Solving Problems, Not Building Empires the Value of Prioritizing your Ecosystem

TL;DR:
NGOs have a unique advantage over for-profits in their ability to cooperate and build common goods, yet few fully leverage "ecosystem thinking." This approach extends beyond an organization's direct impact to consider the entire field's health. Effective ecosystem actors: 1) actively build and connect movements by supporting newcomers and making strategic introductions; 2) practice radical transparency about both successes and failures; and 3) share abundance (office space, funding opportunities, and talent) even when it doesn't directly benefit them. The goal should be solving problems, not growing individual organizations. This cooperative approach often creates impact far greater than the sum of individual efforts.

Introduction

Ecosystem thinking is an aspect that many NGOs and philanthropic actors talk about, but I more rarely see put into practice. However, I think ecosystem thinking is one of the biggest advantages the NGO world has over the for-profit one. Unlike for-profits, philanthropy has unusual incentives to cooperate and build common goods. At the end of the day, the majority of actors working in the same space want to accomplish the same goals. We care far more about the forst than the trees.

What do I mean by ecosystem thinking?

When I talk about ecosystem thinking, I am taking a step broader than the direct impact created by the actor. It can be at a cause or intervention level (e.g., the ecosystem of solving malaria), at a community level (e.g., AIM charities), or at an even broader level (e.g., the philanthropy ecosystem as a whole). Let's consider some examples of this sort of thinking.

An NGO example to contextualize this

An established NGO leader in the AIM ecosystem puts aside a couple of hours a week to mentor a new charity. The younger charity is in a different area but working in the same country and benefits greatly from this advice, moving quickly and ultimately helping many more people at better cost-effectiveness.

This impact will never show up in the established NGO's annual report, but to my eye, it was clearly worth it from an ecosystem view.

The cost to the established actor was low and the benefit to the new one high. In a for-profit world, this might be seen as sharing industry secrets or, at best, a hobby project. But given NGOs are in the business of helping the world, this is far more directly connected to the spirit of the mission, even if not connected to the legal mandate.

Another example from the foundation world

A foundation has an open process and goes through many applications. It funds a portion of them but also passes on the silver medalists to 5-6 other actors it knows well. It never gets any glory for this quiet email, but it's effectively making its ecosystem network of funders have better options to consider and good NGOs have more shots on goal. Again, this would be hard to put in an annual report, but it's a really valuable ad.

Do enough of these gestures and you might be recognized as a cooperative actor, but I really do think these add a lot more value than that suggests. Sometimes a huge percentage of impact might come from something's ecosystem effects in addition to its direct effects. A couple of the most successful AIM organizations are in part successful due to the ecosystem they built around them; they encouraged others (NGOs, academics, funders) to join the field. They did not try to be the solo savior and instead built a cross organization network that did far more than the sum of its parts.

Thinking bolder when it comes to ecosystems

Despite some great ecosystem work, I think ecosystem building and supporting is way underinvested in by most grantmakers and NGOs. This is one of our few big advantages, and yet relatively few organizations dedicate considerable time to thinking about this. It's easy to get caught up in your own organization's goals and forget the bigger picture. Some activities below that I think are rarely worth it when only considering the impact of the individual organization but often clearly worth it for the broader community and ecosystem.

I break these into three broad categories (Build/Interconnect, Transparency, and Sharing), although I expect there are lots of other things not covered both within and independent of these.

Build and interconnect your movement

Supporting other actors joining

One of the simplest but most powerful things you can do is making your ecosystem more open to others getting involved. Most of the issues in the philanthropy space are big, and whether it's bringing other funders into the area you are granting in or other talented folks working at an adjacent NGO, it's good for the field. You want competition; ultimately, you care about someone solving the goal, so bringing in other actors who might do it slightly differently or even better is a win. Market share does not matter in the philanthropy space; solving the problem does. There are lots of things established actors can do to make it easier for others to get involved: grantmakers can host meetups that are open to new members; NGOs can support a conference in the space.

Knowing what others in the space are doing

Once you are not alone, having a sense of what others are doing not only allows you to function better but it can benefit the other actors as well. It's hard to know what gaps are missing or what support might be the bottleneck of your area without having a decent sense of what is going on. Some organizations can go too far with this; probably a once-a-quarter catchup call gives you a lot of the details—it does not have to be weekly. But most under-do this aspect. If your org cannot answer questions like "Who is most similar to the work you are doing? Who has the same goal but a different approach to get there? What is the rough $ spend on the entire problem?" you are probably not ecosystem-tapped-in enough.

Make connections between others

It sounds basic, but some actors are super connectors. They know which funder might be best for an NGO to talk to or which advisor might have deep insight on a topic a funder is considering. You have to both know what others are up to and be socially skilled enough to know when to make a connection. Funders are often uniquely in good positions to connect organizations or funders to each other. Think when you meet someone: who might be the single most useful person you know that you could connect them to? This often takes the connector minutes but saves the connectee hours.

