Through the actions of many people, groups and technologies, transformational social change is within new reach but it is also causing new and very different expectations of nonprofits groups.
In his provokingly titled article for the Stanford Review, Paul Klein explains why nonprofits are losing their monopoly as the most effective agents of social change.
Klein is the President and Founder of Impakt, a Toronto-based corporate social responsibility consultancy. He believes that significant new innovation from nonprofit organizations will not be possible until they begin embrace structural change themselves.

Unless nonprofits evolve, he explains that corporations, B Corps, and social enterprises will eclipse them. Funders have become impatient with the status quo in the nonprofit sector. They are limiting themselves by “slow-moving, institutional, and self-interested business practices” – making significant social change almost impossible.

Funders at all levels expect high performance and as a result are more selective about what nonprofits they support. They want social change organizations to do whatever it takes to get the biggest results at the lowest cost in the shortest period of time. They also want to see more collaborative efforts between companies and countries in setting strong goals, having clear plans, and openly demonstrating progress.

So the big question is, should nonprofits be biased towards putting themselves out of business?

With constraints to agility and innovation, Klein argues that it is time for nonprofits to be less bureaucratic and more responsive to the changing contexts in which they operate. “Funders are expecting significant change from charities,” writes Klein. “Starting with an intention of being much less institutional and much more entrepreneurial.”

Jay Coen Gilbert, cofounder of B-Lab explains that funders want to focus on what works. He outlines some of the changes that would help move organizations toward solving issues faster in a way that funders want to see:

1. Pay-for-performance: Linking salaries and bonuses to specific social change objectives.
2. Establishing review process: Looking at the data of all programs to identify initiatives that (a) other organizations would handle better or (b) consider partnerships with the private sector in order to improve performance
3. Introducing new exit protocol: Major supporters would diminish investment requirements as social change outcomes improve.

Many are still uncertain however of how shifting to a new structural model would fair for the majority of nonprofits. Mission drift, loss of focus on the communities and budget restraints are among the primary concerns. The gap between the capacity of small nonprofits versus large nonprofits raises another important question of how would smaller, local nonprofits benefit from a switch to for profit models.

For the full article and discussion, visit this link.

The post Are Nonprofits Getting in the Way of Social Change? appeared first on LiisBeth.

With recaps of the great (and not so great) moments of the past year flooding our news feeds, now is the perfect time to reflect on what was and what will be.

As entrepreneurs we always have to be cognizant of what works and what doesn’t. We have to know how to review and measure our own investments in terms of time, money and resources. We look at what contributes to our success and what sustains the livelihood of our stakeholders. By paying close attention to the things that either derailed or propelled our business, we can make better choices for each new quarter.

But aside from profits, what about purpose? Are you driven by the want to create for the better? Are you inspired by products and services that will allow for a better more sustainable future?

If the answer is yes, then you believe in vision. You believe in turning a spark into an action and moving with it.

That is what young entrepreneur, animator and activist Maya Penn promotes in her charming TED Women Talk from 2013.

Maya is full of ideas and the passion to see them brought to fruition.

Perturbed by the harmful waste in the clothing manufacturing process, at just 8 years old she created (and coded) her first business Maya’s Ideas – an online store selling eco friendly clothes and accessories that later grew into a separate nonprofit initiative that helps spread environmental awareness and encourages young girls to follow their dreams in non-traditional fields.

Today at 15, her accomplishments are inspiring and her mindset is powerful.

She believes that her visions have power. The power to spark movement. The power to make change happen. “Ideas are opportunities and innovation,” she says. “Ideas truly are what make the world go round.”

Maya is fortunate to have so much support and recognition at a young age. She may not yet have had to experience the breadth of hardship that come with entrepreneurship, but if she continues to embrace what drives her and uses it to spark new ideas that can inspire entrepreneurs of every age, we have to appreciate her ambition.

So as you approach the new year, take a bright perspective from Maya. Embrace your strengths, ignite your passions through your work; and never doubt your ability to create what you envision.

The post Maya Penn: The vision to spark movement appeared first on LiisBeth.

This is especially true for entrepreneurs who feel they face discrimination based on who they are or where they come from. A 2014 study from NYU and Wharton reported that women-only teams had a 40% better chance of meeting fundraising goals using crowdfunding.

