National Match Fund

Bob Friedman, Carolina Reid, Wynne Lum

This is the national match fund. Here are some of the questions that we asked.

The advantages of having access to a fund means you can grow your business. But do you have the capacity for this? How much money needs to go for operations? How have your current account holders helped grow your business? What I think is important now and in the future, if you have budget for IDAs, is to constantly ask the question of what do you need for your business?

For the next steps, fortunately Bob was on our team, because he had most of the next steps. We need a champion communicator and to incubate these concepts. We need to look at individual donors, then moving up to institutional donors. The inital goal is $10 million.

We've thought of using credit cards and taking a few dollars a month into the NMF. Or money directly from debit cards. How about self-generating money? How can the fund make money for itself through investing?

Input from the field is crucial to this. We need representavies from the field that are responsive and accountable to the field. We need to figure out that governance structure.

In attracting donors, we need to be careful with segmentation. Take ethnic segmenting - how much money will remain locally, and how much will move to the national level? We need to have answers to these questions when asked. And the more we segment out, the more we money we will need for operations.

You guys did a lot of work. We really appreciate it.

One of the things that we talked about was to find a way to ask the survey questions without getting lost in the model. Based on that, perhaps hybrid models will emerge. We might get different results by coming at it from different directions or perspectives.

There needs to be a way to tell people that some of the money will go to operational costs. Will organizations be willing to change their technology? For example, they might need to all be using the same data base to share information.

One of the things that we struggle with as a CDC is how to explain what we didn't do. There needs to be some sort of regulation force present.

What does it really mean to standardize your IDA? In reference to budgets - there is an operational fund and match fund. I don't know if the issue is standards or accessibility.

There is a nice synergy between these things. If there is a network in place, then that network can give us substance for the products that we need. Then policy will be able to dictate what that product needs.

Basic Network

Kim Pate, Marc Eisenberg, Mark McKeag, Megan O'Neil

We really focused on thinking about the needs of the practitioners. We came up with a list of questions.

Initially we thought of costs and fees. What are some upfront costs - high speed internet, phone systems, etc. How do we assess what people currently have?

If you only had an extra hour a day to do something, what would that be? Organizations should look at technological priorities from that perspective.

Based on how these questons are answered, then we can determine what kind of a network is needed.

Of the components of the model, we looked at several items from a form vs. substance perspective.

Fundamental needs of the organizations - fundraising, public awareness, and credibility. We want to get at these concepts at a more granular level to get a better understanding of how to create this network.

Within each one of these items, there are many roles to play. We need to find out what roles all of the different people involved want to play.

I was looking at another group's boards. Extra-structure was separated from infrastructure. Things that are needed all the time are considered infrastructure while someting that is not is considered external to the structure, and can be accessed in other ways.

What are the needs when you started this program? What are your needs now? How has that changed over time? We can use that information to learn about the progression of needs over time.

We talked about non-members. What kinds of ideas can they provide? Maybe the network is structured in some sort of tiered system.

We are serving people that have internet and email access. We're assuming that everyone has this kind of access, but that may not be the case.

How do you get around people that are thinking about entering the field? Is that something that is impossible to get around? Trying to think about their needs might be too much, since they are most likely looking for basic information. Maybe we can ask questions such as, "What would you like to know upon entering the field?" Or to people in the field, "If you weren't in the field, what kinds of information would you like to have known before you entered the field?"

One big important questions is: "Are we talking IDAs or asset building?"

We need to determine what different kinds of information we can segment. Size, kinds of accounts, etc.

There will be key people in the field that have been there for a long time that will be able to provide quite a bit of retrospective information when we do these surveys.

There's not a list of products and services here. Do you have that? We talked about it, but didn't get into that detail.

