Author Topic: Fail-tastic anti-Mustachianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts  (Read 34166 times)

TheGrimSqueaker

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Is it me, or does the not-for-profit sector attract people who have such a hard-on for their ideology that it short circuits their brains?

I have, for your reading pleasure, a multi-part tale of charitable stupidity.  Maybe someone can tell me, at the end, whether it's a tragedy or a comedy.  Oh, and, a title.  This drama needs a title.

Act 1

Several years ago, I volunteered for a local charity that specialized in mentoring at-risk teenagers.  This was an extremely structured, year-long program in which the mentors received specialized training and support, and it was small but phenomenally successful.  The majority of the kids in the program did indeed improve their grades.  A couple gave up drug or tobacco use, and one even learned to speak English.  It generally served about fourteen to twenty kids per year, and had an operating budget of about $50,000 per year, which meant that the program cost per kid was about $3,000 a head.  (For that, you could hire a private tutor for each kid once or twice a week, but I digress.)

They had trouble raising enough money to fund their program (gee, I wonder why?) but I liked the results the program produced, so I got involved with their volunteer pool and then joined their Board of Directors to see if I could figure out what was not lining up and whether I could fix it.

Once on the Board, I got a peek behind the Shiny Curtain of Oz, and nearly puked because of the grotesque mismanagement.  Over a period of a little more than two years, I saw so much catastrophic stupidity that I realized the charity was on a crash vector unless someone with common sense stepped in.  For example:

- The Board lived in fear of its Executive Director, who was the only paid employee, and who had founded the organization
- The Board basically rubber stamped everything the Executive Director did
- This Executive Director frequently admitted to being "really bad with math" and hadn't balanced a checkbook in years
- The charity was supposedly set up for the purpose of providing structured community mentoring to at-risk youth.  That's what its mission statement said.  It did indeed provide such a program, but over 80% of the charity's money went to professional speakers instead.

The volunteer pool was capable of raising about $25k per year, but the charity consumed about $50k per year, on the average.  It turned out that the average one-year mentoring program cost about $40k, although the program generally didn't run every year, but every 16 to 18 months.  In addition, the Executive Director's salary was $30k a year for a 30-hour work week (which was not totally unreasonable, in my part of the country during the late 1990's and early 2000's).  No wonder the volunteer pool was constantly exhausted and the mentor volunteers were plagued with three fund raisers or more, per year.  How exactly-- I wondered-- did this come to pass?

Over the next year or so I gradually ferreted out the truth.

First, the people running the charity were chiefly devotees of the same crackpot ideology.  For example, there was near-universal acceptance of a concept taught by Landmark, Inc. (formerly known as Est) which dictates that you really can believe and emote your way to success, if you just spend the majority of your time dreaming and fantasizing about what it would be like to have "enough" money, and then act as though that reality already exists.  Supposedly, money responds to sufficient belief by being attracted to it, Law Of Attraction style.  If for some reason the money doesn't flow in, it's because someone in the room (guess who!) Just Doesn't Get It or Just Doesn't Believe Enough.  Therefore, if at any point your organization doesn't have enough money, it's because you've got an unbeliever who's causing dissension, stress, and other big drama because they're either "not really committed", or worse still, "running an agenda" and actively undermining the team's vision of the greater good.

This is why most Board meetings were pie-in-the-sky bullshit sessions instead of serious discussions as to why the organization was tens of thousands of dollars in debt, or discussions as to what to do about it.  Because of the program's small size and location, it had a small but dedicated volunteer pool consisting mostly of working and business class people.

The organization's Board and administrative team also subscribed to a similar belief, also taught by Landmark, that all human limitations come from simple lack of awareness of one's own potential.  Supposedly, according to this doctrine, the best way to have a "breakthrough" and reach a higher level of operating is to:

   (a) set a goal that's substantially beyond what you have any reason to believe you can achieve,
   (b) make a public commitment to achieve it despite having no idea how you're going to meet this commitment, and
   (c) cause other people to depend on you (such as by signing a contract or scheduling a charitable program)

That's right!  These folks were so entrenched in their own lack of self-knowledge, they genuinely believed everyone else suffered from the same cranial-rectal inversion.

I was stunned by the fact they actually believed that you can over-commit your way to success, and "fake it 'til you make it".  According to this notion, lying to yourself and the rest of the universe causes the universe to reward you by making your bullshit come true, or at least turn into something besides bullshit if you sling it far and hard enough.  The number of other people who get hurt or screwed over in the process when the fakers failed to make it apparently wasn't a significant factor in their decision making.

At no point, by the way, did anyone involved with this charity's fund raising have a "breakthrough".  A breakDOWN, possibly: several volunteers burned out, a few of us resigned rather than be involved in further stupidity, and eventually there was a massive lawsuit which the charity did not win.  Yet all of this failure was still yet to come.

At the end of the program where I'd been a mentor, when I first joined the Board of Directors, the charity had raised a small amount of money toward operating expenses and the next year's program, but nowhere near the $50,000 it needed to be certain of paying all its program bills on time.  For reasons I'll get into in Act 2, the program structure required an up-front expense of about $35,000 to $40,000.  When I joined up, the charity was just barely in the black, having raised about one-quarter of what it needed.  The monthly burn rate was higher than I liked, for reasons I'll get into later.  But, at the moment, the charity had raised about a quarter of what it needed.  Yet, despite not having anywhere near enough cash, and with no concrete plans to raise it by the deadline, the Board-- against my recommendation-- signed a contract and committed to running a program.

These guys wanted to be in debt, and in serious trouble, because they believed it would motivate or magically enable them to make the next "breakthrough", and turn into the fabulous leaders they wanted to be.  In reality, the debt just chewed up their revenue stream, and they exhausted their volunteer base and alienated much of their social support structure with constant fund raising.  But, in their minds, they were always on the verge of a "breakthrough", and the more hopeless they made their situation, and the more self-inflicted misery they created, the closer they were to some kind of success.

That's why they actually agreed to sign a contract and schedule another program and kick-off course without having the money to pay for it, and without knowing where the money would come from.

Now, I'm just as big of a fan of positive thinking as anyone.  It's good to be motivated, and happy, and positive, but it's also good to have a firm grasp of reality.  It's also vital to connect cause and effect.  If financial distress is caused by stupid spending decisions, and stupid spending is caused by a truly imbecilic medieval world-view, correcting the problems with the world-view ought to relieve the financial distress, right?

Wrong!  It turns out that my colleagues were far more invested in their pie-in-the-sky ideology than they were in running an effective and sustainable not-for-profit.

If you liked this, I'll continue with Act 2, which deals with how the organization dealt with debt, and how its spending became increasingly more radically out of step with its stated mission.  I'll show exactly why and how the organization turned into a life-support system for professional speakers.  I will also illustrate how the charity ended up with a single full-time employee whose main concern was raising money to pay their (modest) salary, but who insisted that the money spent on their pay should be categorized as "program" and not "fund raising" or "administration".
« Last Edit: April 10, 2015, 09:15:00 PM by TheGrimSqueaker »

swick

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Ohh I would be in for hearing more, having recently exited this world, it is nice to hear other peoples horror stories and know my experience was not in any way unique :)

MDM

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Schadenfreude sells.  Bring it on.

Forcus

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We've been involved in a few pet-rescue non-profits (wife is president of one now). I skimmed the details but it mirrors our experiences. A lot of people with the passion but no business sense. A lot of people who don't understand the people side of it and wish to ignore it when that connection is critical for success. Just a lot of baggage and drama. We've had people steal money, hijack social media pages, slander us, threaten us, etc. The worst part is all that takes away from the true mission (of whatever charity / non-profit it is).

Louis the Cat

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Glad to know I'm not the only one who enjoys watching a good train wreck purely for the entertainment value. Bring it on!

