Acronym

I’ve gotten some inquiries about which nonprofits and associations have been able to overcome the many political and operational barriers and actually provide aid to communities devastated by Cyclone Nargis in Burma/Myanmar this week.

I have already heard about associations that are making donations to these and other aid groups, offering technical expertise, holding fundraising events, and keeping members informed. Association business partners also have been working to help aid groups respond. Hilton HHonors members, for instance, can donate their Hhonors points for cash to the IFRC.

While I can’t recommend one group over another, and the list varies by the day for political and operational reasons, I can say that the ones with staff already in the country pre-cyclone appear to be furthest along in their relief efforts and in their appeals for specific types of assistance. Already, online videos of their work and the difficult conditions facing staff, volunteers, and community leaders are on many of the Web sites listed below.

In related news, three of the largest charities in the United Kingdom—World Vision, Save the Children, and the Red Cross--set aside historical attitudes toward competitiveness and addressed the sheer scale of the relief response and political maneuvering needed to deliver workers and supplies on site. The powerful trio launched an unprecedented national fundraising appeal this week and pledged to work together on relief efforts, under the oversight of the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella group of the largest 13 UK charities.

Nonprofits on the ground in Burma include the following:

- World Vision: Its 500 in-country staff have reported that the situation is “worse than in the [Asian] tsunami” of 2004 as they try to track down and help feed and shelter sponsored children and families who survived the 15-foot sea surge in the delta region.

- Save the Children: They report that they have supplied “food, plastic sheeting, water purification tablets, kitchen equipment, rehydration salts,” and more to 63,000 displaced children and families.

- International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC): A special section of its Web site is devoted to daily updates, videos, and photos of the response effort.

- Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): With 43 international staff and 1,200 national staff throughout the country, “teams are treating wounded, distributing food, and providing water and relief items,” according to its Web site. Planes with 160 tons of supplies were scheduled to depart today.

All have been rushing more staff and supplies into areas already suffering from deep poverty and local health challenges. Access to safe, clean water is a major concern, along with poor sanitation, exposure and the risk of outbreaks of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. Nonprofits and their allies have been urging the government to accelerate visa paperwork for aid workers.

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Many people at the Global Summit for Social Responsibility last week asked me about coalitions and industry-wide efforts that are underway and how they can learn more about them. I’ll be blogging more about such efforts in response, and anyone can access an ever-growing list of association and nonprofit coalitions working on a wide range of social, environmental and economic issues on ASAE & The Center’s Social Responsibility website.

One joint effort I’m hearing about relates to voting—not the usual voter recruitment campaigns but the access to and ability to cast your vote. In this week’s North Carolina and Indiana primaries, for instance, a Voter Protection Hotline created by the Election Protection Coalition—the largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition in the U.S.—took almost 800 calls about voting problems from residents in both states.

The coalition also uses hundreds of volunteers to monitor polling places during primaries, answer questions from confused residents, and most recently paid close attention to problems related to Indiana’s controversial new requirement that a voter produce a government-issued photo identification. The group is especially concerned about voters who were turned away by undertrained poll workers giving incorrect information, voting machine problems, and outdated or wrong voter registration rolls—the most common problems found in numerous state primaries, according to the coalition.

Participants in the coalition vary state-to-state, but national partners include the nonpartisan National Campaign for Fair Elections of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Right's Voting Rights Project, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The May issue of Associations Now featured the first article in our case study series to be written by a volunteer author; thank you to Jeff De Cagna for bravely taking the plunge!

Jeff's case study focuses on an association (the National Association of Chief Happiness Officers, or NACHO) facing many challenges: a strategic plan that doesn’t address the important issues facing his association, a board that voted down his best ideas, and a competitor eagerly gobbling up market share.

What should he and his association do to face down these problems? Virgil Carter and Nancy Green provided some great commentary from their perspectives as CEOs; I'd be very interested in Acronym readers' thoughts as well. Can NACHO be saved?

I'm at the Exceptional Boards program for CEOs and their incoming board chairs in San Francisco today. One of the early questions that presenters Nancy Axelrod and Paul Greeley asked was what was the single most important governance issue that they were facing. There was a myriad of answers, but one of the recurring answers was board engagement.

A little later in the presentation, Axelrod described the work of David Nadler as written in the Harvard Business Review in May 2004. He described board engagement on a continuum. On one side is the "Passive Board" -- the rubber stamp board that doesn't really deliberate at all. Next on the continuum is the "Certifying Board" -- one where the extent of board activity is fiduciary and other executive functions. In the middle is what most people think is board nirvana -- the "Strategic Board," which is engaged in strategy development, then steps back and lets others do the tactical things. Moving on the continuum is an "Intervening Board," which can be seen at organizations in crisis mode, to an "Operating Board," which does the work of the organization.

