Tom Bruce, the Director of the LII (USA) - the original recipe LII, will join us via videoconference to present on issues of sustainability for open access legal publishers.
The notes are attached.
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IF YOU LEARN NOTHING ELSE TODAY, LEARN THIS:
IT’S EASY TO NEGLECT THE FOUNDATIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY, ESPECIALLY WHEN DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS ARE DIFFICULT. BUT IF YOU DO, YOUR ORGANIZATION WILL DIE.
The usual disclaimers
● What I’ll describe today are things we’ve done here at the LII
● Some will work differently or not at all because
○ The US is not Africa
○ We have high traffic volumes
○ We are in a very big place, and very remote from our audience
What is sustainability?
“Sustainability” has become a kind of code word, but that’s not all there is to it.
● Donors increasingly see what they do as an investment that will produce a return.
● Not a return in money, but a return in results.
● Usually, those results will take much longer than the “lifespan” of the donation to produce.
Sustainable organizations create three kinds of value:
● Economic value. That’s what we’ve just been talking about.
○ Revenue generation
○ Revenue diversification
● Social value.
○ Generating content that the audience needs and wants
○ Generating content with measurable impacts
○ Engaging the audience as community
● Organizational capacity.
○ Adaptive capacity.
○ Leadership capacity.
○ Resource allocation
Sustainability is hard for LIIs
● There is much more enthusiasm for establishment than there is for maintenance.
○ It’s easier to get money to put some documents up than it is to get money to maintain and grow the collection.
● Supply chains are fragile
○ Did I say supply chain? Sounds awfully corporate.
○ What else would you call the flow of documents that you deliver? It’s the raw material you use to make what you make.
● Hiring and firing is difficult
● Continual managing of relationships is essential
● Messaging can be complex
● It is hard for operations-oriented people to think about relationships, strategies, and marketing.
Sustainable organizations
I’m going to spend proportionately less time on these, but I do want to mention a few aspects of social value and organizational capacity that I think have a unique slant in the LII context.
Social value: things to remember
● Social value is in the eye of the beholder, not yours
○ In order to create value for an audience, you have to know who they are and what they want.
■There is probably more than one
■Set up and use your analytics. Do surveys. Ask.
○ People do legal research for a purpose, not as an end in itself.
○ Donor organizations (and committed people like us) worry about freedom and democracy. Your audience has more immediate things to worry about.
● Engagement is difficult but crucial.
Organizational capacity: things to remember
● Being adaptive is hard.
○ Do regular SWOT analyses.
○ Think about
■supply chains
■key relationships
■key personnel
● Fulfilling your mission depends on things that it can be easy to throw off the boat when operations get difficult. But that’s when you need them the most.
○ People
○ Relationships with suppliers
○ Relationships with key audience components
Sustainable business models
“The job of a successful program director is to maximize income while minimizing commitments” -- William Y. Arms
Revenue: a three-legged stool
● Revenue earned from core competencies
○ IT services for your audience (eg. websites and blogs for lawyers)
○ IT services for your suppliers (document conversion; court-records systems)
○ Research/question-answering services
● Revenue earned from online presence
○ Dues and subscriptions
○ Sponsorships
○ Tiered service models
○ Directory services
○ Online advertising
● Revenue donated by sponsors and supporters
○ Pre-designated donations
■Grants
■Designated gifts
○ Undesignated income
It is important to balance these.
● Too much pursuit of earned income, and you lose your mission.
● Too much donated income that comes with strings attached, and you lose your independence (and probably your mission too, because programs become hard to kill).
Economic value: important things to remember
● no single one of these sources is going to carry the entire organization
○ nor should it. Monoculture is a problem for organizations as well as farmers.
● revenue sources will shift in relative importance over time
● some revenue-generating activities only make sense for a federation of LIIs
● some jobs aren’t worth taking, and some grants aren’t worth getting.
Resources
A few things I’ve found useful, for you to check out later.
Knight Foundation report on sustainability for community-funded newspapers. Closest thing I’ve found to LIIs, at least in the US.
● Overview here: http://liicr.nl/N4VzLH
● Important bits here: https://knight.box.net/shared/static/l6hyy9i09yrugr3qqrhk.pdf
Resources for nonprofits:
● BoardSource : http://www.boardsource.org/Knowledge.asp
● TechSoup: http://home.techsoup.org/pages/default.aspx
SWOT:
● Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
● Nice worked example: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_05.htm
Bloggers to follow:
● Guy Kawasaki : http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
● Beth Kanter : http://www.bethkanter.org/
● Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
● Kivi Miller:
○ http://www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com/
○ with a great resource guide : http://www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com/blog/blogs-i-read/
● Katya: http://www.nonprofitmarketingblog.com/
Tom: tom@liicornell.org ; @trbruce ; http://blog.law.cornell.edu/tbruce
