Some days it’s not clear which is worse: using the term "nonprofit" to define our sector, or debating what we should be called instead. A recurring complaint in the sector is that "we shouldn’t be defined by what we are not." And of course, we can (and need to) make profits; it’s that we can’t distribute profits to the staff and board. Peter Drucker suggested the term "human change sector" because the mission of the sector and its organizations is to change lives, an
d more recently I’ve seen a little buzz around the term "Delta Sector," because we are the sector of change.
One problem is that the public recognizes a term that almost no one likes: "charity." In this graph that analyzes the number of Google searches from 2005 to September 2009, you’ll see "charity" in red, "nonprofit" in blue, and "non-profit" in brown. As you can see, "charity" wins by a wide margin. Searches for "charity" peak at Christmas/end-of-year, with the exception of the 2005 spike at the time of Hurricane Katrina.
There was a short-lived Silicon Valley-based effort to call ourselves "public benefit corporations," and others have proposed "community benefit organizations." "Community-based organizations" Â (CBOs) used to mean nonprofits as we know them (for example, taking universities out of the mix), but has come to mean something narrower: human service nonprofits that have government contracts for services.Â
Maybe it would be harder to get us all lined up behind the same new term than it would be to live with the terms by which the public knows us. Or maybe instead of changing the name of our sector, we should just change the name
of the OTHER sector: Instead of calling us the nonprofit sector and calling them the "for-profit sector," what if we called ourselves the community benefit sector, and called them the "non-community benefit sector"? 🙂
* In this issue you’ll find an insightful and compassionate article from Tim Wolfred written for executive directors: Six Ways to Know If It’s Time to Leave. We also welcome a First Person Nonprofit OpEd on pride, a Board Cafe column with an unusual board member "contract," and lastly, a 3-Minute Vacation to a Hair Salon.
P.S. I was just talking with the COO of a large national organization who commented on last issue’s article on Criminal Background Checks. She told me it was passed around her office and they found the article valuable, and found the reader comments just as valuable as the article! More reasons for you to join the discussions by posting Comments. –Jan Masaoka
Thank you for a great article .. it really highlights all of the many reasons I started a PR/ad agency 10 years ago to serve the nonprofit sector. Thank you for this article and for Blue Avacado.
Hannah Brazee Gregory
SHOESTING CREATIVE GROUP | the nonprofit’s agency
http://www.shoestringgroup.com
The split between nonprofits and for-profits is where this got weird in the first place. All corporations were originally assumed to be formed for the public good. The split seems to have occured with the passage of The Statute of Charitable Uses Act of 1601 England, an attempt to halt misuse of charitible contributions to corporations. From there the two paths diverged until one forgot its roots of public benefit all together.
So Jan’s suggestion to call the others the “non-community benefit sector” gave me a good laugh. Might be a better use of energy to harass those guys until we can all find a way to come together again for good work. Then we could have a really fun renaming party!
Sue Knaup
One Street
http://www.onestreet.org
So, why not “Charity”? The term is commonly used in other parts of the world, for example my original home Great Britain. Most of our missions involve being Charitable to others – whether people, animals, environment. When you consider that the opposite would be “Uncharitable” you can see how “Charity” is the good alternative to “Business”.
Unfortunately, the word “Charity” here in the United States does have some negative connotations: it’s often considered to be akin to “taking pity” upon those less fortunate. The familiar phrase “I don’t want your charity” conveys that the speaker feels looked down upon by the giver.
Hi Jan and others:
I really like the term mission driven organizations.
I do realize many organizations in all sectors have mission statements, but the mission for a nonprofit organization is sacrosanct. The best practice we teach in our sector is about aligning your programs and resources with your mission. In our current economic climate, we talk about, and try to teach practitioners to get their organizations back to their core missions. We all try to avoid mission drift. As Drucker stated, our organizations exist to bring about change to individuals and societies. The change work that we do is captured in our mission statements.
Or the other way to go (albeit tedious) is to say we are the non-governmental/non-profit-distributing sector. 🙂
My two cents…
Rima Dael
Asst. Professor Nonprofit Management & Philanthropy
Bay Path College
+1 on “mission-driven.” It affirms how these orgs should be led (but sometimes aren’t) in the same way that “for-profit” affirms how those orgs should be led (but sometimes aren’t).
