Giving Tuesday Reflections: Time to Step Up and Learn

Photo by Liza Summer from Pexels

Today is Giving Tuesday. It comes on the heels of Black Friday and Cyber Monday activities when nonprofits ask people to put their money toward a cause. My inbox is flooded with requests for donations with headlines like:

• #GivingTuesday is today; please give
• One donation can impact multiple lives
• Be a Hero and give to keep families housed this holiday season!
• Go Big & Go Home
• Partner with Us this Giving Season

Say you want to give, but you aren’t sure where to start. You might ask, which nonprofits are tackling issues I care most about? Education, food insecurity, racial justice, housing, climate change, and public health are pressing issues that many people care about. It’s a good initial step, but with so many organizations to choose from you’ll need some more criteria.

Sure, you can choose based on Ads you see on TV (though I hope not) or who your friends or family donate to. You might go a step further and look up organizations using some nonprofit rating agency like CharityNavigator. But if you want to really have an impact this Giving Tuesday, give to a nonprofit that is or is becoming a learning organization.

A learning organization uses data and insights to look forward in order to become more effective, more impactful, and advance their mission and goals. In essence, a learning organization learns in order to change.

One of the six practices in Do More Than Give, a book by my former FSG colleagues Leslie Crutchfield, John Kania, and Mark Kramer is “Learn in Order to Change.” I realized it recently after picking up their book for some inspiration as I step back into consulting.

How can you know that a nonprofit is a learning organization?

Here are four signs of a learning organization:

1. A learning organization can clearly articulate its goals and a plan of action. It doesn’t need to (nor often should it) stick rigidly to the plan, however both nonprofit leaders and direct service staff should be able to communicate their goals in the short- and long-term and have action steps in place to achieve them.
2. A learning organization is frequently collecting, reflecting on, and acting on new data to inform its work. Beware of organizations that collect a lot of data, but never take the time to discuss and use it. Creating insights from data does not need to be time-consuming and expensive, but it should be intentional and sufficiently rigorous in design and implementation. Interviews and observation are perfect ways to collect data continuously and support learning.
3. A learning organization measures progress toward its goals. An annual scorecard is a first step toward understanding that a nonprofit takes its goals seriously; but if you really want to be a learning organization you need to take stock of progress along the way with quarterly (or so) check-ins. Finding proxies for goals is often vital to having a successful progress check-in. For example, if a goal is for 75 students to successfully complete a program this year, you might need to use enrollment, retention, and attendance data to understand if you are on track to meet this annual target.
4. A learning organization seeks feedback from others to better advance its mission and to improve. Board members, community leaders, funders, and other nonprofit peers are often great sounding board for learning conversations. Nonprofits can sometimes struggle to “see the system” beyond their particular strategy or set of services. Inviting others to learn with and from your organization, enables a learning organization to identify and work toward more systemic change.

I’ve had the privilege of working with and hearing about so many great learning organizations in my career, including Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula, PathLight International, LifeMoves, Hamilton Families, Ripple Community, and others. I hope you find your learning organizations to support this Giving Tuesday and in the months and years to come!