Bringing Purpose & Creativity to Work

7/28/2019 Bringing Purpose & Creativity to Work

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Leading a movement to bringpurpose and creativity to work.

Aaron Hurst, Founder, Taproot Foundation


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Bill Draper IIITranscript from his

remarks on Taproots

10th Anniversary.

1

First, I want to congratulate everyone in the room

who had anything to do with the development of

Taprootits extraordinary what youve done. Taproot

and DRK were born in the same year and we were

eager to nd someone like TaprootAaron is such

an example of sartorial splendor that I thought, we

really need to back this guy; he will do a lot of good

for us. When we conceived of our foundation, we

dreamed of helping to launch a panoply of stars, who

like Aaron Hurst, had a dream. We dreamed of lling

this sky with stars who together as they fullled their

vision would brighten up the lives of thousands less

fortunate than ourselves.

At the end of 10 years,

we look back with great

pride and satisfaction

at the results of the

work of the 40+ socialentrepreneurs we have

supported. They include

powerful organizations

that are changing the

landscape of the world

immigrant support

systems, help for wounded

veterans, healthcareareas where nonprot social

entrepreneurs are needed to ll that gaps that private

enterprise or the government have done their best to

ll but have left as gaps.

Among all of the wonderful organizations that we

have enthusiastically supported, I can think of none

more effective, more impactful, or more important

than the organization we are here tonight to

celebrate. Taproot has leveraged the work of many

of our social entrepreneurs and many thousands of

others. Its encouraged volunteers to come forward

from all walks of life. Who knows what impact its

encouragement and support has had or will have on

individuals they have supported and what positive

changes have occurred in the world because there

was a Taproot.

We at DRK are always looking for social

entrepreneurs who have vision, character, generosity

of spirit, persistence in following their dream, and

the managerial competence to successfully build

an organization to reach that dream. Aaron Hurst

after 10 years of hard work is the epitome of that

social entrepreneur. But he would be the rst to say

that he did not do this alone and that it was a team

effortand thats what were celebrating tonight.

And that has made the pro bono work of thousands

of volunteers more effective and more efcient. His

vision helped others see how the corporate world and

community of nonprots could help each other in a

synergistic way.

Taproot has much more work to do to promotethis wonderful pro bono activityand everyone

in this room can help even more than you already

have. Please volunteer your time, services, and your

companies support if none of that works, cash is

always accepted. On behalf of DRK, congratulations

to the entire Taproot team and to its network which

now stretches across the globe. 10 years old, and the

best is yet to come.

FOREWARD


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2

Covert

Operations

Caroline Barlerin crouched under her desk, speaking

softly. If her colleagues overheard her conversation,

shed be sunk.

Caroline was on the sales team for Landor Associates,

perhaps the most venerable branding agency in the

world. Walter Landor had by most accounts invented

modern branding 60 years earlier, and the agency

is still the go-to partner to make a product or brand

more compelling (and more protable). Landor made

Old Spice manlier, Citi more global, Kraft Macaroni &

Cheese happier, FedEx more innovative, and BP more

than just a petroleum company.

A brand is the most valuable xed asset of most

organizations. Interbrand, another branding agency,

does an annual valuation of the worlds 100 largest

brands. It values Coca Cola at $78 billion. Apple$77

billion. IBM$76 billion. Google$70 billion. This is

not the value of the company, just the brand. Could

Apple command the same prices without the Apple

name behind the products? Would Coca-Cola sell as

much soda without its 127-yr-old brand behind it?

Would you be just as likely to ship a critical package

with a no-name brand as with FedEx? A brand is more

than just a name and logo. A brand is a promiseit

sets an expectation with the customer.

The need for strong and recognizable brands has

grown over the last few decades at an increasingly

fast pace. We are bombarded by more and more

brands every day. More sources of information, more

products and services from all around the world. Even

the government understands the importance of brand.

When the United States Department of Homeland

Security was created in 2003, it looked to Landor

the company that revitalized the Smirnoff brandto

create their identity.

And now Caroline Barlerin of Landor was talking

brand shop, not to the CEO of some major company,

but to the executive director of the Florence

Crittenton Center, a social services organization

in San Francisco. The Center helps pregnant andparenting teens and young families thrive, and like

Coca Cola or IBM, they too felt the pressure of an

incredibly loud marketplace. As they competed for

attention from donors and the pregnant teens they

served, they needed a strong brand and clear, effective

messaging to reach the people who could ensure the

Centers continued success.

Like the Department of Homeland Security, to

achieve its mission, the Florence Crittenton Center

needed Landor-quality services. The difference? Asa small nonprot organization, the Center had no

way to pay the six-to-seven-gure fees of a Landor.

Caroline was deeply moved by the work of the

Florence Crittenton Center and wanted to help,

but she knew that Landor as a rm wouldnt touch

this agency, or be very happy to nd her spending

company time talking to them.

So she sat huddled under the desk, trying to gure

out which of her many friends at Landor would be

up for taking this on off the clock, ipping through

True happiness

involves the full use

of ones power andtalents.

John Gardner


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her mental Rolodex of talented Landor designers and

strategists to nd the ones she needed for some covert

pro bono. In the end, the Florence Crittenton Center

did get Landor-quality workbut management

never knew. The work was done by a small band of

professionals who cared about both their craft and

their community, people who were compelled to work

for more than prot.

Ask for help. If you

offer purpose and

direction, people

will give you the

world.

(And if they dont,

someone else will.)


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4

Donors Choose:

The 20%That Makesthe Dierence

Charles Best was a high school history teacher in the

Bronx. Despite his low salary, like his colleagues, he

found himself spending a lot of his own money on

copy paper and pencils. He would come up with all

these ideas for projects that would bring the subject

matter to life, but those ideas would never go beyond

the teachers lunchroom because he didnt have a

place where we could go to get the kind of micro-

funding that he needed to get his students a particular

book or take them on a eld trip or get the materials.

He had a simple ideaconnect the interest in society

to improve our schools with the specic teacher need.

He knew Americans were skeptical about just giving

to a school bureaucracy, but if they could buy $100 in

supplies on a teachers wish list well, that might just

work.

Charles saw that the rise of the web would makeit possible to create a national platform to ensure

every teacher had the supplies they needed for their

classroom. He envisioned a place where public school

teachers could post classroom project requests and

donors could choose projects to support and get really

rich feedback on their investments: photographs

and thank you letters and a cost report showing the

impact of their donation.

Ten years later, half of all the public schools in

America have at least one teacher who has posteda project request on DonorsChoose.org. Over $130

million has been donated on the platform to fund

classroom projects reaching 6 million predominantly

low-income students.

This scale is no accident. Charles didnt want to

create a nonprot that couldnt scale to meet his

vision. From day one, he partnered with companies

and business professionals to build, leveraging

relationships with corporate partners to augment

nancial support with pro bono help, from marketing

to technology to strategy. He developed a corporate-

oriented board and recruited companies like

JPMorgan Chase, American Express, and Yahoo! to be

true partners in building and marketing his new site.

To this day, Donors Choose relies on the business

community for far more than funding. Charles

estimates that as much as 20% of this operating

budget each year is met with a wide range of critical

pro bono services.

I didnt learn about Charles work until several years

after he got off the ground, but the story he shared

when we met immediately afrmed what I learned

when I left school, eager to make a difference.


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After graduation from the University of Michigan, I

moved to Chicago for an entry-level position at the

Chicago Foundation for Education, a decade-old

nonprot that made small grants to teachers to help

them buy supplies for their classroom. The grants,

up to $600, were available on a competitive basis to

local teachers with compelling needs to enrich their

classroom.

