EFTA00605502.pdf

Optimizing Program Impact and Cost-Effectiveness Philanthropic Venture Partnership Opportunities for the Non-profit Community Charles L. Harper, Jr., D.Phil. Executive Director/Senior Vice-President John Templeton Foundation Radnor, Pa Overview This is a brief introduction to "venture partnership," which involves introducing a variety of entrepreneurial concepts, practices, and standards of planning and evaluation into non-profit activity. Such concepts are new to the philanthropic communities, and may seem unusual in the context of academic research and other non-profit activity. This document, therefore, attempts to introduce venture philanthropy by outlining a learning exercise in creative thinking - the core of entrepreneurial success. Contents (I) Introduction (II) Some Useful Quantitative Metric Components (III) Working Examples • Freedom Project - Academic Course Competition • Symposium Webcasting • Speakers Bureau • Academic Lecture Series EFTA00605502 I. Introduction Progress-Generating Creativity Creative, innovative, productive, aspiring people are the key to success in nearly any venture. Many philanthropists and grantmaking institutions now seek to foster an ambitious and dynamic success-generating entrepreneurial ethos among program managers supported by their grants. The future of effective grantmaking will demonstrate foundations providing philanthropic investments in venture partnership with outstanding people of talent and vision. Providing capital to be utilized by such people in developing programs allows their vision to flourish. Oftentimes the degree of success hinges on the ability of the grantee to develop and utilize new skills as an effective entrepreneurial project creator/manager. Demonstrated skillfulness is knowing when to seize opportunities that make a program successfit From the point-of-view of grant applicants, a foundation may appear as an institution with pools of money and concerns about making its IRS grantmaking requirements. This is generally not true, and It is important to recognize that the John Templeton Foundation certainly does not view itself this way. Our activities equate more to philanthropic venture capital investments. Our grantmaking is directed toward changing the world over the long-term in a few wholesome ways. In the true business sense, prudent investing focuses on sustained long-term growth where the access to capital enables a person or organization to start something which will flourish over time through the power of sustained and growing momentum. The John Templeton Foundation's philanthropic investments attempt to use this business acumen. The long-term success of a venture depends largely on the ability of grant recipients to use resources which serve to catalyze further opportunities. Especially we are looking for philanthropic opportunities with high 'leverage' potential. The term "leverage" refers to the capability of utilizing a project investment to build momentum by connecting with a much larger resource base. The organization should demonstrate capable management and adaptive strategies that show clear objectives in developing a fiscally healthy organization. This allows for a greater likelihood of sustained and growing momentum. Building vision broadly within the social order and also especially with opinion-leading changemakers is a goal of the John Templeton Foundation. This requires a focused combination of skills and activities which produce excellence, innovation, persuasiveness, and strategic and effective outreach. A key feature of "entrepreneurism" or "entrepreneurial success" is the capacity to lead processes of creative innovation. Investment guru, Peter Drucker, has defined innovation as "change that creates a new dimension ofperformance." The most successful program managers are entrepreneurial men and women in that they are always eagerly looking for opportunities to create new dimensions of performance. This requires a well-informed but also open, dynamic, and creative mind. The entrepreneurial spirit is captivated by an eagerness and EFTA00605503 ability to exercise creativity. It enjoys the challenge of finding ways to accomplish goals more effectively. It finds joy in setting and accomplishing new and challenging goals. It is this quality of progress-generating creativeness that is what is most worthy of philanthropic investment. Over the long-term, success of an endeavor typically will depend more on the richness of the ideas, creativity, and motivated talent rather than the specific level offunding support. Progress-Generating Creativity Leads To Action To realize an ambitious vision, "perspiration equity" often is vital. "Perspiration equity" is a way of describing the quality, tenacity, ambitiousness and investment of a person's conviction and motivation pursuing the vision a project serves. It often has to do with entrepreneurial abilities to accomplish goals by communicating a vision effectively and persuasively to key change-makers. In short, entrepreneurially creative ideas matter most when converted into action that has long term affect. The results of a philanthropic investment can be increased by factors in excess of a hundred or a thousand by a program manager who is creatively entrepreneurial. Progress-Generating Creativity Can Be Measured How can entrepreneurial creativity be fostered and encouraged in the context of non- profit activities? This document focuses on one important method involving