100 Days of Gratitude - Day 23: Jed Emerson

Jed Emerson

"The most important thing is the music.  It's all about the music," Jed insisted.  

The scene was Colorado, many years ago.  I was in a deep funk, because GlobalGiving, which had just launched, was going nowhere fast.  I was run down, bleeding cash, and almost ready to throw in the towel.  At some point, I met this guy named Jed Emerson, and he invited me to come out to visit his new place in the wilds of Colorado.  

Jed had an interesting background running a nonprofit and teaching, but he was not a potential funder or user of the site, and I had no direct business reason for going.  As far as I could tell he was just some wild man with ideas about things like blended value.  

But something told me I should get on the plane anyway, and Mari told me it would do me good to get the heck out of Dodge, so I did.

Jed and I spent a couple of days in the deep snow in the outback of Colorado doing nothing in particular - mostly walking his dogs in the freezing cold and shooting the breeze and talking about relationships gone bad.  And listening to music.  Jed was all over the heavy metal stuff - groups like Stone Temple Pilots and The Marvins -  which he listened to at high volume while writing his books and articles. 

As I was flying back to DC, I thought to myself, "Well, crap, I have to keep going.  I can't give up now."  I had no blinding insight or a huge surge of energy. The feeling was more subtle.  But I knew I could not quit.  

So I went back to DC and started listening to more music.  Jed's tastes were a little heavy for me (please don't tell him), but I did start cranking up the Flaming Lips and My Morning Jacket, and the music helped keep me going.  I haven't seen Jed much over the past ten years, but I sure have listened to a lot more music. (Right now I'm listening to Steve Earle.)

Yesterday, I was on a conference call with Jed, and I thought back to that trip to Colorado, and how far things have come over the past decade.  It wasn't possible on the call to explain to Jed how pivotal that trip was for me.  Or to tell him that GlobalGiving has now mobilized nearly $100 million from 250,000 donors to build the platform and fund 5,000 projects in 130 countries.  Or that we broke even in 2011.

So let me say this here, loud and clear: Thank you, Jed.

It's not about the mileage...

"Oh, it's not really about the gas mileage, it's about the power. This thing has 340 horsepower, and will do zero to sixty in under six seconds, and I can still feel good about it." - new owner of a Lexus hybrid.

When we started GlobalGiving a few years back, there was much fanfare about the concept of social return on investment. The idea was that philanthropic donations are analogous to financial investments, except that the return is social in nature (# of children educated, workers trained, etc) rather than financial.

But I soon realized that most people do not use an "investment" mentality to make decisions about their philanthropy. Instead, I found, philanthropy is much more like consumption than like investment. People derive immediate gratification from the act of donating and supporting a group. Often a donation is much more about the donor than the donee.

Katherine Fulton of the Monitor Institute agrees that philanthropy is not like investment. A couple of years ago, she defined philanthropy as "an expression of values" by the donor. I thought this was right on, and I started using her definition instead of my own.

But lately I have started thinking that maybe we are saying the same thing. Consumption often is an expression of values, not simply a calculated act of getting the most for your money.

One of best known examples of this is the popularity of the Toyota Prius. By most analyses, it takes many years of driving to recoup the extra cost of the the hybrid engine, despite the much higher miles per gallon. When you ask people why they buy the car despite the long pay back period, they will often say "Oh, well I bought this thing just to show I care about the environment."

Here is another example. I recently bought a Subaru Outback. It is a very popular car among people who care about the environment, and I have been amazed at the "brand" that this car has built among environmental activists. I like this car for performance reasons (it will go anywhere, winter or summer), and I like being a card-carrying member of the enviro-community. But here is a paradox: My Subaru gets lower gas mileage than many BMWs.

And last weekend while at the Solar Decathlon on the mall in Washington, DC, Mari and I ran into a friend. She told us she was going to install solar panels on her roof. I told her that we had considered that but that the payback period was so long it did not seem feasible. "Oh, I am not doing it for the pay back, I am doing it because I like the idea of solar power."

So consumption is often "an expression of values," too, just like philanthropy.

