The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (23 page)

*  *  *

Later that month, I received a frantic email from Brad.
You’re not going to believe this, but the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi (the largest advertising agency in the world) wrote his daily blog post about Pencils of Promise. People in the advertising industry are blowing up my email about it!
Brad sent me a link, and when I clicked into the blog of Kevin Roberts, I read his impassioned post about the merits of our work and approach. The power of simply following up, or “closing the loop,” was so evident from the experience with Larry, I decided I had to use this as an opportunity to reach out.

I searched online for any way to get in touch with him and finally was able to get a note through. I got an email back from his assistant, with a PDF of my email printed out and Kevin’s response written by hand on the right side of the paper.

Adam, good to hear from you. I’m on the road for the next few weeks and not really in NY much at all I’m afraid. My assistant will set up a call when I’m back. . . . I’d love to hear your plans. Best, KR

The call itself was a whirlwind. Kevin didn’t waste any time or words. He was a model of passion and efficiency. I frantically tried to scribble down notes during our thirty-minute chat, but the pen could barely keep up with all of his brilliant insights and advice. As our time came to a close, I asked him if we could speak again in the near future. His response was quick and dead serious: “We’ll speak again when you reach your hundredth school.”

I almost laughed out loud. We were two and a half years in and had built a little more than twenty-five schools. I believed that we would get there many years into the future, but I’d never even considered that we would reach a hundred schools anytime soon. But perhaps it wasn’t all that unrealistic? I think he heard my hesitation on the other end of the line, and he offered a final few words of assurance: “Here’s my best advice: make the little decisions with your head and the big ones with your heart. Do that, and you’ll be just fine.”

He was right. Kevin had illuminated a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to drive toward, and if I stuck to my gut, we might get there. I’d never considered it before the call, but I decided to set our sights on building our hundredth school by the end of the following year. Relentlessly following up on every lead had paid off. PoP was built on the underdog mentality, so only a goal that big would seem right to motivate the hell out of us and serve as our rallying cry over the next twenty months.

O
n a warm summer evening, I found myself on a stunning rooftop terrace in midtown Manhattan, attending a launch party for a large media company. Partygoers in expensive suits and tight cocktail dresses milled about, sipping fine champagne and admiring the city skyline. The Empire State Building was just a few blocks away, towering over us in a reddish glow. Prominent venture capitalists, journalists, investors, and business executives mingled, exchanging summer plans and their latest business ideas. Although I’d just returned from a trip to Guatemala where I’d spent my days with children more interested in markers than markets, the conversations that night were enlightening, and I didn’t feel all that dissimilar to most people in attendance.

I began talking with a guy in his midforties who ran an investment fund and told me about his latest capital raise. We hit it off while discussing the differences between start-ups on the East and
West Coasts, and I enjoyed learning about how he evaluated new investment opportunities. Although I’d left that space a while ago, I still knew it well enough to carry a solid conversation and felt as if we were speaking the same language. Then he asked what I did.

“I run a nonprofit organization called Pencils of Promise.”

“Oh,” he replied, somewhat taken aback. “And you do that full-time?”

More than full-time,
I thought, feeling a bit judged. “Yeah, I do. I used to work at Bain, but left to work on the organization full-time.”

“Wow, good for you,” he said in the same tone you’d use to address a small child, then immediately looked over my shoulder for someone new to approach. He soon waved at someone across the terrace and feigned interest in me with one last question:

“Tell me the name of your project again?”

Project?
It wasn’t the first time someone had referred to PoP with that dismissive term. “Pencils of Promise,” I said. He then gave me his card, another way of saying,
This conversation is now over,
and walked away.

In the awkward and electrically charged pause that followed, I couldn’t help but feel less than equal. Worse, the feeling was becoming all too familiar.

On my subway ride home that night I began to reflect on the many times that this scenario had happened since I’d started Pencils of Promise. Conversations began on an equal footing, but the word
nonprofit
could stop a discussion in its tracks and strip our work of its value and true meaning. That one word could shift the conversational dynamic so that the other person was suddenly speaking down to me. As mad as I was at this guy, it suddenly hit me. I was to blame for his lackluster response. With one word,
nonprofit
, I had described my company as something that stood
in stark opposition to the one metric that his company was being most evaluated by. I had used a negative word,
non
, to detail our work when that inaccurately described what we did. Our primary driver was not the avoidance of profits, but the abundance of social impact.

Non
is defined as “of little or no consequence: unimportant: worthless.” Worthless? Clearly, something needed to change. Why were we the only industry that introduced itself with a negative when we existed not to reduce profits, but to foster a profusion of purpose? Instead of introducing ourselves by touting what we didn’t do, shouldn’t we share what we did do? Shouldn’t we boldly proclaim that we work to produce social good in the largest measurable form possible? It was time to remove the stigma that vastly separates nonprofits from their for-profit counterparts. Even though PoP would always remain a 501(c)(3), not-for-profit organization, couldn’t we at least adopt the mind-set of a for-profit company that focused on structure, results, and adherence to long-term strategic impact?

*  *  *

As I started to think about it more, I realized that I’d never once considered myself a “nonprofit person.” I thought of myself as a business-driven entrepreneur who wanted to work on global education. No part of me wanted to be poor; I just refused to let the size of my bank account serve as the yardstick of my success. While I once thought the best measure of accomplishment was monetary wealth, my path over the past few years had shown me that real value comes from investing in the well-being of others. I wanted to spend my time maximizing purpose rather than profit, which seemed to be a common characteristic of many of the people I now looked up to. We adhered to a different bottom line, but that didn’t
stop us from wanting to see that final number become as big as possible, whether it stood for children educated or lives improved.