Transparency

Transparency on what you are covering

One of the simplest ways to be a great ecosystem actor is to be transparent. One of the actions I see NGOs doing all the time (and sometimes funders) is way overclaiming the ground they are covering. This might seem like a trivial thing, but I think it effectively flag-plants that an area is covered when it's not. Pretty consistently, when I am working with new charities, they will say another actor said, "Don't work in area A; it's already covered." When I dig deeper into these claims, they are pretty consistently overstated. I think it's the older NGO forgetting the goal "solving the issue" instead of the subgoal "grow your personal organization." A public post on areas you are not covering (like this one) or ones where you were covering but are scaling down can be extremely valuable to the ecosystem. Funders are not immune from these either. I have seen funders speak to others suggesting, "Oh, this area is covered; if there was a good NGO, I would know about it." This was from a funder without an open application who primarily met people at conferences. It's really hard to have a whole area covered even if you are steller in the field. One of the best ways to grow an idea into a full ecosystem is by inviting others into the space, working on building up other actors, not dismissing them or making it harder. Territoriality is the antithesis of ecosystem building.

Transparency of failure

Although lots of forms of transparency help your ecosystem, none are harder than being transparent about things that don't work. Every NGO and philanthropist has done tests that do not work out (if you have not, you are either very new or very naive). However, most of the time these are filed away and buried under a pile of successes, only to be replicated by someone else a couple of years later. One of the charities we support, MHI, failed in such a graceful way it massively improved the ecosystem as a whole, ensuring no further resources would be spent on an intervention that ultimately seemed less promising than it did from afar. Not only was it described front and center on their website, but they spent a month trying to spread the lessons of what they had learn\ed. I estimate only about 10% of failures are shared in any sort of way in the philanthropy world, and less than 2% are spread far enough that the whole ecosystem hears of them. Sharing does not help your org's impact once you already know it failed, but it helps dozens of other actors.

Ecosystem mapping

A step even further than sharing your own coverage, failure, and lessons is proactively trying to build maps and knowledge bases that benefit others (and ideally sharing them transparently). It has to be something that is actually useful to decision-makers in the space, but when created, resources like this can carry a lot of weight. I think people sometimes assume these models need to be perfect or extremely high-resource to be valuable, but often the most useful ones I have seen (particularly on the funder side) are scrappy Google Docs or spreadsheets. An example of the progress studies ecosystem gives a sense of what this looks like.

Sharing abundance

If you know your limiting factors and the gaps of the rest of the ecosystem, often you end up in abundance of some things and in shortage of others. Sharing this abundance with other ecosystem actors can make your entire space much stronger.

Sharing office space

I took a visit to this little office space called tEAmwork in Berlin. It was run by a solid organization, but the thing that really stood out is they had rented an office ~3x the size they needed and had opened it up to other actors in the ecosystem. The culture and growth that these organizations had created through organic conversations every lunch was impressive. It was so inspiring that the next time AIM moved offices, we did the same thing, setting up some open space for a much broader community than just our staff. The costs were ~1.1x what a smaller office would have cost (and debatably we would have gotten the exact same space, just had it half empty), but it provided a huge benefit to the community. The number of times I meet with an NGO or foundation in a beautiful and empty office, then meet someone later in the day who is working out of their basement in the exact same area!

(they also have an amazing photo wall guests can take a polaroid of and see who has visited the office also an idea we applied to the AIM office).

Sharing funding opportunities

Some of the biggest impacts I have had come from passing on grantmaking opportunities I am not funding to other funders who might be a better fit for them. This is easy as a funder, but I have seen NGOs do the same practice, turning down funding and telling the funder about others in the ecosystem who could use it more than they can. Particularly as NGOs get bigger, a $10k grant for them might not be nearly as important as for a much smaller, less well-networked NGO.

Sharing talent

One of my favorite examples of a cooperative NGO was one who I witnessed find a star talent they were about to hire but then learned about a job that was probably a better fit for both the talent and the very talent-starved organization.

The temptation, of course, is to hire this superstar and quick before they see the other job. This NGO did the exact opposite:

they told both the org and the candidate that although they were the top option in their job, they should also consider this one. The candidate ended up taking the 2nd job and going on to have a huge impact. Did the NGO lose out on some impact directly under their brand? Sure, but the ecosystem got stronger, and I (one of their funders) was so impressed they were often first on my list for talent I found. They kept in mind the goal—to make a difference in the area, not to build their NGO.

Conclusion

NGOs care about the issue, and this allows us to be way more cooperative and ecosystem-focused than our for-profit counterparts. We should use this advantage and encourage actors who are building the ecosystem, even when it's hard or does not directly benefit themselves.