SunshineAZ

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“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

Ashyukun

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I'm definitely interested in The Rest of the Story...
« Last Edit: April 10, 2015, 02:58:29 PM by Ashyukun »

TheGrimSqueaker

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Act II

Recognizing your insatiable appetite for tales of stupidity, I shall now focus on the more asinine money and resource management aspect of this charity’s situation.  But in order to fully appreciate the extent of the stupid, I should probably provide some context.

My family has always been active in volunteer work and non-profit administration (not for pay), so over the years I’ve seen the inner workings of several different kinds of charities.  Based on my experiences, I’ve come up with some general rules about how such enterprises should work.

First, your volunteer base is a finite resource that is not easily renewable.  Burn these people out, or exhaust their social capital, and you can’t get it back.

Second, fund raising is a process by which people monetize either their social capital or their labor.  Both of these are finite but renewable resources.  When you exceed the sustainable capacity of the resource, you temporarily exhaust it and get diminishing returns (or no returns) until it replenishes.  When you exceed the maximum burst capacity of the resource, you break it permanently and no longer have access to it.  It’s like pumping water out of an aquifer.

Third, it’s possible to predict the productivity of any given volunteer pool on a per-hour basis.  To do this, you take the mean per-hour income of each volunteer who actually shows up and works (for homemakers, use half the breadwinner’s hourly rate of pay, and for retired persons, divide monthly income by 360 hours per month).  Multiply this per-hour income by the number of hours of work they did fund raising for you in the last year.  Add this total together, and divide by the total number of person-hours worked over the last year.  That will be the per-hour, per-capita income you can sustainably require from a volunteer fund-raising team before it breaks down.

Every year, you can have as many labor-based fund raising events as you have volunteers to staff them, but the sustainable number of solicitation or network based fund raisers you can have is one.  Any more, and you start getting diminishing returns because your volunteers are making unreasonable requests on their friends and family.  Making unreasonable requests damages the social network of the person doing the asking.  It’s like going to a well.  The first unreasonable request you make, you might get what you want, but you’ve run the well dry.  You might not be aware of this until the next request you make, when you get a “no” or no answer at all.  The third time you ask, if you’re dim enough to think you still can, you get bugger-all, because your social connection to that person is now broken.

Fourth, it’s possible to raise money by writing grants (sometimes) or soliciting individual donations, but these should always be for special projects or capital equipment as opposed to administrative or regular program expenses.  Grant money is more addictive than heroin, for a non-profit.

Fifth, human “need” expands to consume, and then exceed, all available resources.  If you expand your program due to the availability of a windfall such as a large grant, people expect and demand a similar sized program in subsequent years, and will be dissatisfied with less.  This is human nature.  So it’s a really bad idea to give people an appetite for money they didn’t earn.  They come up with all kinds of creative ideas as to how to spend it, but they seldom consider how they’re going to replenish it to keep up with the precedent they’ve set.

Sixth, a properly run charity must scale its program to suit its available volunteer pool and its available funding.  IT’S NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.  If the community served by a charity can’t raise enough money to run a specific program, IT SHOULDN’T BE DONE.  Either the demand for the program isn’t high enough, or the cost is too high.  Find a way to get more bang for less buck, or save the bucks until the program becomes affordable.  That way, two or three years down the road, you still have a functioning volunteer pool and not a bunch of disillusioned zombies.

Seventh, no charity with an annual income of less than USD$200,000 (in 2015 dollars, including in-kind donations) has any business paying for administration.  That includes professional fundraising or grant writing experts.  Sure, spend money on hiring experts to handle program related expenses that only an expert can do (like the judo coach for a judo club, the vet for an animal clinic, or a plumber to fix the toilet in your homeless shelter).  The second a small charity hires a professional administrator, it becomes a life support system for that person and possibly his or her clique of friends.

So, those are my seven pillars of non-profit management.  They’re controversial as hell.  I’ve had several professional fundraisers or professional grant writers blow up at me when I tell them that a small non-profit, properly run, has zero need for their services.  But, when an organization operates according to my principles, they become both cost effective and sustainable.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled soap opera.

The organization spent the vast majority of its program money on things not related to its primary mission.  Recall that this charity was set up to provide adult mentors from the community to at-risk teenagers for a one-year program.  This was a one-year program that was run every 16 to 18 months, but only about 10% of their budget was spent on a year’s worth of mentoring.

So, where did the money go?

Each program started with a 3-to-5-day "kick-off course", which was held at a camp site or some similar place during the school year (yes, the children were taken out of school to attend this... and yes, the mentors were required to take time off work).  It was set up like a Landmark course room, with a designated course leader, people guarding the doors to physically deter those who might exit early, and lots of yapping.  One, possibly two "experts" were flown in specifically to conduct the kick-off course, and the price ranged from $30,000 up, depending on whether the course was three, four, or five days long.  The last day was always supposed to be a ropes course designed to help the kids bond with their adult mentors.  But how were the other days spent?

The speaker in charge spouted everything from quotations by ancient philosophers to reconstituted New Age malarkey involving mind over matter.  Anyone who's taken an introductory psychology or philosophy class has heard all of it before, only better.  There were individual and small group activities that varied from having people draw their family trees or list things that worried them.  There were large group activities where the speaker explained the significance of what had just happened.  Imagine, if you will, an extended Stephen Covey style seminar that lasted twelve hours a day, only instead of discussing business principles the instructor selected a child or adult from the audience and proceeded to deliberately provoke, anger, and humiliate that individual.  The individual in question would then be rewarded for submitting and responding “correctly” by kowtowing to the team leader and admitting that he was 100% right no matter what nonsense was coming out of his mouth, even if it was a blatant violation of fact or logic.  Over two to three days of course room activity, the goal was to humiliate and then “acknowledge” or reward every person in the room.

People were pressured to reveal their innermost secrets, which were frequently immediately used against them.  The lectures were replete with jargon and misused terminology, since the leader re-defined very common words in order to suit his flawed logic whenever he saw fit.  His goal was to force everyone to admit that all the problems in their lives came from them acting out a self-destructive "agenda" of some kind, and that they were basically stupid and worthless, except that they weren’t really stupid or worthless, because now they were learning a New Way Of Doing Things.

Course room sessions lasted up to sixteen hours a day, because the goal was to wear people down physically and emotionally.  It's called "traumatic bonding".  When I experienced it for a few hours, it gave me a migraine severe enough to temporarily blind me.  Needless to say, I exited the course room early (much to the annoyance of the highly inadequate door guards) and developed a profound contempt for the people running it.

The next day, during a break (and for my own personal amusement), I trapped the organizer in a “friendly” Socratic dialectic and forced him to admit that he was deliberately breaking people down and building them up in order to create traumatic bonding as a group.  The thing is: the kids didn’t NEED to bond as a group.  These were not soldiers in boot camp.  These kids only really needed to bond with their mentors, and vice versa.  They did not need this very expensive mind-fuck.

Anyway, for any given program the biggest expense by far was the tens of thousands of dollars spent on this type of professional speaker.  It turns out there's a clique of them who take turns teaching kick-off courses or introductory mentor training courses for grossly inflated rates.  Speakers were hired for on the order of $40,000 a pop.  Compared to this, the rental of the camp or facility and the food prepared for the mentors and kids was chicken feed.

The second big expense the non-profit had was a full-time Executive Director, who received a little more than $30,000 per year (year 2000 dollars), for 30 hours per week.  I had no problem with the rate of pay, except it violated my principle of not paying for management until the non-profit’s revenue was sufficient to require it.  In addition, the Executive Director got 10% of all grants or donations.  That's right: if you dialed the phone number and made a donation just because you had a bee in your bonnet, or spontaneously wrote out a check to cover some emergency expenses, that individual got 10% of it right off the top.  So, if—and this happened late in the game—somebody wrote out a donation check to cover 100% of the payroll and expenses for that month, they were still 10% short because the Executive Director was entitled to the 10% commission off the top.  That’s just plain idiotic.