In a Fast Company article, Ryan Caldbeck, CEO of crowdfunding platform CircleUp, tells writer Lydia Dishman that he doesn’t believe the success of crowdfunding to be gender-specific. He believes that women “are a clearly identifiable group that is benefiting from this transformation, but there are many others, including entrepreneurs in rural areas.”

In the article Dishman speaks to how crowdfunding acts as a buffer to unconscious bias and benefits underserved entrepreneurs. Aside from Caldbeck, Dishman also talks to entrepreneur Bonnie Marcus, author of The Politics of Promotion, and serial entrepreneur Courtney Nichols Gould, cofounder of SmartyPants vitamins, about what it takes outside of a capital campaign to secure growth for your company.

Read the full article here: Is Crowdfunding Leveling the Play Field for Female Entrepreneurs?

The post Is Crowdfunding Leveling The Playing Field For Entrepreneurs? appeared first on LiisBeth.

We’re still smiling this Wednesday, albeit a bit nervously. What started as a bit of elfish fun about gender inequality, surfaced a real issue about who and what are shaping our children’s gender perceptions.
London creative agency Anomaly worked on Elle Magazine Uk’s #MoreWomen campaign which highlighted how few women there are in senior positions.

For Christmas they wanted to create more conversation about perceptions of gender. In their 90 second video they asked children “If Santa was a woman, could she do the job?”

The response they received was disturbingly based on bad stereotypes.

The “women can’t drive” stereotype:
“She would get lost in the sky.”

The “women can’t possibly do anything else if they have children” stereotype:
“If she had a baby then she’d be like doing the presents, taking care of the baby, giving it milk…”

And our personal favourite, “the delicate flower” stereotype:
“She would get a headache.”

Save for one boy pointing out that “Girls aren’t any different than boys,” the video concludes by asking what would a lady Santa be good at, which the last child undoubtedly concluded would be “Cooking.”

Terrible right? But there it is. Now the big question is how can we start amending theses stereotypes before a future generation of CEOs, VCs and HR teams are tainted too?

Excuse us while we go re-pen our own wish lists to Santa.

The post If Santa was a woman, could she do the job? appeared first on LiisBeth.

A female VC once told Jessica Mah that her personality was too strong – at least for a woman in the tech industry. Mah calls it unapologetic confidence and she’s not ashamed to put it to good use. After all it was strength and willingness to believe in her abilities and her company that allowed her to reinvent her financial software firm and create a stunning growth rate of 2,685.6% over a three year period.
Mah launched inDinero in 2010 with her friend and co-founder Andy Su. At the time Mah was just 19 years old and by the time she was 20 they had received $1.2 million in funding through Y Combinator.

Inspired by her entrepreneurial mother, Mah claims to have had her first taste of business in second grade selling drawings in the school playground. When she was 8 years-old Mah began learning computer programming. At age 12 she started her first company and by the age of 15 she dropped out of high school to take computer science courses at University of California at Berkeley from where she later graduated. Tech Crunch toted her as “the closest thing we have to a female Mark Zuckerberg.”

In creating inDinero, Mah was motivated by her previous small business ventures and the problems she faced with managing her books. She took something that intimidated her and decided to create a product that would make it easier for small businesses to manage their own accounting.

With her immediate PR and funding success, Mah did not project that inDinero would fail within the first year. According to her feature in Inc. magazine most of the 30,000 mom-and-pop-shop customers using inDinero were not buying into premium tools and used the software for free.

Money started to burn away. There were the basic operational costs but there were also the costs of letting your ego get the better of you. In an email to her parents she confessed to the detriment of cockiness and arrogance: “I feel like I’m Bernie Madoff – rich on the outside, but completely broken on the inside.” Flashy PR and an expensive office was not going to sustain her success. Mah had a wake up call. She was spending $80,000 a month, with only $150,000 left in the bank. The platonic co-founders laid off all their employees save for two, moved the company into their home apartment which was subsidized by their parents and started again from the ground up.

In order to survive inDinero had to pivot. Mah and Su used their personal connections and market research to create a more refined business model and product offering. Ultimately inDinero acted as a back office operations software that would handle accounting and taxes for small to medium sized businesses.

