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Sean Stannard-Stockton
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Sean commented on the article |Nell, this is a good post and I agree with much of it. But one thing I think that people need to keep in mind when they point to how many nonprofits are small is that the same is true in business. While good revenue numbers are hard to find, did you know that 73% of for-profits have less than 10 employees and 54% have less than 4 employees?
It seems to me that as a field we need to do a better job of segmenting the nonprofit market and having very different expectations for nonprofits which are "small businesses" vs those that are "public companies".
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Sean commented on the article |Nathaniel,I am a big believer in having a niche focus. However, I don't believe that the SIF will be able to identify great innovations on their own. I'd rather see them simply piggyback on "private" venture philanthropists like New Capital, REDF, Venture Philanthropy Partners, Edna McConnell Clark, etc. By making an investment and tracking the results, the government will get more comfortable with making large scaling up investments as some of these organizations are successful.
Lots of great mutual fund/hedge fund managers will make very small investments in stocks they are interested in, but not yet ready to buy. There is a natural human tendency to pay more attention to things that you have a stake in. By using the SIF fund to take a stake in promising organizations, the government can learn a lot that can inform their later stage and large investments.
What's the competitive advantage of the Fund? Not the amount of money it has (the other venture funders have more), not its smarts (the other venture funders are the smart money). It is simply the Funds connection to the government and its ability to influence later stage government funding. This means it probably should make something like 25 investments. The reason many great investment managers hold roughly 20-25 positions, is because beyond this level your ability to know and follow the investment intimately weakens. With 25 investments, the government could make meaningful investments and track the organizations closely. -
Sean commented on the article |Muhammad,I wrote a long comment, but it was lost when I tried to post it. I'm not going to rewrite it now, but I just wanted to say how interesting (and correct) I found our comments here. I'm glad to know you are a Tactical Philanthropy reader and I hope you stay in the conversation on this topic. Thanks for the insightful comment.
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Sean commented on the article |Nathaniel, Great post! Your connection to TV broadcasting Viet Nam makes a lot of sense. Another example would be the asian Tsunami, which only really captured public attention a couple days after it happened when digital video started making the rounds of the wave coming in.
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Sean commented on the article |
Renata,Board giving is critical, but I think of it more as a litmus test. I see almost no reason why a board should have less than 100% participation in the prior year. Do you?
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Sean commented on the article |Very well expressed argument. The "new" philanthropy/social enterprise movement has for too long been framed as being "business-like". I have personally not done a very good job of rejecting this concept and finding a new label. In some ways the focus on "tactics" within Tactical Philanthropy implies a focus on "how to get things done" rather the "strategic" focus on what exactly to do. Pragmatism is an even better phrase. Is Pragmatic Philanthropy the new, new thing?
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