Think of some of the top companies in the world, across the ages- Coca Cola, Ford, Walmart, Apple and in recent times, the FANG stocks and Nvidia. In India, Reliance, Airtel, Infosys/TCS/Wipro, L&T, etc.
You’ll notice that all of them were “single product/service” companies for a very long time, till they reached several thousand crores in annual revenue. Even the conglomerates like the Tatas and Birlas started with 1-2 businesses first (Steel, textiles, hotel for the Tatas for example) before they became massive and diversified.
Even in the social sector, the largest orgs in India- Akshaya Patra, Pratham, or in the world (BRAC) were for the longest time, orgs that did just 1 thing (feeding, literacy, etc.). Only after reaching significant scale did they branch into other areas of synergy.
CK Prahalad had identified “core competency” as something that organisations are uniquely good at doing better than anyone else, and how focusing on it helps create sustained ‘competitive advantage’ (which in social sector parlance can be called sustained 'higher impact per rupee").
And yet, I find more often than not, NGOs try to do TOO many things and end up doing not so well.
The logic for focusing is fairly straightforward-
- It helps you build expertise. Remember the 10K hours argument for individuals. For orgs, it’s probably the same or even higher.
- It builds recognition and reputation and allows for smarter positioning and hence attracting attention, collaboration, partners, talent and funding more easily. People know exactly what you are. A byproduct is you waste less time explaining what you are not, and what you don’t do.
- It creates scale and efficiencies of scale that allow you to deliver impact at even lower unit costs.
Now, we all know Pareto’s law, or the 80:20 principle and what Effective Altruism calls “heavy tailed impact” - 20% of work creates 80% of results. So identifying what to focus on, based on one’s core competence, and doubling down on it, seems to be the way to create impact. This applies across ALL social impact work.
Application to Volunteering:
How does this apply to volunteering? Firstly, some of the most effective (in measurable impact terms) volunteer-driven impact organisations are also sharply focused on doing 1 thing well - teaching, mentoring, securing RTE admissions, running movements on environment, RTI, or cracking entrance exams, etc.
Unfortunately, very few orgs build such sharp focus in their volunteering programmes, or constantly reinvent and improve processes to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Most importantly, organisations struggle with engaging volunteers and “give up” because there is no ecosystem to suppor their learning.
For example, one reason we don’t have a large successful volunteering intermediary in India (like say VolunteerMatch in the US) is that our intermediaries tend to get involved in execution themselves because they find NGOs ‘don’t really want volunteers’ - it’s a kind of fallacy that would make Uber become what Meru was once instead of using a strong rating system and doubling down on being good at what they are- a ‘market maker’. But more on that on a separate blog later.
For now, my advice to orgs that seek to engage volunteers at scale-
- Build 1, or 2 volunteering programmes (or focus on 1 or 2 geographies) till you’re engaging at least 1 million hours a year (unless you’re an intermediary in which case build 0 programmes, work with others). Don’t spread yourself thin with 10 different volunteering initiatives in 10 different locations.
- Identify your CORE competence and use that to select the programmes to build. What is your CORE strength? If it is domain expertise, then build your volunteering programmes in the domain where you have deep expertise already- do not diversify. If it is access to either beneficiaries or volunteers at scale through partnerships, then build a programme focused on such partnerships. If you don’t have a core competence (one in which you are better than at least 75% of the others working in the space)- seriously reconsider what you’re working on, or go back to learning till you build that core competence.
- Track your impact and volunteer hour metrics, costs and keep benchmarking yourself not just against other volunteer orgs (for vol hour metrics and costs) but against other social impact orgs (not driven by volunteers) and compare your costs per unit of impact with theirs. Figure out where you need to get better, learn, improve and make sure that you are delivering at least 1.5-2X if not more impact per rupee spent, compared to an org that uses paid staff to deliver impact.