Lessons I Learned

I have been blogging elsewhere recently, so I wanted to link some of them here. This blog post was written for The International Business Council (IBC) blog and can be found in it’s original form here.

The IBC and PEPY Tours in Cambodia

When running a start-up organization, you are always looking for volunteers, people who are willing to share their time and their knowledge with you to get your work off the ground. At first you are hanging on every word that people share with you as you learn about accounting, business plans, marketing, and all of the pieces that come with starting a new venture.  You are willing to take any volunteer who is willing to give their time and you charge full-speed ahead into your work using their ideas.  Then there comes a day when you start getting have to start saying no to volunteers.

This has been our same story as we developed our hybrid organization, PEPY: an education non-profit organization working in literacy and leadership, as well as an edu-venture tour company which helps to fund the programs. There came a point where we started to be more discerning about the help we were able to take.  Many people contacted us saying that they were willing to volunteer.  We have taken some of those who were not able to come to Cambodia but instead offered their services virtually, but usually there are problems with:

• Finding the exact right match of skills and needs. When volunteers are far away from the problem, it takes a long time to get to understand how their skills can fit with your organization.
• Time. It takes a lot of time to construct that match, to follow up with virtual volunteers, and to share the work that they do with the rest of the team.
• Conflicting ideas. When people are outside of the company, it becomes difficult for them to keep up to date on the daily developments of the organization, so sometimes it can result in the repetition of work of a work product or work which misses the mark.

At PEPY, we have worked with groups of volunteers in the past who have taken more time than the value they have added.  I commend the IBC and the process used to support PEPY Tours this year, as it is a good example of what can be possible using virtual volunteers to assist an organization.

First, I want to comment on past IBC support initiatives. I was involved in the first IBC delegation to go abroad to “help”. There were three of us who went down to visit projects, McKinsey professional Maggie Durant, a current State Senator of New Mexico, and myself. We were probably a smart enough group to work on a feasibility study of the IBC’s impact, but there was one big flaw: we weren’t prepared to help in a way that would make sense for the program. We had not understood how to do the proper research before we left, which would have all pointed to the signs saying: you can’t help if you are only committed to the short term. The issues we were looking to “advise” on were extensive: business development in a multi-culture environment, agricultural cooperatives looking for market analysis. . . in GUATEMALA and HONDURAS, places we knew little about. During our week-long visit, we took a lot of people’s time and set expectations that we quickly realized we were not able to fill.  Tim, Maggie and I all agreed – this was a learning experience, and we needed to find a different way for the IBC to promote its social mission.

The next group I came in contact with through the IBC was a delegation that was sent to Cambodia, the country I have been working in since 2005. This group did extensive research before coming out to Cambodia to work with a microcredit organization. There are many costs associated with traveling abroad, as in both of these projects, and issues related to translation and cultural understanding can often add further set-backs.

So what can we do to move forward? Work hard to find the right match. I was grateful that the IBC reached out to us at PEPY last year and offered virtual support, and I was been even more delighted when we saw the match was a good one. A group of IBC volunteers including Ryan Jochum, Kate McDermott, Matthew O’Connor, and Steve Wierema,  helped PEPY virtually for nearly three months. Weekly conference calls kept everyone on track, and the team was led by Evan Lintz, who kept everyone on track and organized, and Tim Rann, a former PEPY intern. With the system they set up of managing the volunteer team, there was very little time taken away from full-time PEPY staff while also ensuring a strong understanding of the work PEPY does which made their final work product very valuable. 

The group analyzed PEPY’s tour offerings when compared with competitors, gave advice on the marketing and branding strategies of the organization, and analyzed industry trends. Their final project will continue to be very useful for our organization for many years to come, and we thank the team for giving us their time and their knowledge.

If any of you is looking to volunteer your time virtually for an organization, you can learn a lot by following in their footsteps:

• Spend the time to find a good match between your skills and the organization’s needs.
• Be willing to do the “boring” stuff.
• Be organized and give your feedback in a well documented fashion so that the partner not only knows what you did, but how you did it. This builds up the organization’s capacity by helping the staff to continue the process in the future on their own.
• Provide connections to new ideas and new people to gather other interest and support for the work you are now a part of.

The IBC team working with PEPY did all of these things, and for that we are very grateful. Hopefully the fruits of their labor will show as we continue to develop our product offerings at PEPY Tours and now have a well outlined path for further improvements.

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Note: After this process, Tim Rann decided to come back on to the PEPY Team and will become CEO of PEPY Tours from April, 2010.  Congratulations, Tim!

PEPY is a hybrid organization with two parts: PEPY Cambodia, an educational development organization and PEPY Tours, a travel company focusing on educational adventures.

Daniela Papi studied economics at Notre Dame and graduated in the class of 2000. She was a member of the SIBC (then the NDCIBD) and worked in London through the SIBC internship program. She has lived in Asia for nearly 8 years, the first three in Japan and since 2005 in Cambodia. She welcomes any IBC members to visit her at the PEPY office in Siem Reap, Cambodia.  You can read more about her thoughts on development and tourism on her blog: www.lessonsilearned.org

Maryann Fernandez of Philanthropy Indaba invited me to be a guest blogger on her site this week, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to share some more thoughts on “giving things”. You can see the post can see on the Philanthropy Indaba blog, and I have copied it below as well. Please comment if you want to share other ideas or stories as I know that both Maryann and I are looking to learn more from others in the field and to get more examples which explain the potential impacts of “giving things”.