TheGrimSqueaker

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Act II, continued

Don’t get me wrong: if you’re going to have an employee and you want to create an incentive for him or her to go out, write grants, and solicit major donations, a commission is a good idea.  However, there should always be a channel by which a person can donate to the charity without entitling a particular person—who may not have caused the donation to occur—to automatically dip their beak.  The IRS has a concept called “inurement”: donations or funds raised should not automatically accrue to any particular individual.  In fact donations that are directed to a specific task or a specific project have to be spent on that project, not on any other kind of expense.  This particular Executive Director, however, had no problem whatsoever dipping into pre-allocated money to cover unrelated expenses.  The fact that such an act violated the rules governing tax exempt conduct wasn’t even a blip on that individual’s radar screen, and the Board was totally oblivious.

Besides fund raising, the Executive Director put together the follow-through courses for the mentors and youth, which were reasonably structured, but which lacked practical application and which were mostly supposed to be the kind of consciousness-expanding exercises attempted in the intensive course.  Some of the mentors occasionally volunteered to put on a presentation, but offers made by people who had not been through the Landmark Forum were rejected.  So, for the most part, the Executive Director supervised the follow-through meetings even though they didn’t really have to, and put most of their work into fund raising to pay their own salary and that of their professional speaker cronies.

After about a year on the Board, I finally grasped the extent of the corruption (although I was still underestimating the stupidity).  So far as I could tell, the charity was breaking at least two out of the eight crash-and-burn, nuke-your-tax-exempt-status rules, in at least five different ways.

1. There was significant private benefit (thanks to the inappropriately high pay for the guest speakers, available only because they were members of the clique)

2. The Executive Director was not recused from decisions in which they had significant personal interest (again an inappropriate private benefit)

3. Donated funds were being misappropriated, because the Executive Director was being paid a 10% commission of all donations, regardless of whether they were intended for a different purpose (which is a form of inurement and which also violates rules concerning the management of donations); this amount was not made up from general revenue because it frequently occurred when there was literally no other money in the bank.  Grant money was likewise being spent on purposes other than the purpose for which it had been given

4. Donations were not being appropriately receipted, and

5. The Board was being used like a rubber stamp to retroactively approve the Executive Director’s decisions, including some extremely dangerous deficit spending.

In addition, the organization was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  But nobody seemed to realize that until after I’d joined the Board and done some math for them.  I objected to this whole bankruptcy thing, and also the blatantly illegal conduct (as I became aware of it).  I became increasingly unpopular because I had a habit of pointing at the offending behavior, indicating that it was illegal or unethical, and insisting that the organization clean up its act.  I also made some enemies by voting against anything I decided was fiscally irresponsible.  Which ended up being a lot of stuff.

While I’d been a mentor, I was also part of the volunteer pool, and it seemed to me at the time that the fundraising never fucking let up.  Over that year, we sold tickets to a local semi-pro sports game and to a circus.  We also had a thing-a-thon, a fund raising gala, and an associated silent auction, plus four days’ worth of labor based sales events.  Damned if I could figure out why at the time, because we had only one paid employee who obviously wasn’t living high on the hog, but we never seemed to have any money. In fact, we were constantly desperate and barely scraping by.  But once I joined the Board, I got to see the books.  As I mentioned in Act I, the sight scarred me for life.

Just prior to my Board membership the charity had made a tentative commitment to run another program, hot on the heels of the very successful one in which I’d been a mentor.  Naturally, this involved committing to a massive cash outlay to one of these professional speakers, for an extremely expensive on-site course.  The only problem was that they didn’t have the money for it.

I ran some numbers to get a seat-of-the-pants estimate of how much the volunteer base was capable of sustainably raising.  Then I looked at the previous year’s expenditures and realized the organization was spending more than double the fundraising team’s sustainable capacity.  In fact, they were headed into diminishing returns territory, which meant that network based fundraisers weren’t producing the desired results.  So we shifted into a labor based approach, which increased revenue but not by enough to justify signing a contract.  So far as I could see, we were about to go heavily into debt for no good reason.

What did they do?  They had a massive kum-ba-ya session, that's what.  Instead of figuring out how they were going to manage their money intelligently, the Board spent hours in a guided imagination and fantasy session, talking about all the things they’d do if they had access to unlimited money.  Then, they collectively decided that the limits to money collection were imaginary, and each person made a commitment (which they were never held to) to raise a truly unreasonable amount of cash.  I committed only to a regular monthly donation I knew I could afford.  (This was the only one of the commitments that actually got kept.)

We had a series of other meetings, in which the Executive Director and various other clique members introduced people who were passing themselves off as folks who raised money for a living.  They were basically professional mouth noise makers.  One was a minister, well versed in raising money from devotees who believed in the same scorekeeper-in-the-sky that he did.  He could turn the water works on at will, bursting into “spontaneous” tears and expressing a desire to use our charity as a means to advance his oh-so-holy mission.  This worked less well than expected (the majority of the audience happened to be Jewish) but a few of us got a good laugh out of it.  Seldom have I seen bullshit piled that high or deep.  They didn't hire the guy, due to a misalignment of interest that even the kum-ba-ya crowd appeared to recognize.  I took their skepticism to be a sign that they were improving.

Meanwhile, did I mention that the executive team signed the fucking contract for the overpriced rah-rah artist and his cult-like kick-off session to start another program?  Yes!  They did!  The Board didn’t get a say.

The Executive knew they didn’t have the money, but remember how I mentioned earlier that they truly believed that they could vibrate, visualize, mentally masturbate, and Law-of-Attraction their way into a higher level of competency just by making a commitment they had no idea how to keep?  Yes.  So, instead of doing the sensible thing and postponing the program, they got together and decided to give themselves a massive “breakthrough”.  That’s right: they signed the contract with absolutely no idea how they were going to pay that bill.  Everyone congratulated themselves on their new level of commitment and their spiritual superiority in recognizing and taking an opportunity to become better people.

What. The. Flaming. Fuck?

Fully half the individuals on that Board did not personally experience the months of hell that came next.  We busted rump with massive amounts of labor based fundraising, because that produced a reliable return on investment and I for one refused to exploit my social network to benefit an organization that had proven itself utterly incapable of proper money management.  Volunteers were dropping out from fatigue or work conflicts.  Gradually, we lost ALL our casual volunteers, and were left only with the core group of Board members, program volunteers, and their families (this becomes important later in Act III)

We delayed the start (and paid a penalty), but still ended up owing the duckspeaker half our annual budget—HALF—which we borrowed from his company at something like a 14% APR.  That’s right: the majority of sustainable fund raising dollars were now going to debt service and debt reduction.  There was literally nothing left to cover payroll with, except for checks written by Board members who occasionally put in enough money to keep the boat afloat.  The organization had no savings and no negotiable assets.  All it had was debt amounting to half its usual annual budget (and 100% of what I calculated as our maximum sustainable fund raising capacity).

Around this time, the Executive Director left town.  I mentally breathed a sigh of relief, because that was one less monthly expense.  Unfortunately, despite aggressive fund raising, we did not meet our fundraising goal for the next program.  The charity was in jeopardy.  I volunteered to serve as Treasurer for one year, provided I could execute a viable budget and get the organization running in a fiscally responsible way.  THIS OFFER WAS ACCEPTED.

Sadly, the organization didn't follow through on the promise.  They never gave me signatory authority on the checking account; instead that remained with the outgoing Executive Director and with that person’s buddy, who was not a member of the Board and whom I’d met only in passing.  They were always “gonna” make an appointment to have me put on the account, but found reasons not to do it.  This was because they were (rightly) concerned that I would declare a moratorium on spending until such time as we’d paid off our debt.  I also had a fetish for operating within the law, and they just weren’t good, giving, and game for that.  But it took me a few months to figure out that they LIKED operating that way.

