See What’s Out There

What is your theory of change? How do we impact the world with our advocacy and our dollars. If you are a nonprofit advocacy group, I hope you have a good answer to this question.

I can be a pretty cynical person and I think we live in a cynical time — a kind of Orwellian world dominated by quests for fame (reality TV, Paris Hilton) and fortune (hedge funds and payday loans).

But, for a minute today, I wasn’t cynical and I thought change is not only possible, it’s happening. And for all of you who, through your hard work, have made an imprint on the culture to bring the issue of climate change to the public consciousness I say, “Thank you!”

If you haven’t heard the news about the largest leveraged buy-out in history and its environmental implications, take a look. When someone from Environmental Defense says this is “a turning point in the fight against global warming” then that’s gotta be something. The short story is that the buyers of TXU (KKR and Texas Pacific), as well as their lender Goldman Sachs, decided to only do this deal if TXU abandon their plans to build 11 coal fired power plants in Texas. They sought out Environmental Defense and the NRDC and asked them, “what would it take for you to support this deal.”

This story also makes me think about goals and measurements. Something like this is due to the work of many many people over many many years because it was not just the recent work that changed the hearts and minds of the people involved. Al Gore gets credit as does the guy at Wal-Mart who decided to push compact florescent light bulbs as does Yahoo! for making a kick-ass website to help push it along. And, lets not forget all the video! There has been lots and lots and lots of video that have begun to change people’s ideas about the environment in general and climate change in particular. The images of dirty smoke stacks and polar bears struggling on melting ice have had a huge cumulative impact.

Because it was all of these things together, the focus on too narrow of measurement of success for any individual one would be a mistake. Yes, organizations need to focus on the dollars raised and the names added and evaluate programs that way. But lets not forget the harder to measure, but equally as important, impact on the culture.

Below is Environmental Defense’s ad against TXU that surely helped push the buyers into a deal.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Video, Nonprofits, Web Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.