School Work

More graduate students are gaining hands-on experience while providing free services to charities

Matt Forti would like to run a nonprofit group one day. But for now he must content himself with helping to manage organizations run by others.

Fortunately for Mr. Forti, 27, a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, he has ample opportunities to sample bits of the nonprofit life.

Through programs at Northwestern, he has served as a nonvoting board member of the Donors Forum of Chicago, a group of grant makers, and selected charities that stand to benefit from student labor, then handpicked classmates to help them. He has helped a local charity reconfigure its marketing approach so the public better understands its mission.

Mr. Forti says he chose to attend Northwestern over the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in large part because it offered “a clearly delineated nonprofit-management program and activities that would give me hands-on experience.”

He says he made the right choice. “It’s turned out that the synergies that come from matching students with charities has been the most amazing thing about my time here,” he says.

Paula Conrad, a spokeswoman for Misericordia, the Catholic charity in Chicago where Mr. Forti and his peers worked on a marketing project, agrees that pro bono work performed by graduate students has many benefits.

Mr. Forti and four other graduate students helped Misericordia’s Hearts & Flour Bakery conduct a survey of potential customers, then advised the charity to revise its marketing to more directly feature its mission: training and hiring developmentally disabled adults.

“I couldn’t put a monetary figure on it, but there’s no way we could have done a study like that without [them],” says Ms. Conrad.

Serving as Trustees

Like Misericordia, charities nationwide have found value in the work of graduate students in business or nonprofit management. Students have been enlisted as temporary board members and consultants, performed market research, mobilized volunteers, and undertaken many other tasks at organizations that often lack the resources to take on special projects that might help them plan for the future, raise more money, or operate more efficiently.

As charities have benefited from free services provided by students — services that might otherwise cost them as much as hundreds of dollars per day — students have learned how nonprofit groups work.

Colleges and universities like the efforts to get students involved in charity work, in large part because doing so gives students real-world experience before they graduate. Among the efforts colleges have started to offer students are:

• Forming “board fellows” programs that train and place students on the boards of directors of nonprofit groups, usually for a semester or a full academic year. As part of their experience, students in most of the programs are required to join board subcommittees or take on projects suggested by the board.

• Making specialized nonprofit service, such as the development of a marketing approach or strategic plan for a charity, part of a student’s course work.

• Creating outside volunteer opportunities or “special projects teams” in which students can participate on their own time, but which specifically make use of and hone management skills related to their education.

While leaders of nonprofit organizations disagree about the efficacy of such programs and on how much they do to help charities, all say that the price is right and that students bring a wealth of business and management skills with them.

“It’s really a win-win-win proposition,” says Anne Wilson, chief executive of the United Way of the Bay Area, in San Francisco, which raises $38-million per year for local charities. “It helps schools draw students and build a sense of community within them, but what’s terrific for nonprofits is they get to deal with students who are experienced and smart. We can never pull staff people off to do some of the things the students do for us in such depth.”

For the past two years, Ms. Wilson’s organization has taken advantage of a board-fellows program run by the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

The program takes students who are studying business, some of them to nurture nascent nonprofit-management careers, and places them as nonvoting members on Bay Area charity boards for one semester.

The university signed up eight students when it started the board-fellows program in 2004; for the 2006 academic year, it has enlisted 53 students — a sign of the overall popularity of such student-nonprofit pairings, says Nora L. Silver, director of the nonprofit and public-management program at the Haas School.

“We’re seeing the board-fellows idea replicated around the country,” Ms. Silver says, adding that Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have all started fellows programs in the recent years, as has Northwestern. “The idea is really appealing to business schools today because of the growing interest students have in nonprofits.”

The United Way of the Bay Area approached the Haas School two years ago about offering a temporary board seat to a student, says Ms. Wilson. The student sat on the United Way’s 35-person board and was assigned a veteran board member as a mentor. Together they directed a self-assessment of the organization, including a survey of board and staff members.

