Italics are mine

Update on Holistic Life Foundation

 Photo credit: Holistic Life Foundation. This post is really intended for HLF to follow up on a Facebook conversation, but anyone is welcome to read along and leave comments… HLF is dedicated to bringing yoga and mindfulness to inner-city youth in Baltimore, MD. Please “like” them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter! If you haven’t heard about HLF before, you might want to read my February post about the foundation.

Below I make a couple of suggestions that could perhaps help increase HLF’s funding, for whatever my suggestions are worth – HLF deserves to become wildly successful and thinking about business strategy happens to be part of my line of work.

First, you should fix the pictures on your website. When I looked at your website, not a single picture was displayed (except on the front page) – apparently they’re not in the folder where they’re supposed to be, so only the alternative text is shown instead. For instance, the “About us” page is supposed to have a “Holistic Life Foundation Portrait” picture at the following address: http://hlfinc.org/hlf_wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/about_us_1.jpg but there’s nothing there. It doesn’t give the best impression when people visit the website since all they get is a lot of words, and this is a topic that begs for pictures of smiling youth.

Also, whenever I consider donating to charities, I look them up on Charity Navigator to see if they have good ratings. You’re not rated. In fact, you’re almost never mentioned anywhere. It seems that it’s because you’re way too small. From what I understand, you’re not getting rated because HLF isn’t submitting a Form 990, and it’s not submitting a Form 990 because it has less than $50,000 in gross receipts.

Now, given the significant amounts of media exposure you’ve received in the past few years, that’s a little disappointing: there are probably many people like me who, when they learn about a charity, look it up on Charity Navigator before they make a decision, and you’re most likely losing donations because you’re so small that you’re flying under the radar. If HLF is to grow, it is going to need to get lots of donors. The website makes it sound this is really a company with three people, which just isn’t sustainable in the long term for the scale that you need to achieve in order to keep garnering media attention and fulfill attention.

So, a couple of thoughts from the top of my head:

• Provide a clear vision with measurable goals and well-defined metrics of success (that means numbers). I like the mission on the first page of the website, but it’s very vague. I have no idea how many youth you currently serve, how many you aspire at serving, and what you need from donors to help this vision become reality. To get donations, you need to give people a much clearer picture of what you want from them so that they can get enthusiastic and support you.
• Suggest donation amounts (of various sizes) on the donation page. There is no suggested amount, no list of categories, and no idea of what a gift of a certain size will help HLF achieve. At the very least you should translate a few amounts into terms related to the mission of your organization. (For instance, and I’m making the numbers up, “$50 gives weekly yoga classes to a group of 20 underprivileged kids for a month. $500 pays for weekly yoga classes for a month for all the low-income children in School XYZ.”) People want to help, but they need to feel that their donation will make a real difference. Don’t think “we’ll keep it vague because anything would help.” Be specific.
• Let’s assume one of your intermediary goals would be to grow enough to be rated by Charity Navigator (as it should be, if you want to arise the interest of most donors). You can learn from this page that you will need the following: public support of at least $500,000 and total revenue of at least $1,000,000 in the most recent fiscal year, with at least four years of Form 990. Obviously, “getting rated by Charity Navigator” isn’t going to make any donor swoon. On the other hand, perhaps you can translate a revenue of $1,000,000 in terms meaningful to HLF. (I know, it’s a stretch goal, but stretch goals inspire donors.) For instance, the data center at Kids Count indicates there were 82,000 children in single-parent families in Baltimore, MD in 2011. Assuming that you’d pay the teachers $10/hour, providing one hour of yoga/mindfulness per week for the 26 weeks of the school year for every Baltimore child living in a single-parent family – if the kids are taught in group sizes of twenty –  would cost 10*(82000/20)*26=$1,066,000. So you can translate your goal into “providing each Baltimore kid in a single-parent family one hour of yoga or mindfulness every week during the school year.” Of course you can update the numbers for a two-hour yoga class and for more low-income children, for a goal that is really meaningful for you.
• There seems to be enormous interest from developers who are re-developing part of the city, as well as from the Baltimore business community, to keep crime down and advertise Baltimore’s “renaissance”. They have a clear self-interest in your program being successful, since it could alleviate the fears of people considering a move to Baltimore by showing a positive image of the inner city. Well-documented work with a proven track record to help underprivileged youth deal with whatever is going on in their life in a more productive way will benefit them indirectly. However, they won’t have any interest in donating to your foundation if you can’t convince them you’re going to grow enough for them to care.
• Find mentors. It looks like you need people with previous nonprofit management experience to have a beer with while they tell you how their nonprofit made it out of startup status. Find local nonprofits with small-sized assets on CharityNavigator (search for Baltimore charities or charities within a certain distance of a zip code, and then on the next page you can filter search results to only see the ones with small assets. The idea is that they probably still remember how life was like when their charity was very tiny.) Pick charities that are not in your line of work so that you wouldn’t compete for donations, but ideally do something complementary so that they could mention you and you could mention them to the people you serve.  
• You don’t seem to have an advisory board. (If you had one, you’d list them on your website to make them feel valued…) If you want to grow, those are the people who will donate either money or expertise and will share the HLF story with their friends, who will also hopefully be able to make donations.
• Write a book. I’m serious. Have you noticed how many Omega speakers have books? They’re on sale at the facility bookstore. (I’ve been to Omega once before.) Some presenters require or recommend their audience to read their books beforehand. The whole idea behind writing a book is that it allows you to generate income through sales without you having to put in any effort once it’s written. To scale the HLF program, you will need to generate revenue in ways that don’t require you to attend. Business speakers like to sell their books in the back of the room after they give a talk, and this gives them a sizable stream of income because some of those people will then place large orders for their friends and associates.
• Upload a good-quality video of the foundation and its work on YouTube. This includes good sound. This way, people can share the video or embed it on their blog, to disseminate it to their friends. Make sure the graduates of the HLF program share their stories, so that the audience can connect with the message. People relate to stories and stories are more effective in video format.
• Develop a speech you could give for paid speaking gigs. You need income to sustain the foundation’s work, and transforming the HLF story into a message that can benefit for-profit organizations (the ones with the money to pay speaking gigs) can help you in that regard. I’m reading a great book by speaker Judy Carter, “The Message of You” (I don’t know her and am not making any profit on the number of copies she sells!) and it seems that you could translate what you’ve done for inner-city youth into a talk for companies and professional organizations about resilience in difficult (business) environments, even when people seem to be at a disadvantage. Former homeless kid and now author and motivational speaker Liz Murray (who wrote Breaking Night and ended up at Harvard) has been able to do just that with great success.
• Use Kickstarter for crowd-funding. HLF is very much a nonprofit start-up. It can achieve its goals through lots of small donations combined together (in contrast with much bigger organizations, where corporate sponsors become much more important.) This is well-aligned with the crowdfunding philosophy. Now, I haven’t used Kickstarter, but there seems to be enough projects having been funded in the Baltimore area that you could get in touch with people who have run successful Kickstarter funding drives and learn how they did it. Here is an example of Kickstarter project. Also check out this page.
• Low on resources? Enlist (for instance to create and edit a video, or help you with a marketing plan) local college students who may work for course credit instead of money, or simply to improve their resume if the work is related to their major.

Good luck! Let me know what you think.

(And why do I care? I come from a very poor family with grandparents who faced war and genocide, and while my parents did all the work of getting themselves into the middle class, I've also seen them become bitter, "chip on their shoulder", "the rest of the world hasn't suffered as much as we have and beside the rest of the world is just out to get us and take everything from us again the first chance they have" types. I won't even get into issues of anger management, alcohol abuse and the like. Being at the bottom and struggling to get out tends to do that to people. There has to be a better way. Yoga and meditation have grounded me and given me strength. I'd love to see more inner-city kids be given such tools. Keep up the great work.)

"The Big Knife" at the Roundabout Theatre

I got to see "The Big Knife" by Clifford Odets in a revival at the Roundabout Theatre this week, and I liked the production a lot. The reviews have been mixed, it seems, but any flaws I noticed are truly due to Odets - the cast, costumes and set are stellar.

The theme of the play can roughly be described by the famous e.e.cummings quote, "to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being and never stop fighting." It's a battle the main protagonist, Charlie Castle, an actor in Hollywood in the 1940s who've wasted his talent in B-movies but is prodded by his wife Marion to become true to himself again, ultimately loses.