-1 on “social profit.” First, the concept is oxymoronic: profit is by definition a private, not a social, return. “Social return” orgs would at least have the virtue of greater intellectual coherence. Second, and deeper, the problem with “-profit” as a label is that it encourages bad performance assessment practices. The two models have different objectives: it is as foolish, counter-productive, and conceptually meaningless to measure mission-driven services in terms of “profit” irrespective of mission as it would be to assess IBM or Sony on whether they were “accomplishing their mission” irrespective of profit. Calling a social return “profit” doesn’t make it so: it just makes you look like someone trying to play football while dressed for ballet.
I understand the impulse to try to use the winners’ language against them, but in the long term it’s a sucker’s game. Better for the long-haul to fight the battle to educate people about the political economy of mission-driven organizations.
I have been using the term "social profit" for the last few years, and find it really resonates with local not-for-profits in the USA and in my work in other countries. Admittedly this term may not serve environmental groups, but they are welcome to coin a new term as well. More importantly is understanding that words create our world and reality, and that we should describe what we do, not what we do not do!
Christopher Szecsey
Love your Blue Avocado news blog.
Reading your thoughts on the nomenclature for our field, I am reminded of the similar debates about the term fundraising. Since nobody seems comfortable referring to it by that name we created terms like development and (!) advancement.So I’ve been convincing my clients to rebrand their fundraising as "philanthropy".I know that the literal definition does not compute,but like so many words,usage is everything.
So, Jan, let’s start calling nonprofits the philanthropic sector or simply philanthropy.
Many organizations here in Vancouver, have adopted the term Social Profit. I hope it sticks.
I don’t think any term will ever cover what all of us do. So, how do you describe your own work to friends, relatives, people on the elevator? If you’re a low-income housing banker, you don’t say you’re in "Business"…If you’re a Physician or Nurse, you don’t say "I’m in Medicine"……. When asked, people describe what they do. I respond: I work for ………… an organization that works to improve , advocate for, support or change: …………. (fill in the blank.)
Karen
Non-profit describes a shared legal/regulatory category, while the rest attempt to create some other commonality that will never capture all nonprofit organizations. Some identify with each other, some have more in common with those of similar mission or behavior who happen to be governmental or even for-profit businesses. So I wouldn’t spend a lot of effort on the labels.
BTW — I assume the nitpickers out there noticed the alternate spelling of nonpofit/non-profit in the first sentence. If we go back to the chart and add up the two alternate spellings, the legal/regulatory category is NOT clearly exceeded by “charity”. Slight of statistical hand, Jan?
This is an excellent point. As for the statistical point, the fine print on Google warns not to try to do additional analysis using the information they provide, because it is produced through some protocol that makes other kinds of analysis invalid. I’m not sure whether that’s just corporate liability talk, or if it’s true, but I decided not to fiddle with the numbers.
Regardless, it is interesting to me that within the nonprofit sector the term "charity" is seldom heard.
Finally, what I’d like to see is a term that does not attempt to encompass the full sector, but the organizations that we think of when we think of the sector: nonprofit, community-based, community-benefit, and authentic.
And Anonymous, next time you make such a thoughtful remark, how about signing it? We want to know who you are. Jan
I’m not really hiding (apropos those comments on nonprofit self-esteem)! I wasn’t signed in and didn’t realize the site wasn’t going to give me an opportunity to identify myself.
Best, Paul
I think that the nomenclature issue is actually masking a larger and deeper issue, namely the poor self image that is endemic in the sector. Further, I believe that the poor self image comes from the continued codependent relationship that is at the heart of the means for funding social change. How the public identifies with the sector is only relevant if you are dependent on them for grants and gifts. If you are able to free yourself from the tyranny of the donor and find your own way, you will not only be able to devote energy for your cause, but you will not need to worry about what the sector is called.J. Howard KucherBaltimore, MD
I read Jan’s article about what we call ourselves with great interest and appreciation, as always. I also just read a very thought-provoking and different view by David Hunter: “The End of Charity.” What do you think?
http://www.philasocialinnovations.org/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36%3Athe-end-of-charity-how-to-fix-the-nonprofit-sector-through-effective-social-investing&catid=20%3Awhat-works-and-what-doesnt&Itemid=31&showall=1
I’m not sure what’s a greater waste of time, trying to rename the non-profit sector or writing an article about it.
