#failurerevolution

by Suraj

You may know that we've built Beehive - a web-based service designed to make the funding experience easier and more efficient for non-profits and funders.

You may not know that we've been fundraising to help grow and develop the service beyond the current beta.

Over the past 6 months we've written 10 funding applications, amounting to £826,595.50 in funding requested. Can you guess our hit rate?

We've been successful with 1 in 10 of the applications we wrote, providing 1.21% of the funding we requested. Ouch!

So does this mean we've failed? Or what we’re trying to do has no value?

Some people may think yes, and if the funding system were simpler I'd agree. However for this to be true some 90% of the sector would also be failures.

I don't believe this to be the case. There are certain market dynamics at play which make judging a non-profit on their fundraising success to be ineffective. Indeed the current funding system is so complex and opaque that it dictates a low success rate - it's the system's crude 'quality' control and fundamentally it's failing the majority of those seeking funds.

We know there has to be a better way. And this direct experience of fundraising failure has shaped how we've developed Beehive, to create an easier and more efficient funding system.

We're continuing to capture our failures and share them monthly. November's post is from Head of Programmes, Anna Chojnicka. 

In my role I'm really lucky to be able to work closely with all our partners, both in the UK and East Africa.  As start-ups working in different environments, they encounter a whole host of challenges which we discuss and try to work through together on a regular basis.  This means I get to piggyback on their experience, soaking up as much useful learning as I can about everything from how to develop a sustainable organisation to how young people are kept engaged.

This last subject in particular is something that many organisations we work with have at some point found challenging. Often, due to competing commitments and challenging circumstances, engaging young people in a sustained way can be difficult.  We've learnt through our partners that alongside running great programmes with a hook that makes people genuinely want to be involved, sometimes you also have to email, text, call, and call again to make sure they can come to a session the next day.

(Pictured: Abramz from Breakdance Project Uganda, exhibiting a great 'hook' to engage young people')

So it's a shame I totally failed to remember this when bringing our Young Associates together for our second session last month.  Following a great first session, where our Associates had their say about which UK organisations we should partnering with, we had another exciting afternoon planned out.  This time their task was to get the low down on what the biggest challenges are facing young Londoners today.  They would be given a video camera and sent out onto the streets of Camden to interview people to find out what matters to them and how they would change London for the better.  The footage would be edited into a short film, which would be used to raise awareness about youth issues, and bring young people and their voices to the forefront.

So the process of engagement went like this: I sent out an initial email to all the Associates telling them about what was going to happen.  A few people replied saying they loved the idea and were excited.  Result!  So I left it for a few weeks.  With a couple of weeks to go, I sent out another email asking everyone to let me know if they could make it.  Of 8 Associates, 4 replied saying yes.  With a few days to go, I was still none the wiser about the remaining 4, so I sent a final one saying 'if anyone cannot come, please let me know'.  Foolproof, I thought.

When it finally came to the day, two of my certain "yes's" were no longer able to make it, so I was in a position where there could be six coming, or just two.  Not so foolproof.

 How could this have been avoided?  Well, I could have texted them, phoned them, and spoken to people from the organisations the Associates are connected to, to make sure they knew about the session.  And I should have followed up, and not just assumed that if I've sent an email out, it's been read and the information has been locked in their eternal memory...

In the end, 2 people came.  Whilst it was a shame that more couldn't be there, the afternoon was fantastic.  Kubby and Frankie took to the streets with their camera and gathered some great insights into what makes people tick and what really riles them.  The film is now under construction so watch this space...

In the meantime, I've learned that:

1. You can't cut corners when it comes to keeping young people (or any people) engaged

2. When you gather learning about something, don't just store it at the back of your cupboard, use it

3. Embrace your failures, because they are so valuable.  For me, this gave me better understanding of our partners and the challenges they face around engagement.

This month Forward Foundation's Communications and Fundraising co-ordinator, Mike continues our series of blogs about failure. 