the discipline of using quantitative methods to stimulate an entrepreneurial mind set where innovation and improvement is always welcome and can be recognized and rewarded. The most useful aspect of developing the ability to evaluate success in a quantitative manner is the degree to which it can stimulate the initial formulation of a project by requiring a person to think creatively and "outside of the box" over an extended period of time. Often this discipline of extended initial planning will pay off handsomely over the long term. It has the potential to greatly expand the horizons of possibility. Measurement Leads To More Progress Another positive aspect of quantitatively evaluating success or failure is that it can provide compelling feedback. A person who is engaged in an activity that provides feedback in quantitative methods benefits from the opportunity to continuously hone and improve skills and performance. Feedback monitors performance and by doing so allows the components of excellence or success to be observed and improved upon. Feedback provides a necessary and vital basis for learning. Quantitative performance measurement in an activity is important for dynamism and cost- effectiveness because it provides an objective basis of feedback. It provides structured EFTA00605504 opportunities for creative learning and improvement based on a serious effort to understand the sources and dynamics of possible "success factors" in a thorough and objective manner. Success is Multi-Dimensional Success in most complex activities will have the property of multidimensionality, which means nothing more than that there are many dimensions of success. However, it is a vital concept in the quantitative evaluation of success. A common temptation or trap is to reduce success to one dimension. This can have catastrophic results because it can motivate behavior in the direction of that one dimension only. (As an example, 1,000 people in a lecture hall does not amount to a huge success if the targeted audience was to consist of academic professionals, and 95% of the audience were high school science students.) Therefore a good rule of thumb is as follows: If real success has many important dimensions, then efforts to quanttfr success should be developed with subtlety and sufficient multidimensionality. An important corollary is: Apects ofsuccess which are relatively intangible (and therefore are difficult to measure) should not be ignored. EFTA00605505  Part II. Some Useful Quantitative Metric Components Here I offer a number of relatively simple quantitative metrics of efficiency and cost- effectiveness in nine different categories. These may be utilized, modified, supplemented and combined in developing multi-dimensional impact/cost-effectiveness analyses for specific programs. They are offered as examples of ways that relatively simple quantitative measures can be developed. The list is not meant to be exhaustive. Metrics are listed under three headings: (i) leverage metrics; (ii) specific success metrics; and (iii) generic success metrics (i). Leverage Metrics 1. Direct "financial leverage" The ability to nourish a broad diversification of sources of project funding is a vital aspect of the long-term health of an organization that receives philanthropic grant support. It is of particular importance to avoid long-term dependency on one single philanthropic source. It also represents success in widely and strategically communicating excitement and value in an organizational mission. In any new form of philanthropic endeavor, a broad gauge of success is the degree to which the vision can be transmitted such that others appreciate the value of the objective to the degree of seriousness that they will back it with their resources. Diversification of support may apply to a single project or to a portfolio of projects. A metric defined as "direct financial leverage", (DFL), represents the degree of up-front financial "buy-in" on a project (or, alternately, on a portfolio of multiple projects) from other financial donors. It can be metricated as a ratio expressing the degree to which the funding of a project (or set of projects) is supported (or will be supported) by funds from sources other than provided by the main or `catalytic' £under. Thus: DFL = [directly leveraged funds] / [total project expense] Example: Total Project expense: $100,000 Core / Catalyst Fonder: $ 60,000 Other Donors: $ 40,000 DFL = [$ 40,000] / [$100,000] = 0.40 = 40 % directfinancial leverage on the project Alternately, DFL may be defined differently as an investment multiplier: EFTA00605506  DFL = [directly leveraged funds] / [Core funds] Example: (Same numbers as previous example) (DFL),!, = [$ 40,000] / [$ 60,000] = 0.67 = 67% direct financial leverage on the investment 2. Indirect "financial leverage" Indirect financial leverage, IFL, represents the degree of downstream capitalization of new projects which have been catalyzed by an initial project. It can be metricated as a ratio expressing the degree to which an initial project capitalization has been utilized (or is planned to be utilized) to raise new project funds in the future. Thus: IFL = [ downstream funding from other donors] / [initial project support] Example: Initial project expense: $100,000 from a core / catalyst funder Downstream target project expense: $ 1 million from other donors IFL = [ $1,000,000] / [ $100,000] =10 = tenfoldfinancial multiplication of the initial investment 