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We get stuck too much on the idea of giving “things” to save the world. People need education? Build them a school! People are getting malaria? Give them a mosquito net! There was a devastating earthquake in Haiti. Send them shoes!

The problem is, THINGS don’t make improvements in our world. PEOPLE do. Schools don’t teach kids. Teachers do. Water pumps don’t provide clean water to people. People treating the water and transporting and storing it hygienically do. THINGS don’t change lives. So why do we keep talking about giving things as the main solution to the world’s problems?

When it comes to emergencies, it’s different. Right now, the short term needs in Haiti revolve around basic needs and access to things like medical equipment, food, clothing, and shelter, (all ranking above shoes!). When we get outside of emergency situations we are often looking to make changes in human actions and need to stop looking to things for a solution.

For example, we look to bednets to solve a malaria problem. We try to rush to get more bednets to more people to solve a problem that isn’t just about things. In many places in the world, malaria-carrying mosquitoes feed at sunset. Most people are not spending the time right at sunset in their beds. Besides that, it isn’t about getting the bednets into people’s hands; the solution is educating people about malaria—ways to prevent it (including bednets), how to treat it. In places where malaria is very prevalent, putting dollars which might have gone to bednet distribution into educating people about the early signs of malaria, connecting people to local or free hospitals, and providing education about the most useful forms of treatment might save more lives and also create a market demand for bednets.  Besides, giving things away can sometimes destroy the development of market-based solutions to product distribution.

One organization I have come across that really understands that educating people is the key to putting technologies to work is the team at Resource Development International Cambodia (RDIC). They make a rope pump which iss made entirely from locally sourced materials including rope and PV tubes. It fits on top of a traditional open well and sells for about $250. Though much cheaper than the deep tube wells installed by many NGOs, the price is still cost prohibitive for most families, so RDIC has a two year repayment plan. At RDIC, they recognize that the core changes they are looking to see don’t have to do with things as, in this case, they are looking to see reductions in the number of people with water born illnesses. With 24 repayment days where an RDIC employee collects the payments, they have a chance to teach 24 lessons to ensure that they reach their goals of improving health. Lessons have to do with in-home water filtration, how to fix and maintain the new rope pump, home dug toilet solutions, hygienic food preparation, and more. They not only have 100% repayment on their rope pumps, but they are making changes in attitudes and actions surrounding health issues.

After learning these lessons in Cambodia, when I give money to an organization, I look for one where the methodology involves community education over a cookie-cutter solution focusing on giving things away.

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I want to leave you with some tools to think about when donating money. When choosing where to give my money, I would look for NGOs where:

• The website seems less focused on the quantitative numbers (10,000 libraries in 50 countries) and more on the methods of how they will build capacity in the local community to create these changes themselves.
• When asked, NGO workers are willing to discuss past failures and current improvements. I would ask “What things are you doing today that you weren’t doing a year ago, and which things have you stopped due to lessons you have learned from your successes and failures?”
• The focus is on putting “things” and ideas to use, not just distribution. If there is a physical item being donated or sold, what are the plans for education and support around repairs, usage ideas, and markets for further local-led distribution.

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Daniela believes that changing attitudes and actions requires an investment of time in people, and that education is the key to the changes she wants to see in the world. Daniela is the director of PEPY, an educational development organization working in rural Cambodia. PEPY focuses on building the capacity of teachers and communities to increase access to quality education. PEPY is funded in part through PEPY Tours, and edu-venture tour company offering cycling trips and service learning experiences in South East Asia. You can connect with Daniela on her blog, Lessons I Learned, or in real life in her office in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

In the social venture world, there seems to to two types of prizes, money and/or a chance to learn from and connect with experts about their work.  Many prizes are designed to reward people by supporting their ideas of how to “scale” or “become financially sustainable”, but I wonder….. are there prizes or support out there for people who DON’T know how to do that?  Maybe there is something to the idea of giving support to people who DON’T know how to take their project to scale.

As discussed here (mostly in the comment section), I think that sometimes the organizations who are the first to jump at money being offered to support scale are not necessarily the ones who are focused the most on QUALITY.  Rather than focusing on the people in the front row waving their hands at money, maybe we need to start looking in the back at people who are diligently working away, too busy “getting it right” to think about getting it bigger.

What if there was an organization supporting only the social ventures who could prove that they have very high quality offerings in their area: the best water filters, locally developed and highly successful leadership training courses, the most fuel efficient generator, etc.  The winners, based on commitment to quality, get a prize of not just money or mentorship designed to support the “social entrepreneur” at the helm, but instead crafted specifically for that organization to determine a way to scale their impact without loosing quality.

Imagine the prize was a “Quality Expansion Team” – who came OUT to the project – for a period of time – say 1-2 months.  They are experts in their fields: a business professor, an engineer, a top designer from Free Range Graphics, etc. These people would be hand picked to fit the specific needs of the organization and ideally the sponsors of the project would be those people’s employees who give them a paid sabbatical from work, perhaps as a prize or incentive for senior staff.

