Ladling Soup, Raising Hell: Nonprofit insider Robert Egger is out to reform charities from within

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Circumstances like these oftentimes create the perfect atmosphere for innovation. For example, there’s a lot of talk about mergers, and that’s not an illegitimate discussion. I’m of the idea that if we merge our voices, our assets, we could be a tremendous force in any community. This might prove to be a real breakthrough time for people to realize we have more to gain by staying together than by taking the kind of balkanized route we’ve historically taken.

If we just act as if we have to somehow weather the storm on our own, I think that’s part of the flawed thinking of the separation of government, nonprofit, and for-profit. Part of me recoils at saying you have to choose between a dot-com and a dot-org. I’m a big believer in the hybrid, that there’s something out there that’s in between. And there are lots of amazingly good experiments. But if we just sit back and say, “Wow, all these different resources are down, what are we going to do, woe is us,” we’re going to get more of the same.

Nonprofits were already facing other challenges before the recession came along, weren’t they?

Yes. Donations of products, whether it’s food or building materials, were decreasing dramatically over the past few years, just because industry standards have shifted. There’s a greater sense of inventory control than there was in the 1970s and 1980s.

You could also predict that a significant amount of individual giving would decline, just because people were getting worn out by the perception that nonprofits are somehow out of control and all over the place. The only news the vast majority of Americans get about nonprofits, outside of seasonal stories, is a steady drip of nonprofit scandal stories.

So all this stuff you could kind of see, but what I and a lot of other people have been trying to get out in front of is a consolidation of the nonprofit sector. I’ve said the sector would be more dynamic and robust if we had 25 percent fewer nonprofits. I think that’s going to happen anyway; we’re in the middle of it right now.

From an economic standpoint, it makes sense. There are nearly 2 million nonprofit organizations without any real standards that unite us or market forces that propel us forward. You’ve got a cacophony of goodwill. Flowers are blooming, and it’s not bad—I’m just interested in a garden. You don’t get that by tossing
seeds out the window hoping something grows. You get it by deliberately going out and tilling the field and planting it and weeding it and all that other good stuff.

The imperative question is: Is this consolidation going to be done intelligently, or is this survival of the cleverest? Who’s got the cause of the year, who’s got the prettiest ribbon this year, who’s willing to exploit a pitiful image more than the other person? I recoil at seeing that this is what our business has become. We compete with each other for the leftovers of America’s table based on ploys like these. That’s why the imperative right now is to develop a new set of metrics that will allow the public in particular to tell which organizations can deliver on their promises, and who’s just pitching empty words.

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