3. Program multiplication in competitions and by imitation There are a number of immediate parameters which broadly can gauge the quality and impact of a program based on an open competitive selection process: The "selectivity ratio," SR, measures the acuity of a competition in terms of the ratio of winners to total applicants: SR = [number of total applicants ] / [number of winners ] Example: $100,000 research prizes for book proposals to explore the constructive engagement between science and religion. (Program managed by Billy Grassie / PCRS) Total applicants: —350 Prizes awarded: 7 EFTA00605507  SR = 50 = a selectivity of one winner out of fifty applicants. (This is hyperselective and confers a very considerable honor on the winners) As a rough rule of thumb, a healthy competition should have selectivity of at least four. A second gauge of impact in a competition-based program is the degree to which the competition generates productivity amongst non-winners. For example, in the book proposals competition noted above, it likely will be the case that a substantial number of the proposed books will be written by non-winners in the competition. Thus a second factor is the "project multiplication ratio," PMR, may be defined as the ratio of unfunded projects completed with respect to the number of funded projects: PMR = [# of unfunded projects completed (or projected)] / [# funded projects] Thus, for example, if 14 books were to be written by non-prizewinners based on the initial stimulus of the competition, then we would have: PMR = [14] / [7] =2 Variants of this kind of metric may be developed as appropriate. Another form of success may be generated by the stimulation of imitation due to the involvement of distinguished opinion leaders in a project. This aspect of the impact of a program is difficult to objectivize. However, as we have seen, it can be quite useful in strategic thinking to treat a difficult or impossible-to-measure variable as if it were in fact quantitatively tangible. As an example, consider the book prize program mentioned previously. If successful, this project will generate one or more highly outstanding books by distinguished thinkers of sufficient significance to provide a recognizable stimulus to future intellectual activity. Future books may be generated based on this stimulus. Consequently, a factor definable as the "downstream imitative multiplication ratio," DIMR, can be defined as a rough gauge of success: DIMR = [# of downstream imitative projects inspired] / [# funded projects] If, for example, two out of seven of the best books generated out of the books prize project were to stimulate a total of seven additional imitative or responsive books, then: DIMR = [7] / [7] =1 = 100% imitative multiplication 4. Vision leverage involving other donors / philanthropic trend-setting EFTA00605508  To make a long-term difference in the world, a vision requires rationality, innovativeness, boldness, conviction, persuasiveness, moral force, and dogged "perspiration equity." These are required to take hold and begin to flourish widely to the degree that other "agents of change" take on the vision to further it. Therefore an extremely important form of downstream success in developing new programs is "philanthropic trend setting." If a program is highly successful and if its effects disseminate widely into the social order to the degree that a positive recognition of their value is widely appreciated, then other philanthropic organizations may develop similar programs. Again, this aspect of success is difficult to objectivize but can be very helpful in shaping strategic thinking even if the variables are quantitatively intangible. Thus, consider another productivity-factoring ratio, a "philanthropic trend setting yield ratio," PTSYR, which might be defined as: PTSYR = [downstream capitalization by philanthropic trend setting] / [initial set of projects capitalization] This, by definition, is going to be a long-term measure of success and will be causally "entangled." (That is, it will formally not be possible accurately to trace programmatic possible "effects" to one or more programmatic "causes.") However, difficulties of measurement should never be allowed to deter the formation of realistic strategy. Therefore, to provide an example, consider a one-time expenditure of $4 million on a novel program. Were this program to be sufficiently successful to set a trend that generates $8 million in downstream support for similar programs by other philanthropies, then: PTSYR = [$ 8 million] / [$4 million] =2 = 200% yield leverage by philanthropic trend setting (Note, that this ratio, in principle, could be tracked as a growth parameter.) (ii) Success Metrics (Impact Measures Denominated by Cost) To engage task of developing ways to evaluating the cost-effectiveness of specific programs, it is necessary to consider the degree to which causes and effects can be traced. If a program changes the world by generating impact or influence in a cause-effect relationship, then a basic question to ask is are the effects causally separable. An aspect of the impact of a specific program, A, is causally separable if and only if it effects can be seen to be clearly identifiable and distinct from the impacts of other programs B, C, etc.. Some forms of program impact are causally separable while others are not. For example, it is clear that causal separability holds if the awarding of a research grant for work on a certain