In a recent interview with Inc. Magazine on her success Mah said,

I think if anything this [experience] has made me even bigger and bolder. I am more ambitious now than I was a few months ago. A year ago I was calling my mentors and saying, wow, maybe I won’t be able to build a huge business and its not going to be great – and over the past few months that attitude has completely shifted. Now I’m like, I can really crush it. I can do really great things in the world.

Mah also noted that although she might be a little bit more paranoid after coming back from the brink of failure, she has learned not to take anything for granted.

Today, inDinero is a growing force in the small-to-medium-size-business software space. Customers now pay three to four figures monthly for use of the the proprietary software and inDinero received another $8.8 million in funding which led to a staff of 150. In 2014, inDinero hit $2.9 million in revenue with a growth rate of 2,685% and Mah is confident that their growth will double by 2016.

For more details about the trials and triumphs of Jessica Mah and her co-founder Any Su read Inc. Magazine’s feature “How Couples Therapy Helped Bring This Company Back From the Brink” by Kate Rockwood.

The post Her unapologetic confidence to succeed appeared first on LiisBeth.

The study looked at more than 90,0000 Kickstarter projects – 30% of which were created by women. Researchers focused on key questions including: how likely are you to start a second venture, and were men more overconfident than women, as opposed to being optimistic?

“In fact, overconfidence is the biggest psychological predictor of whether or not you’re going to become an entrepreneur.” say’s Wharton. “Having misplaced confidence in yourself and thinking you can win when other people always lose is a strong predictor of entrepreneurship. We call this kind of overconfidence classic, Greek-style hubris — the idea of unfounded self-confidence.”

The study defined optimistic as the entrepreneur who would launch another project because the had missed their fundraising target. Comparatively, Overconfident defined those who decided to try again despite missing their first target.

On average, the results showed that women were less likely to launch another project regardless of whether their first attempt had succeeded or failed. They were also more dissuaded by big failures. These finding led researchers to believe that women had lower levels of overconfidence, and higher levels of humility.

The study concluded that men and women perceive failure and success differently. Women see failure as a sign that they are not cut out for entrepreneurship, Men see it as a stumbling block that they can overcome if they try again. Women tend to view success as sheer luck, where men will see it a s a testament to their natural skills and hard work, despite if they have previously failed or not.

“We found that — in our sample, at least — if women were as immodest and as unhumble as men, and as overconfident, there would have been 30%, roughly — about 28% — more female founding attempts in our sample,” Mollick says. “That was a huge number of people being discouraged by this psychological characteristic. It explained a lot of the gap in the founding rates between women and men in our sample.”

Mollick noted that this type of mentality hurts women as a group. Individually it saves them from not buying into doomed ventures, but with fewer women buying into the idea of the entrepreneurial “lottery ticket” you have fewer “lottery winners” as women, which means fewer role models for women entrepreneurs.

Mollick brings up the the issue of homily and the principle of “birds of a feather flock together.” The Boy’s Club is a network that has been in place for 10 – 20 years and people tend to like people like themselves. VC’s tend to be mostly male; they have friend networks that are mostly male. This results in a strong network of men who talk to each other, which can make it much more difficult for a woman to get access to the right kind of people when launching an enterprise.

This was most likely chivalric venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz’s issue. It’s not a question of how hard you look, but what you can actually do to help support the representation and promotion of women in areas where they face the most disadvantage.

Mollick explains one experiment where researchers took a successful Kickstarter project and we created two exact versions of that project. The only difference was between the two creators — in one case, it was created by Jessica Smith, in the other case, it was created by Michael Smith. Everything from clothing, to presentation style, to natural good looks was on the same level.

Researchers wanted to figure out whether the project being created by a man or a woman made a difference, so they asked participants to judge where project quality was better.

Mollick explains their findings:

“We found out that men didn’t care whether a project was created by a man or a woman. There was no significant impact. At least in this case, it didn’t seem to move the needle. With women, it turned out to be really interesting. Two-thirds of women actually thought the project created by the man was better than the project created by the woman.

[However], we took a bunch of measures, and we realized about one-third of the women in the sample were what we called “activists.”

These were women who knew that women were underrepresented in technology. They felt that women suffered from discrimination in this field, and they thought it was important to try and fix that. They thought either the government should help or they should help or it was important to try and change this. Those women were much more likely to [fund] a project created by a woman.

So all of the success that we found — the reasons why women were doing better than men [on Kickstarter] — came from a small group of women who were helping to support other women in areas where there was the most disadvantage for them.”

