A Sane New Year

There’s an old saw that says that Sigmund Freud defined insanity as “doing the same thing over again and expecting it to come out differently”. Now with a little spin around the interwebs, it turns out that maybe it was Benjamin Franklin, or Mark Twain, or nobody at all. And maybe it doesn’t really define insanity after all. Maybe it defines the way we as Humans learn to change behaviors over time. Like the way that you learn as a child that holding your hand over a candle will burn your hand, so you don’t do it again. Regardless of the source, or the condition it describes, it seems pretty easy to see that the rational adult would seek a new mode or method when the old one no longer works. Too bad that most of us are not nearly that mature.

All of this came to my mind the other day while meeting with an organization that wanted me to volunteer to help with fundraising. It’s a local mission that I care about and have personally benefited from, so I was happy to have the conversation (actually two separate conversations of about 90 minutes each as it turned out). There was a lot of social value being produced by these folks, and a lot of potential interested parties. There were significant opportunities for commercial partners, any number of ways to monetize the social benefits they were producing.

Our discussions were very interesting. We talked about the incredibly low return on investment that most programs accrue from the typical fund raising gala. We spent a lot of time talking about how the traditional grant-seeking process is not working particularly well these days. We even talked about how little time many folks spend in working with a grant maker before they submit the proposal, and that the real source of philanthropic support is the private donor (a source they have not even begin to tap – even though the membership roles were filled with people of means). They asked a lot of good questions. We wrapped up the conversations with a commitment to follow up in a few weeks.

About 10 days later I got an email from the primary contact thanking me for my time and telling me that the board had decided to pursue a strategy of grant writing and “maybe a few fundraising events”. So here’s a group of folks that are openly admitting that the exact methods that haven’t worked for them before are the ones that they are going to use going forward. Why? Well, as they said to me, it was because all of this earned income and social benefit stuff was kind of new and hadn’t really been proven to work. So rather than take a shot with something that might work, they chose to stick with something familiar, even if it didn’t work.

So maybe that quote from Freud (or Franklin or Twain or whoever) isn’t really the right fit for this problem. Maybe the better notion is that “Change happens when the pain of holding on becomes greater than the fear of letting go” (attributed to Spencer Johnson but with an equally checkered pedigree). And while I certainly understand how an organization can come to the conclusion made by my friends (who – by the way, received my membership renewal and a small donation), my hope for all of us in the coming year is that we will have the courage to step out into this new world of funding freedom, where social benefit organizations are recognized and rewarded for our ability to create value far beyond that recognized in the commercial world.

That we won’t wait until the pain of the old model becomes so bad that we are forced to try something new. That we, as social innovators, can model mature and sane behavior, learn from the past, and make great change happen. That we make a resolution – to try.