As my first action item, I immediately came up with alternatives to utter financial ruin and presented those ideas to the group.  They included delaying the hire of a replacement Executive Director until the organization was solvent, delaying any future programs until there was money in the bank to support them (I calculated the dates at which each of these things would be possible), and scaling the program down to something the charity could actually afford to do every year.  This involved skipping the kick-off course and focusing solely on the community mentoring, which is the aspect of the program that was producing tangible, quantifiable results that donors like so much.

You know the story about how, in parts of India, cows are said to be so revered that cows are allowed to roam around everywhere, including inside people's stores or homes, and shit all over everything, and it’s supposedly illegal to keep them from doing it, or to bump a few of them off when they get too aggressive?  I don't know if the story is true or not.  But what is true is that the crude brainwashing attempt that occurred during the kick-off course, and the perceived necessity of spending tens of thousands of dollars on what was essentially a mandatory circle jerk, was this group’s sacred cow.  No matter what, the majority of the Board had an irrational devotion to the concept of the kick-off course, and to paying ridiculous amounts of money to hire a professional manipulator to conduct it.

We needed to do more than kill that particular sacred cow.  We needed to barbecue the fucker and sell the burgers to raise operating capital.

You’d have thought I committed heresy.  In fact, the new President took me out to the parking lot and yelled at me for a while, accusing me of trying to derail or break up the charity.  He told me that the charity was going to run “the kind of program it knew how to run”, and that my job was to keep my mouth shut and write checks to cover operating expenses, and that if I didn’t like that, I could either resign from the Board, or get with the program.  I responded by telling him that, as a businessman himself, he ought to have better sense than to engage in deficit spending.  I told him his volunteer fundraising base was exhausted, that he was so deeply in the red it might actually be more ethical to go bankrupt, and that if he wanted to stay open I supported that, but it was vital to stay within the bounds of what we could intelligently raise.

Dude, I thought, keep your Kool-Aid.  I’ll stick with vodka.  I told him I’d fix his financial problems as long as he didn’t come up with anything even more stupid or self-destructive than what had already happened, and provided the organization learned from its experience.  But I was definitely not going to do it by writing a check and buying their way out of the hole they were in just so that they could immediately jump into another one.  I think the phrase I used was “codependent bullshit”.

My mistake, apparently, was in not declaring that there WAS pie in the sky, dogdammit, and it would be ours bye and bye.  Kum-ba-yah, kum-ba-yah, and sign me up for the Landmark Forum and all its associated leadership academies!  (Yeah, right…)

What followed was one final attempt at The Big Payoff: they decided to bring in a real, live, professional fundraiser.  This was a company that specialized in a special kind of thing-a-thon.  In exchange for signing up for three years or three of these special thing-a-thons, this organization was saying they could generate returns on the order of $100k per event.
I was late arriving to the special Board meeting where the fund raiser was giving the presentation.  Praise Baphomet, I was sideswiped by a hit-and-run driver and it took a while for the police to arrive.  This cost me a fair bit of money (a witness got the plate, but the owner was uninsured).  Yet it saved me from the usual happy horseshit that constituted a Board meeting, and it also protected me from whatever it was that the presenter did to a room full of people at the start of his presentation to shut down the critical thinking faculties of all present.

The thing-a-thon in question was supposed to have about a dozen participants raise about $10k apiece, which after the organizers took their slice and deducted the expenses, would net a profit of about $100k to the charity.  Each of the golfers would not only solicit pledges on their own behalf, but have a small pyramid of other pledge seekers who, together, would make up an average of $10k per golfer by raising about $2,000 apiece.

Exactly how were we to accomplish this goal?

Cue the brimstone…

Each volunteer was to call people he or she knew, and say: “I’m in trouble, and I need a hundred dollars.  Would you mind sending me that amount of money to help me out?”  Apparently, there are people who say yes to that.  Admittedly, I have friends I’d gladly give money to if they were that badly up the creek.  It’s imaginably possible that there are other humans who would help me out the same way, except it would cost me an unacceptable amount of social capital to admit that I’d fucked up so badly that $100 from them would make the difference between success and failure.
The volunteer was further instructed to say: ”I got myself signed up for this (thing-a-thon) where we’re each committed to do 100 (units).  I shouldn’t have given in and agreed to it, but I did, so I’m trying to get twenty people to pledge just one dollar per (unit).  Is there any chance you could help me out by giving me just one dollar per (unit)?  If I don’t raise enough, I’ll have to pay two thousand dollars myself.”

I don’t know about you guys, but I’d rather wax my pubes than let such horseshit come out of my mouth.  The speaker in question was instructed to admit that the request was unreasonable BUT MAKE IT ANYWAY, and trust to the strength of that person’s emotional attachment to you.

This is an example of going to the well and taking way, way too much.  I said so.

“Don’t you have anyone in your life who loves you?”  Asked the presenter.  “Or are your parents so poor that they couldn’t afford a hundred bucks?”

My parents were (and still are) independently wealthy, and were about to go FIRE despite some decidedly anti-Mustachian tendencies.  I admitted that they had more than enough cash on hand, and that it would not be a major hardship for them.

“Well, wouldn’t your mother give you a hundred dollars if you needed it?”  He asked.

“For this? No, of course not.” For whatever reason, this must have been an unexpected response.  He asked me why.

Clearly this guy had never been a lawyer, and hadn’t heard the rule about asking a question you don’t want publicly answered, or you don’t know the answer to.  All eyes were on me, and I found myself doing that jaw-clicking thing I so often do before I really unload on someone.  Then I explained, slowly, as if speaking to a young and math-challenged child, that I’m expected to not be that big of a screw-up.

If I were sick, or lost my job, or was in a more serious accident than the one I’d just experienced an hour before, of course my parents would help me out.  But self-inflicted drama due to my own stupidity?  No.  Even if by some freakish fluke I got away with it the first time, nobody would believe the same story, coming from me, ever again.  Particularly not the following year.  Or the year after that.  In fact, after the first offense, I’d pretty much lose my adult card.  After the second offense, they'd likely have me committed to an institution for the criminally stupid, and rightly so.

After the presentation, when we debated whether or not to sign the contract, I said not just “no” but “hell, no”.  I explained why making a request like that was unethical as fuck, and why it put such a strain on the social network of the people who did it (unless they were part of a social circle where people exchanged $100 donations like party favors—none of us fit that description).  I explained that bit I told you earlier about the well, and how everyone present was being instructed to overtax their personal network and basically burn their credibility for a short-term gain.

I don’t know whether the entire Board had been Mickey Finned before I arrived, or whether the presenter had hypnotized them with PowerPoint, or whether they’d been drinking more than their usual Kool-Aid.  Maybe they were just that desperate, like a group of gamblers badly in debt to the Mob and anxious to roll the dice just one more time for the big payoff.  I do know that everyone there had dollar signs in their eyes.  They were also desperate to pay off the last of the debt and commit to a new program.

Not only was I the only person who voted against signing the contract, I resigned rather than be associated with the initiative.  The Prez accepted my resignation with obvious relief, and I rather suspect the rest of the Executive appreciated the fact I was gone.  For my part, I felt a huge and smelly load being lifted from my shoulders, and went off in search of a more sustainable venture.

A few years later, I had another run-in with the same President, in—as Lord Baphomet is my witness—in another parking lot.  No, nobody got shanked and there were no fisticuffs.  One of us was walking into a grocery store, as the other was walking out, and he related the events in Act III of this drama.

swick

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Have to say, I love your writing style. My jaw kept dropping while I was reading. I do really like your seven points. I wish someone had told me those when we started getting involved with non-profits. I might just copy and paste them (with your permission) and send then to a few bored folks I know. Looking forward to hearing the conclusion. DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.

midweststache

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #10 on: April 09, 2015, 09:08:00 PM »
Dear Baby Jebus, I have to know! Act III!