The Chicago Foundation for Education had an

inspiring idea and it was working. There was just one

problem: it wasnt growing, and it could only meet a

small fraction of the teacher need. Their few hundred

grants per year werent going to achieve their vision

of a city of well-resourced teachers, and yet they had

no plans to grow.

I found it disheartening, more so when I heard the

same stories from colleagues at other nonprots withsimilar experiences. We were all so inspired by the

vision, but the reality in which our organizations

operated and expected to operate kept that vision

very far away indeed.

Walking home from work, I would look up at the

skyscrapers in every direction housing many of the

worlds leading companies and think: they didnt

settle for achieving 2% of their ambition. They had

the resources to turn vision into reality.

So why didnt our organizations have those resources?

It was a fundamental issue of social justice. Why

should the greatest IT, the greatest planning, the

greatest marketing, be available only to commercial

interests? Why should nonprot organizations, doing

the most important work in society, be forced to run

on crumbs? It was totally out of whack.

Most disturbing was the fact that the leadership of the

Chicago Foundation for Education, and most of the

nonprots I encountered, had developed a poverty

mentality. They had accepted a lack of resources

as the permanent reality, and stopped ghting. They

were caught in a starvation cycle.

Like Charles Best at Donors Choose, I decided that I

couldnt spend the rest of my career hungry. I swore I

would never again work for an organization that was

resigned to operate below their potential.

To change this reality and make professional

resources available to more nonprots, I needed to

know more about how business works, and how big

companies achieved their visions. At 22, however,

I didnt know a single business professional. My

parents didnt have a single friend in corporate

America. It was a 100% foreign universe to me.

It was time to break family tradition and venture into

foreign territory. I considered two paths forwardbusiness school, or business itself. Given my academic

history and school debt, the choice was easy. I went to

Silicon Valley for a 5-year apprenticeship in product

management.

1996:

Hitting Wallsand OpeningDoors


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2001:

Service AllianceGains an Ally

Several months after Caroline nished her covert pro

bono project, she found herself having an epically bad

day. She was frustrated with her manager. A client

was giving her a hard time. She had been doing this

for ve years. There had to be something better out

there.

So she went window-shopping on Craigslist. A

start-up called Service Alliance was looking for a

marketing director to help launch its effort to connect

business professionals to nonprots to meet their

marketing needsfor free.

She had never heard of Service Alliance, but a few

days later, we were having lunch.

When I met Caroline in May of 2001, I couldnt offer

any money or stock options. We didnt have a dollar

in the bank; we werent even a legal organization.What I offered was the chance to help make history

by ensuring all nonprots would have access to the

marketing services they needed. Id worked 5 years in

product management to learn how good businesses

got to great, how they used their resources, what

skills might be available for nonprotsnow Service

Alliance was the rst step to Taproot.

I asked Caroline if she could leverage her network to

help us develop a world-class brand and website in

time for launch in a few months. Much later Carolinetold me how crazy she thought my timeline was, and

my ambition, but she also found herself compelled.

It was a unique opportunity, and just the kind of

challenge she wasnt getting from her day job. So over

the next few months, Caroline brought together her

covert Landor team and a few of her other all-star

contacts to help me create a world-class brand and

website in time for our December 11th launch.

Caroline was one of several amazing professionals

who responded to my ads on Craigslist and got the

organization off the ground. In fact, most of the

launch team were not part of my existing network,

but new friends made through Craigslist who were

compelled by my vision and the need to do something

historic and meaningful.

Some of the most talented and passionate

professionals I had ever had the honor to meet

donated hundreds of hours of their time. None

of them were paid a penny. Over the next dozen

years, people continued to stand up and support

our mission. The most talented and passionate

professionals are always looking for a way to stretch

and make an impact.

This good fortune isnt isolated to Taproot. From

Donors Choose to Year Up, many of the top nonprots

in this country can trace back much of their success

to pro bono services from amazing professionals. Noris it isolated to the nonprot sector: conversations

with the entrepreneurs behind many visionary

commercial start-ups reveal that much of their early

success is tied to professionals who wanted to be

part of something exciting and compelling, even

without pay or the promise of future employment.


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Design Matters A world-classbrand is worth

the investment.The way your

ofce, website and

materials look

profoundly impacts

peoples condencein your work.

My grandfather, the son of a Jewish tanner in Salt

Lake City, worked his entire career as a public

servant for both nonprots and the government. In

these roles he worked with some of the wealthiest

and powerful people in the world. He had the ear of

presidents, CEOs, and Rockefellers, and he strove to

look the part. He wore suits hand-tailored in London,

ate in the most stylish restaurants in New York, and

stayed at the best hotels in every city he visited.

As a high school student, I questioned how a public

servant could justify wasting money on these frills.

But for him, these expenditures were the furthest

thing from frills. They were the ticket to engaging

with the rich and elite. He had to act like them so theywould invite him to their dinner tables.

This was the same thinking that I used in launching

the Taproot Foundation. When we launched,

many people assumed that I had made millions in

technology and invested them in this new venture.

The organization looked like a million bucks.

Technology hadnt made me rich, but like my

grandfather, those dotcoms had taught me about the

incredible importance of brand and design. If there

was one thing that all dotcoms did exceptionally

well, it was projecting their aspirations, not just

their current balance sheet. The Taproot Foundation

needed the same aspirational look and feel to attract

the resources, talent, and buzz to get off the ground,

even if we couldnt do it with $5.50.

We aspired to be a world-class brandthe kind of

brand our Landor team would put on their resumeswith pride. We had to communicate our bold vision

and professional culture, create a brand that would

give nonprots and professionals alike the condence

to share with us their most precious resource, their

time.

We did it. When we launched at the gorgeous Hang

Art Gallery in San Francisco with a crowd of over

100 professionals, we were immediately seen as a

player. We werent even a legal entity yet, but thanks

to the amazing work by Caroline and her team (AmySherman, Alton Wright, and Maria McGlaughlin), we

had a world-class brand to t the audacious goals of

this new organization.


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Dressed

or Success

In the audience at the launch was the development

director of Community Awareness and Treatment

Center (CATS), Terri Sideakis. She was in the class of

rst nonprot professionals to submit a request for a

Service Grant. She asked for the Taproot Foundation

to assemble a team to help create a new brochure for

their organization.

CATS had been a key part of the social services

infrastructure in San Francisco for years. They had

become best known for their CATS vans that helped

transport the homeless and in need to shelter and

treatment centers.

CATS faced many challenges, but one of the most

pressing was overcoming the lack of condence the

community had in their services. Despite the high

quality of their work, the perception on the street was

not remotely aligned with reality, and many of thecitizens of San Francisco stayed on the street rather

than take advantage of CATSs services. Terri wanted

something she could hand out to those in need that

would give then the condence to use their services.

We assembled a team of all-stars including one of

the Gaps best photographers and one of the best

copywriters we knew to create a powerful brochure.

A few months later, I got to see the brochure. It was

deep blue. The copy was sharp and powerful, and the

photographs were unlike anything I had ever seencreated by a nonprot. Striking.

Another few months passed before we heard back

from CATS. They had started distributing the

brochures at homeless encampments around the city.

One day, an older homeless man arrived at one of

the their treatments centers with the brochure in his

hand. He had been homeless for a long time and was

scared of shelters. While he was still skeptical, the

brochure had given him the condence to try.

At the end of the day, all the team had produced was a

simple piece of paper, but its impact was profound.

CATS also used the brochure to educate potential

donors about their work. In the past, Terri told me,

when she met with donors, she felt like she was

wearing jeans to the meeting. With the new brochure

in hand, she felt like she was wearing an Armani suit.


