While I had been traveling throughout Southeast Asia, coordinating the construction of our first school and building the organization on the ground, PoP continued to evolve on the other side of the world in New York. Mimi led our first white party—where everyone wore their finest white attire—which attracted eight hundred people, our largest event yet. As always, all of the party proceeds went toward school projects. Every single contribution, regardless of its size, was tremendously valuable.
Armed with more knowledge of project costs, we demonstrated the impact of each ticket: $30 could buy fifteen books, $40 could buy bookshelves, $60 purchased teacher supplies. People loved that they were able to see the correlation and impact. The event sold out three days in advance, and afterward my inbox was once again flooded with messages from people interested in getting more involved.
Although I didn’t drink coffee, I offered to “grab coffee” with anyone who wanted to join our volunteer force. One of my founding beliefs was that even if people didn’t have money to donate, which few twentysomethings during the financial crisis did, they could still add value through other forms of donation. Their time, energy, and skills could help us advance our mission. Every conversation began with the same question: “What do you love doing most?” Once I understood that person’s passion, we could craft a way for him or her to use it to support PoP. Through that approach, our volunteer force expanded rapidly.
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At the same time, I was focused on finding a way to make the organization sustainable for the long haul. I called George Stanton, my mentor who had first encouraged me to choose Bain over Lehman, and asked for his advice. His answer was direct: “Listen, Adam, you need to find five pillar donors who will give you fifty thousand dollars each. This way you’ll have a quarter million dollars to start, and from there you can figure things out.”
His advice surprised me because it was so far from what I’d planned on doing. We had seen that many small acts add up to make a large difference. Ninety-eight percent of our unique donations had been in amounts of $100 or less from people in their teens and twenties. These small donors funded our first school entirely and had put the funds in the bank for several more. I wanted to stay true to this approach until we had a proven track record that would merit our asking for major contributions.
George told me I was crazy. “In this financial environment, that’ll be impossible.”
His words stung. It’s hard to hear anyone say that something you believe in isn’t possible. But this burned even more because it came from someone whose opinion I valued so much. It also propelled me forward. It forced me to think more deeply about our fundraising approach and helped me define the type of person that we would need to recruit. I needed to find staff and donors who would get excited about doing something others deemed impossible.
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For us to be successful, we had to bet on two early hypotheses. If correct, we would be incredibly well positioned to grow in the years ahead, and to help change the landscape for how a modern organization was built. If I was wrong, we would most likely fold within twenty-four months.
The first big bet was on the rise of social media. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as a sophomore in the class of 2006 at Harvard while I was a sophomore at Brown (one of the first ten schools to use the platform). Unlike our parents, we didn’t view social media as foreign; it was woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. It didn’t take a genius to see that social media would one day penetrate almost every facet of popular culture. But few people in the nonprofit world understood this yet because social media was still viewed as the space for college and high school kids. Most people were only focused on courting their major donors. But I didn’t just want donors, I wanted outspoken advocates. I genuinely believed that someone’s Facebook status was a valuable commodity. Viewing an individual’s social media presence as an important form of currency was something we banked on early.
The second big bet was on the rise of cause marketing. All data suggested that consumers would overwhelmingly choose a product that makes the world better if compared to an equal product that didn’t have an element of social good. As a result, I believed that marketers and major brands with lots of advertising dollars would want to keep those consumers happy by finding ways to show them how their purchases benefited others. I figured they would seek out as partners the organizations with the largest and most engaged social media followings. So we focused on building an engaged community online and transparent programs that created tangible good on the ground, making us a perfect fit for cause-marketing campaigns.
If the world moved in the direction we believed it would, we would be well positioned to springboard forward in the years ahead. But we couldn’t capitalize on either area without top-notch branding and design.
Because of this, I became obsessed with building “the brand” of Pencils of Promise. I considered everything from the colors and shape of our logo, to the language we used in our print materials, to the imagery and architecture of our website. Branding can make or break a company, and a great brand creates legitimacy and trust, both of which are essential in the nonprofit world. While I could envision our brand in my head, I had absolutely no design skills. Some nights I would open Photoshop or InDesign, but within an hour I’d grow frustrated. If Mimi was the organization’s right hand, I desperately needed a left hand that could design the shit out of things.
Fortunately, I received a random email from a guy I’d grown up with but hadn’t spoken to in almost ten years. Brad Haugen was working at a leading advertising agency and wanted to use his talents for good. He had been following our progress through social media and was confident that he could leverage the marketing and design expertise of his company, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), to help us build a world-class brand. A few weeks later, a friend from SAS connected me with a rising star in the commercial photography world, Nick Onken. After a lengthy lunch together, he agreed to fly himself to Laos to shoot stunning photography on our behalf. Suddenly, I had a branding dream team coming together.
Brad began recruiting a volunteer team that expanded to include technologists, advertisers, bloggers, and designers. Now that we had people all over the city working on the organization, I borrowed a page from Scott Neeson’s playbook and had fifty sets of business cards made for $2.50 per set through a Vistaprint.com promotion. All volunteers who took an active role in the organization received their own business card, listing their name and a title I made up. I usually mailed the cards to these people without even telling them they were coming, but the feedback was always the same: “I’m handing out my PoP card twice as much as my actual business card!” It became a part of their nightly conversations, and it soon became a meaningful part of their lives.
I wasn’t just interested in building one school anymore. I wanted to build a movement that changed people’s perception of charity. And although I didn’t have deep pockets behind me at the start, I had a far more potent weapon—conviction in a set of unique beliefs. When you align individually high-performing people around the idea that they are collectively underdogs, you tap into the cohesive gel that brings early adopters together. We created an enemy for us to rebel against (this belief that our approach was “impossible”), which is one of the fastest ways to unite people around a common goal. And with each new person who joined our volunteer army, we received both the validation and the skills necessary to prove that we could carve a different path from those who came before us.
But we had to find and inspire new torchbearers to carry these ideas forward beyond New York City. We had to find people who would test the edge of the world by feeling its curves. It was time to take PoP on a road trip across the entire country.