Five Secrets for Managing Rapid Growth
Contents
The Story of CaringBridge
A unique view of what the client needs
Going from informal to incorporated
Five Secrets of Rapid Growth—and Stability
1. Stability in staff is a major benefit during rapid growth
2. Good financial modeling is essential
3. Secure a strategic-minded board with strong business skills
4. Serve a broad-based constituency
5. Use technology to its fullest
The Challenge to Other Nonprofits
From Vince Hyman, Publishing Director, Fieldstone Alliance:
THREE TIMES in the past year, I’ve participated in a community of people gathered to support an ill friend via the Internet. It works like this: A web site gets posted about the person suffering from a medical condition. Someone sends you an e-mail inviting you to visit. You see messages from the individual’s friends and family, you read about the course of the person’s illness, you write your own messages of support, and gradually, in time, you come to know others involved in the circle of support.
The support is invaluable not just to the ill person, but to the entire community of people who care about that person. It’s the kind of support that once might have happened when human communities were close-knit and close together. But such communities have not existed for generations.
The connections that occur warm the heart, ease suffering, and build cyber-neighborhoods that replace those lost to modern society. And these connections are all digital.
In each case, the service has been provided by CaringBridge, an organization that would have been unimaginable without digital connectivity. The brief history of this organization is a worthy case study for two reasons. First, it is an example of extremely rapid growth, handled well. Second, it reveals that an electronic, mass-market approach to human services can offer high-touch benefits. My hope is that you’ll use the case of CaringBridge to explore ways your nonprofit can rethink its service models.
The Story of CaringBridge
CaringBridge, a nonprofit organization based in suburban Eagan, Minnesota, is the world’s most widely-used free online service for keeping families and loved ones connected to someone who is receiving medical treatment. Its mission is to bring together a global community of care powered by the love of family and friends in an easy, accessible, and private way.
People sign on to CaringBridge to create quick and easy personalized web sites that display journal entries and photographs about a person in need of support. Well-wishers visit the site to read updates and leave messages in the guestbook.
If you’ve ever been the “communicator” in such a situation, you know that the phone system is tiring and tedious. No one can field all the calls, answer all the questions, forward all the well-said words, and update friends on the changing status and needs of the suffering individual. In today’s world, where friends and family are dispersed around the world, the CaringBridge web site eases the communication chore. The space for stories, photos, and guest messages can be quickly updated so that those near the patient can focus on what he or she needs. CaringBridge is a great example of the world come full circle, from local to global and back, via to the Internet.
A unique view of what the client needs
In 1997, CaringBridge founder Sona Mehring was a web designer whose close friend had a health care crisis. Mehring volunteered to set up a web site to keep family and friends in the U.S. and Europe informed. The site quickly connected people who had never met, allowing them to emotionally support their common friend as well as each other during the crisis.
The profound experience convinced Mehring to found CaringBridge. Her vision was to create a free service that would ease communication and help people cheer on their loved ones regardless of distance. Each web site would allow all parties to stay informed without placing extra demands on hospital staff. Thus began CaringBridge, and it existed as an all-volunteer, informal group for five years.
During these years of unincorporated existence, Mehring’s workload gradually increased until she was bearing the equivalent of two full-time jobs—her “real” job and her unpaid job managing CaringBridge’s development and coordinating its volunteers. She then began a careful exploration of whether and how to incorporate the organization—a due diligence that included examining both nonprofit and for-profit structures. She eventually settled on the nonprofit model based on the driving values of nonprofit structure. “We looked at selling the service to hospitals or setting up other modes to keep CaringBridge going. But our core value was to keep the service free and easily available to anyone undergoing this really tough time. We wanted CaringBridge authors [the people who create the web sites on behalf of their ill loved one] to ‘own’ the service.” A for-profit structure, with generating profits as its primary value, was not congruent with this value.
Going from informal to incorporated
CaringBridge was formally incorporated as a nonprofit organization in February, 2002. The transition from a voluntary, informal organization to an incorporated, staffed one was difficult. The first year’s budget was $84,000, and during the first year Mehring said, “it felt as though our hair was always on fire.” Making payroll was tight. However, she had noticed that even when the organization was unincorporated, people sometimes sent money to thank CaringBridge for its help. “I realized, people want to support the service—they feel good about it.” That realization, in combination with the fear that CaringBridge would collapse, motivated change.
In 2003, CaringBridge sent out a note letting users know that if everyone donated $1, they’d have enough money to keep CaringBridge aloft. The support was overwhelming, says Mehring. “In six months, we went from wondering how to pay bills to figuring out what kind of reserve policy we should establish.” Gradually, CaringBridge moved from keeping itself a nearly invisible service provider to actively promoting its logo and donation opportunities on every site. Today, the primary means of marketing CaringBridge are word of mouth, outreach at conferences to referral sources such as nurses and hospital chaplains, and the publicity gained via media coverage. (CaringBridge has been featured on Doonesbury, NBC Nightly News, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few.)
