Stronger Together: All for Good joins Points of Light Institute

I believe all nonprofits are created with the best of intentions.  While many groups accomplish tremendous things, especially in their early years, a large number go on to exceed their expiration date.  Their efficacy diminishes over time, yet they persist often simply for the sake of doing so.

All for Good is young, but as we looked out toward the future, we contemplated an alternative path.  Earlier in the year, my colleagues and I serving on the board decided to explore the possibilities of attaining scale via a partnership with an existing organization, even a possible merger.  The notion of consolidation to cement our gains and improve our efficiencies seemed like a worthwhile option.

In the business world, this happens all the time.  Some firms put themselves on the market when ownership wants an exit.  Some companies seek to gobble up smaller players with attractive assets.  In other cases, two firms might discover mutual benefit from a merger that enhances the capabilities of both organizations.

I personally have lived through these approaches.  As an executive at REALTOR.com (NASDAQ: MOVE), we enjoyed an IPO, then used the proceeds to acquire numerous companies.  As the co-founder of Ethos Brands, my business partner and I decided to sell our business, Ethos Water, to Starbucks Coffee Company (NASDAQ: SBUX) when the company offered a plan that promised to scale our social mission and expand our market reach.

Yet, this type of pragmatism often does not appear in the nonprofit field.  There are more than 1.4 million registered nonprofits in the US – surely some of them would benefit from consolidation.  In fact, some have suggested that its a good idea to put charities out of business. However, for a variety of reasons, investors (donors) and entrepreneurs (executives) typically frown on such mergers.

There are many reasons.  The industry often is led by passionate hearts, not logical minds.  A strong NIH factor seems ubiquitous.  Yet such parochialism inhibits the sector, wasting energies and preventing progress.  Groups interminably squabble over scarce resources and fail to create long-term change.  I think we need to get past this impasse.  Integration is essential and mergers inevitable if we hope to see efficiencies prevail in a field whose success is crucial to the restoration of many aspects of our society.

Thus, after several months of discussions, we are proud to share that Points of Light Institute (POLI) has announced that it plans to acquire All for Good.

This pending merger represents a huge win for AFG.  It also is a victory for the field.  POLI stands out as one of the most accomplished and imaginative nonprofit organizations in the country.  It will be a terrific platform to scale AFG into the next decade as well as the next century.

Points of Light is a long-time innovator that has demonstrated pragmatism in many areas.  It originated based on a turn of phrase articulated by Peggy Noonan, a gifted speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, yet became one of the most enduring and laudable legacies of his presidency.  In a fascinating (albeit entirely coincidental) demonstration of nonpartisanship, Points of Light currently is led by CEO Michelle Nunn, daughter of Sam Nunn, the venerated Georgia Democrat who served in the US Senate for 24 years.  Under her watch, Points of Light has emerged as one of the leading organizations in the service world and the across the entire landscape of the nonprofit sector.

Points of Light already is among our largest data partners, providing tens of thousands of service opportunities to All for Good on a daily basis.  Their network of volunteer centers creates a wide installed base of real-world locations that can leverage our activities and strengthen their local communities.  Plus, Michelle is widely regarded as a leader in the nonprofit space.  Her personal and organizational commitment to building the field and strengthening the sector is well-documented.

The acquisition initially should not change much.  We expect the full process will be completed in early 2011.  As we move into the new year, our team will remain in place.  Our board will continue to guide the effort.  Our product will remain up and running with no interruption in service.  And we will remain relentless in our focus on supporting the remarkable coalition of data and distribution partners who make All for Good possible.

Indeed, Points of Light is committed to maintaining our collaborative model as an open source platform of volunteer opportunities, aggregating content from a wide range of partners and distributing these listings on our website as well as across the Internet via our free API.  By integrating All for Good into its portfolio of social enterprises, Points of Light should be well-positioned to scale All for Good’s mission, extend its distribution and drive operational efficiencies across the organization.  This will allow our team to focus on what we do best – code to improve our product and create value for the partners whose contributions make All for Good possible.

Nunn arguably knows more about mergers and acquisition than anyone in the nonprofit sector. She is a big organization executive who also has been an entrepreneur, originally co-founding HandsOn Network, then engineering the merger with Points of Light in 2007.  The resulting entity constituted the largest volunteer management network in the country.

Their offices around the countries serve as rallying points for people in their local communities.  The brand varies by city – HandsOn Atlanta; New York Cares; LA Works.  But the goal remains the same – using service as a means to cohere communities and address our common challenges.

Nunn has made acquisitions and alliances hallmark of her tenure as chief executive.  Points of Light has integrated groups such as Children 4 Children and The League.  The organization has carved out strategic partnerships with larger corporate players such as Disney, Home Depot and JP Morgan as well as worked with government agencies, such as its long-standing arrangement with the Corporation for National and Community Service to administer the National Conference on Service and Volunteering, the most important annual gathering in the field.

Points of Light also has explored innovation through technology.  They have crafted partnerships with Facebook Causes and Salesforce.com.  Lastly, Michelle personally has worked to serve the sector as recently demonstrated by her role as co-chair of the path-breaking Reimagining Service task force.