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Uh oh...time to stay home

I am sick and tired of flying. I fly so much - back and forth to the west coast all the time, up and down the east coast occasionally, and then overseas a couple of times a year. I can't stand the airport, the waiting lounges, the crowded planes, the long waits, the jet lag and the arriving in Oakland at midnight and having to drive 45 minutes to get to my hotel in Palo Alto.

It turns out the earth can't stand me flying so much either.

Today, I took an eBay-sponsored carbon footprint test here at the PopTech conference. The average American has a carbon footprint of about 9.5 tons per year, it tells me.

The good news is that I walk to work instead of commuting each day, so I don't burn any fossil fuels on my commute. I feel pretty smug about that. On the other hand, I drive out to West Virginia most weekends to get away from the city. Overall, I feel like an average emitter, and that's what the test tells me.

UNTIL...I take into account my flying. All of my flying adds another 33 tons per year of carbon emissions. This makes my carbon emissions FOUR TIMES the national average.

I had heard that flying was one of the biggest culprits in carbon emissions by individuals, but I had not fully grokked that until I took the test.

Boy, now I really *have* to get serious about flying less.

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How it works

In case you have been wondering:




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The DALY show

Did you know?

- Thanks to investments in global health futures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is likely to overtake Microsoft in earnings next year.

-In a dramatic move, KBR (formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton) is repurposing all dedicated military support operations, betting future earnings on investments in clean water and basic health infrastructure.

If you had been reading the blog over at the Center for Global Development, you would know know these things.

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A Pickup Truck Full of Giraffes

Yesterday I went to a CGD seminar by Gregory Clark, author of the new and highly acclaimed A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Clark presented many provocative slides that upset conventional wisdom about the dynamics of economic growth, social welfare, and happiness. But he spoke so fast that it was often hard to grasp the logic or even the points he was making. And then at the end he summed it all up into one big theory and sat down.

It being a (friendly) academic setting, the panelists immediately went at Clark with an aggressive slate of questions and doubts. I have to admit I was sympathetic with the questioners. His thesis seemed rickety, even though the individual points were very interesting.In the first few rounds, Clark handled the questions well and good naturedly.

And then he did something highly unusual and candid.

He said, "Listen, this book took me twelve years to write, and it was murder. Many times I did not think I would finish it. I had all of these novel facts and insights but could not come up with a way to pull them all together.

"Sometimes I would get two insights connected to each other, but they would be contradicted by a third. And then I would get the first and third insights in harmony, but the second one would not fit. "

And then:

"It was like having a pickup truck full of giraffes and trying to get them all to duck at the same time when you're driving under a bridge."

This image brought a wide smile to my face and was so endearing I will definitely buy his book.

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Real Facebook

While pondering the Facebook.com phenomenon, I realize that many younger users have never seen a real facebook. For their edification, here is the back cover of mine from 1978-79.

You had to buy a facebook back then. Mine cost $2.50, which equals about $7.75 in today's dollars.

By contrast, Facebook.com is free (not counting lost productivity at work for users).

My how far we have come (or gone)...




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Ordinary Bills

A few months back, NPR featured GlobalGiving on a podcast titled "Ordinary Oprahs." The host, Michel Martin, wanted her listeners to know that they did not have to be Oprah or Bill Gates to be philanthropists. GlobalGiving enables them to have a significant impact in countries around the world for $10 or $100.

Bill Clinton's Global Initiative meetings start today in New York, and I can attest from personal experience that they are quite the jamboree for heads of state and large philanthropists. Clinton has done an extraordinary thing by bringing together so many powerful people to focus on international giving.

Of course, not everyone can be in New York those meetings this week. But not to worry. GlobalGiving allows us all to be "Ordinary Bills."

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Ning hits 100,000 networks

In his book At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman creates a framework for predicting whether autocatalysis will occur. Autocatalysis is a form of emergence whereby molecules or other agents catalyze the creation of other molecules or agents in a manner that builds on itself. Stuart uses this framework to construct a theory of the emergence of life. His approach builds on complexity theory and is related to the "New Kind of Science" tools developed by Stephen Wolfram.

Stuart posits 3 main conditions for autocatalysis, as I recall. There must be (i) a large enough number of agents; (ii) enough diversity among agents; and (iii) the right number of connections between agents (too many connections between agents is as bad as too few). His model provides actual coefficients for these variables for certain types of systems. I have always thought that it might be possible to apply the same theory to fields such as economics and the emergence of cities.