So the answer to the mystery of where are the women does not lie in how do you increase the numbers of women entrepreneurs and having more participate. Instead, for real change to happen, it comes down to how involved you are willing to get in actively making change happen.

For more information on Hubris and Humility: Gender Differences in Serial Founding Rates, listen to the podcast interview on the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business.

The post Why are women less likely to be entrepreneurs than men? appeared first on LiisBeth.

In a recent Quartz article, Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money New York based writer Aimee Groth writes:

“… the most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability. While it seems that entrepreneurs tend to have an admirable penchant for risk, it’s usually that access to money which allows them to take risks.”

When needs are met its easier to be creative. More money means bigger but safer risks, and undoubtedly more successful ventures. “Many other researchers have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash,” University of Warwick professor Andrew Oswald told Quartz. “Genes probably matter, as in most things in life, but not much.”

Following your dreams can be a dangerous business. $30,000 is the average cost to launch a startup and the majority of startup funding usually comes from the personal assets and investments of founders.

In a response article on Inc., Minta Zeltlin a business technology writer and the former president of the American Society of Journalists & Authors, agrees that the start-up world favors those who come from privilege, and that access to capital is just one hindrance to making it big.

Other factors to consider are the right education, connections and the right background for your start-up tribe.If you don’t have this preferred cocktail, the startup culture you are trying to penetrate may not be that welcoming.

“You don’t need Startup Castle to know that if you drink Bud rather than craft beer, prefer Nascar to tennis, and like pickup trucks better than hybrids, you’re going to be a bad cultural fit in the start-up world,” Zeltin writes. “If you think that won’t affect your chances for success, just ask the nonwhite, nonmale, nonyoung entrepreneurs who’ve been there.”

Change won’t be easy. Beyond access to money, creating scholarships and bursaries for the non elite, its going to have to be a change in attitudes.

Zeltin talks about startup culture catering to the 1%.”They do things like deliver gourmet meals to people with plenty of money but no time to cook, or shuttle the children of professional parents to ballet and soccer practice at $12 to $15 a ride,” she explains.

“Fubu is a great company that demonstrates the good things that can happen when entrepreneurs don’t fit right into the Silicon Valley mold. But “For Us by Us” can mean the opposite too: Upscale services provided by entrepreneurs from well-to-do backgrounds and aimed at customers whose demographics mirror their own. Until we learn to create a startup culture that welcomes everyone, that’s the best we’re going to get.”

The post Does access to money define your success as an entrepreneur? appeared first on LiisBeth.

Emily Nielsen Jones is co-founder and president of the Imago Dei Fund which is engaged in promoting human equality, justice, and peace around the world. Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro is president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women the largest publicly supported grant making foundation that advances human rights by investing in women-led organizations. Both co-authors believe that gender-lens investing needs to “move beyond seeing women and girls as a separate programmatic silo in one’s portfolio”, and that  gender norms need to be re-evaluated.

They ask:

“How can empowerment programs empower someone who is still seen by their culture and their religion as not possessing basic human agency to participate equally in their family, their community, and in all aspects of society?”

This is the elephant in the room.

Jones and Kanyoro believe that private philanthropy plays a critical role in strategically supporting networks of indigenous change agents working to create a deeper shift in gender norms. They call this type of work “belief-based social innovation.” In their article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review they explore global gender progress to date, the barriers to change that women face, and three promising paths for philanthropists seeking to influence beliefs at the root of harmful gender norms.

Read the full article, Belief-Based Social Innovation: Gender-Lens’ Next Frontier.

The post Belief-based Social Innovation: Gender-Lens’ Next Frontier appeared first on LiisBeth.

This weeks reason to smile is imported from Sweden. After the disappointing news that the UK is planning to drop feminism from the politics A-level, we were ecstatic to learn that every 16 years old in Sweden is being given a copy of We Should All Be Feminists, the internationally acclaimed TED talk (later developed into a published essay) by Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The giveaway will be distributed by the Swedish Women’s Lobby and publisher Albert Bonniers. The Guardian reports that the lobby hopes the text will “work as a stepping stone for a discussion about gender equality and feminism.”

Adichie writes in the essay:

“My own definition of a feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.”

Some people ask: ‘Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general – but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded.”