topic generates published work on that topic by the winner of the grant. Similarly, if a prize is awarded to a certain person, and articles describing the award appear thereafter in the media, then this "publicity" is traceable directly to the prize program, -- it is causally traceable. EFTA00605509  On the other hand, some of the most significant impacts of a program clearly are not causally separable, often because they feed into the general "reservoir" of opinion. Consider for example a question such as: Is it prudentfor high-level scientific organizations to invest resources to engage in thoughtful proactive dialog with religious leaders ? To address opinion on such a question, one might, for example poll a random sampling of the membership of an elite scientific body, say, of the National Academy of Sciences as a time series with some periodicity over a decade. Let us suppose that during that time many programs may have been active which may in variously diverse ways have demonstrated in varying degrees that important aspects of useful and tangible progress can in fact be made when senior scientific leaders engage in thoughtful proactive dialog with religious leaders. Reflecting upon this example, it is quite clear that this measure could represent a very important and significant gauge of impact. However, it also is quite clear that this measure would not be causally separable in terms of the possibility of disentangling the respective individual components of impact generated by individual programs. Therefore it is obvious that many highly important aspects of program success are fundamentally diffuse. Often the most significant effects of programs can be hidden within the broad and complex entanglement of the world, within which many programmatic "causes" merge together into a broad generic "effect." However, the fact that it may not be possible to measure something significant should never be excused to pretend that it is not significant. In following, "specific" success measures with causal traceability are described first whereas "cumulate" success measures (which measure the accumulated contribution of many programmatic sources) are described second. (iii). Specific Success Metrics (with causal traceability) 5. Monitoring research fields based on publication statistics Perhaps the most common form of rough evaluation of productivity in academic research is to make a simple count of the number of research publications which a grant or program has produced. This method is admittedly very crude. It does not distinguish differences in the significance, comprehensiveness, quality, or impact of a research publication. (And, as many academics realize, publications counting tends to motivate researchers to publish more, smaller, and often ultimately not very significant papers than they otherwise might were the numerics of publication not so widely used as an index of productivity.) However, it can provide at least a crude mapping of the cost-effectiveness of a project. The simplest metric gauging productivity in generating published research results is cost per (peer-reviewed) paper: EFTA00605510  CPP = [total cost of project] / [number of published (or projected) papers ] Example: [$150,000] / [5 papers] = $30,0001 paper It is useful to consider how more substantial measures of real impact can be devised. There is a vast difference between publishing a paper that few people will read and none will be influenced by and publishing an influential paper which many will read and be influenced by. In academic hiring, research productivity is often gauged by volume of citations available from the science citation index (or from the index medicus or other cumulate indices of reference citations in the scientific literature). Anyone who has worked within a research community knows that this form of gauge of productivity is far from an objective measure. (It also evolves in time and therefore can only appropriately be expressed as a temporal variable.) However, it does allow a second relatively simple gauge of performance in terms of cost per citation: CPC = [total cost of project] / [number of citations (or projected) citations] *(at some specified interval after the initiation of the project or publication of the results.) Example: [$150,000] / [300 citations (10 years after the initiation of the project)] CPC IQ yr: = $500 / citation It should be obvious that use of such statistics in evaluating the potential cost- effectiveness of a project is problematic due to the extended interval required for the variable to evolve to a measure which represents its impact over any roughly appropriate timescale in which research results are published, considered, and cited within a research community. (In fact, some of the most profoundly important ideas may lay dormantly unnoticed in the research literature for a decade or more before being recognized an important `launching pad' for creative scientific thinking.) However, it should again be stressed that the value of going through a formal discipline of cost-effectiveness evaluation is not necessary to provide an evaluative basis for grantmaking. Rather, the primary virtue of engaging in this process is to encourage rigorous entrepreneurial strategic thinking. Another way that citations are sometimes used is to demonstrate the significance of the past pmformance of a researcher. A scientist who has been active in research for a decade or more may take the opportunity to be