I find myself agreeing the most with the Associated Press review, which singles out for praise the excellent actor Bobby Cannavale, who portrays Charlie Castle, the phenomenal actor Richard Kind as studio boss Marcus Hoff, the beautiful set of a Los Angeles home by John Lee Beaty and the swanky costumes of Catherine Zuber. I also was very impressed by actress Marin Ireland, who plays Charlie Castle's wife Marion - the AP, although overall positive, wasn't quite enthusiastic about bits of her performance, but I saw the play after the reviewer did, and I found Ireland superb.

I loved the first half (Acts 1 and 2, before intermission) - in my opinion, it struck a perfect balance in showing Castle's dilemma between living the high life as a movie actor if he renews a lucrative but unrewarding movie contract for a ridiculously long period of time and remaining true to his ideals.

The acting is spot-on in a visually pleasing environment, with sets and costumes in white, light brown, shades of red, without depicting an exaggeratedly lavish lifestyle that would repel the audience. The characters really come alive as three-dimensional people with dreams, doubts and fears and the actors establish a real connection with the audience.

Interestingly, the people who were sitting next to me had read the New York Times review, which depicts the revival as "sluggish, soulless", and enjoyed the play a lot less as a result. I didn't and had a great time, although I did like the first half better than the second. So perhaps there is a case to be made to avoid reading reviews once you've bought tickets to something.

I liked the second half too, but not as much as the first half. To explain why, I'll have to mention a couple of spoilers, so you might want to stop reading here, or accept that I'll divulge a few secrets. It becomes clear early in the play that idealistic Charlie Castle was involved in a hit-and-run accident in which he killed a child and for which a studio yes-man went to jail for in his place. Oh, and there was a woman in the car with him, and that wasn't his wife but a little movie starlet.

In the second half of the show, the studio boss plots with an acolyte to have the starlet "silenced" because she's dropping hints about the hit-and-run. This infuriates Charlie, who - after bowing to the studio boss's demands in renewing a contract Marion didn't want him to sign - finally takes a stand to save her. Well, this really, really annoyed me.

He killed a child and shows no remorse for it and in the first half when he interacts with the starlet he doesn't seem particularly fond of her, and then he does all that posturing to save her? And he supposedly loves his wife so very much? Come on, now. And the sudden outburst where he slaps the studio boss seemed gratuitous - nothing really led to that moment.

I wish we'd seen Charlie Castle raise a fist at Marcus Hoff behind his back, for instance, or shake in anger while the boss wasn't looking, or something more to bridge the distance between the parts of the play before and after intermission. Ultimately Charlie Castle comes across as a very self-centered man, so absorbed in his pseudo-idealism but indifferent to his own lack of morals, flirting with a much younger starlet, sleeping with the wife of the man who went to jail for him, getting a child killed. And perhaps that's part of Odets's message too, but I couldn't help myself feel aggravated toward the end. Also, I couldn't get why he was so despondent all of a sudden in the final scene. (And I won't tell you what happens in that last scene, because I've already said enough.) But the production is so visually satisfying and the acting is so good that I'll have to forgive Odets for the few weaknesses of his play. Rating: four stars out of five.

If you care about theatre in New York, this play is an excellent way to spend your time until June 2. Click here to buy tickets.

"Inventing Abstraction" at MoMA

 On Sunday I got to see the "Inventing Abstraction" exhibition at MoMA with my best friend M. who was visiting New York City from Boston for the weekend. The exhibition was a good way to escape the wind and use those $5 guest tickets I get as a member of MoMA. While initially I only thought of the show as something "nice to do" but not a "must", in hindsight I'm so glad we did decide to drop by.

The show has received glowing reviews from a wide range of critics, including Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker who calls it "splendid" and Roberta Smith at the New York Times who calls it "magisterial". As someone who loves art (right brain) but makes a living in engineering (left brain), I was drawn to the geometric forms used by so many artists of the time, for instance the circles of Fernand Leger or Sonia Delaunay-Terk. It is most likely connected, at least in Leger's case, to the growth in industrialization and, I think, the belief people held at the time that science and engineering were going to bring great benefits to society. It must've felt that geometry - and science, and engineering - was everyone's business, and a necessary part of artists' visual vocabulary to capture their new, modern world. I also enjoyed viewing the work of more rarely shown artists such as Theo van Doesburg and Natalia Goncharova (although Goncharova admittedly is better known than most.) The show helped me remember why I love art so much and motivated me to refocus on what brings me joy. I can't praise it enough - it is certainly one of the key exhibitions of the year in the whole country, if you care about modern art.