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2002:

Designing orScale

It takes the same

effort to hunt fox as

elephants.

By going with the Costco model, we could design

standardized solutions for 80% of nonprotsturning

overwhelming demand into something reasonable.

The next set of insights moved us from demand to

supply. Based on my experience over the previous

ve years, the list of standard needs of nonprots wascomposed of some basic solutions that companies had

been developing for years. Corporate America held

a large pool of talent with experience building these

solutions as well as pretty well established processes

for doing the work.

There was no way to use paid staff to deliver these

solutions. Even if we had the money, we couldnt

hire the volume needed to meet the demand. To

achieve scale and the desired 10% cost, we had to use

voluntary labor. 8 million business professionals inthe United States have the skills nonprots need

these professionals would become our team.

In recruiting them, however, wed nd professionals

who had never worked for an external client, much

less a nonprot. We couldnt just match them with

a nonprot and consider our work done. To reliably

produce professional quality work from this broad

workforce, we would need a very strong and tight

process to manage the services. The key to delivering

quality was the process management.

To meet our goals, we would apply a manufacturing

process to service delivery. Ford Motor Company

meets Deloitte: an assembly line process that leaves

little room for error. Each step of the way would

need to be dened and the roles clear. If you were a

marketing manager on the fth week of a brochure

project, you would have clear direction on what

needed to get done and how you need to work with

your other team members. Staff had to know what

every volunteer was supposed to be doing every

week so they could course correct quickly and

easily diagnose problems. The assembly line was the

only way to could control quality and also keep the

management and oversight costs down.

The constraint of developing a model that could

generate services with a cost of 10% of their value

brought us back to one of the pillars of Costcos

strategy: selling in bulk. At most grocery stores the

vast majority of items for sale are under $10, but at

Costco youll rarely nd something at that price.

Small transactions are expensive. The more someone

buys the lower the cost to the company and therefore

the lower the price they can offer to the customer.

Similarly, we couldnt provide $1,000 in services to

nonprots at a cost of $100. There are xed costs

associated with providing the very rst hour of

consulting services. For example, we needed to screen

nonprots and consultants, set up a team, and makethe matchfor every project, large or small. This is

expensive. Instead, we would provide large bundles

of services to nonprots. These projects would be

team-based, multi-month projects that could generate

north of $25,000 in value.


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This was the fundamental strategy that launched

Taproot: we would offer large standardized projects

that addressed common challenges for nonprots.

The projects would be delivered by teams of

volunteer business professionals and tightly managed

using standardized processes and established best

practices. It was the best way to provide quality at

scale.


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The Queen o

Pro Bono(The Rest oPro Bono?)

The Pro Bono Institute (PBI) was founded in 1996

as a program of Georgetown University, a resource

and advocate for the growing tradition of pro bono

service in the legal profession. Pro bono service had

been a part of the profession for decades, but it was

gaining steam and there was a desire by some leading

advocates support it as a eld with the associated

investments in research and knowledge sharing.

PBI was founded by Esther Lardent, who spent the

rst four years of her life in displaced persons camps

in Poland searching for family members who survived

the Holocaust. From an early age Esther was an

advocate for social justice; after graduating for the

University of Chicago law school three years before I

was born, she became a public interest lawyer.

We take for granted the role of pro bono in the legal

profession today. It is rare to nd a nonprot thatcant get access to pro bono legal services and movies

and TV shows are littered with references to pro bono

legal counsel. When Esther started PBI, this wasnt

the case.

Prior to 1996, Esther had seen a strong line between

those who practiced commercial law and public

interest law. They were two different worlds. Esther

had the vision to see that this was problematic for the

profession and for our society.

With PBI, she had a goal. She would break down the

walls and make pro bono service a core part of the

legal community across the nations thousands of law

rms. She would ensure that society had access to

the counsel it needed to ensure their basic rights and

needs regardless of their ability to pay.

When she started PBI, she began tracking the hours

the rms were doing pro bono. In 1996 they totaled 1.4

million. By 2007 the number had grown to 4.3 million.

Her strategy was brilliant and multi-faceted. She

created a law rm challenge to have rms publically

embrace a pro bono standard and then followed up

with a similar challenge for in house counsel. She

lobbied American Lawyer magazine to do an annual

ranking of the rms by the volume of their pro bono

service as well as the hours per attorney, creating a

competing and conrming market dynamic that

drove increased support within rms for pro bono.They needed it to attract the next generation of

lawyers.

There was also a concerted effort to make sure pro

bono service was part of the process of minting new

lawyers. In 1987, Tulane Law School became the rst

American law school to institute a comprehensive

pro bono program. By 1991, 13 more law schools had

launched pro bono programs; of these, six made pro

bono work a graduation requirement. Five years

later, the American Bar Association mandated that

accredited law schools should aspire to instill a pro

bono ethic, a guideline that was later codied in a

2005 standard stipulating that accredited institutions

shall offer substantial opportunities for student

participation in pro bono activities.

By 2007, out of a total of 200 accredited law schools

nationwide, 35 now have mandatory pro bono

graduation requirements; 110 have formal voluntary

programs; and 24 have independent in-house orcollaborative group projects.

According to a 2001 survey conducted by the

Association of American Law Schools, 95 percent

of law school deans agreed that it is an important

goal of law schools to instill in students a sense of

obligation to perform pro bono work during their

later careers.

Esther also helped develop a profession of pro bono

coordinators at rms and created a conference to help


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support them and their rm leadership to support

best practices. It set a foundation for the profession

that ensured a level of sustainability.

While many other institutions had played a critical

role in leading and executing the movement, Esther

earned the nick name the queen of pro bono for she

had truly been the voice and advocate for sweeping

change.

When I met Esther and learned both her personal

story and the story of the pro bono ethic the legal

profession, I had found my role model. She put a

name and strategy to the change that I envisioned in

society.

Taproots goal for 2020 is to accomplish for design,

management consulting, marketing, human resources

and technology what Esther and her colleagues did

for law. We will build the pro bono ethic into these

professions and create the infrastructure to ensure a

scalable and sustainable movement.


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2002:

Choosing theRight Category

Despite the high quality of our services, many of the

nonprots we approached didnt trust volunteers

to do mission-critical work. They had been burned

too many times by well-intentioned volunteers. You

get what you pay for, they shared over and over

again. They were encouraged by the structure we

proposed to manage the volunteers, but there was

a lot of resistance. One nonprot shared that if they

got another volunteer they would go out of business.Another described volunteers as the gift that keeps on

taking.

We had a major marketing problem. Nonprots didnt

trust our solution. It was hard to blame them, given

their stories of time wasted and promises broken

despite the best of intentions.

How could we earn the trust of nonprots and

broadcast reliability and stability?

We would position ourselves as a charitable

foundationnot a peer of nonprots, but a grant-

making organization. Foundations are well-resourced

and stable organizations with tremendous power in

the nonprot sector. They control the purse strings.

This simple idea turned out to be one of the most

important. It became core to our whole brand

platform and the design of our programs. We were a

foundation, but rather than giving grants we would

make grants of servicesService Grants. Unlikeconsulting rms who sell services to clients or

volunteer organizations who respond to in bound

nonprot requests, we would have a competitive

grant-making process to award services. These

nonprots would be grantees, not partners or clients.

This made working with us an achievement and

something worth promoting. It changed the whole

dynamic of the relationship.

Nonprots were accustomed to working with

foundations and understood the process. It was

familiar and comfortable. The work of applying

for a Service Grant also ensured the nonprot was

committed to the project and would put the necessary

resources against it on their end. They had to really

want it to spend the time completing an application

and doing an interview with our team.