Cooperative Network

Gabe Mello, Gwen Robinson, Kirsten Moy, Rita Bowen, Susie Smith

One thing that everyone seemed to agree on was central data collection. We want it to be accessible, searchable, and very usable. People want some account holder functionality, like dialing up to get their info. We want standard reporting ability, but with some abilitiy to custominze. There are multiple points of entry, so that anyone can get in and sort the info like they need to. For practitioners, right now a lot of time is spent packaging data the way that that particular practitioner needs it.

Then we moved onto a huge list. Forms for drawdown procudures, or online systmes for transfer of funds and payment of funds. There are ways that the drawdowns are policed in an automated way. There is an idea of making an IDA like other financial products, like a mutual fund, where there isn't a one-to-one relationship between your money and what it bought. It goes into a pool.

Some other items: Product development to expand the range of offereings. Information and tools to promote collaboration between programs. Platform for advocay. Collaborate or aggregate to negotiate better deals with financial institutions. Bulk purchasing or negotiate deals for some asset purchases. Lots of people buy lots of computers - let's get them at a bulk, cheaper cost. Or loan products and loan originiation fees. What kinds of things can we get to scale?

Then we tried to rank these things. Number one was very clear, but then it got difficult after that. We had a 2, and then we had two 2 & 1/2s. The central data was the clear winner. Fundraising was next.

Did you guys talk about methods for delivery? We took online off, because I think that is still being debated. There's still a lot to see if this is going to work online. There are lists of fundraising professionals - are there other people that are insterested in this situation that might be interested in getting together to raise money?

Platform for advocacy - the CFB tool is so simple - all you do is click. If people aren't doing that, I don't know what is going to work.

In a cooperative network, people are bought in that are locked into the network, so there is a bit of a compelling reason to get involved. How easy are any of these things to really do?

Standard forms and drawdowns - that's quite complicated and expensive. You're touching money, so there's a lot of security issues. The advocacy stuff is easy - it's right out of the box. Much easier to deploy, but could be have a cost associated with running it.

You're number one itme there, you have a lot of stuff to deal with. A lot of companies do this. You need to define what this is, what the build is. I'm not able to look at that or look at a spec to determine a cost. There are all kinds of ways to use the web. It's all feasbile, but indeterminte in its cost. The thing that seems complex to me is adding fields. Some of the expense is in how maleable you want your data to be. Not to get too far into the weeds, you can combine lots of these different types of tools - advocacy can tie into fundraising. The pieces that work together, you have to combine. You can take your list of 1200 practitioners, and right after you build you'll be able to touch them. Then you can determine what the web does best. You can have an expensive website like some people do, or you can have a listserve that costs nothing and functions very efficiently.

We need to get some commonality between branding and products. Because of the terminology, people think that what they see or read is not what it is. If we're looking to build form the ground up, or with some sort of ground swell, we need to get some common terms for what we're talking about.

There 's a lot of things to do - testing is expensive. You should do testing on user experience and flow. It's embarassing that after years of having some design out there, say on a system or website, that people don't know how to use it, or they don't like it.

I think Kirsten is right - we need to think about products in the basic netowrk. Could you use the next 20 minutes to drill down there?

One next step before the next step - is there a general agreement that this is worth pursuing? I'd kind of like to run with it.

Let us go back to the field first, and see what they say. If they say no, let's find out why. Let's see what might be helpful - if it's not good for the field, then why should we do it? We need to find out some costs, too. How much effort and what are they going to be required to do. That's way down the road. Are you saying there's some R&D, research on other efforts, and looking for other successful models, then write a proposal - who's involved, elements of strategy, what we want oparticipants to do. We're ready to say "Let's figure this out." Then we can come up with an action plan.

I want to ask a question that affects the basic netowrk. Can we go out and survey the field, knowing that we might develop a network? Yes. I can't imagine the field saying they don't need a new source of funds. We need to get at folks on the board, and folks that are potential gatekeepers to other sources of money.

I think there's going to be a quid pro quo for money.

Each one of the 5 main needs we've described could expand and have many components. There's still a lot to figure out here.

Scribing