The Ning platform has now reached what may be a critical mass in terms of number of agents. Ning's founder, Marc Andreesen, says in a recent post that people have now created over 100,000 social networks on Ning. He also says that there is huge diversity in the nature of the networks being formed: some are small networks of friends formed around an event - say a birthday party. Others are larger networks formed around an affinity - say for a particular sports team.

The interesting question is the optimal number of connections *between* networks on Ning. Marc argues that the social networks themselves are starting to interact. If Ning can surpass critical mass in terms of numbers and diversity, and settle on the right number of links among networks, it could potentially become as big or bigger than Facebook.

Just like Stuart's theory, the jury is still out. But it is worth keeping an eye on Ning.

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"I guess we should have let you know"

"We are sorry - that item was on backorder from our vendor. I guess we should have contacted you to let you know that it would be late."

I hate shopping, so I do most of it online, and use Amazon for the majority of my purchases.

But this email was not from Amazon. In this case, I had decided to give another company my business, since as much as I like Amazon, I don't want them to become the Walmart of cyberspace.

Here is the story: I had purchased some wildflower seeds. Because of my travel schedule, I had a window of opportunity to plant them last weekend. Unfortunately, even though I ordered the seeds over a week in advance - and agreed to pay a $13 shipping charge - the seeds took over two weeks to arrive, and I missed my chance to plant. I was mad, and complained to the company.

The seed company's response was pathetic. Maybe ten years ago it would have been acceptable, but no more. What's worse is that this is the second time this happened to me in the last six weeks. I ordered a life jacket so that my god-daughter would be able to swim safely in the Shenandoah. It did not arrive in time, and when I emailed customer service I got the same exact response...

When I order things from Amazon, I get a good price and free shipping. Amazon promises two-day delivery, but many times I actually receive the item in one day. Amazon's exceptional service has created new expectations that other companies either must live up to or die.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what this implies for customer service in the philanthropy business.

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Pandora Poster Winner

Congrats to Charles Badua, who won the Pandora poster contest, which was created to raise awareness about global causes. His design was chosen as the best among over 750 entrants.

Charles's poster, along with those of runners-up Dora Radut and Andy Yamashiro are being produced in limited editions.

A $10 donation to one of the projects promoted by Pandora on GlobalGiving will get you one of the posters. A $25 donation will get you all three.

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And now for something completely...technical

My platform shoes from "Saturday Night Fever" are in my closet. I don't wear them, but once in a while I peek at them.
	-John Travolta

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 70s, "platforms" frequently referred to a certain type of shoes, which were all the rage. Nowadays, a platform generally refers to a "system that can be programmed and customized by outside users."

Those are the words of Marc Andreessen, the creator of Mosaic (the first real web browser) and then co-founder of Netscape. He has recently founded an interesting service called Ning, a new type of web platform.

If you want to learn about both startups and technical issues related to web software and services, his blog is an excellent place to start. He has the ability to give the reader a broad overview with just the right level of technical detail. He is also a great writer.

And if you have been hearing about Facebook's amazing new "thing" but can't understand what people are so excited about, I highly recommend this blog post by Marc.

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How not to treat your customers

The last thing I feel like doing is getting a new cell phone. The last time I did this, I lost almost all of my contacts, and setting up the replacement was a major pain.

But Sprint gives me almost no choice. And the worst part is that I have been a customer for more than ten years.

Last week in CA, my phone decided that half the time it would ring but not allow me either to hear the other person nor be heard. So I went into a Sprint Store in Palo Alto, and described my problem.

"I am sorry; I can't help you," the clerk said. "You will have to send it in."

"Send it in?" I cried. "What do you mean?"

"Well, sir, you will have to send it in to our service depot."

"But what would I do for a phone while it was in the mail - can't I take it there?"

"Oh, yes, you could do that. There is one in San Mateo (about 15 miles away)."

"So will they fix or replace it on the spot?" I hoped.

"Oh, no sir. They will take it and notify you when it is ready. It can take 2-5 business days."

