by Braun, Adam
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As I started to think about it more, I realized that I’d never once considered myself a “nonprofit person.” I thought of myself as a business-driven entrepreneur who wanted to work on global education. No part of me wanted to be poor; I just refused to let the size of my bank account serve as the yardstick of my success. While I once thought the best measure of accomplishment was monetary wealth, my path over the past few years had shown me that real value comes from investing in the well-being of others. I wanted to spend my time maximizing purpose rather than profit, which seemed to be a common characteristic of many of the people I now looked up to. We adhered to a different bottom line, but that didn’t stop us from wanting to see that final number become as big as possible, whether it stood for children educated or lives improved.
That night I decided to start using a new phrase that more appropriately labeled the motivation behind our work. By changing the words you use to describe something, you can change how others perceive it. For too long we had allowed society to judge us with shackling expectations that weren’t supportive of scale. I knew that the only way to win the respect of our for-profit peers would be to wed our values and idealism to business acumen. Rather than thinking of ourselves as nonprofit, we would begin to refer to our work as for-purpose.
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Although this was just a simple twist in language, the internal impact on our organization was profound. When we started to pull apart our model, we noticed some real issues. Great businesses make it quick and simple to buy their product, but we were still fixated on explaining every detail of every school to every potential donor. The first thing we needed to improve was the accessibility of our work. As soon as we broke down our numbers and streamlined communications to show that it only cost $25 to educate one child, $10,000 to build a classroom, and $25,000 to build a full school, people got it right away and understood the difference they could make. Conversations became more direct, and we could tell within minutes at what level someone might be interested in getting involved.
We also noticed that many people didn’t trust charities because they didn’t know what their money was going toward (programs, office rent, salaries, or something else?). Thus, our second focus became to differentiate ourselves by becoming totally transparent and building trust. We decided to hold an annual gala to cover our operating expenses and then promised to commit 100 percent of funds donated online throughout the year to our school programs. Every penny raised on our website now goes directly to support our students and teachers. We even started letting donors who funded full schools decide in which country their school would be built, and we offered to take them into the field so they could see their school open firsthand. I started hosting weekly webinars to which anyone could sign in and ask me questions. We made our financials easy to find rather than buried within our website. One of our founding values was “Donors should have the ability to choose where their money goes,” so we decided to allow anyone to allocate 100 percent of their funds directly into the exact areas of our work that they’d like to support. People found our openness refreshing, and that cultivated a sense of trust.
Third, we decided to treat our work like a business, not a charity. We had to set clear goals and then hold ourselves accountable. As strange as it sounds, this meant that we had to start firing volunteers who didn’t deliver. For years we had people that worked on PoP part-time and full-time whom we would never let go because of the generosity of their service. But over time I noticed that certain people became energy vampires, sucking time and enthusiasm out of others without providing value in return. At first it seemed laughable to consider firing someone who wasn’t even being paid and who dedicated thirty hours per week to our cause, but removing people who didn’t produce became imperative to setting an expectation of excellent performance across the entire team.
We had built a culture of good intentions and boundless passion, but when it came to measuring our impact in the field, that was not enough. We needed to introduce another kind of structure. We decided that we would govern ourselves with the same ruthless commitment to results as the world’s best Fortune 500 companies. We started spending less time focusing on how good we felt and much more energy measuring the positive impact we could create with every dollar. We started to study the metrics, and we figured out exactly what it would take to reach our hundredth school by the end of the following year. With a roadmap in place, the goal started to feel attainable, and while we marched toward it, we also objectively measured whether our programs were succeeding in the places where we’d already established schools. Photos of smiling children were good, but hard data proving that we’d increased literacy and math skills were even better.
Fourth, we had to change how we worked with the members of our PoP ecosystem. Every person we interacted with, from the parent of a student to the CEO of a corporate sponsor, had to see himself or herself as a partner in our mission rather than someone giving or receiving a handout. We purposely didn’t provide the entire funding for any of our school builds because we wanted to work with people who had a hand up, ready to participate, not those who simply had a hand out. We decided that every community had to provide 10 to 20 percent of the funding before we’d break ground on a school. Because the majority of families where we operated lived on $1 to $2 per day and spare cash was rare, most of these contributions were made by helping to physically build the school (clearing land, digging the foundation, or laying bricks) and by providing raw materials such as wood, gravel, and sand. This meant thousands of parents investing in their children’s educations and hundreds of new local jobs being created on school sites.
Lastly, we changed the way we approached our work with companies and their sponsorships. We started to put a price tag on our ability to help start-ups and established brands market themselves while also building their internal morale. Employees felt stronger about their work when they knew that they were contributing to the betterment of society, which was something we could beautifully and tangibly make happen through integrated partnerships. When our Schools4All campaign with Justin raised $300,000 in ten weeks by signing up more than thirty thousand young fundraisers, companies really started to see that we could help them reach their target audiences too.