In her video promoting the giveaway, Adichie says she is a feminist because she wants to live in a world that is more just.

Adichie continues:

“I want to live in a world where a woman is never told that she can or cannot or should or should not do anything because she is a woman. I want to live in a world where men and women are happier. Where they are not constrained by gender roles. I want to live in a world where men and women are truly equal. And that’s why I’m a feminist.”

The first copies of We Should All Be Feminists were handed out this week at Norra Real High School in Stockholm.

If you are not lucky enough to count yourself amount the 16 year old Swedish generation, do not fret. We Should All Be Feminists can be found online or at your local bookstore.

The post Every 16-year-old in Sweden to receive copy of We Should All Be Feminists appeared first on LiisBeth.

Two of the major problems she brings to light are how women at the magazine were given invisible work and discouraged from speaking up about gender pay discrepancies.

Evans takes Gawker’s leadership to task for its token nod to Leah Beckmann, Gawker’s past interim editor-in-chief for “stepping into the breach and helping out” when the site was in a state of flux and she was still able to oversee its highest traffic day in history. Evans calls the recognition out as both dismissive and gendered. “Only a woman would be thanked for ‘helping out.”

Emma Carmichael, Jezebel’s current editor-in-chief and the former managing editor of both Gawker and Deadspin, told Evans:

Gawker’s gossip sites often operate off of more or less ‘invisible’ female management behind the scenes … It’s hard for those women to get recognized for their work, because it’s not on the top of the masthead or on bylines, but they’re the ones pulling the strings each day. Their work isn’t missed until they leave out of frustration or get forced out. It’s a shameful cycle.

Gawker is a hotbed for gossip and pop culture. What cannot be left out is that the media outlet is known for its “sniping, backstabbing culture which is perpetuated by the company’s women too.”

With an editorial philosophy of “why not publish whatever we want” (by male and female staff alike) a problem with rape gifs that the company refused to address, and concern about a sexist work environment that is lacking in diversity – you can only wonder what the leadership board and specifically Gawker founder Nick Denton is thinking.

The following is a quote from an interview that Denton did with the New York Times in July:

“I’d like Gawker to be the best version of itself, taking the best of each era of the site. The scoops of John Cook. The investigations of Adrian Chen or J. K. Trotter. Pop culture from Rich Juzwiak. And some of Max Read’s excellent vision for the site. All the ingredients are there, and the talent. And I’d like to see other properties — category leaders like Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Deadspin and Jezebel — come out from Gawker’s shadow. “Gawker is your one-stop guide to media and pop culture. It is the place you come to learn the real story — the account you won’t (or can’t) find anywhere else.” That’s from Max’s memo at the start of the year.”

Evans points out in her thesis that there are no women in Denton’s ideal vision of Gawker.com, and that no stories by women were held out for praise in an introductory memo from now-official executive editor John Cook.

Jezebel founder Anna Holmes gave Evans her perspective on the way she feels women are treated at Gawker Media:

“My feeling — now more than ever — is that Nick [Denton] has women in two sorts of positions at the company. The few women who actually wield power are, by and large, incredibly competent and dedicated and are expected to clean up other people’s messes and act as emotional caretakers and moral compasses. The women who are not in power, well, it sometimes felt to me like the company saw them as circus acts; provocative and good for pageviews but ultimately very disposable.”

Perhaps one of the most notable disposals of female staff was the aftermath of the notorious Emily Gould and Jimmy Kimmel interview. Shortly after Gould gave a public resignation from Gawker and the New York Times Magazine cover story about her time at the company. Days before the story  was published, Denton saw a video of Gould mimicking a blow job on a plastic tube and fed it to Gawker writer to post. Denton remarked when being interviewed for Gawker’s Oral History book: “Why not? She’s a public person. I’m a public person. This was publicly available.”

Evans does reach out to Denton to contribute to her piece, however was met with some difficulty. Evans gracefully concludes, that while Gawker was a publication she once admired and saw her own writing grow amongst talented individuals, she confronted the problem at hand:

Gawker may pride itself on being a trailblazer in the stubbornly slow-to-adapt media, but only if it starts to treat gender favoritism as the toxic epidemic that it is, will that reputation truly be deserved. After all, someone’s gotta do it.

The post Staff Writer Calls Out How Women Are Treated At Gawker appeared first on LiisBeth.