As Axelrod pointed out, while there is a lot of talk about having a strategic board, it's important to think about what you mean by that. In practice, different situations call for different levels of board engagement, and one is not necessarily inherently bad. Greeley later added that, in fact, most boards are probably operating at all different engagement levels even at a single board meeting.

I was wondering what readers think about the idea of differing levels of board engagement depending on what the board is working on.

Creativity and innovation came up repeatedly during last week's Global Summit on Social Responsibility, and those of us at the event watched a six-minute video about the innovation process as executed on an updated shopping cart by the world-famous IDEO design firm. Anyone interested in learning more about how associations might incorporate its process can check back to a feature by IDEO leader Tom Kelley called "Innovation Personified," which appeared in the February 2006 Associations Now.

During the opening session on the third day, they reported this feedback from the Singapore site:

Asian culture is such that Asians are relatively modest and do not share accomplishments so innovations that happen at the individual or small-group level are not shared. The group at that site thought there was a real opportunity to increase awareness and the spread of these innovations through storytelling and other ways.

Wrapping up Day Two of the Global Summit on Social Responsibility, many different projects were proposed as things associations could begin to work together to undertake right now. These ideas were boiled down to about a couple dozen. At the opening of Day Three, live participants were asked to gather around the proposals they wanted to be a part of discussing. These are the five ideas that garnered the most participation:

- Designing the organizational alliance to carry the movement created at the summit forward.

- Personal and individual local action.

- Branding initiative -- spreading the word to bring more people on board.

- Using technology of collaboration for knowledge sharing and to create an innovation bank.

- Guiding principles for social responsibility and the global compact.

As we did yesterday, we wanted to share a few photos with you to give you an idea of what we're seeing here at the DC site of the Global Summit. These photos are all from the "speed-dreaming" phase of yesterday's events.

Acronym isn't the only place blogging about the Global Summit this week:

- Ann Oliveri connects what she's hearing to associations' codes of ethics;

- Cynthia D'Amour asks chapter leaders what social responsibility efforts they support;

- Sue Pelletier is interested in how the format of the Global Summit is working in connection with the Summit's goals;

- David M. Patt has some thoughts about the term "giving back";

- Joan Eisenstodt shares her reflections and questions from the day;

- Jeff De Cagna has several observations about the Summit so far.

One suggestion in the "dream and design" phase of the Global Summit's Thursday session is for associations to look around them and see if it might be worth....disappearing. Seriously. Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists (and--full disclosure--my husband), suggested that association leaders examine where overlapping associations exist and needlessly compete when they could simply merge and "create half the number of associations with twice the memberships and eight times the influence."

It's an interesting thought. Certainly I've been part of organizational coalitions in which external stakeholders such as corporations or government agencies have complained that they could hardly keep track of which organizations may be the best partners in, say, the environmental sector because so many have similar agendas, duplicate programs with different names, and murky leadership within their field.

Call me cynical, but I think ego would be the biggest barrier to even a discussion of what widescale association mergers might mean to society and the earth. In the fascinating book Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability), authors David Marcum and Steven Smith look at business success and performance from the standpoint of ego. Their extensive research concludes that unbalanced ego "becomes the ultimate blind spot," with more than one-third of all decisions in failed organizations driven by ego. they note that unbalanced ego slows change and innovation, and "there is a clear difference in the power of knowing versus the discipline of becoming."

However, nearly two-thirds of executives "never explore alternatives once they make up their mind," and "81% of managers push their decisions through by persuasion or edict, not by the value of their idea." A surprising 63% of surveyed businesspeople report that ego harms "work performance on an hourly or daily basis, while an additional 31% say it happens weekly." That's a lot of poor productivity and decision making, as well as lost opportunity.

Might the research differ among association employees? What would you think if your boss walked into a staff meeting and said, "For the sake of the planet, let's do a competitive analysis in our industry with an eye toward potential mergers?" Would you think, "Oh, my gosh, my job's in trouble." "Has he lost his mind?" "Finally!" "Whoopie!"

I remember one small trade association whose CEO actually requested that the board let him shut down the organization because the programmatic and mission overlap with industry competitors had led to unsustainable financial hardship. The board was appalled at the idea. He suggested merging with another group instead. Still they balked, citing the organization's long history and criticizing all possible merger candidates.

I don't recall what happened to the association in the end, but I do know that the CEO eventually left, and at some point, I stopped receiving press releases from the organization. Perhaps if leaders--whether volunteer or paid--move their egos more to the side of humility, they will find that exploring potential mergers would indeed lead ultimately to accomplishment of their broader mission.

