The limitlessness of Reason.

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The holidays are a time of creative renewal for me – the free time, mental relaxation, and annual introspection always result in fresh ideas, perspective, and initiative. Writing and recording music is the equivalent of an emotional work out: It keeps my soul in shape. And so I look forward to the holiday break and the annual influx of imagination it brings.

That said, for me the problem with music (and writing and work and life) has never been a lack of ideas. Rather, that problem is bringing those ideas to completion. Just finish it. That's hard for this tinkering perfectionist to do.

Over the last few days I've been reminded of the admonitions of Stravinsky, who famously wrote about the creative process:

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.
Powerful limits.

Powerful limits.

This week I've been recording with Propellerheads Reason, a program that I've had on my hard drive for years but never really taken seriously. When compared to an installation of Logic Pro fully outfitted with plugins from Waves, Native Instruments, and Spectrasonics, Reason has always seemed to me to be, well, limited. And the rack-based system is cute but not very practical. 

But over the last couple of days I've decided to take the advice of Stravinsky and use Reason as a way of forcing some constraints. I have to say, I've loved it. The very things I never liked about Reason – a closed system, limited expansion options, a restricted soundset – have tapped directly into my composition nerve. Plus, the program has dramatically evolved over the last several releases; the mixer and the rack extensions are fantastic. And, Reason doesn't seem to crash. Ever. I can't say the same about Logic, ahem...

It is almost unseemly to suggest that using a program with dozens of built-in effects and instruments, hundreds of tracks, 64-bit processing, and incredibly complex routing options constitutes "imposing limits," particularly when I recorded an entire CD years ago on a system with only eight audio tracks. Still, in the modern world of computer processing that far exceeds most practical uses, I've found Reason to be a nice ecosystem. I hope to post some completed files in the next few weeks.

More than that, I hope that in the new year I remember that the obstacles in front of me are only fuel for creative solutions.

Just breathe...

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I know the holidays are hectic for most folks, and I suppose they are for me as well. Still, I like having more time in the morning to drink my coffee and peruse my Google Reader feed. (I actually hate Google's aesthetic, so I use the Reeder client for Mac, which I highly recommend.)

Ahhhh.

In any case, this morning I found this surprisingly useful article by Matthew May about three simple ways to quiet the mind: Meditation, pulsing, and daydream walks. I kind of know about all three techniques, but I don't practice any that well. His article is a good, short read for anyone overwhelmed by holiday planning, or for anyone who like me is trying to meet 2013 with a more healthy frame of mind. Worth a few minutes of your time. 

Two reviews of The Signal and the Noise.

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Over the last month I've been asked repeatedly about Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise – have I read it? What did I think? What did I think while I was reading it? I'm guessing that anyone who spends even a small amount of time working with and talking about data has been similarly swamped with questions.

The coolest new thing. 

The coolest new thing. 

I've not read the book yet – it's on the holiday list – but I did find two reviews of the book on Andrew Gelman's excellent Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog. The reviews are by statisticians, and offer differing opinions besides, and so the entire post makes for good reading for anyone interested in what seems to be one of the trendier cultural phenomena of 2012.

A blog post about a blog post about blogging.

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These days it's hard for me to take seriously a blog post about blogging, particularly one that contends that we must take blogging seriously. Haven't we crossed that bridge about, oh, five years ago? I find it hard to believe that anyone who reads blogs doesn't understand the value of blogging. 

Still, the factoid about Twitter content versus consumption is interesting: Yahoo Research found that 50% of Twitter content is generated by .05% of users. Sounds like our old friend the Pareto Principle again. 

I do agree with Dorie Clark's point that writing helps one clarify ideas. Whether it also helps one demonstrate expertise is another matter entirely! I'll let you be the judge.

Happy Saturday.

Finding needles in the social media haystack.

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It's a cold, blustery day outside so I'm huddled in my office with a hot cup of coffee catching up on a week's worth of reading. One article at the top of my list this week is  this short piece on Trends and Outliers, the blog of TIBCO's Spotfire data visualization software. In a nutshell, the post outlines efforts by researches to use Twitter information as the basis for predictive models. Professors at MIT have created a model that they say can predict hot topics before they go viral, while a researcher at UC Riverside is building a model that forecasts stock prices based on Twitter chatter about various firms. 

Interesting stuff, with potentially fantastic implications for fundraising. Imagine being able to shift through a pile of tweets to find donors more likely to give at year end. And at the same time, as seems to be the case with all applications of predictive modeling, I see sinister undertones as well. Do we want our global economic health, for example, to be dictated by the whims of millions of Twitter users? Although I guess one could argue that we're not far from that reality already...