The exhibition closes on Monday, April 15 - make sure to go and see it if you're in town! If you can't go, buying the catalog will make for a nice replacement. But if you're still waiting for that tax refund to splurge, you can also enjoy a playlist curated by WQXR (based on the fantastic idea of creating a stand-alone room in the exhibition on the theme of "reinventing music", where you can listen to the avant-garde music of the time, including Stravinsky, Webern, Schoenberg and Debussy) or browse through the exhibition website. I'm continuously amazed by how creative and innovative museum curators continue to be in bringing top-notch, multimedia exhibitions to the public. Can't wait for "American Modern: Hopper to O'Keeffe", opening August 17.

Small Business Advice by John Jantsch

Some time ago I read “The Commitment Engine,” by John Jantsch (subtitled: “Making work worth it”), and while I initially thought it might make a post for my Engineered blog about innovation in workplaces and worker engagement, it occurred to me toward the end of the book the ideas Jantsch describes should be mentioned on my writing blog instead. So, here they come.

Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author who lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and focuses on small businesses. The book, however, will be helpful to anyone who tries to find his own path in the real world – since we are all, in some way, in the business field as soon as we try to earn a living and sell our skills, our expertise or our products.

The book is divided in three parts: Clarity, Culture and Community. Part 1, Clarity, connects passion with purpose and personal commitment to a business without falling into self-help platitudes.  Part 2, Culture, is really about generating commitment and discusses topics such as staff as customer, staff as owner, committed work & teaching. I enjoyed both these parts, but Part 3 was the one that truly caught my attention and made me see connections with the world of publishing and self-publishing.

The central message of Part 3 is: “The community is the business.” Jantsch defines community as “anyone who comes into contact with your business – prospects, customers, journalists, suppliers, advisers, partners, and even competitors.” He argues that the modern business model should be centered on “[o]nline communities that give people the opportunity to join painlessly, come together around shared ideas, and engage and build deeper relationships based on value received.”

Jantsch also emphasizes the power of telling stories, which is central to customer engagement, repeated sales and, more broadly, the creation of this Holy Graal of the twenty-first century, committed communities. Key for the business owner is not only to “communicate [his] business purpose and reason for existing” but also to “make [his] story of passion and purpose interesting to the audience [he] want[s] to influence.”

In a section on “how do you make your customers the hero of your stories?”, Jantsch suggests the following steps (he gives many more details for each of them): (i) learn their backstory, (ii) give them an antagonist, (iii) call them to duty, (iv) help them persevere, (v) free them (“help them understand the results they’ve achieved… how much impact they’re making on your business”.)

He also has an interesting section on “the core questions you must ask every customer”:

1. What made you decide to hire us/buy from us [=buy our book, in the publishing world] in the first place?
2. What’s one thing we do better than others you do business with? Or, what’s the one thing you love most about what we do for you?
3. What’s one thing you don’t have from any other source that you wish you could find?
4. Do you refer us to others and if so, what words do you use?
5. What would you Google to find a business like ours?

Jantsch takes the importance of community one step further when he spends Chapter 21 (the chapter before last in the book) on “the idea of viewing your business as a platform for your community”. The last chapter summarizes the book’s messages:

• Define your relationship with your work
• Discover your higher purpose served by the work
• Install purpose as a meaningful way for others to connect with your business
• Lead by telling stories
• Build your business around the characteristics of real-life strategy
• Make culture your greatest marketing asset
• Orchestrate commitment in every element of the brand.

I will definitely apply those ideas in my career as an author, especially when my novella “The Lost Voice” comes out, hopefully in late May. It is about opera, Paris and World War II – more broadly it is about what people do to achieve their dreams and the murky line, for my protagonist, with collaboration with the Nazis in Occupied France.

At less than 250 pages, the book is a quick read, but it has high-quality content, in contrast with some other so-called business books I’ve seen with suspiciously big margins, large font and increased space between lines. Highly recommended for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and anyone who believes in meaningful work.