To further the positioning as a foundation, we

attached a dollar value to each type of Service Grantwe provided to clearly show the value to nonprots.

For example, we might assign a value of $50,000 to a

Service Grant to design and build a new website. This

greatly increased the perceived value.

This also enabled our business professionals to be

philanthropists. They were each donating $8,000 in

services. It was more than being a volunteer. They

were now a major donor and a philanthropist.

Over time this positioning helped us in ways we didnt

anticipate. We got meetings with foundations easily

as they thought of us as a peer and less as a nonprot.

It also attracted talent to work on the team and our

board who aspired to work in philanthropy. There

was something aspirational about it that was a magnet

for talent.


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2002:

The FinalIngredient

The model that emerged was structured like

Costco, had the professional quality of a Deloitte,

was delivered on an assembly line like Ford Motor

Company, and was positioned as a charitable

foundation. There was one nal ingredient to pull

it all together: technology. This time the inspiration

was Amazon.com, the leader in ecommerce, at a killer

scale.

On Amazon.com the products were merchandized

online. You could learn all about a family of products

and even read consumer reviews before you

made your purchase. The rst taprootfoundation.

org launched with a catalog of ten services for

nonprotsService Grants merchandized just as

books or shoes might be. Each Service Grant had a

page on the site. It had an economic value assigned

to it. There was a description of the service and

key benets, as well as the ideal nonprot grantee

for the service. Also on the page was the scope of

work, deliverables, project plan, and list of business

professional roles that would be assigned.

The difference here was that instead of pressing the

buy now button, we had an apply now button.

At this point, fewer than 10% of foundations were

set up to take online applications, but by making

the experience like Amazon.com it was familiar and

comfortable for nonprot leaders.

We took another important lesson from ecommerce:

a guarantee. In the late 1990s many consumers were

still uncomfortable buying online. What if they didnt

like what arrived in the mail? The solution for the

smart ecommerce sites was simple. They guaranteed

your satisfaction with the product. If you didnt like it

you could return it for a refund or replacement. Most

even agreed to pay for the shipping to send it back.

We would guarantee our Service Grants. We couldnt

promise they would be done on time but we would

guarantee they would be completed and that you

would be satised or we would keep trying until you

were. If a nonprot got a Service Grant, they have

the commitment of their volunteer team, but also

the commitment of Taproot. Even if their team went

AWOL or didnt produce good work, we would x it.

They could apply knowing that we respected their

time and took responsibility for our work.


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Creating

A New Path

In starting Taproot, I studied corporate volunteer

programs to learn what worked and didnt.

Frustrating didnt begin to describe what I found.

Most corporate volunteer programs were fueling

sectorism, instead of killing it.

Business professionals told me over and over again

that nonprots need to act more like companies. They

said they wanted nonprots to be data driven andanalytical. But as I met with these volunteer managers

and heard story after story from nonprots, it became

clear that corporate philanthropy and volunteerism

were the entities that needed to act more like a

business.

So many corporate volunteer programs were

eld trips to see poor people and create photo

opportunities. They were not only not helping

nonprots, they were costing nonprots time and

money. Some of the companies were honest enough

about this and paid the nonprots for the ability to

keep 200 of their employees busy on a Saturday. The

bulk, however, felt nonprots should be thrilled to

have a busload of corporate employees show up so

the nonprot could entertain them and tell them they

made an impact.

I heard one nonprot in DC created a room at their

facility for corporate volunteers to paint. When a

company called and asked to send 30 people over thenext day, the nonprot would share that they had a

room that really needed to be painted blue. A month

later another company would call and they nonprot

would explain that the room needs to be green. It may

be an urban legend, but given the stories I heard, it is

likely close to true.

These experiences exacerbated the distrust between

the sectors. Business professionals walked away

from these bogus service opportunities feeling like

they wasted their time and blamed the nonprots

for being inefcient and not appreciating them. The

nonprots got great evidence to support their belief

that companies are arrogant and clueless about reality

on the ground.

As cost centers, volunteer programs are always

ghting to keep their budgets at companies. There

was no motivation to take a critical look at their

impact. No research was being done about theeffectiveness and I couldnt nd a company that

wanted that research done. They just wanted to data

to support more funding.

These programs had to be accountable for the damage

that many of them were creating in the community. It

was ruining the reputation of volunteerism and was

building even more disrespect between the sectors.

We would build our Service Grant program to show

that there is a better path possible built on respect

and mutual appreciation. We would intentionally

create space for professionals from both sectors to get

to know and admire each other for who they are and

what they share.


18/79

17

When someone

gives you good

advice, take itthen

give it back.Let them know you

made the changes

and how it worked.

2002:

Our First$10,000

I have no idea how I got the meeting with Dick

Matgen at the Peninsula Community Foundation

(later renamed the Silicon Valley Community

Foundation) but I vividly remember the room and can

recall the speed at which my heart was racing. It was

my rst foundation meeting.

Dick wore many hats at the foundation, including

their investments in helping to build stronger andmore sustainable nonprots. Over the next ten

years I would meet dozens, if not hundreds, of

foundation program ofcers. Of all of them, Dick has

the strongest empathy for nonprot leaders. He was

deeply concerned about their organizations and felt a

personal sense of responsibility to help.

We had done a few projects for nonprots at this

point and started many more. Dick had the challenge

so many foundation executives face. He simply didnt

have enough resources to help all the nonprot he

wanted and needed to support. He was impressed

with what he saw from this young and passionate

professional but he also was very aware of how early

we were in our process.

He couldnt support Taproot. We didnt have enough

of the key pieces in places to justify the investment. At

my urging, he shared the list of changes we needed to

make. The list had roughly 10 items from formalizing

some key board practices to showing greaterindividual donor support.

The list was a gift. My focus when I return to my

bedroom ofce became his list of ten items. With

each I researched the best practices and then

implemented.

Two weeks later I emailed Dick back. We had done

everything on his list. Could we meet again? That

time I left his ofce with a request for a proposal that

eventual led to our rst granta modest but historic

$10,000.

Dick eventually joined our board and become its soul

and a good friend and mentor. He knew from day one

that when he gave me advice I would listen and act.

Even for busy people, it is always worth giving time to

people who make good use of it.


19/79

18

2002:

Bill Draper III

Several years after my grandfather died, my

grandmother moved from their New York City 11th

oor apartment overlooking the United Nations to a

retirement home in Palo Alto overlooking Stanford.

She had packed several boxes of photos and as we

were unpacking them I came upon a signed photo

that caught my attention.

It was a photo of Bill Draper that he had signed with ashort note. To Joe Slater, whose loyalty and devotion

has made every task easier.

Was this the Bill Draper? The eyebrows certainly

looked familiar. It turned out that this Bill Draper had

been my grandfathers mentor in Germany after the

war as part of the Draper Commission. He was the

father of Bill Draper III, one of the pioneer venture

capitalists in Silicon Valley. He was doing deals in the

valley when much of the valley was still farm land.

During the dotcom era, Bill teamed up with Robin

Richards, a much younger but very successful

investor, to create Draper Richards International.

They made their share of Silicon Valley investments,

but their big win came from being the rst US venture

rm to invest in India.

The bet paid off- big time. They returned 16 times the

investment in only six years. They had made a ton of

money for their partners and for themselves.

While much of the gains were funneled into personal

interests and into new commercial investments, Bill

and Robin decided they also wanted to do something

for others who perhaps didnt have the opportunities

they had in their lives.

The only thing they knew, however, was venture

capital. The idea struck them that a startup nonprot

could do a lot of good if the right person leads it.

They could put their exceptional ability to identify

and coach entrepreneurs to help start remarkable

nonprots.

