Philanthropy Redefined: Dr. Cecilia Conrad

30:38I think it's between 15 and 20. And how many of them are? It takes about 20 hours. So if you look at this as a sales funnel, how many people enter the top of the funnel and how many drop out at the bottom with 10 million or some other significant investment? So in a typical challenge where there's a topic and a single$10 million grant, I'd say probably about around 80 to 100 enter and about five end up with some award at the end directly from the challenge. Then we also hear from other organizations, and I can't give a precise number on the number, that the fact that we give feedback, which is unusual in philanthropy, that every one of our organizations gets feedback from the five or six judges who read their projects, that they have taken that and incorporated it and actually gotten money from other funders.

31:40So that number, I don't have a precise number. I used to be a venture capitalist, and I'd say we probably fund one out of a thousand, you fund five out of a hundred or something, right? But we never would give feedback because whenever you give feedback, the entrepreneur would then argue why either we were wrong or they actually fulfill what we say they don't fulfill. So don't you encounter that problem? Don't they want to prove you were wrong? And so you should really take me and give me the 10 million? Oh, yes. But you have to remember that my earlier career was as a college professor. And so every grade could be subject to the same kind of, no, you've made a mistake in not giving me an A.

32:29And why I think it's valuable to give feedback is that every one of the applicants, and I'm going to say this, and I'm sure probably somewhere there's one that maybe it's not true, but in general, I feel that every one of the applicants to one of our challenges has a good idea, has a strong commitment to really making a difference in the world, and is sometimes get so passionate in arguing with us, it's because they think that we're just what stands between their good idea and solving a problem in the world. And when you review a person from that perspective, you can tolerate some of the criticism.

33:08The goal is to listen and to repeat what they heard in the application. The thing that has surprised me, what a small number actually do, you know, jump on us or argue that we're wrong. It's not a big number at all. You mean they just give up with their tails between their legs? No, no, no, no. What they do is they take the feedback and they revise their proposal or their project. And sometimes they'll even contact me afterwards to talk to me about what they're doing and the feedback. And then they take it to other funders. What they have reported back to us is that participating in our process has a value add in that they've been making their stronger case for funding.

33:50So sometimes someone will go back to a funder who's been giving them a couple hundred thousand dollars a year for five years and say, hey, you know, I've got this really big idea, but to execute on this big idea, I need a commitment over multiple years that's going to total more than the 100 ,000 a year. And donors have said yes, when they see a great idea. Wow. That's great. You're the Tony Robbins of philanthropy. Okay. So arguably you're one of the most qualified people in the world to answer this question, which is based on all this data you've collected, what are your tips for raising money?

34:31Ah, so I have tips for the organizations and then, but there's another part of this that falls on the philanthropist where we talked a little bit about the change. So for the organizations, I think one of the most common problems that I've seen in applications is that they start with a problem that is very lofty and big. I'm going to pretend I miss America for a moment and say, let's say it's world peace. You look like Sandra Bullock. And then they propose work that might be, we're going to have a program in our neighborhood that will provide after school activities for youth. they don't draw any kind of connection between the world peace and the program on this block.

35:30Okay. And I'm exaggerating here, but that tends to be the biggest problem we see, that people will get very excited because they've been told you've got to have a compelling problem. And they'll spend a lot of time telling us about how compelling the problem is. And that's important. It's where I first, from reading some of our applications, it's where I first realized what a significant number of children die from drowning every year in the world. And I hadn't really realized that until I read this in one of their proposals. But it's just as important to talk about how your solution is making a dent in that big problem and to give some real concrete data or stories or examples that helps to illustrate that.

36:11That's one of the common problems that I sometimes see in proposals. The second - Wait, before you go to second. Okay, so let's say I am this person applying from the Bronx, okay? And I do want to help with after-school care, nutrition, whatever, for kids in the Bronx. What do I describe as the problem, if not world peace? You describe the problem that you're actually solving, and that is that there are young people who are suffering, and perhaps it may be that their academic achievement is lower because they're not getting fed in the case of a nutrition program. It could be that they're having more encounters with the police because they don't have enough activities that are keeping them in safe environments.