Long new names, artificial arguments about not-for and non- etc etc mean nothing to funders or individual donors. They don’t build value. They don’t increase funding. They don’t legitimize us in any way. Our work is pervasive, yet largely ignored or unnoticed by the average American. Our focus should be public awareness. Not through name changes, but mass dissemination of program outcomes, sharing of really powerful impact measures and testimonials by our clients. Relentless, knock-you-on-your-butt, day in and day out – like the smoking awareness campaigns we’ve seen over the last 10 yrs. Not just for Goodwill or Red Cross, but the marketing of social services in totality.
This would be more beneficial than hashing out a new name that the people won’t remember or care about.
Sidenote: CBOs has not come to mean human service organizations with government contracts. For one, in the governmental sense, CBOs usually pursue grants, not contracts. The term is not created by the feds, nor was it popularized by them.
"What if we called ourselves the community benefit sector, and called them the "non-community benefit sector"?"
Wow!
Creating market-rate housing isn’t a community benefit? Starting a business that employs people isn’t a community benefit? Supporting non-profit organizations isn’t a community benefit? I have worked in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. I am currently working for a for-profit company, a small business that does work I care about but does need to make a profit to be sustainable. I am also the chair of an arts organization and we depend on individuals and profit-making businesses for our survival.
I work for a small business. We don’t have health insurance. We don’t have pensions. We don’t have 401K plans. We are not particularly well-paid, but we get to do things we care about and have a supportive work environment. We have renovated historic buildings – primarily for market-rate housing, helped other small businesses get started, started our own businesses
to fit a needed niche in our downtown, and spent thousands of hours volunteering to make our community a better place to live. We have donated time and resources to many non-profits both personally and as a business. I have certainly come across the holier than thou attitude so arrogantly expressed in the Blue Avocado and which I quoted at the beginning of this message. I just don’t think it’s useful. If you truly believe it, perhaps you should have the integrity to turn down support from people and organizations you have so little respect for.
I will be unsubscribing.
Karen Ramshaw, Vice-President, Public Interest Projects, Inc.
Chair, Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance
Karen, I wish I had done a better job of making sure people realized I was making a tongue-in-cheek remark about "non-community benefit." I did put in a little smile icon like this: 🙂 but obviously it wasn’t enough.
I couldn’t agree with you more about the community benefits that accrue from business, especially from small business. The ironic part is that "nonprofit" doesn’t describe nonprofits which certainly make profits, so I was trying to extend that irony by ribbing business as "non-community benefit" when they certainly make community benefit.
A larger question might be: since both types of organizations make profits, and since both make community benefits, are there any reasons to distinguish them at all? I believe there are, but that’s for another day.
I do hope you’ll consider re-subscribing, and even consider writing a First Person Nonprofit OpEd for us someday. Jan
I think we should be called Mission Driven Organizations!
Not for profit corporation is as clear as it gets. Non profit is completely misleading. And the rest of it will only confuse everyone.
This comment comes from 30 plus years of not-for-profit corporate involvement and business studies. The biggest challenge, especially with "young" or "new" boards of directors is to help them understand you want a positive bank balance, a good amount in savings and to hire the best people you can to do the day to day business. –Mettje Swift, artist/owner, Banner Art Studio, Del Norte, Colorado
The narrower definition of Community Benefit Organization may not be true everywhere. However, it does compete with CBO meaning Community-based Organization in our area, which does meet the narrower definition many times. Another term used is "social profit".
Finding a positive way to define ourselves is needed and I am for saying Community Benefit Organizations (no acronym for a long time) to re-educate the public. The problem is that it is too many syllables for ease of use.
Brooke Frost
Okay, I’m signing on to your campaign, Brooke. I agree that this is the best choice. And your idea of not using an acronym is a very, very smart move. Jan
Hi Jan,
Great article, but although I haven’t seen Peter Drucker’s suggestion in its original context, I have to take issue with his suggestion that we rename our field "human change sector" because of a common mission to change human lives. Many nonprofits are focused on other types of change: wildlife conservation, eliminating animal cruelty and pet overpopulation, and protecting the environment, to name a few. While such efforts certainly often improve human lives as well–e.g., by creating a cleaner world for us to inhabit, or by preserving endangered species for our children to enjoy–it seems rather anthropocentric (and unfair to these groups) to suggest that the sole purpose of their work is to benefit humans.
Sincerely,
Maya Gupta, Ph.D.
I completely agree with you, Maya! If Peter Drucker were still alive and if I knew him personally I would have said exactly what you said here! Thank you for sharing this thought with everyone. Now . . . what is YOUR nomination for a good sector name? Jan