"But what would I do for a phone during that time?" I asked.

"Well, you could always buy another one," he replied.

I was so stunned that I just left the store and nursed my phone until I got back to Washington, DC. Each time it rang, I said a little meditation and hit the 'answer' button. Half the time, it worked.

When I returned to Washington, I decided to bite the bullet and go into a Sprint service depot, here on Connecticut Avenue. I went in. There were several lines, but no one to tell me what to do. Finally, I found a desk that said "Please sign in and we will be with you shortly." I signed in, and there were only a few names ahead of me. I was optimistic. I waited. Some time later, I saw a sign that said Drop off phones for service here. I walked over to that desk, which was empty. But I was hopeful, because I knew at least I was in the right place. No one appeared for ten or fifteen minutes.

Finally another customer came over, and I told her not to get her hopes up because I had been waiting 30 minutes total and had gotten no service.

"Oh, that's nothing," she replied. "I have been here more than two hours!"

Five minutes later, a woman who looked like a customer service rep came in from what looked like her lunch hour, carrying various shopping bags. She said nothing - she just went into the back and disappeared. She came out a while later but would not greet any of us who were waiting. We stood there, and someone mumbled something along the lines of How can they have such bad customer service when there is such competition among phone companies?

After five more minutes, I left.

As you can imagine, I will be switching to another cell phone carrier soon.


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Silicon Valley

I have traveled to Palo Alto about 8 times per year over the past 6 years, and I have therefore watched the dot.com boom, bust, and now boom again. What an amazing time.

Mari, Donna, and I have just spent two very productive days in the area discussing GlobalGiving with funders, advisors, potential users, and business partners. It is amazing how much we can get done in 2 days here, since there are so many people inventing so many interesting things.

The money here is an important factor, but what is most powerful about Silicon Valley is the attitude: When you float a new idea out here, people generally try to think of a hundred ways it could succeed. This is a refreshing change from the atmosphere in many other places, including Washington, where people generally respond by telling you a hundred reasons why your idea can't succeed.

To be honest, I am pretty tired of flying so much. But the energy and openness out here (almost) make up for the cramped seats and delayed flights.


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Presto, several months in....

A few months ago, I blogged about a new service called Presto, which allows you to email your mom or grandmother even if she does not have a computer. What happens is this: You send an email to her special email address, and the email - along with any attachments such as color pictures - simply prints out at her house. Presto!

I love this device because (a) it delights my mother (she can get quick email notes from her six kids scattered around the world, along with pictures of her grandkids) ; and (b) it elegantly solves a problem. Many older people are simply not comfortable with booting up a computer, logging onto email, figuring out how to launch attachments, and then figuring out how to print. In my mother's case, she can run her computer, but it is such a hassle that she rarely logs on.

The nice thing about Presto is that it only prints out emails from people on my mom's white list. So no spam. I can also think of many other enterprise-related uses for Presto - printing out orders and work tickets from customers and workflow colleagues automatically comes to mind.

So check this out. Even if you don't get one, you can admire it.

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What information do markets need to work?

Did you know that about 6% of non-profits in the US attract four-fifths of the resources?

This might be fine if there were not so much at stake. There is a growing appreciation of the role that philanthropy can and must play in addressing the challenges we face - be it education at the local level or carbon emissions at the global level. And Americans are putting their money where their mouth is: last year they gave away almost $300 billion to philanthropic initiatives.

So it really matters where all this money goes. The problem is, as Paul Brest puts it in his most recent Hewlett Foundation President's Letter, most donors "simply lack the necessary data to support informed decision making." This means that the philanthropy marketplace does not function well, and resources don't get allocated to their highest-impact uses.

It also means that big organizations can get bigger based on their marketing and branding rather than on their results. And the little guys, regardless of how good they are, usually have trouble attracting the attention of donors. The sad fact is that seven out of the top ten largest NGOs in 1990 either maintained or grew their size relative to the rest of the sector during the following decade.

As Mari and I write in a forthcoming book chapter:

Well-functioning markets, on the other hand, demonstrate significant entry and exit from the market, as organizations with innovative ideas enter to compete, and companies that have lost their edge go out of business. To illustrate, from 1990 to 1999, only three of the top ten companies (ranked by market capitalization) at the beginning of the decade remained in the top ten list by the end of the decade. All of those three companies had lost market share. The other seven companies in the top ten in 1999 had not been on the list at the beginning of the decade.