Because of his status as an organizational outsider, the student offered the United Way some new ideas about how to market itself.

“He gave us a fresh perspective and could look at data with a very clear eye,” Ms. Wilson says. “He actually acted as a consultant to the board and gave us some insights that were very useful.”

Even though only about 10 percent of the Haas School’s graduates end up in jobs leading nonprofit organizations — the bulk of them go into private business — Ms. Wilson says she sees a secondary benefit to the board-fellows program.

“Many of the students will become leaders in the private sector who will understand nonprofits,” she says. “It helps increase the depths of their understanding of civic life.”

Governance Issues

At Northwestern University, students who take part in the board-fellows program take a nonprofit-board governance course during their first of two years of study. That course makes students eligible in their second year to participate in the Kellogg School’s board-fellows program, which will place 35 students on boards this coming academic year, twice as many as last year. Each student board member will serve for one year.

In addition to spending 10 or more hours per month on board activities and projects, board fellows meet monthly to talk about what they are learning.

“One of the main benefits is that while you serve on one board, it’s like you’re serving on 35,” says Mr. Forti, who serves on the board of the Donors Forum of Chicago. “The Donors Forum has a very responsible and effective board, but not all of them are. So you get to hear about some of the other fellows’ experiences and what makes for a strong board, and then think about what kind of boards you’d want to serve on when you graduate.”

For students who seek experience as hands-on nonprofit managers, some universities tie completion of a course to a project performed for or in concert with a charity.

At Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland — one of the first institutions to start offering practical experience to people studying nonprofit management — graduate students at the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations are required to take a two-semester course on strategic planning, which includes practical work with a charity.

Since 1987, Case Western students who have taken the course have provided the equivalent of $20-million in planning work to Cleveland-area nonprofit groups, says Susan L. Eagan, executive director of the Mandel Center.

She adds that the course and program prepare students, who serve charities in teams of three to seven people, for the real world of organization management.

Faculty members help guide students through their strategic-planning projects, for which they receive six credits. After Case Western has sifted through proposals from charities, students are sent out to perform an “environmental scan” during which they investigate how things outside the organization — such as changes in public policy or demographics — might affect a charity in the future.

Students will also look inside an organization to see if its staffing levels are adequate for growth and how they can improve fund raising by reaching more potential donors. In addition, they will work with the charity’s board and executive leadership to develop strategies that might help an organization move forward.

Will Goldstein, 25, a first-year candidate for a master’s degree in nonprofit organizations at Case Western, says that the strategic-planning course teaches students to think like consultants.

“We learned things like how to manage a client’s expectations and how to really understand their needs,” Mr. Goldstein says.

The student team’s client, ReStore, a building-materials store run by the Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity that resells donated cabinets and construction materials at cut-rate prices, exhibited some hesitation when students began their work in January.

“I think they knew that with their limited resources, the last thing they needed was a bunch of students to come in and say, ‘You need this’ and ‘You need that,’” Mr. Goldstein says. “So we decided to take a more holistic approach that concentrated both on ways to look at their future while giving some advice on how to get more donations and volunteers in the here and now.”

The students focused on how to increase the number of used items donated to ReStore, which was started two years ago as an ancillary revenue stream for the local Habitat for Humanity, while offering low-cost supplies to homeowners and people who repair substandard housing.

Jeffrey M. Bowen, executive director of the Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity (and a 1998 graduate of Case Western’s nonprofit-management program), says his organization, which has an annual budget of $2.3-million and relies on a cadre of 2,000 volunteers, cannot afford to buy its advice.

That’s what made it “easy for us to say yes,” says Mr. Bowen. “Some of the students’ advice that they based on research was information we would have been hard-pressed to come up with.”

Specifically, a suggestion that ReStore post fliers on the walls of home-repair outlets — such as Home Depot — was well-received by the charity.