I’m a self-confessed Rugby League zealot. Maybe not what you were expecting to see on this blog, but it’s true (and slightly relevant).

You may or may not know, that if you drop (or lose control of) the ball when playing Rugby League, possession is turned over to the other team, and you put yourself and your team mates under a great deal of pressure to defend your line. It’s called a knock-on, and it’s a mistake, a failure. Obviously, that could never be a good thing.

But I would beg to differ. The knock-on can - if you want it to - galvanise your team; you see people step up for you to help you push on and win the game, which will inspire you to do the same. It gives you the shock that stops you being complacent; and this failure is often the reason that makes you go on and win the game. And even if you don’t win that particular game, you’ll at least go away and work hard on your ball-handling skills.

The way I see it, a big part of the problem lies in how we measure success or failure. We have a tendency to measure by statistics (the final score, if you will), and nowhere is this truer than in the charity sector. To prove ourselves to our donors, partners and doubters, we like to present round numbers, the number ‘1’ rather than ‘0’ - a win or a loss. To me, this seems like a flimsy system of determining whether you have succeeded or failed. It doesn’t account for all those tiny little moments that will strengthen you as a person or as an organisation for the future.

We very rarely consider how everything deemed a failure has a knock-on effect; every interaction, whether failure or success, will add up to your big moment.

This isn’t about Rugby anymore, is it?

We wanted to share one of our failures that we've been able to learn from. Michael writes...

Context

We provide three things to our partners that start-ups really need –funding, expertise and connections. Much of our expertise has come from our wonderful founder, the Forward Internet Group. In our first 2 years we’ve had much success with providing our partners with their expertise. However, in one important area, we failed. We had big ambitions to draw on Forward’s expertise to use technology to create transformative solutions for our partners and for the non-profit sector. And we weren’t able to do this well.

The problem

I found that using a pro bono model meant projects were not being delivered on time. And we weren’t able to even embark upon projects that were going to rock the sector. The main reason for this was because the talented staff from our founder didn’t have sufficient time to work on the projects. And the reason for this was because, unsurprisingly, they had to prioritise their day-to-day work. Ultimately, our founder wasn’t in a position to dedicate sufficient manpower to achieve both their and our aspirations.

My bad

I don’t think we could have influenced our founder to provide us with even more resources. And it was certainly not something we expected - Forward had already been incredibly generous. But there where areas where I failed. Namely:

1. I didn’t test the pro bono model properly. I should have started with one project and closely observed and learnt from it. Instead, I launched us into several projects at the same time, and had my team running around trying to get them delivered, with little observation happening. This meant we were investing a lot of our precious time in an approach that we weren’t sure even worked.

2. I didn’t fail quickly enough. Despite all the evidence that the pro bono model wasn’t working, I persevered for a year. I should have made the decision far earlier that the model was flawed and sought an alternative.

Lying on the coach

I’ve reflected on why I persevered with something when it was not working. One reason is because I have a preference for paying attention to possibilities – what could be – over facts and hard evidence. The model of our founder Forward supporting us to build tech solutions was an attractive one for me. I held on to long to the possibility that we could make it work. The experience means I’m now even more aware of the need to pay closer attention to evidence and facts, and not rely on my intuition alone.

A happy ending

We didn’t beat ourselves up over our failure. We dusted ourselves down and looked for a new way to achieve what we wanted to do. We came up with the idea of creating our own tech team. And we’re currently building a team to build apps that transform young lives. Watch this space for that.

Failure is inevitable in our lives, particularly if we’re pushing boundaries. So it’s critical that we understand how best to respond to it. Here are a few tips we’ve picked up on our journey from the worlds of tech, psychology and charity...

(image via RSA)

Fail fast We’ve drawn much from The Lean Start Up, an approach to building products that the Tech industry in particular has embraced. The approach is all about experimentation, encouraging entrepreneurs to create and test assumptions they’ve made about their idea. For example, an assumption might be that Customer X is sufficiently attracted to a product that they’d pay for it.