evaluated in terms of citation volume ranking. This can be done either by lifetime cumulate or in some more recent interval, (for example over the past three years). Such measures provide a rough basis for evaluating academic distinction and can be utilized accordingly. The output of important interdisciplinary work in science and religion often is published in book form rather than as research papers. A book is essentially a vehicle of communication. Therefore the simplest way to track the effectiveness of a book in its role a vehicle of communication is through the volume of its sales. (To be more accurate, one may also add-in EFTA00605511 factors which can take into consideration sales of a highly technical book to a small but influential audience. Metrics covering "amplified" audiences will be described in the following section.) One of the virtues of quantifying impact in terms of volume of sales is that it can focus the mind on the huge difference that can be made by working with agents, presses and editors who can make a major success of a book. The vast majority of academic books are published with press runs of less than 1,000 copies. However, some books in the broadly "academic" market can be edited, packaged and marketed for outreach in the ballpark of 50,000 copies and above. It is clear that the best science and religion books can compete in this upper echelon market. It can be very illuminating to think through the huge difference in impact that can be made by scaling-up the size of a book project's audience by two orders of magnitude. A simple gauge of the cost-effectiveness of a book project is the cost per book sold: CPBS = [project expense] / [number of books sold] Example: $100,000 project; 25,000 books sold CPBS = $4 philanthropic subsidy / book sold It is obvious that the CPBS will represent a rather unattractive $100 subsidy per book if the sales are at a sales volume for a typical academic book of only 1,000 books. Therefore using this metric, the cost-effectiveness of a philanthropic investment in a book project has much to do with whether or not the book is widely promoted and sells well or not. Often, academics are motivated more by the fact of having the opportunity simply to publish a book, rather than by the volume of published book sales. However, it can be a tremendous career (and income) booster to author a hot selling book. It also will assist the field (of science & religion) greatly if a number of authors in the field are able to become well-known through high volume books sales. This should be possible in a similar manner as is observed in sales of the many excellent books on science which sell widely in the high end popular market. The key is to link with prominent editors who have the strong backing of their marketing departments. A careful study of the various components and connections to make for a big seller can be illuminating for an aspiring writer with an entrepreneurial spirit. 6. Public communication effectiveness measures: In this section we extend our metricated measures of outreach to an audience in terms of "minutes of attention" and "media impressions." These measures are commonly used for quantifying projections in the advertizing industry. They do not gauge impact or quality so much as simply the domain or extent of the communicative outreach using various forms of media. They also allow linkage with media demographics which filter for certain targeted sub- populations within the total audience. For advertisers, the especially sought after sub-populations may be consumers of various types (for example, expectant or new parents in the case of diaper EFTA00605512 advertising). In the case of most of the types of projects the John Templeton Foundation supports, the preferred audiences are composed of various types of persons who are influential in some way and may be described as "opinion leaders." 6.(i) "Media impressions" The advertizing industry has developed a relatively scientific approach to the analysis of cost-benefit in making decisions about advertizing investments. For example, it has the ability to provide detailed quantitative estimates for advertizers of the number of media-to-media-viewer interactions that on average are likely to occur if advertizing is placed in a certain location within a certain publication or show. These interactions are known as "impressions." Advertizing only has the opportunity to motivate a response in a person if that person is exposed to it, and the measure of "impressions" allows estimates of the number of individual impressions which on average will occur for a given placement venue. Based upon knowledge of the scale of impressions, it is then possible to metricate the quality of attractiveness or persuasiveness of an advertizement. This is done in terms of its fraction of conversion of the populations of people subject to impressions into a sub-population of purchasers of the product itself. Thus, for example, if we consider media coverage of an event (such as an academic conference), then we can define a cost-effectiveness metric based on cost per impression: CPI = [cost of the project] / [ sum total of media impressions generated by coverage] Example: $1.5 million project. 