“We had always looked at the stores as potential donors,” says Mr. Bowen. “But the team looked at stores as conduits for people, such as contractors, who throw away perfectly good cabinetry and other items, then buy new materials for the suburban homes they’re upgrading. We’d like to get our hands on the materials they would otherwise throw away. They persuaded us that if we could get remodeling centers to push ReStore, then we could reach our best potential donor.”

Along with other recommendations the students presented to ReStore — which included advice on how to use signs painted on the charity’s vans to better get the word out about volunteering — the students gave the charity a sense of how to grow, Mr. Bowen says.

“Everything they came up was very realistic and in the ballpark,” he says. “The only unrealistic thing is that we don’t have the manpower to implement them. It would be great if we had a Case student as an internship champion of sorts who would be connected to us and provide some continuity, so we can do some of these recommendations.”

Lack of Follow-Up

Other charity officials agree that the lack of any formal follow-up mechanisms is a drawback to making sure students’ ideas are carried out.

Davida Coady, executive director of Options Recovery Services, a drug-treatment clinic in Berkeley, says students who took part in an out-of-class project that was supervised by faculty members at Berkeley’s Haas School and a local consulting firm helped her charity develop a plan for new ways to raise money last year — then left before they could help get it started.

“What I wish is that they had stuck around,” says Dr. Coady, who had asked the Haas School for a team that would help the charity explore ways to start a side business that would employ its clients and provide an additional stream of money to the organization. “They did a good job of whittling down our list of prospective businesses from 30 to one, and they were very good about making us realize the overhead and other costs. Then they were gone.”

On the advice of the student team, Options Recovery Services opened a mobile carwash that would clean the parked cars of local workers. But the vans that contained the cleaning equipment couldn’t get permission to enter certain parking garages, or were too large to fit inside them. Insurance costs proved to be way beyond the charity’s budget.

Within a year, the plan was scrapped. Dr. Coady says the students could have done a better job of isolating a workable business, although she concedes that some of the problems the carwash faced were hard to predict.

“I wish they had talked more to our clients about what they wanted to do before they decided on the carwash,” says Dr. Coady. “Our people weren’t into it.”

But, she says, she is generally happy with the work of Haas students and is asking for another student team to help develop plans for a barber shop, counseling center, or drug-testing business.

Ms. Silver, the head of the Haas School’s nonprofit and public management program, says that putting a project team’s plan into place isn’t part of the deal.

“It is not the role of a consultant or intern to implement a major new program for a nonprofit,” says Ms. Silver. “The student projects are conceived as special, add-on, technical-skills- required undertakings that require additional expertise that the organization does not have at the time. They really cannot be ongoing operational projects.”

How to Meet Expectations

To avoid such misunderstandings between charities and universities, and to make sure students take on manageable projects, Ms. Silver and others say that colleges must bear in mind several factors when creating programs that link students with organizations, such as:

• Limiting the scope of the project. Ms. Silver says the Haas School was recently approached by a performing-arts organization in San Francisco with little in the way of money or staff. The organization asked Haas for help in developing a strategic plan. “But what they really wanted was a plan for every part of their operations,” says Ms. Silver. “It was too much for us to handle, so we declined.”

• Scheduling a project so it meets the needs of the charity and the students.

• Accounting for a difference in work pace. “Students are fiercely fast, and nonprofits have to match that, for the sake of the student and the project,” says Ms. Silver.

• Making sure that the aim of the project is clear between the charity and the school, and that it has the backing of a person high in a charity’s hierarchy.

• Ensuring that projects are manageable enough, but not so simple that students won’t learn something by doing them.

Although some charity officials say they would like more student help to finish projects, others say that they frequently see the students’ charitable spirit extend well beyond a project’s lifetime. Ms. Conrad, of Chicago’s Misericordia, says that members of Northwestern’s student project team have maintained ties to the Hearts & Flour Bakery.

“Matt Forti and his wife came to volunteer because he knew we were very busy during the holidays,” says Ms. Conrad. “It’s amazing during this period of concern over business ethics that you see these M.B.A. students who are so passionate about working in the community this way.”