37:00You can define a problem that may seem small, but it is compelling. And a funder will recognize that, yes, eventually this is going to be important for world peace. But the first step is really solving this very specific problem that you're working on. And showing that you're making headway on that specific problem is what will get a funder excited. Okay. In the venture capital business, the pitches that start, the internet is going to be big. Yes. Or AI is going to be big. Thank you very much. Let me write that down. I didn't realize that till you pitched. Yeah. Okay. Now you were going on with more tips.

37:42My second one is actually about the fact that many of the organizations, let's take your organization from the Bronx that apply, have not ever had the opportunity to think this big before. And they have told us this, that this is liberating, that usually they're thinking in terms of how am I going to get the$100 ,000 from this company or something like that? And they don't have necessarily the space to do it. And so the other piece of advice I have is to look for assistance in putting together the case for funding. And there are opportunities. There are people who will do pro bono support. As I'm saying this to you, I have every year gone and talked to people at colleges and universities, my old haunt, about how their proposals tend to be too theoretical because they don't have any experience doing the work.

38:34And then maybe they should partner more with the organization in the Bronx that's doing the work. So I think there's opportunities to draw from those resources that are around you to help with putting the time in to put together a proposal that is documented with evidence and research. I would see proposals where one of the questions has to do what's the evidence that you will work. And I will know that there is evidence because I'm an economist and I've seen some of the studies, but the organization doesn't necessarily have access to those studies. But they could get access if they could connect with some of those people who are doing the research.

39:13So think about how to make those connections, tap into the resources that are available at universities and colleges who might be able to help you beef up that part of the project proposal. Is there a third tip? Because, you know, I believe in tri-colons. You know, I always start with three as well. And I'm sitting here for a moment. My third tip actually goes back now. The third tip, I think, is sort of a known entity. And that is that there's this storytelling aspect of applying for funding. And think about a bit of making sure you have a consistent narrative. That's a version of what I said in the beginning that you've attached A to B.

39:52But as thinking about that narrative is also being about how you will keep the work on track into the future. Because one of the things that many funders are concerned about is that we'll put money in a project and the project ends and then what happens. For example, in our applications, most of them, many of them have a question about how is this work going to be sustained or how is the impact going to be sustained? beyond the specific grant period. And so that's something else that it's important to be attentive to when you're putting together a proposal. Sometimes that might be that this is what I call the magic pill, that once we do this, we won't have to do it again.

40:35Sometimes it may be that you have identified market-based sources of revenue or public sources of revenue that would become available if only you could get these pieces in place that the grant will allow you to do. And sometimes it may be that once you've been able to demonstrate that your solution works, that you anticipate being able to bring on other philanthropists. Now, when you say storytelling, from your perspective, is it more important to use numbers and facts like what percentage of kids in the Bronx graduate high school? What percentage go to college? or is it more important to say there was this kid named Jonathan, crack addict parents, 10 schools in two years, but somehow he went to State University of New York and he graduated because of all the help that he got.

41:29And that's what we want to make happen. So is it numbers or is it stories? That is a toughie. And I would say that donors have different personalities in this regard. And so if you're applying to a specific funder, it would be good to get some insights into their personality. I have donors who are only interested in the numbers, and then I have donors who want the story, who want to be able to hear directly from beneficiaries about how their lives have been affected. I personally like the projects that sort of interweave the two, that tell a story like 10 % or 10 % of the, I'm going to get a bigger figure than that to make it more impressive.

42:1280 % of the young people who come through our program went on to college. And this includes people like Chad, who overcame all these obstacles to graduate from state or something like that. Up next on Remarkable People. We've done really well in that space and continue to do well. And part of that, I do think, is that we are on a scale more likely than most other systems, educational systems, to let people explore for a long time before they lock themselves in.

42:48Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. so we've been discussing this optimization of this application process and all this but we started this conversation with the example of mackenzie who doesn't have an application process so how do i wrap my mind around the fact that there's this no application from mackenzie scott and then there's this 15 question big application process from cecilia conrad i think there's space in philanthropy for many different tools and approaches to identifying the projects you want to fund.

43:41As I said at the beginning, my other job, the program I led until recently, and I was doing it the same time as I was doing this other thing, is the MacArthur Fellows Program where there's no application, where we do a lot of research. But I recognize that when you don't have an application, when you are basically choosing projects based on the diligence that you are doing yourself, that you're relying on the networks, you try to reach out and find out who's doing what that's exciting, that there's a certain selectivity bias there. That these are, you're more likely to see organizations or people from New York City nominated or from LA nominated and you're missing the middle part of the country or the rural area where maybe there's not an existing funder who's doing work.

44:26And so you want to make sure that we have open processes available, but an open process requires an application because the statement I made earlier, people don't know you, so you need to introduce yourself. How about some tips if a philanthropist is listening to this and say, help me give my money away more effectively? I'm tempted to say, call me. So I'll put that on the list of tips. I respect you for saying that. But there are lots of resources besides Lever for Change, particularly sometimes when I've talked to philanthropists, they'll say, I want to do more. Right now I'm giving to my kids' school and my alma mater, and I want to do more, but it's so overwhelming.

45:10There's so much out there. And they have some of the fears that you described earlier, that they're going to make a mistake and give to an organization, and they can't tell where the money went or how it was spent or did it make a difference. But there are lots of tools. There are philanthropic advisors. There are collaborative funds. For example, there's a group called Blue Meridian that's focused on addressing child poverty in the U.S. There's a group called Co-Impact that just launched a big gender fund that's working in the global south. There's the N Fund that's working on neglected tropical diseases.

45:45There are a lot of opportunities out there to identify a group of funders with whom you may be simpatico to put your money in and to understand and learn a field by co-funding with those others. That's another opportunity. There are other platforms besides Lever for Change. We have a platform that has the finalists from every one of our challenges for donors to think about funding. But there are other platforms that have attempted to apply criteria and pre-vet ideas and projects and make them available to donors who want to fund them in different topic areas. So there are lots of ways to get information to make it less overwhelming.

46:28I think the important thing is to really just take that first step. What you find is I think that the fear that people are going to squander your wealth is really overrated. You hear about these big cases of people doing things. By and large, this is a sector filled with wonderful organizations doing good work who could do even more if they didn't have to struggle constantly for resources. Okay. Now, you mentioned this several times and I was holding myself back from going deep into this question, but I am so curious about the MacArthur Award. Yes. I'm waiting for my phone to ring, but what's the gist of the nomination process?

47:10So each month we go out and we try to identify people who are at the nodes of networks, people in positions where they can spot what the most creative work is happening. And this is across all domains. And people aren't limited to nominating in their domain. We invite them to nominate people for the fellows program. We might invite somebody in science and they nominate a jazz person, or we might invite a high school teacher who nominates an astronomer. We can never really tell where those nominations are going to come from. But we try to refresh that pool every month, paying attention to all metrics of diversity, geography, and so on, in search of these exceptionally creative individuals where our fellowship could liberate them a bit to be able to take even more risk and be more creative.

48:04So that's the first step is the nominations. Nominations come in to the fellows program staff, and everyone is read by at least two of us. We identify the ones that seem ready for development, and then we go out and we start to do research quietly. We read papers. We might sneak in to hear someone give a talk or see a performance. We also reach out to people who are immediately in their field and people in adjacent fields and further away who might be impacted by the individual's work. And we ask for those opinions. Those then come in to a selection committee. It's an independent selection committee.