A year after I launched Taproot, Bill and Robin

launched the Draper Richards Foundation and hired

a family friend of Bills, Jenny Stein, to run it. They

were at the very beginning of a new eld of venture

philanthropy and the rst major US fund for early

stage start-up nonprots.

Bill Draper knew what it took to create a protable

enterprise. The best organizations learn efciency

and effectiveness. They learn that sales, or

fundraising, is very important and that marketing is

critical to supporting it. They need strong nancial

management, human resources, and technology. They

need exceptional leadership and to build equally

terric teams. In Bills experience, there was little

difference between the needs of a strong company

and a strong nonprot. The motivations were

different, but the ingredients remained the same. His

investments in nonprots would share the traits of his

best commercial investments.

Shortly after funding their rst two ventures,

Upwardly Global and Room to Read, Mike

Zimmerman, a friend of Robins, introduced me to

the Draper Richards Foundation. Bill and Jenny

understood the concept right away. Nonprots

needed access to functional talent and the economicsof the sector made it nearly impossible. They saw that

it was elegant and breakthrough. It was the disruptive

innovation needed to bring business talent to the

social sector.

The process to actually go from the rst meeting to

funding took over six months. I later joked that it is

easier to survive a senate conrmation than to get

funding for their foundation. They called over a dozen

leaders in the eld, grilled me multiple times, visited

me at my home, talked with our board members and


20/79

19

had me revise our business plan until it was ready.

The Taproot board ended up being the variable

that push the deal over the top. Bill fell in love with

Caroline Barlerin, who he still gushes about. She was

wonderful. Jenny was equally impressed with her

and other members of the board like Dick Matgen.

That I had built a strong board so early demonstrated

to them that I could attract talent and was in this towin it.

Their support would enable us to get our rst ofce

and for me to stop running Taproot off my credit

card. $100,000 a year for three years plus the boost of

knowing the godfather of Silicon Valley was behind

us.

The Draper Richards Foundation would go on to

fund many of the most successful nonprots of the

following ten years, from Taproot to Kiva to World

Vision to Room to Read. Bill and Robin kept their

golden touch.


21/79

20

2003:

Dr. James

Captain Kirk had Dr. Spock. I had Dr. James, aka

James Shepard, Jr.

In his senior year at Georgetown, James worked

fulltime at the Princeton Review and stayed there for

the two years following college, running their mid-

Atlantic franchise. He grew it from seven staff to over

100 and expanded it to 15 locations.

The Princeton Review used graduate and college

students as teachers to help aspiring students prepare

for standardized tests that would determine their

academic futures. Working with part-time teachers

with little-to-no teaching experience and high

turnover requires the Princeton Review to provide

substantial scaffolding to ensure a high-quality

product. James had to learn how to bring teachers

on board quickly, get them up to speed, and monitor

their progress. This required a rigorous process and

tight management.

James then tried his hand

at management consulting,

got an MBA, and in the

late 1990s, joined several

dotcoms in Silicon Valley.

When I met him through

my girlfriend at the time,

Aimee Randolph, he was

the CMO of Headlight.com, and Aimees boss.

We reconnected in 2003

shortly after Taproot

received funding from the

Draper Richards Foundation. James and I were both

part of a Jewish leadership program and he shared

that he was interested in moving into the nonprot

sector and working in education. We had many long

talks about the need for Taproot services within

education nonprots and he eventually agreed to

volunteer to do a study on the topic.

James was the rst person I had met who really

understood what I was trying to build at a strategic

and design level. He put words to my intuition and

saw that what we were trying to do was productize

professional services. It made complete sense to him,

as he had seen it done before, but he knew that it was

an unusual approach and that most people didnt

understand it. Through his research on education

nonprots he also knew there was a tremendousneed.

I had found the partner I needed to really make this

new organization work. Jamess experience at the

Princeton Review, combined with his consulting

background and start-up background, made him

one in a million. He understood the processes

and risks in using part-time and transient labor to

deliver professional services. He appreciated the

structure and design of consulting rms and had the

courage and audacity to work at a start-up. He could

operationalize the vision.

James took a salary that must have been 25% of his

last paycheck and joined the team despite the fact

that I didnt know where the money would come

from to pay him. I just knew that he was the partner I

needed and together we would nd a way.

We had a blast working together. I would be up all

night coming up with a new approach or framework

for how to get to the next stage and would shareit with him in the morning. He would get it right

away and usually point to some business school

or McKinsey study that stated the same thing and

allowed me to expand on the thinking. We could

totally geek out on strategy and the immediately put it

into action.


22/79

21

Blueprints

One key to operationalizing the Service Grant

concept, as in productizing any professional services

project, was to design it to t into a single standard

process. That process needed to work regardless

of the project type. You had to be able to use the

same process to design a website as to do a branding

project.

Despite the different nomenclature from rm torm and industry to industry, all projects have the

same process DNA. They kick off, conduct discovery,

deliver ndings and recommendations, execute,

iterate, and then transition to the client to take over.

We found a great ally in the design of the program

in the Project Management Institute. PMI is an

association of thousands of licensed project managers

who had developed common best practices for

managing complex projects. They understood the

art and science of project management and were

intrigued by the added complexity of managing a

team of volunteers.

Another key was in the design of the materials and

infrastructure to support the process. Without clear

guidelines on the standard process, best-practice

documents for each project type, and example project

plans and deliverables from similar projects, a team

could quickly get lost, no matter how carefully wed

trained them.

James rst task, then, was to determine the right

documentation and process management to really

support our Service Grants. He set up a war room

and went to work, quickly developing a prototype of

a 70+ page guide that we could customize for each

project type. Each blueprint, as we called them,

included the best practices for that project type,

garnered from the leaders in the eld (such as Landor

for branding), as well as the tips and tricks from PMI.

The documents anticipated the 100 reasons a project

would go south and headed them off at the pass

through proactive communication and processes.

It was not only what many would call the best

volunteer management resource ever created, it was a

profound innovation in process design. We found that

it was not only highly effective in our program but

beyondour business professionals were taking our

documents back to their corporate ofces and usingthem to manage their projects for their company.

James had created a work of art, something a

coworker called drop-dead gorgeous. The

blueprints were our purple cow, in Seth Godin

speak. They became our secret sauce.


23/79

22

Overcoming

Sector Barriers

Sometime in our rst few years I met with a program

ofcer who was highly skeptical about the viability

of the Service Grant program. She told the story of

how one pro bono program had sent a rst year MBA

student into a school district to help develop a new

organization design for the district. It was a huge

failure. The student was way out of her depth and she

pissed off just about everyone at the district ofce.

For many people in the nonprot sector, this was their

experience with business professionals who donated

them time to help x nonprots. Rather than

strengthen nonprots and build bridges between the

sectors, pro bono work was doing the opposite.

The suggestion many made was that we train our

business consultants on the nonprot sector before

they do a project. But the potential models and

curriculum always fell short. The nonprot sector

is way too diverse to create a standard training, and

until a volunteer was on site with the client, they

werent going to retain the information anyway.

Our solution was simple: dont have professionals

doing projects they couldnt be hired to do, and

make sure the projects we offered required little

understanding of the nonprot sector. That MBA

should never have been asked to redesign a school

district, as she didnt have the skills or the knowledge

of the eld.

Another problem was the arrogance dynamic in

projectslike that MBA, many consultants brought in

to help a nonprot offered the wrong solutions, at the

wrong times, and seemed tone-deaf to the nonprots

real needs and resources.

This problem turned out to not be a sector issue at all,

but a consulting issue. Business professionals doing

volunteer work for nonprots really want to help

and they want to hear that they are helping, from the

very rst meeting. So they were quick to give advice

in their rst meeting, even though they had little-to-

no knowledge or appreciation of the organization

and setting. Their insecurity and well intentions were

perceived as arrogant.

