From Mission to Movement

Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant set out three years ago to do for the nonprofit world what the best-selling author

Jim Collins had done for business: uncover the practices that characterize high-performing organizations.

Both women had recently earned master’s degrees from high-powered business schools, and they expected their research to confirm the in-vogue notion that charities could thrive by modeling themselves after their for-profit counterparts. Over the past decade, consultants, donors, and foundations have urged charities to add new layers of management, develop far-ranging strategic plans, build robust fund-raising and communications divisions, and spread their programs around the country.

But after conducting research on 12 diverse nonprofit organizations that were singled out as excellent by their peers and charity experts, Ms. Crutchfield and Ms. Grant found that those actions are a mere sideshow to the real explanation for why some organizations make a far bigger difference to society than others. Instead, the accomplishments of the 12 charities can largely be pegged to work they do outside their own walls — shaping government policy, spurring changes at corporations, inspiring individuals to become advocates for their cause, and sharing ideas and money with other charities to kick-start entire movements.

The authors lay out their findings in Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (John Wiley & Sons), which goes on sale in October. Ms. Crutchfield is a managing director at Ashoka, a nonprofit organization that supports social entrepreneurship, and a consultant to foundations and charities. Ms. Grant is a consultant to nonprofit groups and a senior adviser to Stanford University’s Center for Social Innovation.

“High-impact nonprofits don’t just build organizations — they build movements,” Ms. Crutchfield says in an interview. “Their leaders are obsessed with advancing their cause. Building their organization is one way to achieve that. But the best nonprofits find points of leverage outside of their organization to achieve that goal.”

Widespread Search

To identify the high-performing charities profiled in the book, the authors surveyed nearly 2,800 charity leaders, and then conducted interviews with 60 experts in areas such as education and the environment. A team of M.B.A. students from several universities helped with the research, and more than a dozen foundations contributed a total of $750,000 to help finance it.

The 12 charities in the book are a diverse group spanning the nonprofit universe, including Environmental Defense, the Heritage Foundation, Teach for America, and YouthBuild USA.

After studying these groups for two years, Ms. Crutchfield and Ms. Grant identified six practices that helped make them “high-impact” nonprofit organizations:

Advocate and serve. Some of the 12 charities in the book started out providing programs, and some began as advocacy organizations, but over time they all ultimately did both. America’s Second Harvest began as an organization that primarily ran food banks, and many local food-bank directors initially found advocacy work unseemly. But that changed when Congress threatened to eliminate a $40-million federal food-assistance program in 1994. The charity hired an experienced Capitol Hill staff member as a lobbyist, and he helped protect the program. “Since America’s Harvest began its advocacy efforts, an estimated $400-million more in federally sponsored commodities now flow to the needy each year,” the authors write.

“All the organizations, even if they would not have touched policy with a 10-foot pole in the beginning, eventually got on to advocacy, because the reality is that they could have more impact that way,” Ms. Crutchfield says.

Make markets work. “Great nonprofits find ways to work with markets and help business ‘do well by doing good,’” the authors write. Environmental Defense, whose informal motto in its early years was “sue the bastards,” endured criticism from other environmental groups in the late 1980s for changing its approach and working with McDonald’s to reduce the waste created by the packaging it used. But the effort led to a 70-percent decrease in waste produced by the burger chain over the following decade. The charity also helped create a new market for trading pollution permits, known as “cap and trade,” which provides economic incentives for companies to reduce their damage to the environment. The system reduced sulfur dioxide, which contributes to acid rain, by 50 percent.

Inspire evangelists. “Great nonprofitscreate meaningful ways to engage individuals in emotional experiences that help them connect to the group’s mission,” the authors write. Habitat for Humanity now has a $1-billion global budget, and several thousand affiliates, but it is not slick marketing that has helped the organization grow, the authors argue, but a home-building experience that turns volunteers into evangelists for its cause. The charity scored a big victory when its founder, Millard Fuller, persuaded former President Jimmy Carter to join its board in 1984; annual revenue rose from $3-million that year to nearly $100-million a decade later.

Nurture nonprofit networks. High-impact nonprofit organizations focus on advancing their cause by building networks with allies, rather than viewing other charities as competitors for scarce resources. “Great nonprofits are more like Wikipedia and MySpace than Microsoft or IBM,” Ms. Crutchfield says. “They’re giving away what would be seen by others as proprietary resources.”

