Independent Sector: a quick case study
Independent Sector is the leadership forum for charities, foundations, and corporate giving programs committed to advancing the common good in America and around the world. Their nonpartisan coalition of approximately 600 organizations leads, strengthens and mobilizes the charitable community in order to fulfill their mission. Their constituents include some of the world’s leading non-profit organizations like the Gates Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation.
They rely on high-quality information about elected officials and their relationships to those officials. The first step–figuring out “who knows whom and how”–takes months and sometimes even years. With the help of JUTE, it takes just a few minutes to find a “pathway” from Independent Sector (IS) to key members of Congress. (Please note: the names have been changed, out of respect for the privacy of IS and their constituents.)
Jute found strong relationship pathways from Independent Sector to an Elected Official. This saves IS months of time in the “information discovery process.”
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IS became our client in Summer 2009. In the fall, our Nexus team rolled into Washington DC for an on-site project to help the IS executive team convert their slow, social process of discovering people in their networks who hold established relationships with elected officials into an efficient business process. This allows them to spend their time actually building relationships, not just figuring out what the most beneficial ones are.
This conversion, when complete, will lead to a massive improvement in efficiency for IS and help to uncover the wealth of “relationship capital” that the IS team, board members & member organizations maintain. After just one week, the results were impressive.
Elizabeth Kohm, Vice President of Resource Development, described the change as, “being able to go from 0-60 in five seconds, instead of five months.”
When we arrived on site, we had a few concrete goals:
- Start with 6 data sets with over 200k records & mash them up into “database nirvana”*
- Find “pathways” of established relationships from the IS team to a specific elected official
- Generate reports that can be used by the executive team and board at IS
- Get to work, accessing the information and requesting introductions along those relationship pathways
In the end, the IS project was a success. This was a “prototype” project where we focused on a single elected official. We found 18 “pathways” from the IS team to that member of Congress. Our expectation is that among those 18 pathways, there will be many individuals who can, at the least, provide IS information about that elected official, and hopefully, one or two who have some influence with that official and can help IS educate and advocate for the non-profit and philanthropic community.
Can JUTE do the same thing for my organization?
Yep. That’s what we do. Contact Sean McDonald to learn how we can help you.
*A term coined by Patricia Read, Sr. VP of Public Policy and Gov’t Affairs at IS.
What you can learn from the best bank in the world
This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while now. A tribute, a thank you note and a shameless act of promotion. All for our bank: Square 1 Bank.
In the up and down world of starting a startup, trusted relationships are more valuable than anything else. (With the possible exception of happy customers.)
We trust our bank…heck, we love our bank. Through thick and thin, our bank has been there to support us. From helping with early sales to making introductions to potential clients and listening to our pitches and helping us refine them, S1B is a true ally. And, perhaps even more important, a great teacher.
There are three things I’ve learned from working with the team at our bank:
1) Great customer service is about treating the customer better than they expect to be treated. Quick example: we were waiting on a big wire transfer to come through. Our account rep realized that I was calling every couple hours (I couldn’t sign a contract until it went through…) and offered to flag the account and call me when the transaction went through. No charge, no strings, no hidden fees. Just a better way to serve our company.
2) Trusted friends make introductions. In the business we’re in, we study the way trusted relationships work between professional organizations. At the end of the day, very few things increase the trust between two individuals as much as sharing each others’ networks. Of all our professional service providers, S1B has been the happiest to make introductions for us. A few of those have led to sales. How awesome is that?
3) It feels good to be treated like a rockstar, even though you’re only playing the local pub. We are a small startup. We have not raised a venture round. We do alright, but we’re nothing compared to some of our bank’s other customers. Yet, we get treated with respect from our bank and our bankers. That feels good. Feeling good is a big deal.
These are values that have become a part of the way I treat our clients and, as we grow, will be inculcated into our organizational behavior. There is a lot of talk in the trades about “customer loyalty” these days. While there are a thousand consultants out there with multifarious strategies for customer loyalty, I prefer to follow an organization that leads by example: our bank.
Thanks guys!