Critically, this experimentation should be done with the least amount of time and money. So, entrepreneurs build the most basic prototype possible– a Minimum Viable Product – that will enable them to test and measure whether the assumptions they made were true. If they are, the entrepreneur iterates the product, improving it for the customer bit by bit while continuing to test and measure. If the assumptions were disproved, the entrepreneur moves on to another idea, which may well have emerged from the testing.

We think the approach is attractive to the non-profit sector as it reduces the need for significant up front investment and, critically, minimises the risk of expensive failures. As an organisation, we fail, but we try and do so as fast as possible.

Grit Many of us who work with young people understand the critical importance of grit (or resilience) to their wellbeing and development. Young people will experience setbacks - what’s important is that they get back up when they fall down and carry on their chosen path. The same applies to organisations, and the staff who work for them. Organisations can build a culture that nurtures resilience through providing challenging opportunities to staff, accepting failure, and creating a supportive environment that helps people bounce back if they fall.

Why, why, why It’s crucial to analyse why something failed. That way we’ll improve the way we do things next time. However, most of us move on to the next thing rather than putting in quality time to reflect on what went wrong. It’s also important to get to the root causes of failure, rather than simply the symptoms. We’ve found using problem tree analysis a great way to do so. The tool encourages you to start with the consequences of the failure, and then to keep on asking why that happened to get to the root causes. The Overseas Development Institute has some helpful resources. It’s such a simple thing to say but asking the question ‘why?’ to the right person is a powerful way to understand things.

Our personal role Psychologists have found that most of us tend to attribute success in our lives to ourselves and failure to external factors. They call it the ‘self-serving bias’. A footballer, for example, would attribute a victory to their skill and a defeat to their manager’s tactics.

The strength of this self-serving bias is shaped by our Locus of Control. Those of us with an internal locus of control believe they have control over situations and can shape the world. Those with an external locus of control believe that outside forces, chance, and luck are more important. And it is those with an external locus of control who are more likely to exhibit a self-serving bias after failure – to blame it on external factors.

This all means that many of us can be blinded when it comes to our role in a failure. So it’s important to always challenge ourselves after the event, and have others challenge us too. What we could have done differently? And what can we do in the future to improve our chances of success?

by Michael Fuller

My name is Michael, and I’m a failure. My life has been littered with failure. At age five (pictured) not only did I fail to get the role of Joseph in the school nativity play but my lowly status of shepherd resulted in failure to woo my first love.

Fast forward a few years and, aged 18, I failed spectacularly in my A-Levels due to a flawed revision technique of focusing on a small number of topics that I hoped would appear on the exam paper. They didn’t.

At age 30 I decided to quit my job to become a psychologist. I invested thousands of pounds in studying to become one. Within a few weeks of my Masters I realised I had no interest in pursuing my new career.

I could go on.

I don’t think my record of failure is that different to others. I’m sure (and secretly hope) that most people could up with a similarly list of long failures. Failure is inevitable in all of our lives, which is why I like this quote from Winston Churchill:

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

   Not only is failure inevitable, it’s also healthy if it’s a result of risks being taken to find better ways of doing things. Finding new, disruptive ways of doing things is in the DNA of the Forward Foundation. So, as an organisation, we accept the possibility of failure, whether from our partners or from ourselves.

Despite its inevitability and positive dimension, failure is often brushed under the carpet, and nowhere more so than in the charity sector. This is important because it has helped create a culture in which risks aren’t taken to find better ways of achieving our mission. It also means we don’t get to share learning with each other on our failed experiences, important as we often learn more when things go wrong.

The Forward Foundation wants to change the way failure is viewed. We recently ran an event on failure to encourage people to share their failures. Every quarter we’re going to communicate our own failures, even if baring all makes us feel a little uncomfortable. We’re also going to create more space, and a better environment, to encourage our partners to share theirs.