Wow--what an amazing afternoon of what I'll call "speed sharing," which reminded me a bit of speed-dating but with people exchanging ideas instead of personal phone numbers. Some of the ideas are natural extensions of the exciting momentum we've been building during this Global Summit on Social Responsibility (SR): an SR listserv, an association SR blog and monthly Idea Swap, create a "Social Responsibility in a Box" how-to toolkit, and a new requirement that SR strategies are integrated into CAE knowledge domains.

But here are some of the larger-vision ideas that got me personally jazzed during today's "dream and design" exercise:

Use ASAE & The Center as "innovation incubators."

Create a "Retired Association Exec Corps" to help coordinate and contribute to SR efforts by associations.

Develop an offshoot version of the United Nations Global Compact that allows associations to sign on in agreement to meet specific SR metrics and standards.

Create a "Bright Light Network"--a coalition of associations that want to work together on social, economic and environmental challenges.

Create a "Seven Wonders of a Socially Responsible World" committee structure in ASAE & The Center to focus on global problem solving in the areas of education, environment, health, prosperity, innovation and technology, peace and security.

Friday we'll be breaking into groups to begin creating something tangible from the best ideas in the various categories generated by our "dreaming." Keep checking back for news of our progress!

We’re on break at the Global Summit and have been enjoying the report-outs from the “Dream and Design” phase of the Appreciative Inquiry process. Today we’re imagining what the world would be like in 2020 if associations had become active in social responsibility efforts this year.

The formats in which these dreams have been presented have caused a lot of laughs—“Global Idol” for Associations, “Association Olympics 2020,” “CNN Reports” from space and the Amazon. My group of nine picked up on the comments of this morning’s speaker, former Girl Scouts of America CEO Frances Hesselbein, who explained that a wearying debate about change—in this case, the mere redesign of the Girl Scout pin--was quelled only when Frances promised to continue manufacturing the pin if any member wanted still wanted to order it.
Gripping the ancient Girl Scout Promise and Law as models, my group “dreamed” of a universal pledge that every association in the world would make to become more socially responsible.

Here is our quick draft:

THE ASSOCIATION PLEDGE

I, [stakeholder such as CEO, board chair, member, and business partner] pledge to integrate social responsibility into the core values and mission of my association, and to that end, I pledge to…..
• Lead by example;
• Be responsible stewards of our resources and operate 100% greenly,
• To educate and train our staff, board, and members on SR principles;
• To increase the strength and speed of global connectivity and collaboration across all industries and sectors and with partners, competitors, critics, and regulators;
• To evaluate our social and environmental footprint on an annual basis as stringently as we do our finances;
• And to recognize and honor those who make a positive difference.

Let me know what you think about the idea of a sector-wide pledge that might build on elements of the United Nations Global Compact, for instance. Maybe I’ll even reward the best responses with a box of ThinMints!

One of the ideas that sprung out of my table discussion was the idea of socially responsible lobbying. The idea is that a stigma be attached to any person or group lobbying for something that may be good for their interest but bad for society as a whole. The direct quote was that it be considered "bad form."

How to create such a culture for the lobbying sector?

That kind of fed into another idea--that as part of the outlook or mission of the association, the globe, or society, should be first, the interest being served by the association is second.

Yesterday's participation was an exercise in zen mindfulness. Fabulous technology connected us to the "other" Washington from where I sat in Seattle, but there was alas a buffering delay that made the video feed stop every few minutes.

Sometimes the pauses would catch the speaker mid-utterance, faces frozen with mouths open, hands wide in mid-gesture. Surprisingly, rather than irritate me as it might have done, it gave me time to pause, reflect (especially during Jeffrey Sachs' presentation) and really commit again and again to being in that moment.

As Sachs spoke, I wanted to raise my hand and ask him "Knowing so much about the depth of the world's woes, how can you keep from despair?" But he answered my question: he is hopeful because he knows the solutions exist. It's just a matter of putting them in the right place.

As to Lisa's question of how organizations can and should define social responsibility, I'd repeat what Sachs said: everyone can add in his own way. So one definition will not work, but I believe common principles should frame it. It's not by accident that some of the biggest multinational corporations, which by some measures are the 'worst' actors on many indexes of social responsibility are also the organizations doing the most profound work in CSR. They have the most power. Should they do less "bad" and more good? Sure. But let's let them do good too, and just keep holding their feet to the fire.

For example, I blanched at the idea that Monsanto is donating seed and so on to Africa - great, I thought - bring pollution from fertilizers and pesticides to the places with even less ability to manage it. That's only a solution that creates more problems. But is it a step? Can we hope to hasten them through our developmental pains, perhaps skipping some steps? Or is planting GMO seed in places that can least afford crop failure even less responsible? I don't know - but what I admire about Sachs is that he advocates finding a solution. Asks the powerful to "take a look". We need more looking.

