Group With No Ad Budget and an Unfulfilled Gift Meets Goal 5 Years Early

John Wood, founder of Room to Read, a charity that builds schools and libraries and promotes literacy, left his job as a Microsoft executive in 1999 to start a charity that would help 10 million children in the developing world get access to books. Now Room to Read is doing so well in gaining support that it expects to meet its goal in 2015. Since 2000, it has raised $250-million in cash, products, and services. In an interview with The Chronicle about his new book, Creating Room to Read, Mr. Wood explains how the group has succeeded.

What is the most outrageous stunt you have pulled off in your nonprofit career?

Dubai Cares promised to give Room to Read enough money to build libraries and fill them with 1 million additional books. Every time a kid read a book, a kid in the developing world would get access to a book. We wanted to track the progress.

My team and I said, Well, the Burj Dubai is under construction, it’s the world tallest building, if we can light it up floor by floor, we can turn it into the world’s largest fundraising thermometer.

We put a big ticker and put a big screen underneath the Burj Dubai that every day updated the number of books students had read.

The more books kids read, the higher the lasers went, to the point where the entire Burj Dubai got lit up. The kids actually read 1.2 million books.

When you’re a nonprofit you don’t have an advertising budget, yet you’re trying to compete against companies that are promoting themselves. Any time a charity can find a way for free to cut through that clutter and make a statement is something we all need to be good at.

What fundraising tips can you share?

Number one is never be afraid to ask. I think a lot of charities treat fundraising as a dirty little side business. We’re proud to go out and ask people for support.

I remind myself that no money equals no mission, and I’m not asking people for money to feather my own nest—I’m asking them to allow us to be a conduit so a child who has lost the lottery of life can have a chance to get educated.

Secondly is stop talking about the damn problem, talk about the solution. When I go to charity conferences, I just want to hang myself. Everyone’s wallowing in how bad things are. You have to act on a solution.

In the book, you talk about a donor not fulfilling a $5-million pledge. How can charities deal with such challenges?

You have to step back from the crisis, take a deep breath, and remind yourself this is a long game.

If you’re on the right path, don’t let these things distract you. Even when the $5-million pledge was withdrawn, I walked away from that meeting, took a deep breath, and said to myself, We’re not going to lay off a single employee, we’re not going to cancel a single project. How are we going to do that? I have no idea, but that’s my vow and now I’ve got to figure it out.

I went out and talked to a lot of people and told them what happened. I said, We made commitments to all these villages, girls, and families; we don’t want to cancel any of the projects.

In the heart of the financial crisis, we had our chapter leadership conference, our volunteers who do fundraising in 57 cities around the world. I said, “You have to go out and tell people, ‘You may feel the world is out of control. We can’t control what the stock market does. This is something you can control: $250 means a girl in Cambodia or Nepal can go to school for a year, $5,000 means we can open a school library.’ ”

You’ve met many powerful, influential people in your job. What advice can you give other charity leaders and fundraisers in forging connections?

Get out of the office. Get on a plane. What’s worked for me well is hiring good people to run the operations day to day. A lot of founders like to keep a lot of control, and I made the decision that I don’t need to be CEO. It freed me up to be outside the office as a full-time ambassador for the organization. [Mr. Wood left his position as chief executive of Room to Read, appointing co-founder and chief operating officer Erin Ganju in 2009.]

Make friends with those who have too many frequent-flier miles. There’s nothing better than flying for free because some generous investment banker said, “I’ve got half a million frequent-flier miles. Use them.”

What is next for Room to Read?

A programmatic focus on literacy. In the early years, I might have been somewhat naïve to think that we would open libraries and that would be good enough.

What we discovered early on through our research is that there were a lot of children who were not able to read the books in the libraries, so the libraries were not as effective as they would be if children were getting literate and into a habit of reading in grades 1, 2, and 3. We’ve been working much more closely with the governments and teachers.

To what do you attribute Room to Read’s success?

A lot of international aid work is done by well-meaning people from outside the country and telling the local people what to do. We don’t believe in that model. We believe in having strong, empowered local teams. What frustrates me is the stuff that treats the developing world as passive aid recipients. People go in and dump used T-shirts, several thousand pairs of shoes, surplus grain in the market.

All those things disintermediate the local entrepreneur, who can’t compete against free or subsidized [goods]. We work with local authors and artists to produce original children’s literature that’s culturally relevant.

We combine it with a business mentality of setting very bold goals. I’ve always believed bold goals attract bold people, and that’s why I said we wanted to reach 10 million children by 2020. We’re doing so well that we’ve moved the deadline forward by five years. To date, we’ve reached 7.8 million children.

I’m very much against the adage of small is beautiful. I think small is ineffective.

I think we have a transparent model. We post not one year of financials on our Web site, but five years—five years of auditors’ reports and five years of annual reports. We post all of our outside evaluations on our Web site; we don’t blackline anything, we post them up there, warts and all.

We give our investors—we don’t call them donors because I think “donor” is a very passive term—a direct causal link between what they give and what we do. A lot of people who have resources love being able to know exactly where their money is going and they can see it, taste it, touch it.