For the first time we started saying no to certain offered partnerships, to ensure that we didn’t dilute our own brand. We invested our efforts into fewer but larger collaborations. Through this approach, we ultimately landed partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Delta, Warby Parker, and many other best-in-class companies. They still viewed their donations as charitable contributions, but they also saw a return on their investment by having an active marketing partner to help promote their philanthropic efforts. Whether it was through cobranded events or receiving a portion of their sales, we could introduce their product to a new audience while enabling their employees to feel connected to a cause. By taking this approach, the amount of money we received from corporate sponsors doubled that year. We decided to use that money to match potential contributions from individual donors (giving us the ability to announce statements like, “Your donations this week up to $10,000 will be matched by our friends at Barnes & Noble”). Personal donations increased while companies benefited from the positive exposure. It was a complete win-win, and it exemplified how we could earn money rather than beg for it.
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Later that summer I dug up the business card of the investor from the rooftop and invited him to lunch. I wanted to tell him that he’d helped me change the language I used to describe my work. Chatting over a soup and a sandwich in TriBeCa, I shared my newly developed belief that any company that treats its social mission as its true bottom line should call itself a for-purpose. He smiled, nodded, and said, “I like that line of thinking.”
Several weeks later, I received an envelope in the mail; in it was a check from this gentleman to help build one of our new schools in Guatemala. He now saw his contribution as an inve
stment. He wasn’t increasing his annual profits, but he definitely saw a spike in his sense of purpose.
Mantra 25
A GOAL REALIZED IS A GOAL DEFINED
It hardly happened overnight, but with lots of practice and experience, I began to feel more comfortable speaking in public. Actually, I began to enjoy it. When I received an invitation from Semester at Sea to go back on the ship as a guest lecturer, I jumped at the opportunity. I would join the voyage in Morocco, spend a full week with the students as the ship traveled along the African coastline, then disembark in Ghana, where I would travel independently. The organizers even sweetened the deal by letting me bring a guest, which was great because I didn’t know a single other person on board.
I invited my mother to celebrate her fifty-fifth birthday.
Once I set foot on the MV Explorer, I was overcome by nostalgia. The fresh smell of my cabin’s interior immediately brought me back to that feeling of being a student on the ship six years earlier. This was the experience that had most shaped the person I’d become deep down inside. Time seemed to accordion—I simultaneously felt so far removed from those days and yet I could envision myself right back in my old Nike Air Force 1s.
Most of my recent speeches had been at corporate conferences, so this would be the first time in a while that I was speaking to college students. It felt freeing: I didn’t have to sugarcoat anything; I could simply speak from the heart.
When it came time for my first talk, I focused on what I thought the students would most want to hear. Many of them had told me that this was their first time traveling independently, so I shared some advice on Backpacking 101.
Reflecting on my experiences in Latin America, I advised, “First, accept that plans change and new opportunities will suddenly present themselves while traveling, so just go with the flow. If you remove your cynicism and allow yourself to be astonished by the wonders of the world, you’ll be blown away by the memories you’ll make via the unexpected itinerary. Second, if you make yourself a target, you’ll become one. Don’t wear bright clothing, and if you don’t want someone touching your valued possessions, keep them in a money belt down your pants. Your privates should stay next to your privates. Trust me, no one will be going there without your permission. Third, music and body language are universally spoken, so when someone invites you to dance, let go of your inhibitions and dance. And lastly, when in doubt, just say you’re Canadian. People hate a lot of countries, but no one hates the Canadians.”
A handful of kids laughed, and I could tell the three hundred students in the room appreciated the honest and relatable advice. I knew that because this talk was the first time that I used a technique called “one person, one thought.”
Weak speakers look down at the floor, good speakers look up but scan the room, great speakers make eye contact selectively, and exceptional speakers deliver every complete thought directly to one person in the audience, making that person feel like the center of the room—and then they move on and do it again. We’ve all been in that position when a speaker looks right at you, and for a few fleeting moments your heart starts to race. You are locked in.
I started to look directly at just one student for the entirety of every thought I delivered and attempted to tell them a story as if no one else was listening. It emboldened me to speak with greater conviction, and as the speech gained momentum, I could feel the pulse of the room elevate. After nearly an hour of talking about what I knew and loved, I ended with the most sincere beliefs that I could share.
“You have to find a mantra and live it fully. The one I’d adopt right now if I were you is something I found on the inside of a friend’s journal last year: ‘You may be safe, but I am free.’ Take advantage of the freedom that comes with your youth. Inhale life, exhale fire, and embrace the late, sleepless nights, because that’s when the magic happens—when everyone else is asleep and you’re awake thinking about the world as it is, and the world as it could be. Make the most of those moments,” I said forcefully. “And in the coming years people will tell you that you’re too young to change the world. I’m here to tell you, that’s fucking bullshit.”