Frances Hesselbein spoke at the Global Summit this morning based on her reflections from Day 1 of the event. (If you're not familiar with her work, she is the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute, and served as founding president of the organization back when it was called the Peter F. Drucker Foundation. She also served as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. from 1976-1990.)

Just to share one anecdote from her speech, she told the audience that, when managing major changes like those being contemplated during the Summit, she always kept in mind Peter Drucker's definition of innovation: "Change that creates a new dimension of performance." Who's going to be afraid of new dimensions of performance? she asked.

"Can you imagine when we changed the Girl Scout pin?" she said. "Women clutched it and said, 'My grandmother wore this pin.' So call it innovation!"

(She also noted that the old pin continued to be manufactured for anyone who wanted one even after the change to the new pin, so in their case major change was combined with allowances for those who weren't ready to make the leap.)

The next time you're managing a major change for your organization, maybe that definition could come in handy for you.

To kick off Day 2 of the Global Summit, Soren Kaplan of iCohere shared some reports on what other (non-DC) sites discussed yesterday. Interestingly, both the Shanghai and Brussels sites had discussions about the definition of social responsibility. According to Soren, the Shanghai attendees wondered if China did or should have its own definition of social responsibility, while the Brussels attendees discussed the definition of social responsibility in the European Union vs. that in other parts of the world, wondering if social responsibility was more culturally encoded in the EU than in other places.

There's an interesting discussion beginning in the comments on a recent Acronym post about what the definition of social responsibility really is. Clearly it's a big-tent kind of word--and I'd guess that some definitions of the term would be really unpalatable to certain associations, while a different definition might be something they could more readily embrace.

How do you (or your association) define social responsibility? Should the term be strictly defined, to avoid watering the concept down, or should it be broad, to bring in more people?

One last thing from me on Sach's general session yesterday. He quoted John F. Kennedy:

"So, let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved."

He used it to illustrate that at the most basic level, humans have much more in common than we have different. We all inhabit the same planet, we breathe the same air, we're mortal, etc.

It was interesting that earlier in the day when David Cooperrider had us answering questions in the appreciative inquiry process, I also turned to JFK -- probably to his most famous quote: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." I changed a word--from country to world.

To me, that's what it's about. Linking back to a post of mine from yesterday, I do think it's about changing the culture of the way we live and work. The point I was making was that in general we need to stop thinking about what we can get out of life and start thinking about what we can give back to society. And, we need to do this while keeping our individuality.

During the afternoon yesterday at the Global Summit in DC, attendees were organized into homogenous groups (trade association executives, consultants, philanthropic groups, etc.) for discussion. Notes from those conversations were posted on the Summit's virtual site. Reading through them, one particular entry intrigued me.

Summit leader David Cooperrider asked a table of emerging leaders to talk about the qualities of the ideal association to work for. They said that their dream association would be:

What kind of association do you want to work for? The ideal association is...

- Bottom-up
- Multinational
- Technologically savvy
- Fluid and flexible
- Less bureaucratic
- Run like a business; fiscal responsibility, efficient and lean operations
- Collaborative; willing to work with other associations
- Mission focused; doesn't want to do all things for all people ("you have to say no" being something that has to go away)
- Aware of its membership and what they think (market driven)
- Providing real responsibilities and challenges for staff
- Does not reward people for doing there jobs; only awards staff for going beyond

What do you think? Would you add or subtract qualities from this list? Does your association come close to this ideal?

Should an association serve or lead its members? It's an old debate here on Acronym. I'm on the record saying that I believe there is a difference and, while you need to do some serving, an association is at its best when it is trying to lead.

I was speaking with Petra Mollet yesterday, new to the American Public Transportation Association fresh from the International Association of Public Transportation.

"When the idea of social responsibility came up, our members were telling us, 'oh no, we already do that. We're part of the solution,'" Mollet said.

However, a handful of advanced members said that, yes, mass transit is part of the solution, but it can be done smarter and with more social conscience. The association used these members to launch a social responsibility program that challenged its members to do more and think in new ways. The focal point of their work was their charter that they asked members to sign, and they were asked to identify one or a few things that made sense for them to work on in their own systems.

To me, this is exactly the example of leading vs. serving. The international society could easily have rested on what most of its members were saying--that they would be a part of the conversation only in so much as they were getting patted on the back for being part of the solution. But by using a few forward-thinking members to push the rest, they led the organization to a better place.

At the DC location of the Global Summit, Michelle Boos-Stone is creating an amazing drawing wall or mind map as the discussions progress. Since (to steal a line) writing about her drawings is like dancing about architecture, I thought I'd share a few photos from the Summit's virtual site: