The Philanthropic Family

Philanthropists these days are always looking for leverage. It’s so fashionable to claim that we’ve managed to attract more dollars or achieved more good than one might expect from the actual dollars spent, the stretched application of the word “leverage” can become a bit embarrassing. If I tell the local radio station that I will match any donations they receive during the next hour, and you make a donation during that hour, did I leverage your funds or did you leverage mine? With no particular impact in mind beyond the hourly fundraising goal, it’s all a little silly, really.

One way to think of leverage is to influence the fewest number of people in order to impact the most. For example, if you can convince a few key officials at the Forest Service to issue an administrative ban on logging on 200,000 acres of land, you’ve achieved (created?) leverage.

Graphic fromwww.babypips.com

Besides the federal government, one other huge force  for change out there is “the people.” If you can raise the consciousness of the people and effectively direct their energy toward a goal, you can end apartheid, elect the country’s first African-American president, and provide millions in loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries all over the world. Obvious, right? Maybe, but still hard. Mostly because you need the ad budget of Pepsi and the cool factor of the Marlboro Man to move the masses. You have to create incentives for change that are more powerful than the incentives to maintain the status quo.

So far, the environmental community has been successful at raising consciousness about the problem among the general population. Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth brought the immediacy and reality of the problem home for millions of Americans, to such a degree that they won the Nobel Prize. Right now, the Fox network is featuring a campaign with spots from its TV stars called “Green It. Mean it.” I recently caught ABC’s show “Environmentality” that features kids starting projects to green their schools and their communities. Heck, we’ve almost convinced half the population that global warming is a real, human-caused phenomenon. What about the other half? Well, it’s easier not to believe and so a little encouragement from the oil and gas industries is all it takes for some people to float comfortably down that famous river in Egypt, Da Nile.

Where environmentalists (and the philanthropists that support them) have been far less successful is in helping people move from awareness to action. Sure, we’re using more canvas bags and turning off the sprinkler, but some reports suggest these individual efforts add up to almost immeasurable improvements in the situation. They’re all good, responsible actions and we should continue to encourage people to become good stewards of the resources at their disposal. But we’re not making progress fast enough, and this is mostly because well-intentioned people struggle to understand how they can make choices that make a difference in a larger scale.

I just read an interview with Daniel Goleman in last month’s “O” magazine. Daniel Goleman is the guy who developed the concept of Emotional IQ. Now he’s got a new book called Ecological Intelligence. And this guy is talking about real leverage.

I’ve written before about the untapped power of voting with our pocketbooks where I highlighted a great site called www.alonovo.com that allows you to see social responsibility data for the company that manufactures any item available via Amazon.com. By consciously purchasing products made by responsible companies, consumers are able to reward companies who are practicing corporate social responsibility and encourage others to follow suit.

Daniel Goleman introduced me to an even more immediate tool to inform the way we wield our purchasing power for the benefit of the planet: it’s an iPhone app that grades a product instantly:

“There’s a new software program, GoodGuide, that can calculate the specific ecological impact of a product during its manufacture, transport, use, and disposal. The visionary behind this idea is an industrial ecologist named Dara O’Rourke, PhD, at UC Berkeley. To help us make smart purchases, GoodGuide provides information like: What ingredients in the product are health concerns? How far did it travel? How were workers treated? GoodGuide integrates data from hundreds of complex databases and summarizes the bottom line in the time it takes to exhale. A shopper can type in the bar code of a product in her cell phone, send it via text message, and within seconds an image appears, rating the product in terms of its environmental, health, and social impact. The software is still being worked out, but it’s available for iPhones now, free, at GoodGuide.com.”

This kind of approach has the ability to truly bring the greatest force we have–the almighty dollar–and use it to get companies to act in the right way. If the millions of people who have an iPhone start using this program to inform their everyday purchases, companies will have no choice but to respond.

It’s sad to say, but as social do-gooders and righteous protesters, we have little leverage to move the major actors on the global stage because their short-term incentives for profit far outweigh the long-term considerations on behalf of the planet (and momentarily bad PR can be greenwashed over with a few superficial nods in the direction of corporate social responsibility). But if we can impact their short-term profitability by showing a marked preference for items that were produced following the principles of social responsibility from source to supermarket, then we can get their attention.

And how much investment capital would it take to build the next GoodGuide and other tools like it that make the market more transparent? Minimal dollars compared to the potential impact. This is what we should be looking for when we talk about leverage for our philanthropic dollar. Get people to adopt GoodGuide. Run a social marketing campaign with all the major environmental organizations and labor rights groups and other nonprofits to get their members and supporters to start using it. Turn it from a service where you have to text the bar code to one that can recognize the product when you take a picture. Enhance the functionality so that if your chosen product is problematic it suggests a more environmentally-friendly alternative in the same price point. Convince phone manufacturers to include a bar code scanner with this software program built right into the phone to further cut down the time between seeing the product and getting its rating.

It’s exciting to just think about the possibilities of what a creative social investor could do with this idea and a little bit of philanthropic capital. That’s real leverage for saving the planet.