That night I decided to start using a new phrase that more appropriately labeled the motivation behind our work. By changing the words you use to describe something, you can change how others perceive it. For too long we had allowed society to judge us with shackling expectations that weren’t supportive of scale. I knew that the only way to win the respect of our for-profit peers would be to wed our values and idealism to business acumen. Rather than thinking of ourselves as
nonprofit
, we would begin to refer to our work as
for-purpose
.

*  *  *

Although this was just a simple twist in language, the internal impact on our organization was profound. When we started to pull apart our model, we noticed some real issues. Great businesses make it quick and simple to buy their product, but we were still fixated on explaining every detail of every school to every potential donor. The first thing we needed to improve was the accessibility of our work. As soon as we broke down our numbers and streamlined communications to show that it only cost $25 to educate one child, $10,000 to build a classroom, and $25,000 to build a full school, people got it right away and understood the difference they could make. Conversations became more direct, and we could tell within minutes at what level someone might be interested in getting involved.

We also noticed that many people didn’t trust charities because they didn’t know what their money was going toward (programs, office rent, salaries, or something else?). Thus, our second focus became to differentiate ourselves by becoming totally transparent and building trust. We decided to hold an annual gala to cover our
operating expenses and then promised to commit 100 percent of funds donated online throughout the year to our school programs. Every penny raised on our website now goes directly to support our students and teachers. We even started letting donors who funded full schools decide in which country their school would be built, and we offered to take them into the field so they could see their school open firsthand. I started hosting weekly webinars to which anyone could sign in and ask me questions. We made our financials easy to find rather than buried within our website. One of our founding values was “Donors should have the ability to choose where their money goes,” so we decided to allow anyone to allocate 100 percent of their funds directly into the exact areas of our work that they’d like to support. People found our openness refreshing, and that cultivated a sense of trust.

Third, we decided to treat our work like a business, not a charity. We had to set clear goals and then hold ourselves accountable. As strange as it sounds, this meant that we had to start firing volunteers who didn’t deliver. For years we had people that worked on PoP part-time and full-time whom we would never let go because of the generosity of their service. But over time I noticed that certain people became energy vampires, sucking time and enthusiasm out of others without providing value in return. At first it seemed laughable to consider firing someone who wasn’t even being paid and who dedicated thirty hours per week to our cause, but removing people who didn’t produce became imperative to setting an expectation of excellent performance across the entire team.

We had built a culture of good intentions and boundless passion, but when it came to measuring our impact in the field, that was not enough. We needed to introduce another kind of structure. We decided that we would govern ourselves with the same ruthless commitment to results as the world’s best Fortune 500
companies. We started spending less time focusing on how good we felt and much more energy measuring the positive impact we could create with every dollar. We started to study the metrics, and we figured out exactly what it would take to reach our hundredth school by the end of the following year. With a roadmap in place, the goal started to feel attainable, and while we marched toward it, we also objectively measured whether our programs were succeeding in the places where we’d already established schools. Photos of smiling children were good, but hard data proving that we’d increased literacy and math skills were even better.

Fourth, we had to change how we worked with the members of our PoP ecosystem. Every person we interacted with, from the parent of a student to the CEO of a corporate sponsor, had to see himself or herself as a partner in our mission rather than someone giving or receiving a handout. We purposely didn’t provide the entire funding for any of our school builds because we wanted to work with people who had a hand up, ready to participate, not those who simply had a hand out. We decided that every community had to provide 10 to 20 percent of the funding before we’d break ground on a school. Because the majority of families where we operated lived on $1 to $2 per day and spare cash was rare, most of these contributions were made by helping to physically build the school (clearing land, digging the foundation, or laying bricks) and by providing raw materials such as wood, gravel, and sand. This meant thousands of parents investing in their children’s educations and hundreds of new local jobs being created on school sites.

Lastly, we changed the way we approached our work with companies and their sponsorships. We started to put a price tag on our ability to help start-ups and established brands market themselves while also building their internal morale. Employees felt stronger
about their work when they knew that they were contributing to the betterment of society, which was something we could beautifully and tangibly make happen through integrated partnerships. When our Schools4All campaign with Justin raised $300,000 in ten weeks by signing up more than thirty thousand young fundraisers, companies really started to see that we could help them reach their target audiences too.

For the first time we started saying no to certain offered partnerships, to ensure that we didn’t dilute our own brand. We invested our efforts into fewer but larger collaborations. Through this approach, we ultimately landed partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Delta, Warby Parker, and many other best-in-class companies. They still viewed their donations as charitable contributions, but they also saw a return on their investment by having an active marketing partner to help promote their philanthropic efforts. Whether it was through cobranded events or receiving a portion of their sales, we could introduce their product to a new audience while enabling their employees to feel connected to a cause. By taking this approach, the amount of money we received from corporate sponsors doubled that year. We decided to use that money to match potential contributions from individual donors (giving us the ability to announce statements like, “Your donations this week up to $10,000 will be matched by our friends at Barnes & Noble”). Personal donations increased while companies benefited from the positive exposure. It was a complete win-win, and it exemplified how we could earn money rather than beg for it.