The authors describe the Exploratorium, a hands-on science center founded in San Francisco in 1969, as “looking a bit worse for 40 years of wear and tear.” But from the beginning, its founder, Frank Oppenheimer, viewed the Exploratorium as a movement rather than just a museum. It became a model for the hundreds of children’s museums and hands-on science centers that opened in the 1970s and 1980s, and Mr. Oppenheimer was “eager to help them beg, borrow, and steal his ideas,” the authors write.

Such sharing and openness has also helped the Exploratorium, according to Dennis M. Bartels, its executive director, though sometimes the financial benefits came many years later. Scientists urged the museum to open its current stem-cell exhibit (viewed on a monitor, stem cells from a mouse’s heart beat rhythmically, just like an actual heart), to help communicate why stem-cell research is important. Those same scientists helped persuade the National Science Foundation to continue to provide research support to the Exploratorium. This year, the Exploratorium will receive $11-million — roughly a third of its budget — from the NSF.

“Sometimes you can get into a trap of thinking just about your direct audience — the people coming through your door — and you forget all the other audiences,” Mr. Bartels says. “If you’re sharing and helping them, in the end they’ll support you in turn.”

Dorothy Stoneman, president of YouthBuild USA, which puts low-income youths to work building low-cost housing as they try to earn a GED or high-school diploma, was told by a consultant years ago to focus on building her organization and to see similar charities as the competition. Ms. Stoneman responded that she viewed the other charities as partners.

She lived up to that claim in 2003, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development provided $40-million to spread YouthBuild nationally. Ms. Stoneman refused to run the money through her own organization because she feared the federal government would have capped the funds at $25-million. The loosely affiliated YouthBuild network now has 226 organizations and revenue of $180-million. The authors say Ms. Stoneman “sacrificed her organization’s own interest for the greater good.”

Master the art of adaptation. The 12 organizations respond to changing circumstances by innovating and modifying their tactics to increase their odds of success. In one of the best-selling business books ever, In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters argues that companies should “stick to their knitting” — focus on what they do best. “For nonprofits, that doesn’t really apply,” Ms. Crutchfield says.

When Self-Help, which makes loans to low-income people, primarily in North Carolina, learned that approximately 10,000 people in the state were losing their homes to predatory lenders each year, it successfully lobbied the state to enact a landmark anti-predatory-lending bill in 1999. Groups from other states began to seek Self-Help’s assistance in passing laws in their states, and in 2002, Self-Help started the Center for Responsible Lending, a national subsidiary that conducts research and advocates for policy changes at both the state and federal level.

“Self-Help has always been concerned about impact,” says Eric Stein, the charity’s chief operating officer. “We aren’t always as concerned about how that impact is achieved.”

Share the leadership. The CEO’s of the 12 organizations “know they must share power in order to be a stronger force for good,” the authors write. The Heritage Foundation, regarded by many as the most influential think tank in Washington, is headed by Edwin J. Feulner, who has a “unique combination of charismatic yet egoless leadership,” according to the authors.

When Mr. Feulner took the job in 1974, he called his friend Philip Trulock and asked him to come along. The two have overseen the organization, which now has a budget of $40-million and 275,000 members, for more that 30 years. The foundation also has eight vice presidents, many of whom have been at Heritage for 20 years or more. “We spent a great deal of time studying Heritage’s success, and we came to see that this structure, with its broadly diversified leadership, provided the critical capacity Heritage needed to sustain its growth and impact,” the authors write.

Questions of Approach

The book’s ambitious aim — and the fact that the authors are not academics but are involved in running and consulting with nonprofit groups — is likely to lead some scholars to question the rigor of the research. The authors had no control group, for example, and no baseline measurement for truly distinguishing top organizations from also-rans (as Jim Collins did, in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leapand Other Don’t, which used long-term shareholder returns as the measuring stick).

For a particular approach to be identified as one of the six practices that define “high-impact” nonprofit groups, the authors did require at least 10 of the 12 organizations to use it.

“Can we prove that they’re successful because of these practices?” asks Ms. Grant. “No, we can’t, but we do have a strong hypothesis that these practices led to their success. We’re throwing down the gauntlet and saying, This is where the next 10 years of work in the sector needs to be.”

J. Gregory Dees, faculty director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s business school, which helped finance the book, says Forces for Good goes beyond incomplete measures of nonprofit effectiveness — such as the percentage of expenses that go to overhead — and gives nonprofit leaders a road map to having greater impact.