60 million media impressions generated CPI = [$1.5 million ] / [60 million] = $0.025 / impression Another way to quantify media coverage using advertizing industry information is in terms of equivalent value of advertizing: EVA = [sum total of media impressions] x [ average cost of equivalent advertizing] For example, in the previous example, we had 60 million media impressions generated by a program expenditure of $1.5 million. If the average cost of advertizing to generate an equivalent volume of media impressions was $0.25 / impression, then: EVA = $15 million, or a 1000% return on the initial program investment. 6.(ii) "Opinion leader" outreach EFTA00605513  In the process of seeking to transform well educated opinion on a topic, it is prudent to be sure to communicate in a focused and effective manner to a demographic subset of the population whose opinions are broadly leveraged with others due to their various and diverse roles as "opinion leaders." Consider the following diverse set of media `vehicles': Sports Illustrated, the Harvard Business Review, People, The Atlantic, Red Herring, The Nation, Christianity Today, The New Republic, MTV, Scientific American, Tikkun, Foreign Affairs, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The American Prospect, Esquire, the New York Review of Books, PBS, Mother Jones, Newsweek, Wired, the New York Times, and the Economist. All of these different forms of delivery of information not only have vastly differing audiences. They also have vastly different types of readerships I listenerships / viewerships. An audience's composition is broken down in terms of some kind of "demographic portfolio." Typically the advertizing industry obtains data on household income and consumption patterns through the kinds of polling instruments that we see frequently such as, for example, the fill-in forms which accompany new product warranty information. Though these measures are exceedingly rough, they do allow a form of impact filtering for the diverse subset in the audience composed on "opinion leaders." Also, it is not necessary to utilize advertizing industry data, but rather to make educated "guestimates." For example, one may guess that a reasonably large fraction (say 50% ?) of the readerships of Science and the Harvard Business Review will be composed of people who either have been trained, or are in the process of becoming trained, at some postgraduate level in science and in business respectively. Such publications have highly focused readerships which are different from those of Time or Newsweek or US News & World Report. Where the generic proportion of "opinion leaders" will be much lower (say 2% ?). It also is possible to consider the typical or average time interval of attention that a media intraction generates. An article in The Atlantic Monthly may typically occupy fifteen minutes of reader attention, whereas an article in the Science Times may take two minutes. Factoring in both dimensionalities of "opinion leaders" and also of time, we may define a cost-effectiveness measure defined as " cost per minute of opinion leader attention": MOOLA = [total cost of project] / {[audience scale] [opinion leader fraction] [average minutes of attention]} (Note that the denominator typically will be a sum over all the media "hits" generated by the project.) Example: $100,000 project Media hit: Article in the Atlantic Monthly Circulation: 750,000 Opinion leader fraction: ? 33% Average minutes of attention: 20 EFTA00605514  MOOLA = [$100,000] / ([750,000] [0.33] [20]} = [$100,000] / [5 million minutes of opinion leader attention] = $0.02 / minute of opinion leader attention An important phenomenon to consider in strategic thinking is impact amplification via the so-called "media food chain effect." Media people often obtain ideas for stories in their outlets by reading in higher-level sources of information. For example, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine may be followed by an article in The New Republic which in turn may be followed by one or more articles in the New York Times which may provide ideas for television coverage by the major channels. Therefore developing media "hits" in high-level, small circulation, "opinion-leading" journals of research and opinion can have a strong amplification-leverage effect through the media food chain. For different forms of information, there will be corresponding high-level, high-leverage outlets. (For example, in biology, technical articles appearing in Science or Nature can have highly leveraged impact.) Media information tracking services such as the "NEXIS" database can be used to track the coverage of a news item in the in-print media. Other sources are available to track coverage on radio and television. 7. Monitoring transformation of opinion via polling Monitoring impressions or minutes of attention is a representation of activity on the "transmission" side of a communication effort. The vital compliment to success on the transmission side in any communicative enterprise is the "reception" side. Has the message been heard ? Has it been clearly and convincingly represented ? Has it been persuasive ? Has it influenced people's thinking ? Has it generated a decisive shift in the thinking of a majority of "opinion leaders" ? Such questions can only be answered by checking the reception side of the communicative process. The typical methodology for accessing opinion is by opinion sampling by means of polling. Consider a university-based project which involves a series of public lectures on basic aspects of the field of science and religion. One way to access the reception of the series would be to do a "before & after" poll of opinion in certain sectors