48:42It's not MacArthur staff. We present the case for each one of the potential fellows to that committee. And it's ultimately that committee that selects, makes recommendations to the MacArthur board. And how does one become a nominator? The nominations are also sort of, we do this. We go out and we research and find people. So it should be an exciting invitation to get, almost as exciting as getting the phone call that your MacArthur fellow should be. Oh, we want to invite you to nominate. And is it a secret society? We ask for everyone to keep this in confidence. And one of probably the things that I'm most impressed by is it's rare when we call someone and tell them they've been named a MacArthur Fellow.

49:27It's very rare that they knew we were looking at them. People keep the secret. And I think it's because it's almost cruel, right? Because we name 20 to 25 every year. The other thing about the program is that once a nomination has been made, that candidate is still a candidate for years after the original nomination. We keep an eye on them, track them nowadays. We put Google alerts just to see what they're doing. So you don't know when we're going to actually name someone that you nominated three or four years ago. And why U.S. only? It's interesting because we've asked ourselves this question several times.

50:04And I think what we feel is that the work that we do and this method that we do does require that we have a network, a well-developed network. We would be really excited if someone wanted to do the same thing in another country. And in fact, we've talked to some people about that. It might be down the road in the future. But I think developing the network that you need to be able to get great nominations, to do the due diligence work we do, would be difficult on a global scale. Do you have to be poor? Could there be, conceivably, could there be a millionaire who's creative, doing great things, sustainable, blah, blah, blah, and he gets or she gets a MacArthur Fellowship?

50:48Yes, we don't have poverty as a criteria. We do have an enabling criteria, but we define enabling both in terms of dollars. So sometimes the enabling is raising the visibility of a fellow's work or giving some credibility to someone who may be a little bit outside the mainstream of the discipline or the field that they're working in. But there's the potential there for really being transformative. So the notion of enabling is a pretty big pot of possibilities. but you'll see scientists who are named MacArthur fellows who have probably a pretty solid amount of funding in the science research that they are doing but it could be that that funding is tied to particular applications and they would really like the chance to experiment with a different kind of wild and crazy idea that may not be related to health where there's a lot of rich funding, but related to something else.

51:53And this fellowship can give them the opportunity to do that. So we've had two MacArthur Fellows on my podcast, Angela Duckworth and Steve Wolfram. Yeah. And both are extremely mind expanding episodes. So do you have any pattern recognition tips that you can offer? Being the mother of MacArthur Fellows, you can say, this is what we notice liberal arts, Ivy League, broken home, adopted, I don't know, whatever, you know, like right-handed, left-handed, use a Macintosh. I could put a couple in that I've observed. Now, the first one, when I first came to the program 10 years ago, and so I want to frame this because you might argue that I'm a biased researcher.

52:41I don't think so, but I'll just, I want to be clear that I came to this program after spending my entire career at small liberal arts colleges. And I noticed a pattern that small liberal arts colleges are overrepresented among MacArthur fellows as origins of undergraduate degrees. But I don't think it's that it's small liberal arts colleges. I've tried to dig into that a little bit. I think what we've seen is more of a pattern is that people who are sometimes operating at the interstices of different disciplines, who've been exposed to one discipline and then changed to another, but who have the ability to make connections across fields that are sometimes just unexpected.

53:25Like, I got this idea from over here and I translated it to this other sector and it turns out it worked. That seems to be a bit of a common thread. So we have a neuroscientist who was a dancer, those kinds of things. That's one of the spaces. And there are people who have frequently, going back to a conversation we had earlier, have had experience of failure and then moved on from that failure to see some other opportunities to take that idea and apply it elsewhere. Okay. Basically, truffles can grow in liberal arts. Yeah. I urge people to sample different fields, to sample different spaces. I am sort of, I'm going to make an assertion here that this is more of my belief, so I'm not going to argue that I've done research on this.