I 100% agree with your rules of non-profit. I used to work at a nonprofit that was much more fiscally functional, but perhaps not as much on the volunteer capital end. We lost numerous volunteers to exhaustive requests that were clearly too much for the individual.

That said, the org. was very savvy $$ wise and did a great job of balancing books. So I'm just beside myself with your story. (It's like a train wreck--I should look away, but it's just so fascinating!)

gimp

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #11 on: April 09, 2015, 10:06:35 PM »
Quote
Act III

Feed me, Seymour!

FIRE me

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #12 on: April 09, 2015, 10:14:13 PM »
Wow. I'm looking forward to Act III.

sheepstache

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #13 on: April 09, 2015, 10:32:40 PM »
This is awesome.

eyePod

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #14 on: April 10, 2015, 08:42:35 AM »
This sounds like a lot of churches. I don't love everything Dave Ramsey has to say, but at least he tries to teach churches the basics about debt and how to avoid it. Ridiculous!

shedinator

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #15 on: April 10, 2015, 08:48:44 AM »
daaaang. I knew these places were out there, but having worked for 7 different nonprofits who all managed their money well, I wouldn't have expected one person to have worked with (at least) 3 of the bad'uns. One of us has an abnormal degree of luck in choosing where to serve.

ShoulderThingThatGoesUp

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #16 on: April 10, 2015, 08:58:55 AM »
As my 1-year-old says when she likes dinner:

MORE, MORE, MORE!

Neustache

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #17 on: April 10, 2015, 09:21:27 AM »
So good but hard to read as we are in the midst of a similar drama.  Church world, though.

trailrated

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #18 on: April 10, 2015, 10:56:54 AM »
We needed to do more than kill that particular sacred cow.  We needed to barbecue the fucker and sell the burgers to raise operating capital.

This was fucking amazing. I need more!

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #19 on: April 10, 2015, 11:05:05 AM »
Easily one of the best threads I have ever read on this forum. 10/10 would read again.

James

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #20 on: April 10, 2015, 11:23:49 AM »
I'm enjoying the story!


I have been on the board of a few non-profits, and your story rings so true. Nothing so extreme took place on my boards, but you can always tell the other board members who were clueless and would have followed that line if someone else pulled them down the path. So often I would have to bite my tongue when someone spoke up and I just wanted to point out how absolutely ridiculous they were, but you need volunteers so you try and gently guide them instead. I'm not sure I would have made it as long as you on the board, but I've been there and it's really hard to just walk away...

lifejoy

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #21 on: April 10, 2015, 12:04:18 PM »
Wow. Just wow.

Obviously, no one could make this kind of stuff up. WOW. But definitely write a book, about something, anything, made-up or not - because your writing style ROCKS!!

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #22 on: April 10, 2015, 01:10:46 PM »
Wow. I'm on the edge of my seat. I served a year on the board of a non-profit that was actually quite well-managed, but I resigned because I was expected to do too much fundraising. There aren't many things I hate more than asking people for money.

MgoSam

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #23 on: April 10, 2015, 01:26:51 PM »
Wow. Just wow.

Obviously, no one could make this kind of stuff up. WOW. But definitely write a book, about something, anything, made-up or not - because your writing style ROCKS!!

+1, would love to read anything additional you wish to write.

Elderwood17

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #24 on: April 10, 2015, 01:48:08 PM »
I was the Board Chair for a non profit for five years......thankfully the President and Founder was a tightwad who watched over every dollar like a hawk.  She was good and that made it easy.

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #25 on: April 10, 2015, 05:46:47 PM »
Act III

Perhaps I ought to make it clear that this is Act III of an extended drama involving just one charity.  Not three different charities, mind you: even I am capable of screaming and fleeing from happy hippie crap now that I’ve seen it in its full torofecundian glory.  Astoundingly all this stupidity came from the same source, like overripe fruit from one defective tree, or the meadow leavings of a single large and fiber-loving ruminant.

As you recall, in the first two acts of this drama, I made myself extremely unpopular by trying to force a very unwelcome policy of fiscal responsibility on a youth charity administrative team that didn’t want it.  For whatever reason, they were all convinced that they could solve a small charity’s self-induced cash flow problem by making it bigger.  By “it”, I mean not just the charity, but the cash flow problem.  For whatever reason (I think I know why but I’d have to X-ray their heads to be sure), they were convinced that amplifying the problem would make it go away.  That’s right: their train was wobbling back and forth as it went down the track due to a basic stability problem in its design, but instead of putting on the brakes and tuning the engine, they decided that the way to get the stability they wanted was to increase both the speed and the lateral motion.

I’ve always believed that people in your community really do give a rat’s ass about your charitable venture, but when you gather all those hairy hindquarters up, the pile it makes represents the community’s total interest and investment in what you have to offer.  Sometimes, it’s less than you hope for.  If so, the responsible thing to do is to ensure more people know and care enough about what you do, so that they toss you the occasional north end of their southbound vermin.  In the meantime, you have to make do with the amount of rodent rectum available.  You do not go out and hire the Pied Piper of fucking Hamelin, unless you want that flute to end up somewhere it shouldn’t be.

Now, this youth charity I’ve been bitching about in Acts I and II didn’t actually have anyone with their hand in the cookie jar, which makes them luckier than some.  They were just spending far too much given what their fundraising team could provide, and most of it was being spent on utterly stupid and unnecessary shit that was unrelated to the part of their program that produced quantitative results.  They were further invested in denial than Cleopatra (and look what happened to her.)  So that’s what made them willing to sign off on a bad contract.

Now, when I say “a bad contract”, I don’t mean to imply that the company offering professional thing-a-thon services was in any way dishonest in how they structured the contract.  Far from it: it was a basic agreement in which they agreed to teach the charity how to run a thing-a-thon, and in exchange the charity promised to use their services for the first three thing-a-thons, paying them either a percentage of the total or a fixed minimum, which I vaguely recall was on the order of $20k.  The strategy they suggested was unethical, because it put such a strain on each volunteer’s social network.  But the thing that made the contract really bad was the fact the charity was about to knowingly exhaust an already weakened resource that could not be easily rebuilt.  They were about to slice open the goose that laid the golden eggs, sell their best whore to another pimp, and otherwise sacrifice their only proven long-term asset in order to make a quick buck.  That’s what made the contract “bad”.

At the time I tendered my resignation, not only were they about to sign the thing-a-thon contract, but they were hiring a new Executive Director despite the fact they were in serious debt, had no assets and no revenue beyond what volunteers could provide.  Oh, and did I mention they wanted to commit to another program as well?

I don't think anybody in the world possesses a pimp hand strong enough to correct the root cause of this problem.

It took a couple months before I was deleted from the E-mail list, so I got bits and pieces of news.  For example, I got the mass mailing from that new Executive Director, who after a whopping month on the payroll had been officially diagnosed with an incurable, debilitating disease that affected their ability to work.  Also, the first of the thing-a-thons was scheduled.  I suppose it had to be: they had no other way to make payroll and also cover the debt service.   I twitched a bit, but recited a Polish proverb: “This is not my circus; these are not my monkeys.  But… this IS my vodka.”  That improved my mood quite a lot, so I gave absolutely zero fucks for the next few years, until my run-in with The Prez in the grocery store.

