A Non-Profit’s Funeral
When I knew it was time to stay goodbye
Yesterday, I shared the wisdom and insight of some of the most prolific technology entrepreneurs and investors on how to create an amazing company. Today, I wanted to share a more personal story of how I came to the realization that a non-profit I had dedicated 3 years of my life had to shutdown. While “failure” always stings, this was especially painful because (i) no one was doing our kind of work in the community; and (ii) I had a vision for the kind of impact we could have and after surviving a difficult first year, not fulfilling our vision was just not an option. But I was wrong: I made critical mistakes along the way, compounded by the fact that the nonprofit was not our day job and these two factors made it difficult even for a persistent person like myself to keep going.
I wanted to share a letter I sent recently to our supporters. I hope it’ll benefit other nonprofit startups. It certainly made letting go a little less painful for me.
At MuslimBuddy (MB), we devote most of our “spare time” to thinking about building a healthy American Muslim community. Yet, once a year, during the month of Ramadan, we take a hiatus from community work and instead focus on ourselves. This means no more clients, or grants, or fundraising — just focus on your physical, social, and psychological well-being. I usually look forward to this time to reflect on what we accomplished and think about the big picture. This year however, it was bitter sweet, as I knew we had our last MuslimBuddy meeting right before Ramadan began. It was inevitable. After almost three amazing years it was time to put up the “gone fishing” sign — for good.
One of the core values behind the creation of MB was that in order to better serve our community, we must operate differently than existing organizations. Only by operating and behaving differently could we expect to get different results than what has become the norm. Initially, that was the case: we dedicated 8-10 hours a week to MB, we reflected frequently and honestly on our progress, and our main focus outside of our day jobs was our service to MB. In the course of finishing my degree, my commitment wasn’t exemplary. As a result, I failed to provide the team with the guidance and example to give our work a chance to be impactful and innovative. In fact, in the last few months we were perpetuating the same bad habits we were founded to dispel. We agreed that it would be a disservice to our community to create yet another overstretched, output-focused, and “just good enough” organization.
The past 3 years have been an incredible experience and I learned so much from each and every member of our team as well as from our community partners. I am also incredibly proud of the work we did especially given its unconventional nature. I think one testament to the quality of our work was during a state-wide nonprofit retreat that took place earlier this summer. Although we were not involved in this event the “MuslimBuddy Impact Model” kept coming up and was a focus of the retreat. This gives me hope that we have transferred some of our vision to up-and-coming community members to set the bar higher for community organizations. I am also very proud of our team, many of whom used their experience at MB to grow on an individual level. Our Chief Strategy Officer, Muneer Karcher-Ramos, was recently appointed Executive Director of the St. Paul Promise Neighborhood, and our Chief Operating Officer, Zahra Aljabri was the only Muslim women to be selected as a Bush Fellow in 2012. Finally, we received the University of Minnesota’s Mary McEvoy for leadership and service award, a sign that our work is appreciated in the larger Minnesota community.
Lessons learned
As I sat to write this letter, I wanted to share a few lessons we’ve learned to help other “groups of friends” on their journey to community impact.
Know your customer and their pain
Over my four year involvement with nonprofits, I was astonished that about 99% of community organizations served the same “customer”: funding agencies and/or donors. Everything they did seemed to have a back story about how it would be perceived by that “customer”. This is wrong on so many levels for the community, the donors/grantors, but most importantly, for the team doing the work as they are disillusioned into thinking they are working for the sake of the community while they are working for whoever signs the checks (this is also known as the Nonprofit Industrial Complex).
Initially, we wanted to help nonprofits serve their communities better, so we spent a lot of time speaking with non-profit board members and employees to understand if and why they felt they weren’t fulfilling their organization’s mission. After a year or so, we decided that we ought to work with community members directly. As a result, we conducted a half a dozen “Community Conversations” to get a better understanding of what community members felt was holding them back from fully contributing to the group. Although we had our own hypotheses about what our customer’s pain was, we were greatly surprised to hear their perspective and if you take the time to listen to your “customers” you will be too.
Agility vs. stability
One of the key advantages MB had was its agility. We took pride in rapidly and cost effectively testing ideas, measuring impact and deciding whether to invest additional resources in the idea. Our small size and the fact that we didn’t focus on fundraising and other distracting activities allowed us to follow a “lean startup” approach. However, unlike for-profit tech startups, things take much longer to develop in the nonprofit world, especially when going against the status quo. And while we strove to stay small it hurt us in the long run. One of the drawbacks of being small and agile is that there is little stability and infrastructure to fall back on when changes occur. This means that small life changes can significantly impact the quality of work within a team. While stability can lead to apathy and sometimes severe creative paralysis, I think startup nonprofits must strategically balance agility with stability and infrastructure to be innovative.
From start-up to company
The goal of a start-up is for a company to go from an idea to attaining a scalable and sustainable business model. We were very successful when we served the role of an organization partner and helped existing organizations fulfill their mission by focusing on impact rather than outputs. In fact, we had a sustainable model: for two years in a row, we covered all our expenses through earned income. However, the model was not scalable. At the time, we had 3-4 team members, which meant we could work on 1-2 projects at a time and for any new project we would need at least 1-2 new people. This gave us at a best a linear growth model (1 new member for 1 new project) and this was ignoring the fact that we needed people to guide the strategy of the organization. A linear growth model is fine for a mom and pop consulting firm, but we aspired to do more than just pay the bills — we wanted to transform the way communities and organizations partnered to create the social change communities aspired for. As a result, a model that could not scale exponentially wasn’t going to scale to our vision and our long-term success was thus in jeopardy.
Horse or camel?
Looking back at our most successful projects and the least successful ones, the common denominator between them was our ability to execute quickly as opposed to trying to design by committee. That is: when we were OK with the uncertainty revolving around a new project or idea and decided to just go ahead and layout some clear long-term goals but not worry about the nitty gritty details we tended to do much better than when we tried get everybody’s approval. At the end of the day, would you rather have an imperfect horse or a camel (aka a horse designed by committee)?
Measure what matters
Our group’s mantra was “impact not outputs” and we were dedicated to measuring more than vanity metrics. Yet, it proved very difficult to do so with a small team and most of our energy focused on community work. I found it challenging to justify the time and effort investments when we couldn’t clearly quantify what we were getting in return. If I were to do this differently, I would start by designing a dashboard that we would review at each meeting to make sure we are measuring the right data and adjust accordingly.
I am very thankful for the opportunity given to us to serve our community. Please feel free to respond to this note if you would like to share some thoughts about our journey and keep the learning going!
Yours,
James H. Faghmous
Co-Founder MuslimBuddy, Inc.
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