This is a common challenge in consulting, especially

with rookie consultants. The solution wasnt better

training, but a better process to give the businessprofessionals the permission to learn before they

advise. As Steven Covey famously said, our teams

needed to seek to understand and then to be

understood.

We made this understanding a core part of the

design of the blueprints. The team engaged in a

deep discovery process at the start of the project,

then shared their ndings so the nonprot could

conrm that the team understood the situation.

Only then would they move into a phase of making

recommendations and giving advice.

It became rare to have one of our grantees complain

about the lack of sector knowledge or arrogance

in one of our teams. They felt respected by having

the teams spend so much time listening. It created

authentic and trusted relationships and was critical

to the business professionals giving helpful and

informed advice.


24/79

23

2003:

DefningAssumptions

Parallel to developing our blueprints, Dr. James took

on writing our rst true strategic plan. His draft

was 61 pages, which I cut down to 6, but in it was

something very powerful that continues to core to

how I think about new programs and ventures.

James had worked with John Doer and some of the

best VCs in the valley during his tenure in dotcoms

and had an appreciation for which questions neededto be explored and answered at each stage in the

development of a start-up.

We were going from an R&D stage to taking the

program to market and there were certain key

assumptions, or risks, that we needed to clearly

articulate as a team. Success in this stage was about

being deliberate about testing our key assumptions

and seeing if we could move forward to start to scale

the concept.

We called out the specic assumptions and the status

of validating them in that initial strategic plan. If we

found that any of the assumptions were wrong we

would need to adjust course or even pack our bags. It

created a discipline around our work and where we

put our energy.


25/79

24

Assumption Description Status in 2004

R&D We can professional quality services be delivered

using volunteers for team staff & management.

Proven Yes

Product We can create a system for delivering quality servicesat our target cost point.

Proven Yes

Demand There is nonprot demand for the services

we offer.

Proven Yes, mostly

Volunteer Supply There is a supply of appropriate volunteers. Proven Yes, mostly

Small-batch

manufacturing

We can deliver small numbers of professional-quality

projects in one city.

Proven Yes

Funding Funding available. Proven Yes, mostly

Single-City, Single

Functional-Area Scaled

Manufacturing

We can deliver large numbers of similar professional-

quality projects in one city.

Current Focus of Effort

Sustainable Revenue We can build a sustainable revenue generating

process.

Current Focus of Effort

Multi-City, MultipleFunctional-Area Scaled

Manufacturing

We can manage large numbers of differentprofessional-quality projects nationally. Outstanding

Competition We can build sustainable advantage

and compete successfully against

competitors.

Outstanding

Key Take Away: At every stage in the development of an organization, name your assumptions and regu-

lar check to make sure you are on track.

Here are the assumptions as they appeared in our 2004 plan


26/79

25

2003:

CorporateSirens

Tie yourself to

the mission mast

to steer clear ofdistractions.

Shortly before we closed the funding from the Draper

Richards Foundation, we were in talks with CNET.

They were one of the hottest companies in the Bay

Area at the time and had a beautiful new building

South of Market.

As a media company, they had a ton of the right talent

for our projects. They could help us quickly staff

our projects and help more nonprots faster. They

offered us ofce space in their building if we would

focus our efforts on their employee population.

Working out of my home ofce at the time, my

immediate reaction washell yes. But after sleeping

on it, challenges started to emerge. We didnt have a

funding model yet but CNET was only offering space

(in a recession with plenty of empty buildings intown), and their needs would make it hard to attract

additional funding. They would be legitimizing

but their degree of ownership would make it hard

for me to raise the funds to pay myself and create a

sustainable organization.

The board wrestled with the decision but we decided

to pass. It was hard to do given that we didnt have

any other options but it wasnt the right partnership.

Then, in the year after the Draper funding, we had

another exciting opportunity. Cisco was trying to

make the jump from traditional volunteering to

leverage the skills and talents of their employees to

help the community. We met with them and they

immediately saw the potential.

The problem was that they saw too much potential.

After several conversations, they drafted a document

outlining their needs. The model had to be able to

scale to hundreds of projects within 12 monthsandthey needed to be global. Cisco has ofces all around

the world and the solution had to work just as well in

Ireland and India as San Francisco.

They gave us a long lecture about how this is how

companies work. They need scale, they need a global

footprint, it has to be supported with enterprise

quality technology and it has to happen quickly. They

felt they could do it on their own but it would be

easier if we could help them. They also said that we

should be willing to do it for next to free as working

with Cisco would open so many doors to future

revenue. It was an organization maker.

There was no way in hell we could do it but we didnt

run right away. They had found my Achilles heel.

They had questioned our ability to be world class and

play with a company. They had framed it as a test of

our value and potential.

We returned to our strategic plan and the

assumptions we were trying to prove. There wasno assumption about being global. There was no

assumption about providing enterprise software to

companies or even an assumption about companies

for that matter. Working with Cisco would take us off

course.

We walked. 12 months later they didnt have the

platform they described mandated by their executive

team. They tried and rolled out various programs but

none of them achieved what they had asked us to do

in 12 months.


27/79

If you want to

be national or

global, make thecommitment early

and build it into

your DNA so you

dont set deep roots

in only one place.

26

The Second City

Many nonprots have ambitions or visions to become

national and go beyond just serving their place of

origin. It is their goal but they rst want to make

sure they have their recipe perfected. There is a lot

of merit to this thinking, but as one mentor pointed

out, it has three aws when applied in the nonprot

sector.

The longer you operate in a single location, themore connected your staff and board become to

your identity as a local provider. Rather than seeing

success as becoming national, you begin to worry that

scaling will jeopardize your local efforts. Your culture

or DNA becomes local and your relationships become

local.

The idea of perfecting your model sounds smart when

you think about manufacturing but with programs

that are human-based it is an illusion. Programs are

never perfected and there are always two more things

you want to nail down. It can become an innite loop.

Finally, there is defacto no serious start-up funding

for nonprots. At $100,000 a year, Draper Richards

offered the largest grant available at the time for start-

up nonprots. This could get you off the ground and

enable some piloting but to build infrastructure you

needed more money.

With our model, that was designed aroundphilanthropy, the growth curve in a given city

could only accelerate at a certain trajectory. This

was a healthy growth curve but didnt support any

investments in infrastructure. The only way to

accelerate this curve was to start opening more ofces

so that the infrastructure costs could be allocated

across multiple ofces.


28/79

Sometimesgrandmas are more

important than PPT

in making strategic

decisions.

27

2004:

New York

New York City had the greatest potential to be our

second city. It had way more companies, foundations,

business professionals and nonprots. We knew that

all the key ingredients were there and also that if

someone else entered that market before us it would

both be hard to get in and also hard to be the national

leader if we were out of the biggest market.

But that wasnt the main reason we opened NewYork City second. We could have stayed in the same

state and opened Los Angeles or gone back to the

city where I rst worked in the sector, Chicago.

We opened New York City second because of my

grandmother. My grandfather had recently died and I

wanted to spend time with her and she had a couch I

could sleep on.

Spending time with my grandmother was one of the

best parts and fondest memories of our early days in

New York. Every night I would come home and walk

her through all the meetings from the day. She would

reect on my grandfathers parallel experience scaling

the Aspen Institute and her experience as his right

hand.

The last conversation I had with her before she died

was about our time together in New York. It was the

highlight of our relationship.