“People are desperate for knowledge,” Mr. Dees says. “There will be academics who do not see this as sufficiently academically rigorous. But I haven’t seen them produce anything as useful.”

A Long History

Ms. Crutchfield and Ms. Grant met as undergraduates at Harvard University, after each had spent a year studying abroad. During their senior year, in 1990, they started a campus magazine called There and Back: Notes From Abroad, which focused on volunteerism and study opportunities in foreign countries. In 1993, when the AmeriCorps national-service program was in its infancy, the two teamed up again to found Who Cares: The Tool Kit for Social Change, a national magazine focused on social entrepreneurs and community service.

The magazine folded in 2000, and the two authors made their way to business school (Ms. Grant went to Stanford, Ms. Crutchfield to Harvard). Ms. Crutchfield joined Ashoka after earning her M.B.A.

In 2003, while pulling together information for a new crop of social entrepreneurs who were visiting the charity’s Arlington, Va., headquarters, Ms. Crutchfield says, she couldn’t find any material that told the story of what made high-achieving nonprofit organizations great. The existing publications focused mostly on fund raising, board development, and management.

“That’s when the idea struck that the social sector needs its own study of what it takes to be great,” Ms. Crutchfield says. “I was grabbed by the idea, and it wouldn’t let me go.”

She contacted Jim Collins for advice. “He helped me think about how you could apply his research methodology to what makes great nonprofits great,” Ms. Crutchfield says. (He would later share his thoughts in Good to Great and the Social Sectors, a 42-page monograph published in 2005.)

Ms. Crutchfield took unpaid leave from Ashoka to focus on her new book project. Ms. Grant, who spent two years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company after business school before becoming an independent consultant to charities, agreed to team up with Ms. Crutchfield once again to write Forces for Good.

The two initially thought they would study matched pairs — an approach Mr. Collins had used to distinguish great companies from those that are merely good. But in the end, the authors found few high-achieving pairs that truly did the same type of work. And when they did, as in the case of Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the quantitative data didn’t provide enough evidence to distinguish which group was good and which was great.

“The dynamics of the nonprofit sector are very different from the for-profit sector,” Ms. Crutchfield says. “There’s not the incentive to copy and compete. When you have a program that’s working, donors don’t want to fund overlapping groups.”

Since the authors couldn’t find matched pairs, they went in a different direction and decided to identify a dozen high-achieving charities that focus on a wide variety of causes. They reasoned that any practices that led to high performance among such a diverse group would probably apply across the nonprofit world.

They limited the pool in various ways, most notably by considering only charities that were founded after 1965.

“We’d love to do another book that is about the older, established organizations that have continued to innovate and thrive and grow,” Ms. Crutchfield says. “But I was really interested in organizations that had gone from nothing to high impact in a short period of time.”

Once the authors had settled on the 12 groups, they visited the headquarters of the organizations, interviewed an average of 12 managers and board members per charity, and gathered as much written information as they could find.

Then they sat down to analyze the data. The six practices “truly bubbled up from the research,” Ms. Grant says.

A Call to Expand

The authors hope the book’s findings prompt some charity leaders to reconsider their plans for growth. Only a third of the organizations in the book have expanded beyond a single site.

“What we’d like to see is for the discussion to focus more on impact,” Ms. Crutchfield says. “That means looking beyond the four walls of an individual organization, and looking at how nonprofits can work in concert with business, government, the general citizenry, and also their fellow nonprofits, to create more impact than they could on their own.”

Taken as a whole, the prescription in Forces for Good could prove overwhelming for small charities.

Alan J. Abramson, director of the nonprofit-research program at the Aspen Institute, a Washington think tank that helped finance the book’s research, says charities should pick and choose rather than taking on too much.

“Each organization will have to figure out for itself what resonates and what’s doable,” he says. “It’s hard for any organization to be Superman.”

The authors themselves may need a break; both became first-time mothers as they undertook this multiyear research project. “Don’t ever think of a book as the thing you do on the side while you have babies,” Ms. Grant says. “We both underestimated the time it would take.”

While Ms. Grant continues her work as a consultant to nonprofit groups, Ms. Crutchfield is back part time at Ashoka, as managing director of the Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship, which brings in renowned leaders like the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to counsel up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

As in 2003, Ms. Crutchfield is assembling information for upcoming training sessions. This time, she’ll have plenty of material to share.