Innovation is a common strand in the DNA of both organizations.  All for Good originally was inspired by the remarkable pace of change that was sweeping across the technology world as well as by the call of an incoming president to engage more Americans in service.  At the time, I was serving on the Obama/Biden Presidential Transition Team.  We were exploring how we could marry the notions of increasing volunteerism with improving technologies.  We sought out the experts.  I distinctly recall a telephone conversation in late December 2008 with Internet pioneer Craig Newmark about how we might learn from his work and heed his call for a Craigslist for Service.

During the following year, we visited Silicon Valley, queried thought leaders, and researched failures and successes.  We learned from the veterans and listened to the innovators.  We came to respect those who came before us, particularly Network for Good and Social Actions.  We walk in their footsteps and honor their accomplishments.

Rather than build a big organization, we decided to build a product.  From its initial incarnation as a 20 percent project at Google known internally as Project Footprint to its June 2009 debut as All for Good (AFG), our product was based on an open data model and predicated on a small set of core values:

• We believed that everything counts. Therefore we wanted to acknowledge the many forms that service can take – from traditional volunteering activities to unconventional notions of connecting like-minded people through meet-ups or micro-volunteering or pro bono projects or even microfinance loans.

• We believed that everyone matters. Therefore we felt that we should utilize the principles of crowd-sourcing and social media to leverage the word of mouth affect that typically motivates people to engage in volunteer activities.

• We believed that open systems win. Therefore we wanted to utilize an open approach because this model typically inspires entrepreneurship and rewards ingenuity.  So we created All for Good as an open source platform that anyone could use and, frankly, extend, improve and innovate to benefit the public interest.

In the past two years, AFG has made some pretty large strides.  Though we started from scratch, we cultivated generous pro bono contributions of numerous businesses who wanted to support our mission, particularly Google whose contributions were invaluable.  We also engaged non-profit groups like the Craigslist Foundation who allowed us to preview AFG at their 2009 Bootcamp.  We benefited from the generous financial support of groups such as Gap, P&G and Target.

And we built marketing partnerships such as our recent Veterans Day effort with ServiceNation and MissionServe; our educational program with Waiting for Superman; and our support of the Home 4 The Holidays program with IAMS that is touching thousands of animal shelters across the US.

We also are particularly proud of our strategic alliance with AARP.  AARP is the largest membership organization in the country.  Their commitment to serving communities  was articulated by their founder, Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, back in 1957.  Last year, AARP utilized the AFG platform to power their breakthrough Create The Good initiative, creating a world class site that enables people of all ages and interests to find opportunities in their area. “Creators of Good” then started to submit opportunities directly to our site.  Today these total more than 7,000 and the number grows every day.  Finally, AARP offered grant support for our work.

With the help of AARP and all of our remarkable partners, we proceeded to build the largest database of volunteer opportunities in the field, aggregating listings from a wide range of sources.  Our active content includes nearly all of the major players in the field such as Truist, HandsOn Network, Idealist, Meetup, Samaritan, and others.  We also have showcased opportunities from our friends at VolunteerMatch and hope to do so again in the future.

Our content supports a wide range of services such as Serve.gov, the website of the Corporation for National and Community Service.  Along with Create the Good, robust websites such as iVolunteer, Repair the World and iParticipate were built on our platform.  You can cruise the App store and find applications that use All for Good to power mobile search such as Catalista. Thousands of individuals have downloaded the our gadget from the Google store.

All for Good has been a team effort.  Along with these groups, we are better as a result of a wide array of individuals who gave selflessly to All for Good.   Former Yahoo! Susan Nesbitt, current Googler Ginny Hunt, and Xooglers like Katie Stanton, Mark Heynen and Adam Sah all took an interest at an early stage.  Their labor helped to ramp a simple idea into a world class product.

Many others offered expertise as board members. Present and former directors include our board chairman, David Eisner, CEO of the National Constitution Center as well as a number of leading innovators the service field such as Darell Hammond, founder and CEO of KaBOOM!; Paul Schmitz, CEO of Public Allies; Bill Strathmann , CEO of Network for Good; and Ami Dar, founder and CEO of Idealist; thought leaders from the media landscape such as Craig Newmark and Arianna Huffington; and digital revolutionaries from Silicon Valley such as Reid Hoffman, founder and Chairman of LinkedIn; Randi Zuckerberg, marketing guru from Facebook; Ty Ahmad-Taylor, founder and CEO of FanFeedr; and Chris DiBona who runs all things open source at Google. All for Good is indebted to these individuals and to countless others for their invaluable assistance.

Looking ahead, the first few months of 2011 will be a busy time.  For starters, we will be launching the new version of our product with more features and significantly better functionality.  We will be supporting Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (Monday, January 17) as a nationwide day of service.  We will be gearing up for Earth Day 2011.  But we are grateful for the chance to undertake all these challenges in partnership with Points of Light and our partners whose steadfast support makes it all possible.

This all started when I wrote a post on the All for Good blog earlier this year.  At that time, I paraphrased an old African proverb and noted that it is true that, if you want to go fast, go alone.  But if you want to go far, go together.

We are excited to go together with Points of Light in 2011 and beyond.  There is much to do.  We hope you will join us.

In Service,

Jonathan

(jonathan@allforgood.org)