In his letter, Paul Brest describes some of the organizations (including GlobalGiving and several other excellent ones) that are working to provide donors with the information they need to make better decisions. As Paul says, "diverse philanthropic investments do not have a single common measure [of return]." To that, I would add that diverse "donors" do not share the same measure of returns. As a result, no single set of data or information can or should inform - or motivate - all philanthropic decisions.

The question is how to provide a mosaic of data suitable for different philanthropic investments and donors. It is clear that there will be no single solution to this - it really will have to be different strokes for different folks. But there are common elements that should be applicable to many organizations and many donors, and Paul discusses some of these in his letter, which is highly recommended reading.

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GlobalGiving Badges...

I like these new "badges" we have. Click on the one below. Or you can check them all out here.

The fox and the hedgehog

A little knowledge can be dangerous. But if you are trying to get an education in economics with minimum time commitment, you could do much worse than reading Tyler Cowen's blog Marginal Revolution and Robin Hanson's blog Overcoming Bias. If you have more time on your hands, you might consider enrolling in the exceptional economics department at George Mason University, where they teach.

Tyler and Robin have almost diametrically opposed perspectives on how one can make sense of the world. And yet, like many opposites, they have huge respect for each other.

Here is an excerpt from a recent post by Tyler:

Robin is very fond of powerful theories which invoke a very small number of basic elements and give those elements great force. He likes to focus on one very central mechanism in seeking an explanation or developing policy advice. Modern physics and Darwin hold too strong a sway in his underlying mental models. He is also very fond of hypotheses involving the idea of a great transformation sometime in the future, and these transformations are often driven by the mechanism he has in mind. I tend to see good social science explanations or proposals as intrinsically messy and complex and involving many different perspectives, not all of which can be reduced to a single common framework. I know that many of my claims sound vague to Robin's logical atomism, but I believe that, given our current state of knowledge, Robin is seeking a false precision and he is sometimes missing out on an important multiplicity of perspectives. Many of his views should be more cautious.

The full post is here.

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Just don't return their calls...

"Just don't return their calls; you don't need them."

The scene was 1990 in a World Bank staff meeting. Our director, a very imposing guy, was telling us that he thought we spent too much time talking to people contacting us from outside the World Bank. His view was that we should focus on our work - in other words, process our reports and loans - and ignore everyone else.

Last week, a friend told me that she had been in discussions with a potential partner on a deal, but that suddenly her emails and phone calls were no longer returned. She felt powerless, since she was dealing with a very large company, and her own start-up was at the mercy of the partner.

This reminded me of my own path over the last few years. In late 2000, I was a powerful person after 14 years at the World Bank. As co-head of the Corporate Strategy and Innovation Groups, I had many staff and huge resources at my disposal. When I called people, they left other meetings to take my calls. Emails were returned instantly. In my last few months on the job, I was overseeing the allocation of the World Bank's entire $1.2 billion administrative budget, and senior executives went out of their way in the staff cafeteria to come say hello.

All of this changed on October 15, 2000, when I resigned from my job to help create GlobalGiving. Suddenly, my co-founder and I had no staff and no power. No one returned our calls. The office was quiet: no one came to visit. We were on our own. It was one of the most humbling and frustrating experiences of my life. But then I realized: this is what life is like for almost everyone outside the walls of power.

Now, after much hard work, many people have heard about GlobalGiving, and my calls usually get returned. But my experience made me determined not to repeat old patterns. Having experienced both ends of the power spectrum, I identify with the people who contact our office every day wanting to post a project or offer their expertise.

We are trying hard here at GlobalGiving to have a culture of responsiveness. Although we still feel small in the grand scheme of things, we are often perceived by those who contact us as the powerful one. As we continue to grow, I want us never to never lose sight of that.

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GlobalGiving 3.0 has launched...

Check it out: we have re-launched GlobalGiving with a whole lot of new features, including widgets like the one above that you can add to your blog, Facebook profile, or MySpace page.