I’d never cursed in a speech before. It just came out. An audible gasp filled the room. There was dead silence. Then, much to my surprise, the students began clapping raucously with agreement. After months and months of practiced pitches back home, it felt good to simply speak the truth unfiltered. That night, I vowed, going forward, to speak from the heart no matter which audience I was addressing.
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Following an invigorating week on the ship, I felt like a new man. The students’ sense of wonder and willingness to sprint toward the unknown was refreshing. After my second lecture fifty students even stuck around to brainstorm about a campaign we would launch the following year called the Impossible Ones, which would celebrate the spirit these students embodied by having people take on “impossible” challenges to raise money for PoP. I stepped off the MV Explorer in Accra, Ghana, ready to explore the country as a potential location for PoP’s expansion into Africa.
After a year of research, Ghana was our top choice due to its tremendous need for primary education in the countryside. Since we would need to find a local partner to help us get a foot in the door before building our own fully independent operations (this usually takes about a year), our team set up several visits for me with local NGOs.
On the three-hour shuttle ride to Ho, the capital of the deeply impoverished Volta Region, the poverty juxtaposed with the beauty of this West African nation was captivating. Towering waterfalls dropped misted waters like snowfall onto the mountainsides, while malnourished children emerged from mud huts to wave at each passing car. When we arrived in the dusty capital, I was greeted by the founding team from Disaster Volunteers of Ghana (DIVOG), an NGO started by four Ghanaian friends, which had been building schools in the region for years. Right away, they briefed me on statistics that demonstrated the need for trained teachers and new classrooms throughout Volta.
The following morning, they took me in an old van to see some of their project sites. In one village after another, I saw school-less sites and met children without classrooms or any opportunity to learn. In those same communities, parents verbally committed to provide 100 percent of the labor to build their children’s school if they received funding for the raw materials and a commitment from the education ministry to provide trained teachers. The culture was one of complete community participation. In the days ahead I spent hours with members of the education ministry, who agreed to provide trained teachers for any school we built, and I visited several schools under construction where I witnessed that 100 percent labor commitment being fulfilled. The determination of the Ghanaian people won me over—as did a boy named Justice.
Two years earlier I had received an email from a Ghanaian student named Justice, who told me of his dream to bring education to the children of his country, who were learning under mango trees instead of in classrooms and often had no teachers or books at all. He had discovered PoP through Facebook, and his email was so uplifting that we started corresponding regularly and eventually talked on Skype too. Back then PoP was just getting started, but when the Semester at Sea voyage brought me to Ghana, I knew I had to find him.
On my last day in Ho, I finally got to meet Justice in person. We spent the entire day together, walking through monkey forests and remote villages. Before I left, he asked me for one thing:
“When you go back home, you will not forget about us?”
“Of course I won’t forget about you,” I said.
“Then you must promise me that you will come back. And Pencils of Promise will work in Ghana to support the education of our children.”
“I hope so.” I meant it.
“Hope is not enough. You have to believe, and then it will be so.”
When I went back to my hotel that night, I wrote an email to our team stating that I expected us to expand to Ghana the following year. Rainer Ma
ria Rilke said, “Live not in dreams, but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.” It was time to make that future happen. We’d need to raise a lot of money at our upcoming gala to make it possible, but the first step was acknowledging the goal itself.
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Six weeks later, Justice’s voice was still ringing in my head on the biggest night in the history of the organization, the night of our first gala. We had thrown large events before, but this was a long way from my twenty-fifth birthday party where people launched PoP with $20 and $25 donations. Gala tickets were now $500, and purchasing a table cost $10,000 to $50,000. I was amazed when we sold out three weeks in advance and there was a fifty-person wait-list of generous supporters willing to pay $1,000 each the night of the event—all of whom we had to reluctantly turn away because we were so over capacity.
I had never attended a major gala, and now I was leading this one, attended by Shaquille O’Neal and Usher. One of the evening’s honorees was Justin Bieber, who was by then donating $1 from every US concert ticket to PoP. We were also honoring my brother, Scooter, for his tremendous advocacy and support of our work, along with Rich Lent and the entire AgencyNet team. Sophia Bush, the beautiful actress and activist, was the night’s host.
I had invested so many hours in getting this night right, and I knew that my opening speech would set the tone for the entire evening. As the program began, I made my way toward the stage and, with the audience of 550 people, watched a short video of our work. On the screen flashed the words I had spoken in tiny rooms so many times before: “We don’t just want you to support us, we want you to join us.” After speaking passionately about how much she believed in our work, Sophia, whom I had met through Summit Series, invited me onto the stage.
