successful NGO will have a clearly defined mission, a sophisticated website to advocate for its importance, emotional stories about their organization’s impact, as well as evidence to justify their work and approach.  A social networking presence has become increasingly important in today’s “sound bite” society. NGOs need to look at Twitter, and Facebook and LinkedIn, among others, to keep their work in the mind of potential donors and the media. 

Lastly, and most importantly, NGOs must have qualitative and quantitative evaluation programs in place to showcase their effectiveness. If you can’t prove that your work is making a difference, you might as well go home. Funders are becoming increasingly diligent about requiring proof of impact from an independent evaluation, so savvy NGOs are finding creative ways to measure their results, through partnerships with universities, and students who need a project to take on, or – if they can’t afford to fund it themselves – through pro bono collaborations with respected research firms.

There are an increasing number of NGOs out there, all competing for limited foundation dollars, so the NGO that succeeds in these three areas is going to stand out.

There are certainly occasions where charitable organizations are subject to deception by their grantees, where the money being channeled is not making the kind of difference it could and should. How serious a problem is this? 

Unfortunately, this situation is extremely serious and reflects very negatively on the lack of rigorous evaluation undertaken by charitable organizations. My 20 years of experience in the international sector have shown a “developing country deception dance” happening far too often, and in far too many geographic locations, to let me believe that my experience is unique.  Recently, I’ve started talking about the “development deception dance” theory with other individuals in the international NGO sector, and unfortunately, they all understand immediately what I’m talking about. Donors desperately want to believe that their dollars are genuinely making a difference, and the recipients of the donations want to show that they are achieving the goals of the NGOs. But these grantees may have other goals and priorities – holding on to their NGO job with regular income so they can feed their families, a cultural perspective that does not allow them to tell the truth about the inadequacy of the NGO’s model, and a fear that their income source will end if they tell the truth. So they create a “theater” when the donor organization visits to show them that their intentions are having the intended impact. They “stage” situations where it appears that locals are benefiting from the project when, in fact, people have been shipped in to create parades, celebrations, and staged theater to make the donors believe that their dollars are making a difference. 

And this truly is a “dance” that requires two parties – the donor, who is willing to be deceived because they so desperately want to believe that they are having an impact; and the grantee or international recipient organization who, so desperately wanting to please, does whatever it can do to continue to receive funds.

I’ve read and seen so much major media covering the international donations of famous celebrities, and can’t help wonder whether they are really making a difference, or whether they, too, are the victims of the “developing country deception dance.” These make for great stories on the evening news, but are the true stories really being told?

How can a foundation or non-profit best ensure that its resources are being effectively utilized?

I firmly believe that every foundation grant should include funding for an independent evaluation component.  If the foundation doesn’t require it, it is in the best interest of the NGO to ask for this support. Not only will an independent evaluation help the foundation determine if its funds are well spent, but it will also give the NGO constructive feedback to make changes and improvement to its work, ultimately increasing the quality of services to its constituencies. 

Finally, independent evaluations can be used for marketing purposes to help the NGO better tell the story of their work and impact.

How important is it that charitable organizations interact on the ground level with the populations they’re hoping to help?

Intensive face-to-face interaction with an NGO’s service population is crucial to understanding what is working and not working. Many NGOs will “drop” into a community for an hour or so and not take the time to fully understand the true reality of that population’s situation. This short-term donor “drop in” contributes to the developing country deception dance – things can easily be staged for an hour or for a day. In order to fully understand a community or project’s impact, one needs to spend an extended period of time with project staff and the constituencies served. I have one colleague who says that her job is to be a detective – to ask lots of questions, often in different ways, to fully understand. 

I also firmly believe in the value of unannounced site visits. These can be the most revealing of any ground level experience.

How effectively do today’s NGOs and other organizations make use of available technology?

As mentioned earlier, many smaller NGOs do not have the organizational capacity to hire full time IT experts so they are often behind the curve in terms of technology. Also, many countries in which NGOs work have limited access to electricity, let alone computers and the Internet.  Those NGOs who are thinking about and incorporating solar or other sustainable energy technologies into their projects are few and far between, but those who do it are doing some of the most innovative work I’ve seen.

How common is it for NGOs to collaborate and share resources? Do you consider this an important tool? 

NGOs are generally not good at collaboration, as often their mission is too focused or their financial and human resources are too limited to give them the luxury of stepping back and taking the time to look at the potential of innovative partnerships. These types of collaborations could help them improve services and streamline costs in the long run. Sometimes there is also an ego factor involved, with strong personalities not wanting to alter their model even slightly to partner with another NGO.

But I’ve seen some truly successful collaborations that do support the value of the time investment necessary to make these partnerships successful, and in these cases, everyone has to show some flexibility to make it happen.

If you could see one overall change in the philanthropic sector today, what would it be?

If I had a magic wand, my wish would be to see the philanthropic sector adopt a philosophy to encourage all NGOs to become “learning organizations.” The truth is that if international development work were easy, poverty, disease and corruption – to name a few – would have been eliminated by now.  These are hard challenges and NGOs will make mistakes – I like to call them “lessons learned” -- in their approaches. My one hope for change would be to see the philanthropic community incentivize the sharing of “lessons learned” and not penalize NGOs who openly discuss what worked and what didn’t work for them. A few foundations are leading the way in those discussions, but the NGO sector also has to be ready to put their egos aside to share not only best practices, but also failures that turned into learning so that others can also benefit from those lessons. And grantees need to feel secure in sharing bad news about what is not working openly with donors, without the fear of losing funding or their jobs if they are honest.

What sorts of positive trends to you see unfolding in the NGO world?

The James Irvine Foundation recently completed a report on nonprofit trends, so I’d encourage readers to visit this comprehensive report that discusses demographic trends, new social networking tools, technology and volunteerism http://www.irvine.org/images/stories/pdf/eval/convergencereport.pdf  It is the most comprehensive and timely report on trends that I’ve recently read.