Meeting with foundations, corporations andnonprots in New York was so refreshing. We had

proven the model in the Bay Area and they didnt have

the same skepticism as we faced pitching the program

before there was evidence of success. Unlike the

Bay Area, there also wasnt the sense of innovation

fatigue. Funders in the Bay Area get pitched new

ideas every week and the headlines in the paper are

always about technology and innovation. In New York

City the foundation community was excited about

our entrance and saw the real value in what we had

created.

Our biggest champion was Matt Klein, the head of

the Blue Ridge Foundation. We met in his ofce in

Brooklyn and within 30 minutes he gave me a verbal

offer of funding and incubator space. He was the rst

entrepreneurial funder I had ever met. Other funders

understand entrepreneurs, but Matt was one and

acted like one. He didnt need PPTs or budgets. He

just had the instinct.

Matt introduced us around town and within nine

months we had funding lined up from many of the top

foundations in the city from the United Way to Booth

Ferris. They were all modest grants but they were

all we needed to be able to hire someone to lead the

ofce and a desk for them to sit at.


29/79

If you are

introducing a new

category, dontexpect customers

to come to you; nd

out where they are

and go to them.

28

Sell the End,

not the Means

How do you sell a product to someone who isnt

looking for it? Harder yet, how do you do it in a way

that costs next to nothing an in large volume?

Few business professionals today are looking to

engage in pro bono services. Far fewer were seeking

these types of opportunities back in 2003. While they

wanted to have more impact and purpose in their

careers, and be more connected to the community,they didnt know pro bono was the solution.

When we spoke to potential candidates for the

program, most had a bad association with the very

concept of volunteering. They pictured old ladies in

Keds planting owers. Those that had volunteered

in the past found it an utter waste of time and

talent. They were not looking to volunteer, so trying

to recruit people through traditional volunteer

channels like volunteer centers and websites like

volunteermatch.org was bearing very little fruit.

Another challenge was that we needed very specic

roles. Most of the volunteer-oriented sites were too

heterogeneous and could not reliably create pipelines

for roles like graphic designers and web developers.

Again, we decide to approach it from a different angle.

What was the prole of the person we wanted to

attract? They were professionals in a given eld. They

werent satised with the current state of their job orcareer and were looking for something else.

Where did graphic designers or web developers going

when they were looking for change in their career?

They went looking for a new joband by 2003 most

of them were looking on one or more of about a dozen

job websites from Craigslist to CareerBuilder to Dice.

com to Monster.com. These sites could target specic

professionals in certain geographies who all met our

target prole. Most importantly, they reached

thousands of professionals per day and could generate

real volume.

That was the insight, but getting these sites to help

us was another story. There was no way we could pay

the hundreds of dollars they asked to advertise a role

and they were concerned about having unpaid jobs

listed as it might frustrate job seekers.

One by one I made the rounds and gave each site mypitch. Our nation was in trouble and the nonprot

sector was our best bet, but nonprots needed the

talent to help them rise to the challenge. Taproot was

working to make this happen but they (insert job

board) were the only way we could do it. They had

the attention of the business professionals and had to

decide if they would use that power for good.

If they didnt do it we would fail, the nonprots would

fail, and our society would be in deeper water. I asked

them to let us post for volunteer positions on their job


30/79

29

boards and to donate the inventory, tens of thousands

of dollars worth per year.

These sites protested that it would open a ood

gate of requests from nonprots for free listings;

they told us it would ruin their job board. But most

were able to see this as a unique opportunity. Other

nonprots might want free job postings here or there,

but we were the only one who had this strategicability to partner. We were the only one with a large,

ongoing need for something only they could provide,

something that would enable their customers to

maximize their careers and impact.

In just a few years we signed up every major job site

and had hundreds of thousands of dollars in donated

job board inventory each year to drive business

professionals to nd purpose.

And come they did. Over 61,000 people have applied

to do pro bono with Taproot; as of May 2013 we

have more than 5,000 active or on hold pro bono

consultants.


31/79

Surround yourself

with great people

and let them ndways to create

value and energy.

The best ideas

rarely come from

management

30

Like me, Lindsay Firestone speaks a mile per minute.

Like me, she did her undergraduate studies in

sociology and organizational behavior. This focus

was a product of her natural interests but also her

experience as a summer intern at the Red Cross

headquarters in Washington. It was the perfect

opportunity to understand how a large nonprot

was able to run a world class program and operate

efciently and effectively. It would be a master class

in organization design and leadership. It ended up

being just that but not for the reasons she expected.

The Red Cross needed help. It had world class

programs and yet was also missing the most basic

systems and infrastructure support because there was

little funding that was allowed by donors to be spent

on overhead. Lindsay was shocked. If a nonprot

of this size and stature was hampered by these

fundamental obstacles, how could other organizationsexpect to have it any better. It turned her thinking

2004:

LindsayFirestone

upside down. She returned to Yale that fall with a

renewed passion to understand how to build a healthy

and strong nonprot organization so that she could

one day help ensure our

social sector was able to

realize its potential. She

had been out of Yale for

a few years when she

approached James aboutjoining our team. To her,

Taproot was exactly what

the doctor ordered. We

were scaling a model to

bring talent and services

to nonprots that they

couldnt afford. She wanted to be part of it. James

met with her while I was on my honeymoon. When

I returned he shared that he had found a profoundly

passionate young star that he wanted to hire but we

didnt have the right role for her. We did have one

opening, as a volunteer recruitment associate, but it

wasnt quite right. After I met with Lindsay, I gave

James my blessing to hire her for the role anyway:

dont let this one get away. While it wasnt intentional,

over the next few years Lindsay got what many

management grooming programs at big companies

received, a rotation through all the departments in the

organization. She was our young star, and when we

needed something done and done well, Lindsay got

moved into a role to work on it.


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2004:

Matt OGrady

Key to opening a second market was to hire someone

else to run the Bay Area so I could be on the road and

know that our work in the Bay Area could continue to

grow with quality. That person was Matt OGrady

one of our early culture carriers who thought Taproot

was an innovative experiment in engaging people in

service in a much more powerful way than had ever

been done before. He had worked for decades in the

nonprot sector and was a thought leader in bothnonprot management and volunteerism.

Taproot was breaking a lot of the rules and turning

conventional wisdom about volunteering on its head.

Based on what he was hearing, the early indicators

were that it was successful and really powerful. He

wasnt looking for a job but when he saw that we were

looking for someone to run the Bay Area ofce, he

through his hat into the ring.

Where James was an ideal

partner to operationalize

and develop our programs,

Matt OGrady was the one

guy in Bay Area that could

be our ambassador to the

nonprot establishment.

He was one of the old

guard and had seen it

all and knew all the key

players in the nonprotand philanthropic

community. His endorsement and ability to put what

we were doing into language that would translate into

the eld that would control our success.

Several years later as part of a 360 review for Matt

I interviewed a foundation executive about her

experience working with Matt as our Bay Area

Executive Director. She was very complimentary

but when I asked if she had any challenges working

with him she shared that Matt at times was too

excited about Taproot and his enthusiasm could be

overwhelming.

Matt is an effusive guy to begin with, but Matt

become the best possible advocate for our

new program. He truly understood why it was

revolutionary and was able to get others to share his

excitement.

For Matt, our rst heresy was that we focused rst

on nonprots and then on volunteers. Instead of

going out and recruiting volunteers and then nding

nonprots that might need them, we had started with

the nonprot demand and then sought to nd the

volunteers to meet their needs.

This runs counter to just about every volunteer

program. The collective wisdom was that volunteers

and valuable and if they want to contribute their time

and talents you should support them and nd a way.

There was a lot of truth in this but Matt had seen the

result of this thinking in the past. It fundamentally

cost more than it was worth and set up the wrong

dynamic between the volunteer and the nonprot

in need. Being volunteer-centric actually limited the

impact you could make and Taproot had ipped the

model around to address this issue.