of the audience. For example, let us consider the science faculty as the target group. An interesting simple poll might in part be expressed in terms of Ian Barbour's fourfold typology, asking faculty members to place themselves within one of the four opinion groups on the following thesis: The proper or natural relationship between science and religion is: (Answer with one or more selections, marked r, 2 nd, etc., in order of intensity of agreement.) A. Fundamental conflict B. Separation into non-conflicting, non-overlapping domains C. A fusion based on determining truth / reality EFTA00605515  D. Mutual two-way dialog leading to: (i) Better mutual understanding with widespread but respectful disagreement (ii) Better mutual understanding with resolution of some conflict issues (iii) Better mutual understanding with resolution of many conflict issues (iv) Better mutual understanding with resolution of most conflict issues (v) Better mutual understanding leading to separation into non-conflicting, non-overlapping domains. (vi) Better mutual understanding leading to complementarity / symbiosis (vii) Better mutual understanding leading to convergence & synthesis Another interesting question might be one such as: As a prospective interdisciplinatyfield of discourse, "science & religion" : (Answer with one or more selections, marked 0, r d, etc., in order of intensity of agreement.) A. is not to be taken seriously B. is improper for consideration as a coherent academic field C. has a long way to go to demonstrate its value and coherence D. is an interesting concept and potentially promising E. shows the signs of a quite promising new development F. has impressed me substantially so that I an very interested G. addresses a fundamental need and is absolutely vital for the future of intellectual life To determine success in communicating a message, one could use these and many other carefully crafted polling questions to track transformation of opinion in sectors of a university community in order to measure the impact of a program. It is also possible to track attention through questions such as: "Has the special series of lectures caused you to read any books related to it ?" "How much time would you estimate that you have invested in this reading ?" " Do you consider this investment of your time to have been: - wasted ? - roughly average relative to other activities ? - moderately exciting and worthwhile relative to other activities ? - highly worthwhile relative to other activities ? - vital and transformative relative to other activities ? 8. Prizes and other honors Philanthropic initiatives which confer honors in open and objective processes pursue an EFTA00605516 indirect strategy which seeks to promote progress in a field by offering broad public recognition of some aspect of excellence. This may be of an important publication such as a book or an essay or research paper or it may cover the accomplishment of a particularly gifted person over the work of a lifetime. It is often generically difficult to measure the impact and cost-effectiveness of prizes and other honors because their long-term effects are generically diffuse and intangible. It is also mostly a mistaken notion to imagine that highly gifted scientists and scholars can be motivated by external incentives such as prizes. Motivation for such people typically is deeply internalized. Specific objectives that honors can accomplish, however, may include: (i) contributing towards the legitimization of a new and controversial field (ii) massively stimulate book sales and influence opinion accordingly (iii) contribute significant momentum to propel a young career forward (iv) open up public platforms for strategic communication (v) stimulate new philanthropic support Here we will consider the second example (book sales) in terms of a strategically formulated prize program to recognize outstanding books. If a prize is utilized strategically in conjunction with a Press's marketing campaign, the prize program can be evaluated for cost- effectiveness by linking its expenditure to an enhancement in book sales generated by the utilization of the prize in the marketing effort for the book. Because academic book sales are typically not very substantial (< 2000 copies), we can ignore the "baseline" and define the "book prize cost-effectiveness" as follows. For simplicity we will consider a program which confers a single prize. Slightly more complicated formulii can be devised for multi-prize programs. BPE = [cost of program] / {[book sales] [opinion leader readership fraction] [estimated average reading time invested by the average buyer]) Example: Program cost: $150,000 Book sales: 50,000 Opinion leader readership fraction: 0.5 Estimated average reading time: 200 minutes [Minutes of opinion leader attention: 5 million] BPE = $0.03 / minute of opinion leader attention Another way to leverage both book sales and influence opinion would be if a prepublication article (a summary or a reworked chapter) were placed in a widely read high-end journal of opinion such as The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker. Similarly, major reviews will impact sales as well as generate substantial scoring in terms of minutes of opinion leader attention. For example, consider a case with the same numbers as in the previous example, but with a chapter placement in The Atlantic Monthly generating, say: EFTA00605517  Readership: 500,000 Opinion leader fraction: 0.5 Estimated