Five Secrets of Rapid Growth—and Stability
Once it incorporated, CaringBridge’s growth was geometric, essentially doubling in service units each year. CaringBridge now has the following stats:
- CaringBridge has hosted more than 61,000 CaringBridge sites.
- Those sites have received nearly 396 million visits and 9 million guestbook messages of hope and encouragement.
- Seven percent of CaringBridge sites listed a country other than the U.S.
- Every 13 seconds a new CaringBridge Site is created.
- Every minute a new user registers with CaringBridge.
- Daily, over 250,000 e-mails are sent regarding new journal postings
The $84,000 budget that marked year one of nonprofit existence is now $3 million. More than 20,000 people have donated an average of $65 each to CaringBridge—and 92% of donors are new.
Due to the Internet, the growth potential for CaringBridge is huge. Each year in the U.S. alone, more than 1 of every 10 Americans undergo the type of medical condition that fits the profile of a standard CaringBridge site. A 10% market penetration would yield 1.8 million site authors annually. When networks of family and friends join in, it’s conceivable that at some point in the very near future, virtually every person with Internet access in the U.S. will have been involved in a CaringBridge site.
Handling this pace of growth is a major challenge. Its all volunteer, nonprofit status aside, CaringBridge is in many ways a traditional entrepreneurial start-up. Says Mehring, “Even though we are a nonprofit, it’s not taboo to think like a for-profit and use the methods and literature of small business.” She cites the following approaches that helped the organization manage and spur rapid growth:
1. Stability in staff is a major benefit during rapid growth
From the start, CaringBridge set it is sights on providing decent, competitive benefits and wages. This has enabled it to recruit good staff and retain them, even during the turmoil of fast growth. “You need good people—you can’t rely on the passion of the mission to bring them in the door. You’ve got to find them, and you’ve got to keep them.”
2. Good financial modeling is essential
Space for a rapidly growing organization was a major challenge. CaringBridge worked in cramped, donated space during its start-up phase, and the decision to move was nerve-wracking. Careful financial modeling helped. The new organization worked hard to analyze and understand donation behavior in a way that helped it forecast revenue. This, in turn, enabled it to confidently project revenue and lease a space that would support, rather than hinder, growth.
3. Secure a strategic-minded board with strong business skills
The board has been key in strengthening CaringBridge and helping it to grow rapidly. The organization worked to bring key business, legal, and executive leaders to the board early on. Mehring notes that the consistent recruitment and participation of board members with broad business backgrounds—people with experience managing and modeling rapid growth—have made a major difference. For example, it was one such board member who pushed CaringBridge to face its infrastructure challenges and develop the financial models that enabled the move to a better space.
4. Serve a broad-based constituency
A standard nonprofit setting out to help a “patient” would likely focus on services just for the client. CaringBridge sees its clients as the entire circle of support surrounding the patient. This model is consistent with the patient’s experience, and it guarantees an enormous constituency. Broad constituency means a massive donor base, enabling a model of support closer to public radio and TV than the major donor approach used by other client-focused service providers. Note, though, that CaringBridge purposely chose this broad-based model. During its search for the right business model, it also explored a hospital-based delivery mode. This would have limited the organization to major clients—which require much more work to secure and serve.
5. Use technology to its fullest
Obviously, CaringBridge is uniquely suited to Internet delivery. In concept and execution, it is a platform that facilitates connection. Thus CaringBridge focuses on providing the enabling technology, while constituents supply the content. In the process, technology creates a unique and highly personal relationship between CaringBridge and its constituents.
The Challenge to Other Nonprofits
CaringBridge is providing a valuable, free service—one that many people are happy to support, as evidenced by the growth in contributions. But the scale of growth and service provided, as well as the major potential for future growth, should be a wake-up call for others. Those of us with more traditional service delivery modes might study this example for keys to revamping programs. It is easy to become so entrenched in our current models that we miss the opportunity to enable better mission delivery. CaringBridge was facilitated by the Internet, but it also has a unique view of what the client needs—a view that encompasses the patient’s entire community and thus takes into account the real-life web of human activity. This raises some key questions for other nonprofits:
- In what human ecosystem do we deliver our services?
- Are we locked into a one-person/one-service-unit model that restricts our capacity to reach the system that benefits our client?
- In what obvious ways can technology ease and improve our services to our community?
- Given the above, can we radically rethink what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for to reveal the unobvious benefits of technology to our community?
Sincerely,
Vince Hyman
Publishing Director
Fieldstone Alliance
July 11 , 2007
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