He was also blown away by the idea of nonprots

applying for services in a competitive grant-makingprocess. We werent trying to serve all comers but

instead setting as high bar and making it something

special to get access to our services. This was not

the way volunteer programs were supposed to work.

You were, within limits, supposed to help everyone

you could and nd a way to make it work. To

treat services as the same value as cash and lift the

philanthropic model to do so was unheard of and ran

counter to so much of what he had seen.

Finally, he would tell foundations and nonprots


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about how we had productized our services and

developed blueprints for each project type. He would

bring the blueprints to meetings and show them off

like pictures of his kids. He spoke of wishing he had

been able to use these previously in his career and

saw them as a work of art.

Despite all his excitement about our innovations, he

was still skeptical when he took the job but felt it was

worth taking the risk given the potential. What nallywon him over was seeing the work our volunteer

teams were producing.

The nonprot grantee that he most often sited was

the Point Reyes National Seashore Association. We

had awarded them both a branding and website

Service Grants and he saw how it transformed how

they positioned the organization in the community.

But he also saw the transformational power these

projects were having on the nonprot staff and

leadership. The process was helping them reconnect

with their vision, bond as a team and become more

focused and energized about their work. It was

making them each stronger professionals and the

organization as well.

Unlike many of the industry veterans I had seen

destroy the commercial start-ups a few years early,

Matt didnt join the team to change us or teach us

how to run an organization properly. He truly loved

the model, appreciated the team and wanted to help

be part of making the vision a reality.

Key Take AwayDont hire people who want to x

you but instead are motivated to help you do what

you are already doing better.


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The Smell o

Success

Have you ever noticed the distinct smell of certain

stores? Most people dont consciously but research

shows that they do subconsciously.

It is such an important variable in retail that at one

point in the 1990s a technology company received

signicant funding to create scent speakers. The

idea was that if you went to Macys.com that website

would have the scent speaker produce a specic scentthat they wanted to add to your online shopping

experience.

It was riddled with problems, not the least of which

was that bouncing around on multiple sites would

produce a horrible cloud of different smells leaving

the room smelling less like a perfume counter and

more like a mens locker room.

Research by Eric Spangenberg reported in the Journal

of Retailing found that people respond best to singlesimple smells. In a home dcor store, the plain scent

of citrus well outperformed a mixed scent including

basil and green tea. People spent more when there

was only one scent. In fact, all of our senses respond

best to simplicity, not just our nose.

In 1897, Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss endowed

28 scholarships at UC Berkeley. His descendants,

the Haas family, have become the standard-barrier

for family philanthropy in the Bay Area. The

family divided their fortune and created a series of

independent foundations to focus on their diverse

interests. The largest is the Evelyn & Walter Haas,

Jr. Fund, which has assets of around $600 million.

The other Haas funds include the Walter & Elise

Haas Fund, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund,

the Miriam & Peter Haas Fund, and the Columbia

Foundation. While there is some overlap in their

funding, they largely fund different areas of need in

the Bay Area from social justice to the environment to

the arts.

Many local nonprots counted a Haas foundation as a

benefactor. It is rare for a nonprot to receive funding

from more than one given the diversity of interests,

however. Under the leadership of Matt OGrady, the

Bay Area executive director, we relieved support from

nearly all of them.

The funding was for what is called capacity

building in the nonprot sector. The term refers toinvestments made in strengthening and sustaining

nonprots vs. supporting programs. It covers costs

like marketing, human resources, strategic planning

and technology. These are areas of investment that

have historically been painfully underfunded.

Donors want to sponsor scholarships, feed kids or

provide another bed at a shelter. Very few donors

want their money going to implement new human

resources software. This is not only true to casual

donors but also many of the top foundations. Howoften do you see an end of the year charitable

solicitation in your in box asking for support for their

capacity building needs?

Only one of the Haas family funds proactively

provides funds to nonprots to help build their

capacity. Despite this reality, Matt offered a solution

that made it too hard to not invest in capacity build

through Taproot - a simple and compelling solution

to a challenge they see every day. For every dollar you

donate to Taproot, we could generate $8-10 in critical

services for nonprots in your portfolio. As one

funder put it, we turbo-charge a foundations funds.

Foundations who had never funded capacity building

suddenly became our partners. Not only were we

likely the only nonprot funded by nearly ever Haas

family fund, within a few years we were working with

nearly all the top philanthropic organizations in the

Bay Area. Our pitch was perfectly simple.


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Create a strong, simple hook. Complexity

kills partnerships and sales. Create a

simple hook. We raised funds from morefoundations than any other nonprot in

our eld because we have a simple hook.

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2006:

Returning toChicago

In 1996, I left Chicago with a vision to learn how to

help nonprots realize their visions and potential.

Nearly ten years later, with the New City ofce open

and new leadership in place, it was time to return to

Chicago.

Chicago has arguably the most civically-minded

corporate community in the world. Over the last ten

years however, nearly all the big Chicago corporateheadquarters were gone. Some had gone bust. Others

merged and moved. Many jobs remained and the

employees remained commitment to the community

but the power and leadership had been greatly

degraded.

Unlike the Bay Area and New York City, there was

next to no appetite for innovation and despite my

short tenure in the sector a decade earlier we were

seen as an outsider and the welcome mats were not

rolled out for Taproot.

But there were a few key champions that enabled us

to establish a beachhead. The Wrigley Foundation

provided our rst support and slowly a few other

foundations started to see the value of our work and

follow suit.

A few years after we opened the ofce I was scanning

the list of nonprots we supported and saw the

Chicago Foundation for Education appear on the list.

I had come full circle. We were now helping to bring

business support to the nonprot that drove me to

start the Taproot Foundation.


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2007:

Pro Bono Air

As we scaled the Service Grant program it as a

constant battle to ensure we had the right resources

in place to deliver on our plan and maximize our

impact. To deliver a Service Grant we needed to have

a ready nonprot, sponsorship to fund it and a team

of diverse business professionals. Without any one

of those resources in place, the project couldnt go

forward.

In his work as a management consultant prior to

business school, James had worked in the airline

industry. For a company like United Airlines, success

was about optimizing their revenue per seat.

In designing their model, airlines had to decide which

routes to y and with what frequency. They also had

to pick the right plane to handle the expected number

of passengers. Finally, they had to determine the

right mix of rst class, business class and economy

class seats on each plane. Getting this equationwrong would cost them money and often leave their

customers frustrated and looking for a new carrier.

This was the same challenge we faced as we scaled

and James brilliantly went to work applying the

Excel magic he had learned in the airline industry

to manage our operations. We needed a predictive

model that could enable us to forecast likely supply

well in advance.

We learned that you need to reach out to ten

nonprots to get three to apply for a Service Grant

to ultimately lead to one ready grantee. We learned

that 50% of volunteer applicants never make it

past orientation. We learned that on a team of ve

volunteers, an average of one of them drop out during

the course of the project. We learned that many

projects would be on hold because we couldnt ll one

role of the ve on the team.

These hot roles were worth a lot more than other

roles that were in abundant supply and never held up

completing the stafng of a team. They were our rst

class and business seats. They needed more attention

and service.

These were all inputs that went into the design of

the management and reporting systems. Our stafng

database was congured to suggest the best role of a

given trained volunteer based how to maximize thenumber of projects that could be launched. We knew

which projects to promote to nonprots to encourage

applications for projects we could staff more easily.

We built volunteer recruitment goals based on the

projected need in 3-6 months.

Pro Bono Air was ready to take

Bringing Purpose & Creativity to Work

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