I didn’t recognize him he looked like he’d aged about twenty years and put on a lot of weight.  He even had to reintroduce himself as he shook my hand.  The first words out of his mouth were an apology.  Also, he blurted out a very important phrase: three little words that I never expected in a million years to hear from him, particularly not in front of his wife.  I was just as shocked as if I’d been hit in the back of the head with a board.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a somewhat lazy version of evil incarnate.  Yet the body I occupy is biologically female.  So I’ve got a not-so-secret weakness.  There are three little words that really get my panties wet.  These three words, by the way, will magically allow a man to command the attention of any woman he speaks them to, and cause her to listen with an open mind whether she plans to or not, even if she’s in the middle of a sentence.  I therefore accepted his apology and listened to the whole story as though I’d been hypnotized by a grocery-toting Ancient Mariner.

(These words, in case you ever need to make a woman preemptively shut up, are: “You were right”.)

(Not “I love you”, or even “here’s your check”, although the latter phrase is one we also enjoy.  We’ve figured out that the bit about love is generally manipulative bullshit.)

“You warned us,” he said, “and it happened exactly like you said it would, only worse.”  He continued to say that the first thing-a-thon went as planned, but ended up with only half they’d been led to expect from the number of volunteers they were able to field.  None of the thing-a-thonners reached their $10k goal, but it was still their biggest and most successful fundraiser to date.  After they brought in enough to cover the fee to the company that set up the thing-a-thon, they were able to settle that large outstanding debt and cover payroll for a month or two.  But they weren’t entirely in the black, and went right back to labor-based fund raisers.  They never did replace their casual volunteers, and were now saddled with a sick Executive Director.

For their second thing-a-thon, they were unable to raise much more than the organizing company’s minimum supervising fee.  Too many people refused to participate, or refused to donate.  So they ended up making enough to pay for the organizing company to take home their check, but had nothing left over to run their charity with.  At this point, they started to feel ripped off: a five-figure bill to tell them how to put on a thing-a-thon that they were now fully capable of setting up for themselves?  The money, if they hadn’t had to turn it over to the thing-a-thon company to fulfil their part of the contract, would have covered several months’ worth of operating expenses.

At some point, someone—El Presidente used the word “we”—decided to fuck over the Pied Piper.  The charity executive team members broke their contract with the thing-a-thon company and tiptoed off to do their next big thing-a-thon fundraiser without them.  For whatever reason, a something-else-a-thon (which would not have been covered by the contract) wasn’t an option for them.  They scheduled and operated their thing-a-thon, which brought in a relatively sustainable amount of money that (at the time) appeared to still be more than worth their while since they didn’t have to pay the promoter.

Just because there are forks in the road doesn’t mean you have to drive over every single fucking one.  One of the regular volunteers and Board members was married to a prominent member of the legal community, and could have gotten some decent free legal advice.  The Prez himself had recently fought (and won) a breach of contract lawsuit related to a pay-to-play government construction scam in which he rightly refused to participate.  This was a basically ethical, honorable person who was working with a bunch of generally honest, good-intentioned people in the service of the greater good.  But for whatever reason, they all had one last communal sip of the Kook-Aid.

(That started out as “Kool-Aid”, but a typo happened, and I like the Freudian slip version better).

Somehow, the thing-a-thon organizers figured out they’d been had, and discovered that the cheeky little monkeys had gone ahead and had the party without them.  No problem, they said: just write us a check for our fee, and that’s the third thing-a-thon, so we’ll go our separate ways.  Well… there was a problem.  You see, not enough money had been raised to cover even that minimum fee.

In most US states, including ours, charities buy a type of liability insurance commonly called “E&O” or “Errors and Omissions” insurance.  It protects the charity from being held accountable if they accidentally make an accounting mistake or give somebody bad advice that causes them to lose money.  Also, because of the kind of charity it was, this youth charity bought the kind of insurance that protects the charity if one of the background-screened mentors or volunteers is accused of doing something inappropriate with one of the kids.  What they didn’t have is an insurance product that would protect them from the very predictable consequences of breaching a contract it had not only signed, but followed and upheld.  You can’t get the kind of insurance that protects you from a breach of contract suit.  The way to avoid a breach of contract suit is to not break the fucking contract.  It isn’t that difficult, for a contract like this.  If they decided to stop paying these guys to help them put on thing-a-thons, the way to do that and not have a lawsuit is to delay the next thing-a-thon until the fifteenth day of Never-ever-ember, and find some other way to raise money.

So, yes, the company they screwed over filed a lawsuit.  The law was very much on the thing-a-thon company’s side, because they’d provided the services they’d promised to provide, and the first thing-a-thon fundraiser had worked for the youth charity more or less as planned.  There were also several charities that, after following the company’s instructions but with access to a wealthier community, more volunteers, and a social network that hadn’t been exhausted, were able to raise $80k to $100k per year indefinitely, even after completing the three-year commitment to the satisfaction of all concerned.  The thing-a-thon company also, supposedly, had no reason to suspect that the youth charity’s collective social capital was so badly overdrawn that it simply wasn’t capable of exploiting its volunteers’ social networks any more than it already had.  (Although, the advice about faking an emergency to get help from relatives sounds, to me, as though the thing-a-thon company had run into the problem of insufficient social capital before.)

In most US states including the one where I live—although I spent the later part of my childhood in Alberta and picked up a fair bit of my non-profit experience there—it’s perfectly legal and customary to sue not only a not-for-profit, but the individual members of the executive team.  Anyone whose signature is on the contract, or who was an officer of the company at the time the deal was broken, or who was an officer of the company at the time the deal was signed, is routinely named in a lawsuit.  Through the court system, they can be held individually liable for what they do through the charity.  This applies to both criminal and civil judgements.  So it’s possible to get stuck with a slice of your charity’s debts or commitments if for some reason they exceed the charity’s assets or if the charity enters bankruptcy.  That rule is not usually enforced without an actual lawsuit, but here they were with an actual suit.  So there were legal fees for both sides in addition to the missing thing-a-thon fee.  It was eventually settled out of court, but that’s why El Presidente looked rather war-weary.  In addition to the usual stresses of running a sizable company, and dealing with non-profit drama, he’d been financially sodomized.  Yet, miraculously, this introduction of the Pied Piper’s righteous flute, with its associated sharp springs and keys, had loosened his nether sphincter enough to allow him to extract his own head.  Hence the very sincere, spontaneous public apology.

Thus, the youth charity faded into obscurity.  It lost its tax exempt status automatically after nobody filed its tax paperwork for three years in a row.  Its Web site, having not been updated since after the first thing-a-thon, still exists but the Landmark Forum has justifiably fallen out of fashion.  The individual Board members went their separate ways and many of them, including me, are still active in charitable ventures.  I therefore leave you with that touching and heart-warming scene: two people shaking hands in a parking lot, and wishing each other well.  I lived happily ever after.

THE END
« Last Edit: April 10, 2015, 05:57:20 PM by TheGrimSqueaker »

gimp

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #26 on: April 10, 2015, 06:42:11 PM »
Can I buy your book?

EricL

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #27 on: April 10, 2015, 07:11:15 PM »
Oh. My. God. I actually attended a few Landmark Forum events back in the early 90's and got some value out of them before I went on to other things.  They had some new agey bits but were still solidly grounded in reality.  I heard the main office was destroyed in the 911 attacks and wondered how the organization held up.  Now I know: they went to smoking crack and drinking their own bath water.  How sad.  It's like Detroit: only amusing if you never saw it up close during its glory days.

seanc0x0

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #28 on: April 10, 2015, 07:13:17 PM »
Can I buy your book?

Wait until it's free on Amazon, that's the mustachian way. ;)

Also, great read OP! Thanks for sharing.

TheGrimSqueaker

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #29 on: April 10, 2015, 07:35:14 PM »
Have to say, I love your writing style. My jaw kept dropping while I was reading. I do really like your seven points. I wish someone had told me those when we started getting involved with non-profits. I might just copy and paste them (with your permission) and send then to a few bored folks I know. Looking forward to hearing the conclusion. DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.

You may indeed quote me, but please attribute the invective to R.A. Williams which is my full legal name.