If you took a small organization doing great work and brought in a dedicated and highly skilled team of mentors, not just for a few weekly hour-long phone calls, but for a few weeks or months of intense entrepreneurial fury IN the place where the work is being done, I’m willing to bet you could take a project which had been designed for quality, and also bring in the quantity.

Who else is willing to bet on this with me?  Do YOU want to sponsor or be a part of this kind of prize?

I am in the US for two weeks care of Ashoka and National Geographic as PEPY was a winner in the Geotourism Challenge last year.  I am getting my talk ready for the conferences they are bringing us here to speak at, and one of the themes I usually focus on is about investing time in people as a way to effect lasting change (as opposed to giving things away).

As I have been thinking about my presentation, I realized that the Geotourism Changemakers team are doing exactly that for us: investing time in us, not just giving us an award.  I have been a part of competitions which are about a thing – giving you a prize, money, or recognition.  That’s nice and all, but the Ashoka/Nat Geo team have gone out of their way to make this award be much more than just giving us a prize.  They have invested time in each of us, have flown us here to the US to speak at the Geotourism Summit as well as the Educational Travel and Learning Conference in Providence, RI, and generally have invested effort to help us develop the connections which might be needed to improve our work.

I commend them for that and I look forward to this week of conferences and meeting new (and hopefully inspiring!) people.  Plus, I got a free trip home to see my parents!  That’s a prize in itself!

I see a slippery slope ahead and I fear that donating to non-profits is becoming more and more like shopping for a magazine in the UK.  About 10 years ago I lived in London, and when I would stop at a news stand, I noticed that nearly all of them were wrapped in plastic and included a gift.  This was a tricky way of not allowing the reader to see inside the magazine, perhaps to avoid the possibility that one would flip through it and read enough to know that they didn’t want to invest in purchasing the magazine in the first place.  By including a free gift which then required wrapping the magazine in plastic, magazine companies were forcing buyers to make their purchase choice based on:

a) The title of the magazine and their perception of all the good things which might be inside

b) The free gift

I feel that this is sort of what donating to charities has now become.  People see the NGO title, make a guess as to what might be going on inside, and the ones who really don’t want to let you see the inside promise lots of pretty free-gifts.  With more and more organizations promising GPS coordinates, photos of the child you helped, etc, donation choices will become more and more like UK magazine shopping: it’s all about the free stuff you get and not at all about the actual content.

We have tried on some occasions to jump on the bandwagon too with an end of year appeal offering information and updates as well as recognition for people who donated to our programs.  I fear that this is a slippery slope….

Shouldn’t:

1) we be donating our money because of the IMPACT the organizations we believe in are having. . . not the swag they give us?

2) organizations be offering transparency and information to everyone, not just those who pay for it?

3) there be a better way to do this?

My two cents to anyone looking to donate to an NGO:  If the website looks like it’s focusing more on the Happy Meal Prize than the quality of the burger, you might not be getting a healthy meal.

I am learning to read Khmer – and it is SOO hard.  Nearly every new vowel I learn, the teacher says “but that is an exception, it doesn’t turn AW consonants to O” or “That is from Sanskrit.  There are no rules as to why you have to pronounce it that was, you just have to memorize how to write that word.”  It is seriously like doing a logic game and a guessing game and a memorization game at the same time.  I have realized that you have to be REALLY smart to read Khmer (which clearly I am not!).  MANY of the teachers in primary schools here have a hard time reading fast and often don’t know how to spell words correctly (they are always correcting each other, even around the PEPY office).  It makes me wonder if it wouldn’t make more sense to do what Korea did (in the 1700’s?  someone fact check for me!).  Transitioning from very difficult Chinese characters to an interchangeable written language which is one of the most intuitive in the world made it so that nearly everyone could learn to read, not just the elite or very smart.

Maybe that is what Cambodia needs? Or is that a less-linguistically-inclined-centric thing for me to say?

Alexia Nestora, aka “Voluntourism Gal”, recently put up a post called “Why Adventure Travel Companies Fail with Voluntourism”.  It has generated a lot of feedback and discussion.

I wanted to pass it on here and encourage others to join in the discussion: http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/why-adventure-companies-fail-with-voluntourism/

My thoughts:

I would argue that this list is missing the main point of why some adventure companies, and others, “fail” at voluntourism.

#1) They are used to thinking of their guests as their only customers.

All 5 of these points relate to how the company treats the potential traveler and how the traveler perceives the company. Adventure travel companies and others will continue to do poor work in this sector if they continue to only focus on the relationship between the company and the traveler. Many adventure companies have little to no contact with the communities and programs in the areas where their tours are located and instead leave those connections to their guides. Those companies are forgetting that their follow up, monitoring, and impact assessment, when doing any type of philanthropic or community based travel, is no longer just about surveying their client base but also about understanding the needs, educational potential, and relationship with the communities in which they work. That takes time invested in the communities they claim to be “serving”, not just in finding the best adventures, and often that is overlooked.