54:14But I think some of what has been a competitive advantage for the U.S. in the global economy has largely been about creativity and work that requires kind of new ideas, creative thinking. We've done really well in that space and continue to do well. And part of that, I do think, is that we are on a scale more likely than most other systems, educational systems, to let people explore for a long time before they lock themselves in to a particular path or particular career. and liberal arts colleges are just one example of that but if you look at even our universities that are not liberal arts people could can move from engineering to history or history to engineering during the years of college i think that is one of the ways in which great ideas emerge somebody should tell san luis obispo this but i digress if you're familiar with how they like In your kindergarten year, you have to declare your major for San Luis Obispo.

55:21But anyway, and I'm friends with Tom Peters and there's been follow-up studies about the companies in search of excellence. So has there been follow-up studies of we're tracking MacArthur fellows and this is what they went on to do? They're still at the leading edge, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, we did a review of the program about 10 years ago. It was right before I arrived. So that was probably 2012, 2013. And you can see a summary of it on our website. And that asked what people did with the money. And it asked for the fellows to assess what the impact was. It also asked influentials, what they thought of the people that we had identified as fellows.

56:07So it's interesting. It's basically based on survey evidence in different populations. the challenge for the macarthur fellows program and this is a challenge i think going back to any sort of grant making where it's no strings attached is that it's no strings attached we're saying to the fellows we trust that whatever you decide to do is going to be creativity enhancing and lead to great things so it's very hard to do any kind of traditional evaluation study because they take this fellowship in different directions. Some become more public intellectuals and even assume positions in the national government or even one was former head of the World Bank.

56:51Some continue along that path of research that they started with and end up, in a recent case, we've had two of our women scientists who've become Nobel Prize winners. Others start to branch into different kinds of disciplines that they might not have taken or taken some risk. So it's hard to sort of look at any one outcome and say, this isn't great because that's what we said. We said, take this money and run with it. We're in the process of doing another one of these reviews. And one of the things that the internet has allowed us to do is that we can do more tracking because they don't have to report to us.

57:27So we may see some more kind of specking out of of what fellows have done over time. Some fellows take the money, going back to your hypothetical wealthy fellow, and they have used it. They've given it away themselves. They have set up their own programs. In one case, there was a program to give scholarships to Latino students who were interested in public policy. And in another case, there was a fellow who set up a project to give caregivers sabbaticals. I think you're going to find this very interesting. So I went to Bard and I went to ChatGPT and I asked who should be 2023 MacArthur Fellows.

58:07Oh, that's a great idea. I haven't tried that. First of all, ChatGPT says I'm a large language model, blah, blah, blah. I can't answer. But Bard answered and it gave me like six or seven names of people. When you do the research, they sound exactly like what you're looking for. and so i go to bard and ask who should be 2023 macarthur fellows and you will be fascinated with who they come up with it's really interesting okay i'm typing it in so now if this is how macarthur fellows are picked in the future i want acknowledgement okay I will give you acknowledgement if this is what happens. Well, I'm in the wrong spot in Bart.

58:59I'll have to wait till I get in the right spot. But I am going to try that. I asked it to write a short bio of me. I asked chat and it made up amazing things. So I hope you hadn't seen that. You hadn't done that in order to decide to invite me to be on your program. I really have not done all the things and things I have. I don't know about you, but it makes me feel good that Cecilia Conrad and people like her are driving bold change to the big problems in the world. Her visionary leadership continues to inspire and ignite a brighter future for generations to come. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People.

59:44My thanks to Merge 4 for sponsoring this episode. Merge 4 is the creator of the world's coolest socks. Remember to use the promo code FRIENDOFGUY to get a 30 % discount. Next, I want to thank Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez, the incredible sound engineering team. Also, Louise Magana, Alexis Nishimura, Fallon Yates, and the dynamic duo, Madison and Tessa Nismer. This is the Remarkable People team. Until next week, mahalo and aloha.

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