The laws State-side differ somewhat in the way they're implemented, but appear to serve the same general purpose.  They vary a bit from one state to the next.  Generally speaking, Board members are not on the hook for a charity's debts, unless it can be proven somehow that they breached their duty, such as by participating in or approving the kind of breach of contract that occured in my little 3-act drama.  By being Treasurer (or even just on the Board) at the time the deal was signed, or by doing so much as bringing people bottled water at the first thing-a-thon, I'd have basically bought shares in the drama.

That's why I had to resign.  After trying my absolute best to steer the train onto a safer track and slow it down to make the necessary repairs, I knew I wasn't going to be able to save it since they were all determined to charge right off the rails and over the cliff.  Then, when the inevitable happened, I'd have to find and present proof that I tried to stop the train wreck and didn't participate in the breach of contract.  Finding proof like that after the fact still isn't easy especially since these folks weren't fans of accurate record keeping.  Nor is legal self defense cheap.  So instead of going down in flames with them, I jumped while I could still save myself, and encouraged as many people as possible to come with me.  Nobody did.

Most likely, I stayed longer than I should have and enabled the situation more than I intended.

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Great memoir. Your communication skills are especially competent, and the topic is greatly interesting.

I hope the charities I have named in my will are a lot better run than the one where you worked.

TheGrimSqueaker

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Thanks everyone.

Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?

TheGrimSqueaker

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #32 on: April 12, 2015, 11:33:17 PM »
Oh. My. God. I actually attended a few Landmark Forum events back in the early 90's and got some value out of them before I went on to other things.  They had some new agey bits but were still solidly grounded in reality.  I heard the main office was destroyed in the 911 attacks and wondered how the organization held up.  Now I know: they went to smoking crack and drinking their own bath water.  How sad.  It's like Detroit: only amusing if you never saw it up close during its glory days.

Well, everyone at Landmark survived, so they just set up shop somewhere else.

If what I had to endure in the youth charity's courseroom is any reflection of the rest of the Landmark product, a person could get better value in less time by going to the public library, skimming a book of famous quotations, and leafing through a copy of a Stephen Covey book.

If there's still a chance Landmark can continue making a profit off intellectual property it didn't actually create, I suppose they're still running their marathon yap sessions, packaging up centuries' worth of philosophy, psychology, and mysticism that's been in the public domain for ages, tossing in a couple Venn diagrams, and marketing it as their new, whizbang "technology".  Not one bit of original material was added to justify any extra expense, so far as I could tell, and a substantial amount was being deliberately misquoted or misinterpreted.

I also saw no point in the deliberate public humiliation of non-consenting children whose parents thought they were signing them up for a summer camp followed by a year of something out of Big Brothers/Big Sisters.

But apparently there are otherwise honest and intelligent people who truly believe that they benefit by being given the necessary confidence to lie to donors and contractors, spend themselves into bankruptcy, break contracts, and get their butts sued off looking for that big "breakthrough".  Because "self esteem".

Travis

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Thanks everyone.

Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?

In college one of my political science professors was discussing political communications and brought up a personal ancedote.  He donated to a wildlife charity every year for at least a decade.  After a while he felt they were heading in a direction he didn't like and sent them one final donation with a letter explaining why they wouldn't receive anymore from him and they should put that money to good use.  Over the next year he continued to receive donation requests from them (which he kept).  By the end of a calendar year he added it all up and they spent more on solicitations to him than he sent them in that final donation.

The only charities I deal with are the ones that appear each year on the Combined Federal Campaign roster.  They have to go through a fairly rigorous vetting process to qualify for a spot in the book each year.

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It was a fun ride but you broke my suspension of disbelief when you claimed he admitted he was wrong.

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #35 on: April 13, 2015, 02:01:05 PM »
Oh. My. God. I actually attended a few Landmark Forum events back in the early 90's and got some value out of them before I went on to other things.  They had some new agey bits but were still solidly grounded in reality.  I heard the main office was destroyed in the 911 attacks and wondered how the organization held up.  Now I know: they went to smoking crack and drinking their own bath water.  How sad.  It's like Detroit: only amusing if you never saw it up close during its glory days.

Well, everyone at Landmark survived, so they just set up shop somewhere else.

If what I had to endure in the youth charity's courseroom is any reflection of the rest of the Landmark product, a person could get better value in less time by going to the public library, skimming a book of famous quotations, and leafing through a copy of a Stephen Covey book.

If there's still a chance Landmark can continue making a profit off intellectual property it didn't actually create, I suppose they're still running their marathon yap sessions, packaging up centuries' worth of philosophy, psychology, and mysticism that's been in the public domain for ages, tossing in a couple Venn diagrams, and marketing it as their new, whizbang "technology".  Not one bit of original material was added to justify any extra expense, so far as I could tell, and a substantial amount was being deliberately misquoted or misinterpreted.

I also saw no point in the deliberate public humiliation of non-consenting children whose parents thought they were signing them up for a summer camp followed by a year of something out of Big Brothers/Big Sisters.

But apparently there are otherwise honest and intelligent people who truly believe that they benefit by being given the necessary confidence to lie to donors and contractors, spend themselves into bankruptcy, break contracts, and get their butts sued off looking for that big "breakthrough".  Because "self esteem".

Crack and Bathwater. The Landmark Forum I knew wasn't about that. The events I attended had audience members determined to out them as a cult or a fraud. They failed. Indeed, nobody even walked out as they threatened to.  The first time I ever heard the joke "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt" was there.  The behavior you describe would have emptied those events in ten minutes.  I just wish such behavior was limited to organizations like Landmark. I had a relative work as an accountant at a successful charity once and she described it as a nest of vipers.

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It was a fun ride but you broke my suspension of disbelief when you claimed he admitted he was wrong.

It broke mine too, because I never expected to see him again unless it was in the newspaper.  Apologizing is also an extremely un-American behavior, because the custom here is to escalate instead.  It came out of nowhere and that's why it was such a shock.

EricL

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Thanks everyone.

Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?

In college one of my political science professors was discussing political communications and brought up a personal ancedote.  He donated to a wildlife charity every year for at least a decade.  After a while he felt they were heading in a direction he didn't like and sent them one final donation with a letter explaining why they wouldn't receive anymore from him and they should put that money to good use.  Over the next year he continued to receive donation requests from them (which he kept).  By the end of a calendar year he added it all up and they spent more on solicitations to him than he sent them in that final donation.

The only charities I deal with are the ones that appear each year on the Combined Federal Campaign roster.  They have to go through a fairly rigorous vetting process to qualify for a spot in the book each year.

The Combined Federal Campaign vetting process isn't what's great about it. Lots of crummy charities get in. What's great about the CFC is they post the % of each contribution that goes to fundraising and admin. Many CFC listed charities have 20-30%+ donations go there - WTF?  This % posting is a big help encouraging smart contribution decisions among snot nosed privates and officers.  Ironically there's a TED talk where a guy encourages high fundraising costs. Then there are charities like Direct Relief International that spent a whopping 1% of each dollar received on admin and fund raising.  Now just Direct Relief since Hurricane Katrina, they are my favorite.  But recently admin and fundraising costs went to 2.5% so I'm keeping an eye on them.  Landmark isn't the only organization to go to hell over time.

BTW, there are charity monitoring websites that really go into the weeds with details on director pay, transparency, efficiency, and other metrics.

MgoSam

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Thanks everyone.

Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?

In college one of my political science professors was discussing political communications and brought up a personal ancedote.  He donated to a wildlife charity every year for at least a decade.  After a while he felt they were heading in a direction he didn't like and sent them one final donation with a letter explaining why they wouldn't receive anymore from him and they should put that money to good use.  Over the next year he continued to receive donation requests from them (which he kept).  By the end of a calendar year he added it all up and they spent more on solicitations to him than he sent them in that final donation.