average reading time: 10 This addition will generate an additional 2.5 million minutes of opinion leader attention and increase the cost-effectiveness of the project by 50% to an efficiency of better than $0.02 / minute. Conclusion: The most important aspect of making such calculations is that it focuses strategic thinking on ways to make a program very highly successful. For example, in the case of this book prize program, key strategic success factors would be: (i) identify strategic approaches which are fruitful/highly leveraged and those which are not. Focus all activity and resources only on the fruitful / highly leveraged approaches and perfect them. (ii) develop the program in close linkage with interested and favorable editors who have the ability to catalyze a highly effective marketing effort utilizing the prize. (iii) advise the authors on how to work closely with such "entrepreneurial" editors. (iv) help the authors to link with dynamo literary agents (e.g., John Brockman in the sciences) (v) develop a program ethos which encourages entrepreneurial success and transmits key aspects of knowledge in terms of networking and connections to help promising authors to have the opportunity to compete in the literary public square. (iv). Generic Success Metrics (without causal traceability) The impacts of specific programs are causally separable in terms of their outcomes in the world if the effects, A*, B*, and C*, etc., of programs A, B, C, etc., could be observed in the world as being identifiably distinctive and independent of each other. It is clear that the assumption of causal separability cannot be sustained in many of the most important aspects of transformation of opinion where an "isolated laboratory" condition preserving cause and effect relationships for a specific program cannot hold. This raises a very interesting issue. It has been stated several times previously that the most important outcome of a process of detailed quantitative cost-effectiveness analysis is not to develop exact and practically realizable measurement strategies, but rather to stimulate entrepreneurial strategic thinking. How can this kind of stimulation best be encouraged ? Being successful within the terms we are considering means developing strengths and learning how to communicate a message or vision based on those strengths persuasively into an expanding and influential community of discourse. To EFTA00605518 envision success in these terms requires habits of thinking which are both ambitious and large- scale. Therefore it is vital not to limit one's view in strategic thinking only to situations where cause and effect are closely and locally connected. A vital "big picture" aspect of strategic thinking in this regard is "vision mainstreaming." 9. Vision mainstreaming The successful evolution of a vision which generates a "philanthropic trend" is to mature by a process of "mainstreaming." Mainstreaming is a term to describe a process of transformation in perception whereby an issue or a movement is transformed from what seems an odd, novel and controversial notion to one which is broadly appreciated as having clear merit either in the society as a whole, or at least amongst key influential sectors of intellectual commentators and decision-making `elites.' For a movement to be successful in mainstreaming its general vision, the creative leaders who are developing the movement must think with strategic care and seriousness about how to be successful in accomplishing such a transformation in a practical and realistic manner. (And in any new academic field, the core of the success must be due to the significance and significance of the research and in the innovativenness, quality, quantity, diversity and persuasiveness of its creative productivity, ---but this is far from the whole story !) Towards this end, it can be helpful to think through what kinds of "markers" might be available to gauge progress in the direction of mainstreaming. In following, we have suggested four distinct perspectives defined in terms of three different "sampling success ratios" focused respectively on three facets of transformation: (a) "Marker group opinion" (b) "Institutionalization" (c) "Financial support diversification" Simple sampling success ratio metrics for each of these three facets might be defined as follows: (a) MGO = fraction of a marker group responding positively to a question addressing a basic point Example: Marker Group: Deans of departments of biology at major research universities in the United States Question: Can a biologist be an intellectually honest and be a philosophical theist while simultaneously possessing a clear understanding of evolutionary biology ? Hypothetical time series result: EFTA00605519  Year 2000: 25% responding yes Year 2005: 50% responding yes Year 2010: 80% responding yes (This is provided as an example only and NOT to imply that the answer to this question is a matter of clear agreement in the field of science and religion.) (b) There are various factors which could be considered as measures of success in institutionalizing a vision. In the case of the nascent field of "science and religion" we might consider the following ten items: (i) Are one or more courses offered in the subject are ? (ii) Are there one or more active local discussion groups or societies ? (iii) Are there one or more professorial appointments in the field broadly ? (iv) Are appropriate periodicals on display in appropriate li