In any case, worth a few minutes of your time. I hope you are warm and cozy wherever you are!

Optimism: Yet another reason to try multichannel fundraising.

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I thought this post on Beth Kanter's blog from Frank Barry (@franswaa) of Blackbaud was worth sharing: It's an overview of Blackbaud's 2012 State of the Nonprofit Industry report. Not surprising, "flat or decreasing funding" ranks as one of the top problems cited by the nonprofits surveyed. More interestingly, nonprofits who use multichannel approaches are more optimistic about their fundraising prospects and are up to three times more successful than groups relying on fewer channels.

Who can't use a dose of increased optimism?

Most of the groups I talk with understand they need a multichannel strategy but have a hard time getting off the dime into new approaches. Usually the culprit isn't a lack of ideas, but ironically, a history built upon huge success in a single channel. That is, a nonprofit will find success in one channel and naturally build its organization around that channel. But ultimately this can create a structure that is too rigid. In other words, business processes are often the biggest impediment. 

If your organization has processes that are overly centered on a single way of approaching donors, diversifying doesn't need to be as difficult or as scary as it sounds. Like everything else, the key is to start small. Initial forays into major giving, digital giving, direct mail, or event fundraising can be bite-sized -- you don't have to start by hosting your own triathlon. 

Better results are a compelling reason to diversify in my book. And the prospect of being happier and more optimistic each day? Sign me up!

Full infographic at the source link below. 

The Age of Questions.

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If we can be sure of one thing, it is that we're living in the Age of Uncertainty.

Our economic outlook seems cloudy as we hear our politicians talk about debt, taxes, and cliffs. Our national security seems suspect as we attempt to unravel ten years of war against an amorphous, unseen, unbeatable opponent. Our mental health seems precarious as we deal with the latest shocks to our safety and preconceptions. Our shared values seem most days to be merely a shared willingness to shout at each other on social media.

When I was in high school I remember asking my mother about the Sixties and early Seventies. I was trying to understand the time period around my birth. Was it as interesting as it looked in the books? "It was hard," she said. "It was troubling."

I can't help but thinking that, whether we like it or not, we are in the same kind of period. Perhaps in ten or twenty years we will look back with nostalgia about the better world that was borne from all of this tumult. But right now it just feels troubling.

I was thinking of all of this yesterday in Mass. Yes, I went to church on a Monday morning -- I can't say I wanted to. I went for the funeral of a friend. Someone killed far too young. So many questions. Too many, actually -- too many to even contemplate. 

As the words of the Catholic Mass washed over me I was reminded of a line in Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. A young man had written the great Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke asking for advice on how to make sense of the world. And we learn that Rilke is just as confused as the rest of us. He writes:

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Why do children die? Why must we torture each other? Why haven't we learned to practice tolerance? How can we value the contribution of each person without forcing our ways upon one another? How can we create a community that applauds achievement and still encourages kindness?  How can we build a country that aspires to its best qualities rather than reducing to its worst?

These are very difficult questions to live. But this is our role. This is our time. I pray we will live our way to the answers so that our children and grandchildren no longer have these questions to bear.

Perhaps the Mayans were right.

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Perhaps the Mayans were right, and the world is coming to an end. 

And our mistake was not in thinking they were correct, but in thinking that the end would be a blinding flash of light, or a cataclysmic explosion, or a searing fireball. Instead of what the end seems to be: A slow, steady unraveling of sanity...

Another way to look at Hurricane Sandy donations.

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Figure 1: Disaster giving over the last decade. Click to enlarge.

I wanted to follow on Monday's post about the fundraising results from Hurricane Sandy. If you remember, some observers have commented on the fact that the overall donations generated following Sandy have fallen far short of other recent disasters.

Let's first take a look at the fundraising results we looked at on Monday. Figure 1 shows the results of post-disaster fundraising from five recent disasters: the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Haitian earthquake, the Japan earthquake and tsunami, and Hurricane Sandy. The numbers estimate U.S. private giving three weeks after each disaster.

Setting aside for a moment the tragic thought that there seem to be an increasing number of severe natural disasters, we can see that yes, there does appear to be a downward trend in response. Note that I did not access primary data for the graph, and so there are likely to be inevitable inconsistencies in how the numbers were measured. In fact, I can guarantee we're not looking at a strictly apples-to-apples comparison. But we're interested in order of magnitude, and in that sense we can see that both Hurricane Sandy and the Japan earthquake and tsunami seem to have inspired notably less generosity from the U.S. than the other three disasters.