The only charities I deal with are the ones that appear each year on the Combined Federal Campaign roster.  They have to go through a fairly rigorous vetting process to qualify for a spot in the book each year.

The Combined Federal Campaign vetting process isn't what's great about it. Lots of crummy charities get in. What's great about the CFC is they post the % of each contribution that goes to fundraising and admin. Many CFC listed charities have 20-30%+ donations go there - WTF?  This % posting is a big help encouraging smart contribution decisions among snot nosed privates and officers.  Ironically there's a TED talk where a guy encourages high fundraising costs. Then there are charities like Direct Relief International that spent a whopping 1% of each dollar received on admin and fund raising.  Now just Direct Relief since Hurricane Katrina, they are my favorite.  But recently admin and fundraising costs went to 2.5% so I'm keeping an eye on them.  Landmark isn't the only organization to go to hell over time.

BTW, there are charity monitoring websites that really go into the weeds with details on director pay, transparency, efficiency, and other metrics.

How do they compare to such sites as CharityNavigator.com? I am always wary of non-profits and charities as some don't do a good job of implementing their vision, and for some their vision is to line the pockets of the founder.

EricL

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charitynavigator.com is one such website. I figure if people are interested they'll google them.

TheGrimSqueaker

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #40 on: April 13, 2015, 04:12:26 PM »
Crack and Bathwater. The Landmark Forum I knew wasn't about that. The events I attended had audience members determined to out them as a cult or a fraud. They failed. Indeed, nobody even walked out as they threatened to.  The first time I ever heard the joke "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt" was there.  The behavior you describe would have emptied those events in ten minutes.  I just wish such behavior was limited to organizations like Landmark. I had a relative work as an accountant at a successful charity once and she described it as a nest of vipers.

I got the Cleopatra reference from a country and western song sometime back in the 90's.  :)

To be fair to Landmark, I never attended any of its courses myself.  At the time, I blamed it for the severely deranged behavior I was seeing from its graduates I'd met through the charity, so I decided to not check in at the Hotel California.

Although I blamed Landmark at the time, there was at least one other common factor: the people doing the weird decision making that was radically out of line with their values and track record were also in a charity environment that, at first, appeared to act like a little bubble in which the normal rules of reality didn't necessarily apply.  I'm thinking that it might have felt like an opportunity to experiment with magical thinking, and it would explain why most of them had such functional lives otherwise.  Removed from the charity environment, the Prez did indeed display the kind of magnanimity and integrity he was generally known for.

Neustache

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Crack and Bathwater. The Landmark Forum I knew wasn't about that. The events I attended had audience members determined to out them as a cult or a fraud. They failed. Indeed, nobody even walked out as they threatened to.  The first time I ever heard the joke "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt" was there.  The behavior you describe would have emptied those events in ten minutes.  I just wish such behavior was limited to organizations like Landmark. I had a relative work as an accountant at a successful charity once and she described it as a nest of vipers.

I got the Cleopatra reference from a country and western song sometime back in the 90's.  :)

To be fair to Landmark, I never attended any of its courses myself.  At the time, I blamed it for the severely deranged behavior I was seeing from its graduates I'd met through the charity, so I decided to not check in at the Hotel California.

Although I blamed Landmark at the time, there was at least one other common factor: the people doing the weird decision making that was radically out of line with their values and track record were also in a charity environment that, at first, appeared to act like a little bubble in which the normal rules of reality didn't necessarily apply.  I'm thinking that it might have felt like an opportunity to experiment with magical thinking, and it would explain why most of them had such functional lives otherwise.  Removed from the charity environment, the Prez did indeed display the kind of magnanimity and integrity he was generally known for.


The last paragraph - man - so applicable to our situation.  I won't go into details, but it's become cultish and just weird, and I know these people and love them, and it's hard to believe that it's gotten to this point. 

Erica/NWEdible

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I love a broad who knows how to wield the full force of the English language.

Well done, and thank you for the story.

Dee

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Loved this narrative, too!

My only criticism with regard to the "you were right" aspect is that I'm not sure it's so much a woman-thing as it is a human-thing. I remember once saying those words to a male boss about something I'd initially disagreed with, and he asked me to please repeat it because it was music to his ears. Those are three powerful words for many people, of any gender, to hear.

MarciaB

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #44 on: April 14, 2015, 10:28:25 PM »
DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.
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I personally won't serve on a board if the organization doesn't have D&O insurance (Directors & Officers). This protects individual board members from having their personal assets seized if the organization is being sued by someone (or the IRS or other gov't agencies). I'm in the US

MgoSam

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Loved this narrative, too!

My only criticism with regard to the "you were right" aspect is that I'm not sure it's so much a woman-thing as it is a human-thing. I remember once saying those words to a male boss about something I'd initially disagreed with, and he asked me to please repeat it because it was music to his ears. Those are three powerful words for many people, of any gender, to hear.

I agree. Someone once told me that the most beautiful thing for the average person to hear is their name. I believe that was from Dale Carnegie's, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," but I think the second most beautiful thing to hear are those three words.

TheGrimSqueaker

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #46 on: April 15, 2015, 08:52:46 AM »
DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.
.
I personally won't serve on a board if the organization doesn't have D&O insurance (Directors & Officers). This protects individual board members from having their personal assets seized if the organization is being sued by someone (or the IRS or other gov't agencies). I'm in the US

That's a very wise decision on your part.  If you're in a well run organization, the D&O coverage is sufficient to protect against the legal threats that actually exist: frivolous suits, accidents, oversights, mistakes and the like.

Of course, like any other insurance product D&O policies have all kinds of exclusions down in the fine print that prevent it from being abused.  If there's undisclosed conflict of interest, corporate malfeasance, illegal activity, or a variety of other dishonest behavior, the policy won't cover the people engaging in it.  In a poorly run organization, where the abuses are bad enough to venture into the D&O exclusion areas, or routine enough to be part of the standard business practice, or even premeditated, the protection just isn't effective.

I think of D&O as a raincoat, not a condom: great for keeping you from getting soaked in a downpour you didn't cause, but not effective protection if you're actively screwing someone.

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Re: Fail-tastic anti-Mustacianism in the non-profit sector, drama in 3 acts
« Reply #47 on: April 15, 2015, 11:07:14 AM »
I think of D&O as a raincoat, not a condom: great for keeping you from getting soaked in a downpour you didn't cause, but not effective protection if you're actively screwing someone.
BAHAHAHA <3

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Quote
Act II

This is pretty amazing.  I haven't gotten to Act III yet, but I really enjoyed the first part of Act II. 

Because I'm on the PTA board at the school, and this is so chilling.

So you mentioned the volunteer capital for a homemaker and a retiree, do you have a value for a full time employee?  I'm just wondering, because many of our board members have full time jobs.

We are exhausted.  We have too many fundraisers, with the same people doing all of that. 

Now, in general, I think the *right* thing that we do is that we fundraise this year for next year, so we know what we can do going in.

But one serious problem we have is this - due to budget cuts in the school budget, fully 50% of the money we raised last year ($42,000) is going to pay the fucking salary of the IT guy at the school, because the district doesn't cover it.  Why the fuck am I raising money to pay some guy's salary?  (Yes, he is a hard working, useful individual.  No, the school would not be able to do ANY of the electronic-based testing, etc., without him.  But I shouldn't be raising money for this!!)

Also, what we need to be honest about (with the teachers and the Principal), is that we don't have enough volunteers to do the fundraising AND 75% of the students are on free lunch, so we just don't have a pool of money.

Seriously this Act II was eye opening, and mind blowing and I'm going to re-read it.

gimp

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If I was getting paid from donations instead of by my employer (the school), two things would be true:

One, my boss would then be the people donating the money, not the school. Awkward.

Two, I'd be out of there as soon as I found a new job.

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!