But is that the whole story? Is giving perhaps related to the overall scale of the disaster?

This is where we find ourselves on tricky ground both ethically and empirically. From an impact standpoint, scale is certainly a matter of perspective. Even one lost home, pet, or loved one is heartbreaking. How can we quantify physical loss and emotional pain? If your heart aches, it aches. 

On the data side, we're on equally rocky footing. I attempted to see if I could quantify the scale of each disaster in economic cost. Given enough time, I could probably find the correct sources and create normalized data -- but I can tell you it does not appear to be an easy task. For example, the economic loss from Katrina is estimated to be far higher than that of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami -- in large part because of the amount of development on the Gulf Coast as opposed to that in rural India. But does that make Hurricane Katrina more tragic?

Figure 2. Disaster impact as measured in overall loss of life. Click to enlarge.

What if we turn to a more verifiable -- and macabre -- statistic: Number of deaths. These statistics are, sadly, very easy to find. And, without sounding crass, they do not need to be indexed for inflation. Figure 2 presents total confirmed deaths attributed to each disaster.

What do we see? Well, we see a different picture. It's hard not to be struck by the enormity of the crises in the Indian Ocean and Haiti. Again, this is not to say that the other disaster weren't crises; our attempt here is to find a way to compare the relative impact. The overall loss of life from the disasters in the U.S. was far less than the disasters in other parts of the world. 

Figure 3. U.S. giving as compared to loss of life. Click to enlarge.

Now let's go back to the giving numbers. We now have enough information to take our data analysis one level deeper. Figure 3 shows a basic scatterplot of U.S. giving as compared to overall loss of life. In this admittedly very small dataset we can see we have two groupings: A linear trend for overseas disasters, and a separate, very steep cluster for the U.S. disasters. 

All of which takes us to figure 4, which shows dollars donated per death. From this graph we can see that on a relative sense, the response to Hurricane Sandy is the most generous by far. It is a grisly metric, to be sure -- and let me say once again that I in no way mean to imply that some losses are more important than others.

What I am trying to do is show that the truth is often in the interpretation. In matters of giving data, as in most things, it is worth doing a bit more digging before deciding you have the whole picture. I don't contend that figure 4 is the whole story, either -- but it is a valuable addition to the discussion.

Figure 4. Donations per death. Click to enlarge. 

For my part, I do not believe that our country is less generous, or less responsive, or weary of providing relief. I believe that people give according to the perceived scale of the impact. At least on this  measure, the response to Hurricane Sandy has been laudable. At a time of political weariness, economic sluggishness, and sustained appeals for help, we continue to respond to the call. 

Being Big.

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This probably doesn't need to be said, but here goes: Being big is not the same thing as being great. This applies to most things and all organizations, and certainly applies to all nonprofit organizations. If your primary rationale for support is that you are the largest -- or the oldest -- nonprofit in sector X, then it is time to rethink your value proposition. If your primary goal is to get to Y size, then it is time to find a goal that actually relates to impact rather than appearances. 

Corollary: I have noticed that there is an inverse relationship between organizational size and organizational passion. This is not a universal rule, but it does appear with notable frequency. 

There's nothing wrong with growing, and there's nothing wrong with large organizations. But size is not the purpose of anything we strive to do. Impact is. The challenge is to endeavor to be great and to grow while doing it -- while not breaking the things that make you great in the process.

Interpreting the reaction to Hurricane Sandy.

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Yesterday Gina Bellafante of the New York Times ran a piece about the many cause-marketing initiatives being launched in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. I found much of the article to be a re-hash of many previous essays about the pros and cons of cause marketing, so I kind of skimmed down the column until my eyes stopped at this:

According to data from Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, three weeks after the storm, $219 million had been collected. Comparatively, at the same point, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, $1.3 billion had been raised; at the same point after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, $610 million. The figure for the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was $752 million.
One explanation for this disparity is that donors presumably have been less moved to help victims who seem largely middle class and white — the residents of Staten Island, Breezy Point in Queens and the Jersey Shore — than they were to assist broader communities of the poor in New Orleans and abroad.

There's something more here to explore, and over the next several days I'd like to come at it from a few angles. Is the country biased against New Yorkers? Is there, as Bellafante seems to intimate, well-meaning but latent racism at play? Is this a massive example of how impact and need both need to be demonstrated in an ask? Have the economic conditions taken another toll at giving? Or has the tragedy in NYC just not gotten the exposure of the other crises?

I'll take a look at a few of these ideas this week.

An interesting trend.